Morgan Barbre is a Ph.D. candidate in American Religious History. Her dissertation, “Home Rule: A Political Theology of Feminine Mastery,” studies the twentieth-century home economics movement, a Progressive Era disciplinary movement that transformed American education across all levels and through which most schoolgirls in the United States circulated for more than half a century. Weaving discourses from feminist science studies, ritual and performance studies, and American religious history, “Home Rule” argues that we can see in home ec’s propositions for the good life and the procedures for the good result—a lifted laundry stain, a resolved baking woe, or better home ventilation—ritually regulated tactics of knowledge production that white women employed to build profiles in authority that reflected masculinity and whiteness but were reducible to neither. As a genealogy of a gendered American secularism, the dissertation seeks to demonstrate that the bucolic American domesticity visible in today’s Christian-inflected trad wife is not simply a feminized product of right-wing religious populism but the result of a deliberate, strategic, and well-funded experiment in home education that has recast the homemaker as a competent, though pleasant, master of herself and her domain.
Her wider research and teaching portfolio is concerned with religion and governance in the US, medical humanities, and print and media cultures of American feminisms. Before coming to Yale, she received a B.A. in Religious Studies from North Carolina State University and an M.A. in Religious Studies from Indiana University-Bloomington.