Karin Wulf, Department of History, American University, Washington, DC
7/22/96
Colonial Women Using Religion to Break New Ground
Karin finished grad school in 1993 (Johns Hopkins), taught at Old Dominion 2 years, now at American U.
Looking at marital status as distinguishing factor in social history. Today talk about religion and marital status: Phila Quaker women and religious argument for celibacy.
Article by Susan Juster, "Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England" is a good source on gender and organization of religious institutions and religious experience. Women who resisted marriage are the issue here.
Some of the German pietist sects also have an important place for unmarried women's authority. Scholars of early modern Europe literature are a good place to look for information about how women are placed within Protestant hierarchy. Protestant women live within a setting which forces them to mediate their religious experience through their husbands. Michael Winship, Behold the Bridegroom Cometh talks about how marriage is about the only voluntarry authority relationship that anti-authoritatian Protestantism held onto
Celibacy, however, confirmed status on women, by allowing women to focus on spirituality, and ?incidently? to resist male authority.
Quaker ministers note that marriages were inhibitors to spiritual work, so marriages had to be reconfigured. Levy points out that one of the most radical parts of Q is its re-structuring of marital relations. But the central piece is the pre-lapserian notion of Q's, as set forth by Fox and Fell.There was worry about the potential tyranny of husbands, especially if those husbands were themselves not spiritual-enough. There is then a theological/political/social contextual setting for this question: Susannah Wright--poet, scrivenor, silk-worm raiser, many things, but never married, writes this poem (attached) to Elizabeth Norris, also a spinster who, with her spinster sister, raised four spinster nieces,
Rubin: This is much earlier than Lee Chambers-Shiller, Liberty a Better Husband, argues that women in late 18th c. chose cult of "freedom"...much earlier?
Ans.: Yes, there is a rise in never-married women post-revolution, connected to post-rev. but yes, this IS very early
Gallien: Where does heterosexuality fit in here ?
Ans.: we don't know. There are new books about lesbian imagery , but the presumption we are making is of a CHOICE of CELIBACY to gain independence, though there is some evidende to suggest that there were some "couples" also.
Barnes: There is some confusion also about what celibacy stood for. Celeibacy used to, in early modern Europe, stand for "power"(read: "freedom") to be chaste. So question, is this women breaking free of men, or is this women going about claiming a status that had always been denied them.
Ans: yes, nuns have a different story to tell! Questions are whose sexuality is too voracious and needs to be controlled is what is tied to who is out of control here, and needs to be controlled. By this time, women's sexuality is viewed as passive, unlike the earlier time where convent's role is to control women's virulent sexuality
Barnes and Wulf try to sort out where sexuality/power/control lines lie in the transition from early modern Europe to 18thc America
Wulf: to return to the poem...
Gallien: is this transcribed exactly?
Ans.: the only known copy of this poem is not in Wright'ts own hand, but in someone else's contemporary copybook.
Kray: there are other contemporary pieces in which "tyrant" is used in this context of modernizing liberalism
Ans: sure. Jay Fligelman's Prodigals and Pilgrims also talked of this. Date of this poem is unclear: before 1774 and probably about 1750, right at the point where there is such concen about tyranny. This is probably explicitly political. Note in particular line 27, celebrating Elizabeth Norris' willingness to remain single in which there is a quite magnificant library in which women get together to read, and retreaat (the library passed into the hands of a woman who later married Johne Dickinson, and now it is known as the Dicksinson library and lives at Dicksinson College)
This is the most "strident" of Susannah Wright's work, most of which is more reflective.
Chinery: where is the manuscript?
Ans: Historical Society of Pennsylvania
Rubin: in the New England setting, there is more nuance: some notion of husband/wife relations being ruled by sentiment.
Ans: yes, we are discovering earlier statements of affection, but we do know that the society works to enforce patriarchy, e.g., men are dragged into court for not behaving in patriarchal-enough in public ways: they are not supposed to let the world know that women are in charge.
Elrod: most of the rest of Wrght's poetry is reflective?
Ans: Yes, and, in fact, I think this one is intended to be reflective, but the venom slips through.
Little: so you would consider that authority structures are well-developed by mid-17th c?
Ans: yep. And there's a whole lot of nuance to be thought of on widows/widowers and remarriage. Mary Beth Norton talks about this in her new book Founding Mothers and Fathers talks about people being connected to the state as individuals rather than as families, by 1670s (and I think there's some problem with that argument)
Harvey: the model is too limited if we stick only to the regions of New England and the early Chesapeake
Gallien: what does she do with Catholic hegemony in MD?
Ans: Catholics are under siege by 1670 in Chesapeake
Rubin: In the Friends hospital papers I have found three Q. women who won't "submit" , and the hospital teaches them to being a submissive, mid 19th c.
Lapsansky: there is a companion set of materials from mid-20th c. : a diary of a woman who was sent to Friends Hospital to learn submission
Bruce: Where does Wright derive her sense of authority: is she using traditions of Q. or is she picking up on a new rhetoric to stretch Qs?
Ans: there is some confusion here about Q. "theology" but, of course, who is to say what is "Q theology" anyway? But the pre-lapserian voice is, I think the Q voice.
Greider: How much authority is there for women inside the home?
{note-taker loses concentration for a moment}
Crowley: Do Quaker women use the word of "sway" in Abigail Adams' way of using it?
Ans: I'm not seeing that, though maybe it is there. But these women I am reading are spinsters, after all, and therefore not the woman behind a throne. Rather, the men they deal with are their brothers and cousins and fathers
Crwley: How many women are we talking about here?
About 13-50% of Phila women in 18th c never marry. The group that centers around Fairhill is the most "groupy" about their non-marriage
Gallien: What's their interaction with other women?
Ans: Hannah Callender , who married (badly) a Sansom, goes off to Mennonites and learns how nice it is to have this freedom. But I don't find it among Presbyterian or Anglican women.
(Coffee Break)
Wulf: I didn't know how much you've talked about gender and power and authority and how they are related: a good book Religion and Domestic Violence in Early America by Ann Taves (Abigail Abbott's diary). (Indiana Press, 1989) Abbott's husband abuses her daughteers/ 1780s and 1790s, and she tries to think about how this all works and how religion should have helped. Men being re-gendered not by property, but by male "potence" and manhood
Crowley: are there other groups that use pre-lapserian equality?
Ans: I'm not aware of others except, to some extent the Moravians and the Shakers. Read the work of Beverly Smaby on the Moravians, and her forthcoming work on the spiritual sisters within this group. (And go visit Ephrata Cloisters)I keep wondering why we don't talk more since women are most concernedwith religion.
There's a good piece in William and Mary Quarterly, a couple of years ago by Joanna Gillespie about Martha Ramsey's struggle with not having an authoritarian husband, squandering her inheritance.
Lapsansky was out ot the room for part of a discussion about how to handle these issues in the classroom. Wulf does not set up her curriculum as a "women's discussion" but rather a "gender" rather than "women" perspective. After all, men have "gender" too, and there is good literature about men.
This "engendered" a discussion among Piar, Lapsansky, Brady and Wulf about the ghettoization of gender, race and ethnicity in scholarship
Stephen Breen and Innis , MYNE OWN GROUND: RACE and FREEDOM ON VIRGINIA's EASTERN SHORE gives some life histories of non-slave folks in early America. Wulf uses these, and women bios in class to give some integration to the issues
Barnes: talk a bit about the basis of these women's independence
Ans: Most women do not have real estate--it is fairly unusual to have a self-owned place to be in 18th c., but in 19th c., these women begin to have the ability to create resources and independent.
Gallien and Lapsansky used examples from their own families in the 19thc, to get us into a discussion about what sorts of experiences make women feel they have the informational resource to make independent decisions. The conclusion is that an important aspect is having access to someone else who has made independent choices: "role models"
Ans: there is evidence that this modelling thing is of importance here, and modelling is an important piece.
Lapsansky: the Forten family (a 19th c Philadelphia black family), and Charlotte Forten's diary give some insight into this.
Wulf: the role of teachers in this, in 18th c. setting, is to say to institutionalize this modelling
Brady: does it all go downhill, and after the Rev. women's lives go downhill and they have to reinvent feminism?
Ans: I don't think it is just so linear: there are different opportunities in each century
Barnes: How about the onlookers: were there others who were identifying with these "free" women?
ns: external "legitmization" of these folks? I think so, or there wouldn't be so much interest in them. Fascination with Shakers...
Cultural dynamics within congregations--lotsa women and a small male leadership.Women are voting out their ministers. Men have to "earn" that authority--or demonize women to get it. And after the Rev., men have to work for their authority, and their is an entrepreneurship.
Brady: but even for women with capital, they aren't women ministers
Crowley: Emily Dickinson is another example of a person can just let the whole mess of marriage and having to accept another's authority go by.
There is a body of historians' work that started out to be a literature about 19th c. women, and now has become a literature about class as well(example: Mary Ryan's work, Cradle of the Middle Class) In this, Ryan defines women's class definition as being about staying home to care for one's own family and "the poor" and this moves on from knitting socks for the poor to sellng socks and using the money to carry out other reform issues
Greider: similar issues emerged in my research among women in Guatemala between 1980-95, in a very male-dominated and military setting where women's independence poses a threat, many women got involved in sub-rosa petit-capitalism: maybe this is not just a pattern in Euro-centered societies.
Wulf: yes, that brings up the central question: how much does gender-politics constrain women, and how much does this just inspire women to be creative. Rural household economy, for example, as another aspect of this
Lydia Huffman Hoyle, Teaching Men How to Preach (dissert. Chapel Hill, ?1993?)
Patricia Hill, The World Their Household
Ans: Relations of Rescue, by Peggy Pasco also deals with this question of how missionary women deal with "re-entry" to a world where people don't have power.
After lunch:
Wulf starts with discussion with the reading of Chaste Liberation of Mormons and where they fall in this gender piece.
Jensen: I want to contest her notion that duality necessarily means hierarchy: in many Native American systems this is not the case,--duality is complementary-- and much feminst lliterature seems to be overly-limited by this assertion, which is based (as we have said earlier) on the set of notions that drive European religious research
Sicius: some questions about where captialism-as-nuclear-family-service (p. 196) : what about environmentalism in this question also
Ans: these are interesting issues since once you push against one of the societal limits, you invite radicalism of all sorts
Piar: simplicity of Shakers= not wasting resources (simple clothing, furniture, etc.)
Harvey: what do these women say about "appropriate sexual desire."
Gallien, Harvey, Rubin and Wulf try to handle the issue (a la Dworkin) of sexuality/pleasure and celibacy
Barnes: some of this represents a lack of historical depth to our discussions here: Protestants are reaching the same place that religious intellectuals had reached in the late Roman empire.
Ans: yes there is a connection between celibacy and authority that goes way back, but in THIS setting--America in the early 19th c. --what are the unique qualities about Amerian society that sets people to feeling that sexuality is the way to revolutionize society?
Rogers: Dworkin is the wrong place to start that discussion, for Dworkin is ahistoical
Ans: I agree, Dworkin is the wrong way to enter this argument
Bruce and Rubin raised more questions about how to reach functional equality, about the "biological tragedy" of child-rearing and how much power actually is available in a celibate community
Chinery and Lapsansky argue that such a setting is "making space" witihin the structure, but that is not the same as taking over the space, or taking over the structures by which the space would be defined
Helmer: parts of this are connected to the Luddite movements, but at the end of the Civil War we get recruitment--and Montana ends up with Hutterites.
Glass and Jensen and Helmer return to the issues of why sexuality is the determining factor, and the anxiety of neighbors about these issues.
Wulf talks about Schmidt's book where he describes people having sex in the woods as part of the "physical" religious experience of camp meetings
Crowley: I think Jester overstates the platonic: hymns are highly erotic in the 19th c.
Rubin: yes, the published formulaic accounts often dont contain the level of physical intimacy that is revealed in diaries.
Jensen and Wulf get into a discussion of Native American relationships of gender; the Navajo tradition of healing/mythology made it possible for Navajo men to take from missionary only what they needed to take on power in their own community.
Helmer: It might be worth it to look at the Baker Massacre in Montana, 3 yrs before Custer was wiped out, where Baker was sent to wipe out a peaceful set of Indians. War dept. asked Q's to take over as missionaries, but couldn't, so other mission--Catholics and Baptists and others took over Montana missions
Wulf: Spirited Resistance by Gregory Dowd talks about the American Rev. as just one of the events that shapes the Native American religious reality
Rubin: in the early chaptes of this book, Dowd helps to shape the rise and fall of various syncretism within indigenous pan-indigenous alliances
Wulf: how would we start if were trying to do this in a classroom: gender, biology, theology, sociology, household practice : I would go back to the Taves book.
Brady: it is important to include the voices within congregations, not just the voices of the power struggles of the male leaders.
Jensen: space, land, time and power in the Shaker circles: there is the passionate dance, and a connection to dreams. Does this "free" people to move over to physical spirituality--rejecting sexual behavior .
Gallien: There is an the elder who serves as chaperone to keep this from getting out of hand
Lapsansky: but external control is not so necessary if internal control is set in place, for, in fact, sexual behavior is highly ritualized, even in private heterosexual settings, with limits on what sorts of sexual behavior individuals are willing to engage in: (example of Black anti-homosexuality taboos for example--see Elijah Anderson, and Elliott Liebow's Tally's Corner or Catholic taboo about birth-control)
Bruce: we need to be careful about time and region. Much of what we're up to here has to do with region, class, etc. and who's attracted, who's turned off (the map that tells what is illegal in what states)
Wulf: another issue is the dangers of pregnacny and childbirth: this is one that can be brought to students in the classroom to help them see some of the issues that emerge before there is good birth control
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