"I Sing for I Cannot be Silent": The Feminization of American Hymnody, 1870-1920 (Pittsburgh Series in Composition, Literacy and Culture) - Hardcover

Evangelical hymns constituted a cherished part of communal Christian life and served as an important and effective way to teach doctrine. These hymns - the focus of "I Sing for I Cannot Be Silent" - served an additional social purpose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: they gave evangelical women a voice in their churches. Drawing upon her own experience as a Baptist, June Hadden Hobbs shows how women utilized the only oral communication allowed to them in public worship. In this engaging study, Hobbs employs an interdisciplinary mix of feminist literary analysis, social history, rhetoric and composition theory, hymnology, autobiography, and theology to examine hymns central to worship in most evangelical churches today.