Wombs As God's Laboratories: Pentecostal Discourses of Femininity in Zimbabwe

Studies of born-again Churches in Africa generally conclude that they help members embrace modernity. Their teachings provide the ideological bases for members to embrace changing material realities. Such studies are rather silent on the demands of this ideological frame on women and men. This article looks at two Zimbabwean women's organisations, Gracious Woman and Precious Stones, affiliated to Zimbabwe Assemblies of God in Africa and Family of God respectively. Using ethnographic methods, it argues that such organisations teach women domesticity and romanticise female subordination as glorifying God. They discourage individualism by exalting motherhood, wifehood and domesticity as service to God. These demands emerge at a time when life is changing drastically in urban areas as women get educated and enter the professions. Economically a small but growing number of black families have experienced some upward mobility—something these Churches encourage through ‘the gospel of prosperity’. Although accumulation and upward mobility free families from (traditional) kin obligations which the Churches encourage, women are discouraged from resisting the patriarchal yoke even when material circumstances make it possible. The organisations repackage patriarchy as Christian faith. The article concludes that if these Churches are concerned with managing modernity, then they see modernity as female subordination.