Fallen Women and Destitute Men: Gender, Religion, and the Redemption of Urban Space in the United States Salvation Army

Team Members/Contributors

Linda Marie Martin Drew University Theological School Contact Me

About this dissertation fellowship

This project explores the Salvation Army’s urban rescue work with women and men in the United States through the multiple lenses of religion, gender, and the shaping and controlling of urban space. The project begins with the Salvation Army’s arrival in the United States in March 1380, and follows the Army’s continued work and presence in the cities of the United States throughout the twentieth century. The dissertation is interdisciplinary, working at the intersections of Women’s History, Anthropology of Religion, and American Religious Studies, and incorporates as well contemporary discourses in urban and landscape studies. Through a combination of historiographical inquiry and ethnographic participation and observation in a local Salvation Army Corps, the project explores the ways in which religious discourse, constructions of gender, and modern attitudes toward the urban landscape have combined in Army rhetoric to shape and legitimate the Army’s urban social and religious work, as well as the ways in which these themes shape the religious lives and experiences of the contemporary believers who serve in, and are served by, the Salvation Army.

Image Title Year Type Contributor(s) Other Info
  Home Leaguers and Homeless Women: An Ethnographic and Historiographic Study of Salvation Army Corps Life 2001 Dissertation Linda Marie Martin