In recent years, scholars like Catherine Brekus, Rosetta R. Haynes and Carla L. Peterson have enriched the field of American religious history through their research on African American women who staked claims to religious authority amid patriarchal and white supremacist barriers. These studies illuminate how women like Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw and Julia Foote exercised spiritual power in traditions holding doctrines that formally precluded female preaching and theologising. Quincy D. Newell's book resonates with this body of scholarship while also highlighting that analyses of Black women's religious authority have generally centred Protestant Christianity. Newell recovers the narrative of Jane Manning James, a free Black woman who converted to Mormonism in 1842 and, despite her marginalised position in the community, held significant social power among the Latter-day Saints (LDS) throughout her lifetime. According to Newell, who refers to James by her first name to reflect the nomenclature James herself most often used, ‘Jane's story is left out of books on African American history, American women's history, and the history of the American West’ most likely ‘because she was Mormon’ (p. 1). Addressing these fields as well as scholars of American religious history, Newell asks what new insights might emerge when we pivot to the religious margins and ‘focus our attention on religious traditions’ less powerful members’ (p. 136).
In a manner reflective of the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw's framework of intersectionality, Newell demonstrates how Jane's social identities as a Black person whose life spanned both the antebellum and post-emancipation eras; a woman; a mother; and a member of the working class who was a domestic servant to Joseph Smith and Brigham Young intersected to shape her experiences as a Mormon. Jane's position as a Black Mormon, for example, becomes clear in the story of her migration to Nauvoo, Illinois. While the white converts in her group journeyed to Illinois by steamboat, Jane and her family faced discriminatory black codes and were forced to complete part of the trip on foot. Newell's account also raises questions about spiritual gifts in Mormonism's early years. Despite Smith's 1835 restriction of divine healing to the male priesthood, Jane cites her ability to heal the sick in extant records of her life, asserting, as Newell remarks, ‘that healing power was not limited to men’ (p. 35). Just as Jane claimed spiritual gifts, so she reinterpreted Mormon theology, pushing church leadership to provide her with access to LDS rituals from which Black people were doctrinally excluded.
Newell's most notable contribution is her engagement with archival sources. Since primary sources related to Jane are scarce – and the few that exist were mediated through or written by white people – Newell's methodology is necessarily conjectural. She leans into asking questions of Jane's experiences, even using Jane's silence on particular subjects as evidence. Building on recent work by Max Perry Mueller and W. Paul Reeve, Newell offers an alternative model for telling the story of a religion, one that removes patriarchs from centre-stage and foregrounds marginalised historical actors as a window into questions about race, gender, Mormonism and American religion more broadly. Bound to engage both scholarly and non-specialist audiences, Your sister in the Gospel would be an especially useful text in undergraduate classrooms, given that Newell's appendix includes five of her key primary sources for readers to investigate for themselves.
