Second Thursday Lecture Series
Daughters of Divinity: Evangelical Protestant Christianity and the Making of a New Southern Woman, 1830–1930 with author Katherine E. Rohrer

Join us for a virtual evening with Katherine E. Rohrer as she discusses her recent book, Daughters of Divinity: Evangelical Protestant Christianity and the Making of a New Southern Woman, 1830-1930 (LSU Press, August 2025). This program is sponsored by the Friends of the Cabildo as part of the Second Thursday Lecture Series. It is free and open to the public, but registration is required. The program will take place on Zoom. Please register here and a link will be emailed to you on the day of the lecture.

About the Book

Looking through a predominantly gendered lens, Daughters of Divinity: Evangelical Protestant Christianity and the Making of a New Southern Woman, 1830-1930 studies the ways well-educated white women of the South used the institution of evangelical Protestant Christianity as an instrument through which they expanded their intellectual and professional capacities as well as their agency and influence at home and throughout the world. Daughters of Divinity traces both change and continuity in women’s religious identities and experiences from the antebellum period through the 1920s. Over these one hundred years, southern women assumed faith-based roles that increasingly fell in the public sphere and occupied positions in religious work in which they exercised more authority and agency. Alternately, Daughters of Divinity traces changing conceptions of gender—specifically conceptions of femininity—as experienced in, and seen through, a religious environment in the American South from 1830 to 1930. Well-educated white southern women from middle-class and elite backgrounds embraced religious work as a means to pursue new and fulfilling professional outlets, while they still lived up to the South's idealized and conservative conceptions of womanhood. For such women, they could "have their cake and eat it, too."

About the Author

Katherine Rohrer is an associate professor of history at the University of North Georgia in Dahlonega. She earned her bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in history from the University of Georgia. Katherine's research and teaching interests explore the intersection of gender, religion, and education during the nineteenth and early twentieth-century South. Daughters of Divinity: Evangelical Protestant Christianity and the Making of a New Southern Woman, 1830-1930 (LSU Press, 2025) is her first book.