Women and Religion

Sources

Women in Church. Eighty years before the American Revolution began, the Puritan minister Cotton Mather observed that “there are far more godly women in the world than there are godly men.” Mather’s statement is one of the basic facts of the social history of American religion. In every religion, in almost every time and place, women outnumber men as church members. The support of women for organized religion in the revolutionary period was crucial even though they rarely had public roles to play. During this period women made up an increasingly large proportion of church members. Membership patterns in the Congregational churches of New England demonstrate this. During the entire revolutionary era women consistently made up more than half of most congregations. From 1730 to 1770 an average of 59 percent of all new church members were women. From 1770 to 1800 that number rose to 64 percent, and after 1800 it would grow again, to 69 percent. People at the time were well aware of this trend, given women’s presence at the revivals of the era. In 1767 minister John Cleaveland of Ipswich, Massachusetts, reported on a revival that began during a meeting of a “considerable Number of the Youth, chiefly Females,” and led to the conversion of ninety new church members, two-thirds of them women. These statistics reveal important developments

in the shaping of American religious culture. The stories of individual women, however, bring such statistics to life.

Faith Robinson Trumbull. Faith Trumbull was a pious Congregationalist and the daughter and great-granddaughter of ministers. She was also the wife of Connecticut’s governor Jonathan Trumbull, the only colonial governor who supported the independence movement. Her son, John Trumbull, would aid the new nation by becoming one of its most prominent painters, taking the battles and heroes of the Revolution as his frequent topics. Faith Trumbull combined some of the attributes of her husband and son, expressing her political feelings in artistic form. Significantly it was religion that made it possible for her, a woman with no public role as a politician or artist, to do this. Sometime between the Stamp Act crisis of 1765 and the onset of the Revolutionary War in 1775, she produced a piece of needlework depicting a scene from the Bible that was an allegory for the political events of her time. The scene was the death of Absalom, a son of King David who had rejected his father’s authority and led a revolution against Israel’s leader. Absalom suffered for his sin as he became caught in the branches of a tree and died from hanging. Many ministers, as well as Faith Trumbull, used this story to comment on America’s rebellion against its king and figurative father, George III. David, like George, was noted for his interest in centralizing power over his subjects and the immorality of his court. He was also genuinely esteemed by his people, something that captures the difficulty many Americans had reconciling desire for freedom with sincere reverence for their legitimate king. The notion of the rebellious son resonated with many Americans in this period. Absalom’s tragic death was at once a warning to Americans to proceed carefully, as well as a hopeful sign of possible reconciliation since in the biblical story Absalom’s death causes the grieving king to forgive his wayward son. In this small piece of cloth Trumbull used an art form practiced almost exclusively by women to express this complex political stance that was simultaneously an endorsement of revolutionary feeling and a caution against going too far with it. The work is filled with symbols combining political and religious feelings. A dove stands for peaceful relations and the Holy Spirit; Absalom is figured as a martyred rebel and the crucified Christ. Unlike her husband, Trumbull had few opportunities to express her political feelings and here found a homely means to do so in a way appropriate for the women’s roles of the period. That she used religion to do so shows that women, like men, found a close correspondence between their faith and their revolution, even if they expressed themselves differently.

Patriotic Spinning. Trumbull’s political statement was itself a religious activity, something true for other women as well. During the 1760s and 1770s resistance to British rule took the form of economic measures such as the nonimportation movement of 1769. Women had an important role in this movement because they were the ones able to produce what was no longer being imported. In many cases women came to this patriotic duty with a sense of religious obligation. Ezra Stiles, one of the ministers of Newport, Rhode Island, encouraged the linking of politics and religious feeling in his female congregants. He hosted a spinning bee at his home in 1769, during which women used thirty-seven spinning wheels to produce ninety-four skeins of valuable linen yarn. The women made a gift of their labor and the yarn to the church, and Stiles saw that it was used patriotically. Spinning bees continued yearly until war broke out, with up to seventy wheels spinning in Stiles’s home. Similar bees were held throughout New England, at least thirty in 1769 alone. On one Sunday in November 1775 the minister of Litchfield, Connecticut, told his congregation about the suffering of American troops in Canada. The women of the church responded by spinning and knitting for the men all afternoon even though no work was to be done on Sunday, except for truly religious purposes. Clearly ministers successfully cast such work as a virtuous service to God and country. These meetings foreshadowed the vast religious humanitarian movement that emerged in the early national period, an effort largely undertaken and funded by women. In the revolutionary era, spinning meetings were a chance for women to be patriotic, public, and pious all at once.

Mary Gould Almy. Religion was a resource available to women on both sides of the political issues of the revolutionary period. Mary Gould married Benjamin Almy in 1762 in Newport, Rhode Island. Both hailed from families that had once been Quaker but now worshiped at a variety of Newport’s many churches. Benjamin was a member of the Second Congregational Church, led by liberal Stiles, while his wife was a lifelong member of Trinity Church, Newport’s Anglican community. Liberal Congregationalism shared many features with Anglicanism in the years leading up to the American Revolution, but the politics of the two churches could not be more different. Because they belonged to Britain’s state church, headed by the king, the Anglicans generally resisted the independence movement and were the core of the Loyalist groups in most of the colonies. Mary Almy was no exception and remained a Loyalist throughout the war. Her husband was a Patriot and fought for the American side when the conflict broke open in 1775. This was not an easy situation for the Almys since it meant that Mary was rejecting her husband’s authority in favor of her own interpretation of God’s will, something that was not lightly done by an eighteenth-century woman. Some of her anxiety over this choice emerged in a letter she wrote her husband in 1778. While Benjamin was off fighting, Mary was left in Newport during the British occupation and was there to face the French-American invasion of the city in late July. When it was over she wrote to her husband, criticizing the French allies and asserting her continuing support for British rule. Yet she was also concerned for Benjamin’s fate even though he fought for the other side, and she turned to God to ensure her husband’s safety. “At last I shut myself from the family,” she wrote, “to implore Heaven to protect you, and keep you from imprisonment and death.” Prayer was the only way to reconcile the political and religious conflict that divided her family. She was not alone in this. Perhaps a third of Newport’s families were divided religiously, and as churches divided on the political issues of the day, so too did families. The burden of this division necessarily fell on the mothers and wives of the day.

Mary Silliman. One woman who recorded her struggle to understand God’s will for her life during the revolutionary conflict was Mary Silliman of Fairfield, Connecticut. Silliman’s husband, Gold Selleck Silliman, was a prominent member of the Connecticut militia and the state’s attorney in his town at the outbreak of war. He was instrumental in convicting local Tories of disloyalty. In retaliation Silliman was kidnapped and held by the British authorities for almost a year, leaving his wife, pregnant at the time, to manage the farm, raise the children, and endure the sacking of the village by the British. Religion helped Mary endure this and other wartime problems, and she mingled pious and military images in her writing. In 1776 she described to her husband a day of prayer and fasting she kept as “wrestling for you and our bleeding land,” and she hoped that she had “in some measure acted the heroine as well as my dear Husband the Hero.” Mary persevered, aided by a strong sense of the duty owed by women to submit to the judgment of men and by all humans to acknowledge the power of God. It was this religious doctrine, learned from her father, who was a minister, and from the pious woman who taught the school she attended, that sustained her during these times. Her letters and journal indicate that it was a powerful doctrine for her but also one with which she struggled. She resented the tests she had to endure but found meaning and comfort in what she called “the way of duty.” In the end she agreed with her father, who wrote to ask “Where should our Friends be, and where are they safest, but there, where the Lord calls them, where their Duty lies? There only may we hope for & expect protection, even where we are serving God.”

Women in Ministry. Very few women in the revolutionary era were able to become religious authorities in their own right, transcending at least in the sphere of religion the strictures on women’s public lives that most early Americans took for granted. One example was Sarah Osborn, another woman from Newport, Rhode Island. Osborn was touched by the revivals of the Great Awakening and for the rest of her life sought to bring that experience to others in her congregation. In the course of this work she became the true center of that church, and even her minister credited her efforts as at least as important as his own. An even more dramatic example is Quaker Elizabeth Ashbridge. Women had greater freedom among the Quakers, at least as far as being religious leaders went, since that group had no ordained ministers and their participatory style of worship left room for women as well as men to speak publicly. Ashbridge endured an unusually harsh life, even by the standards of eighteenth-century women. She was widowed at an early age after marrying against her father’s wishes and emigrated to America only to be unjustly placed into indentured servitude for four years. She was briefly an actor and dancer in New York. A second marriage brought no more happiness, as her husband abused her frequently, in part because she had become a convert to Quakerism. She also became a minister and traveled from place to place across Pennsylvania and New Jersey, speaking at Quaker meetings about God’s presence. She drew directly from her experiences as a woman to do this, although that experience was hardly limited to the domestic sphere. Ashbridge provided a model for godliness in a way that expanded women’s roles, even as it spoke to how those roles were limited by the American conditions she knew too well. She had an expansive vision of her ministry as well and in 1753 asked to be allowed to go to Ireland and pursue her preaching vocation there. She left behind an account of her life, first published in 1774, which enabled her work to continue after her death. Even though eighteenth-century women could not be ministers in the formal sense, examples such as Osborn and Ashbridge show they pursued a ministry of just as much value to the church and the nation.

Female Virtue. Religious women contributed in one other way to America’s revolutionary history despite their limited public lives in this era. They provided a way of talking about what made America different from the rest of the world, and in doing this, religion helped women to contribute significantly to independence. The republican language that lay behind the speeches, pamphlets, songs, and sermons of the revolutionary era centered on the discussion of virtue. The civic virtue of caring about the country enough to serve it in politics or war would make the new nation prosper. While the military and political worlds were male worlds, virtue in this period was also a concept closely associated with women, especially religious women. The revivalistic preaching of the revolutionary era strongly emphasized the connection between virtue and God’s grace. Only the reception of grace could produce true virtue, the disinterested benevolence that evangelical Protestants such as Jonathan Edwards and Samuel Hopkins talked about. That distinterested benevolence was the religious corollary to the ideal of civic service, for the sake of the country, not from self-interest. In making this connection religious thinkers of the period argued that religion was an essential support for the nation. Women were the key link in the chain, something increasingly made clear in the sermons and other writings of the 1770s and 1780s. For example, the sermon preached in New Haven, Connecticut, for Mary Clap’s funeral in 1769 stressed her piety as a feminine virtue, one that led to a seemingly blameless and selfless life of service to others. Women were seen by many people of the time as especially open to the work of the spirit, and their growing dominance of the churches and revival meetings confirmed this idea. Women raising sons were also the people most responsible for training the next generation of leaders. Pious women could receive the gift of virtue from God and teach children how to do the same and so insure the safety of the republic. For many religious Americans the Revolution was a matter of reformed behavior as well as a new political order. While it was not a public effort, women had the leading roles in that campaign.

Sources

Joy and Richard Buel, The Way of Duty (New York: Norton, 1984);

Elaine Forman Crane, “Religion and Rebellion: Women of Faith in the American War for Independence,” in Religion in a Revolutionary Age, edited by Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994);

Cristine Levenduski, Peculiar Power: A Quaker Woman Preacher in Eighteenth-Century America (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996);

Richard D. Shiels, “The Feminization of American Congregationalism, 1730–1835,” American Quarterly, 33 (1981): 46–62;

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “‘Daughters of Liberty’: Religious Women in Revolutionary New England,” in Women in the Age of the American Revolution, edited by Hoffman and Albert (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989).