Women and Revivalism

     I have just finished reading Mary P. Ryan's "A Women's Awakening: Evangelical Religion and the families of Utica, NY 1800-1840."  I have to say, the reading left me somewhat irritated, less due to content, and more due to format and style of argument.   I followed DeAnne's advice and read the concluding paragraph first, which allowed me to come at the reading with a greater sense of purpose.   The conclusion made it clear that Ryan wished to demonstrate the powerful, if hidden effects the women of Utica, NY had on influencing the revivalist movement by being the primary religious influences in their respective homes.  However, I have to say that I am not entirely sympathetic to the rest of her article.   Ryan put a lot of time and effort into collecting, sorting, and analyzing statistics, however I found her train and organization of argument increasingly difficult to follow as she used more and more numerical statistics, relating to one another, to prove her central claim. It was very difficult for me, even reading closely, to connect her ideas towards her central claim.  However, despite these difficulties in reading her work, I feel that I was able to come away from the reading with a greater understanding of the undercurrents of movements such as the Second Great Awakening in the United States.  Noll's history selection on The Second Great Awakening underscored the importance of  "major players"  in the movement, namely influential preachers and famous women.  However, Ryan's article allowed me to see that in the Second Great Awakening, the unseen, less-commonly thought of influences had a powerful effect on changing culture as well. As she put it, "the experience of a small group of mothers in upstate NY..., propelled by the fervor of their own convictions and strengthened by the female institutions that grew up around revivals, Utica women conducted a systematic evangelical campaign" (623).  I think that this is an interesting topic to explore as we move through the large nebula of Democracy, as I feel that exploring the fringe effects and undercurrents of our society can allow us to better see how the average American can affect society on a larger scale, as the women of Utica, NY did during the period of the Second Great Awakening.