Women and Religion

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Women and Religion

Female Piety. The role of women in religious life expanded tremendously during the nineteenth century and helped elevate the position of women in public life in general. In colonial times women made up the majority of most churches, often constituting as much as two-thirds of a given congregation. But church leaders were traditionally men, who were believed to hold the only authority to speak on religious matters. After the American Revolution, however, this situation began to change. The state churches were disestablished, and ministers and their churches lost their official public roles. As religion became more personal and voluntary, it also became more clearly connected with home life, and by extension, with women. Women were thought to be pious and moral by nature, while men, who dealt with the secular world, were inclined toward brutish behavior and vice. It was the proper role of women, therefore, to instruct their husbands and children in spiritual matters. This duty became all the more important as the nation expanded. Families migrated to unpopulated areas where there were often no churches for dozens or even hundreds of miles. Mothers, it was believed, had the innate and vitally important ability to ensure that a moral and virtuous society was maintained.

New Roles. While the changes wrought by disestablishment elevated female spiritual authority in the public eye, they did little to alter the traditional notion that a woman’s place was in the home. Rather, that notion was reinforced by the pervasive idea that a virtuous republic could be maintained only if there were good, selfsacrificing wives and mothers at home to give moral strength to their families. But the revivals of the 1820s and 1830s began to expand women’s roles into the world beyond the home. The novel experience of offering public testimony of their faith at a revival offered many women a form of emancipation from their cloistered domestic lives. Revival preachers encouraged all of their converts, male and female, to share their experiences with the larger community, and many heeded their call, going door-to-door or holding prayer meetings in their homes. In doing so, women ceased to be simply objects of the revivals and became active evangelists themselves.

Public Life. Formal ordination for women was rare in the nineteenth century, but there were other ways to become active in the evangelical drive to convert the world. Many women became missionaries, both at home and abroad, often remaining unmarried in order to devote themselves fully to their godly professions. Others traveled on revival circuits, preaching and exhorting on an informal basis before large audiences. Nancy Towle, a Free Will Baptist, began preaching and holding revivals as early as 1815 and was once invited to preach before the United States Congress. At first many people of both sexes were startled or even offended by the idea of women speaking in public. Some attended religious gatherings simply to gape at the spectacle where women were lecturing or preaching. Once there, however, many were moved by the power of the speakers and began to abandon some of their prejudices. By midcentury female religious authority had become sufficiently accepted to allow several women to lead new religious movements and denominations. Most notably, Ellen Harmon White became the prophetess and leader of Seventh Day Adventism and Mary Baker Eddy founded Christian Science.

Reform. Participation in religious life also helped women move into broader spheres of activity outside the home that offered many a much-needed sense of intellectual fulfillment. Encouraged by revivalists such as Finney, many women became leading activists in the social reform movements of their day. Separate female benevolent societies were formed by some women, while others came to stand on equal footing with men in established societies. Again they met resistance, this time from people who felt it indecent for women and men to mingle behind the closed doors of committee meetings, but they held their ground. With stature gained from participation in the religious realm, women began to give public lectures against intemperance, gambling, prostitution, and other sins. Sarah and Angelina Weld Grimke, Lydia Maria Child, Lucretia Mott, and others emerged as prominent voices in the antislavery crusade. Empowered by these roles, many of the same women in turn became leading figures in the struggle for woman’s rights.

ROCHESTER RAPPINGS

In March 1848 two young sisters named Kate and Margaret Fox began hearing mysterious rapping noises in their house near Rochester, New York, Interpreting the sounds as communications from the dead, the girls set up a code system by which the spirits could respond to their questions. Friends and neighbors flocked to the Fox house to ask their own questions and speak to deceased loved ones. The following year an older sister became the girls’ publicity manager; P. T. Barnum made them part of his show; and they were soon national celebrities. As their fame spread, so did the national enthusiasm for Spiritualism, the belief in communication between living humans and disembodied spirits, generally through a medium. At seances across the country objects moved by themselves; instruments played in locked cabinets; and men and women revealed apparently unknowable information while in trance states, convincing thousands of the reality of the spirit world. Some enthusiasts, mindful of accusations of fraud against many mediums, were content to view spiritualist séances as simple entertainment. For others, however, séances were deeply religious experiences, offering “scientific” proof of the existence of the human soul after death. Spiritualist mediums and writers tended to reject the claims of the clergy to any special religious authority and to stress the ability of every individual to follow his or her conscience. Many rejected the idea of hell as unjust and argued that all people would eventually be saved. The movement had widespread appeal to people of all social and educational levels, and served as both an extension of and an alternative to mainstream religious beliefs.

Source: R. Laurence Moore, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).