ABSTRACT
Pentecostalism varies widely in the extent of formal authority and leadership allocated to women. In its weakest form, women as wives possess only the necessary agency to support and ensure the continued agency of their husbands. On one axis, women are narrowly constructed as wives in terms of the relationship with men in an ideal ‘Christian marriage.’ As in middle-class Jamaican Pentecostalism, single motherhood is the subject of disproportionate attention in lessons and sermons, but when women come into the church as single mothers, the circumstances are taken as given and their past sins forgiven. Brusco records that in Colombia, the traditional male role is one of machismo which results in a high degree of sexual segregation, the divergence of male and female interests, goals and motivations, individualist consumption patterns, and attenuation of the male roles of father and husband, which jeopardize the safety of women and the security of the domestic unit.
