RESEARCH
With a Master of Theological Studies in Women, Gender, and Sexuality in Religion from Harvard Divinity School, and BA in English Literature and Studio Art from Trinity University, Reinis examines how evangelical ideas about gender, family, and domesticity shape the cultural and political understanding of the “American home” in the United States.
Her work focuses particularly on conservative evangelical women and their role in producing and preserving this ideal through storytelling, mythmaking, and other narrative traditions. This research is rooted in the study of eighteenth and nineteenth century North American evangelical women's writing, spiritual autobiographies, political essays, religious tracts, and sentimental literature (particularly, domestic fiction). In this research, Reinis traces how white and Black Protestant women used the era's expanding print culture to build, and contest, ideas of race and gender, defining, negotiating, and circulating a normative vision of American Christian womanhood, often in direct conversation with one another.
Despite the undeniable cultural impact of their work, much of this writing has been systematically neglected by the academy, history, and risks leaving our cultural memory as a whole. However, these works were not simply a footnote to American culture. They defined it. Sentimental novels Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe and The Wide, Wide World by Susan Warner, were the era's best-selling novels only second to the Bible.
These women provided a large part of what Americans were actually reading, and the narratives and stories they told shaped–and continue to shape–-American popular culture at large. In fact, Reinis argues that the very narrative strategies these women pioneered are still key to how conservative Christian women negotiate and define the American home, and American cultural and political life at large. By tracing these stories, we can begin to fully understand not only the cultural ideal “American home,” but recognize it as the powerful political force it has always been, and take seriously the women who have wielded it.
For more on the specifics on my research, check out my FAQ below!
