Women in Early American Religion 1600-1850

The Puritan and Evangelical Traditions

Marilyn J. Westerkamp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134648795
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Women in Early American Religion, 1600-1850 explores the first two centuries of America's religious history, examining the relationship between the socio-political environment, gender, politics and religion. Drawing its background from women's religious roles and experiences in England during the Reformation, the book follows them through colonial settlement, the rise of evangelicalism, the American Revolution, and the second flowering of popular religion in the nineteenth century.
Tracing the female spiritual tradition through the Puritans, Baptists and Shakers, Westerkamp argues that religious beliefs and structures were actually a strong empowering force for women.

1
Women, the Spirit, and the Reformation

I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy; your old men shall dream dreams; your young men shall see visions:

And also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out my vision.

(Joel 2:28–29)

Throughout the history of Christianity, leaders and followers have looked to a variety of authorities to understand the divine and structure their relationships with God. Different communities have focused upon different sources of truth—church tradition, reason and learning, popular practice, and the scriptures; yet most affirm that the significance of each authority has been mediated by the Holy Spirit. In some groups, the Spirit's grace merely hangs as a plumb line against which to measure the unchanging legacy of scripture or tradition. For others, the Holy Spirit plays an active, vital role in the personal lives of believers, directing spiritual journeys and mandating personal and social change. The stronger a church's belief in the immanence of the Spirit, the more difficult it is for a church's magisterium to control its members. For centuries, Christians have remained convinced that God moved in arbitrary, unpredictable ways, sometimes gifting the least of humanity while ignoring the most powerful. Surely, if a man or woman acted under divine commission, no earthly church institution could justify countermanding that person or controlling actions or speech.

This book explores the theological beliefs and spiritual careers of Puritan and evangelical women during the first 200 years in what became the United States. These women, socially and politically subordinate according to custom and law, experienced the Holy Spirit during their lives and discovered their own charismatic authority. Largely descendants of British and West African forebears, these women were members of Christian movements that envisioned the Holy Spirit as a powerful, immediate force in the world. Their history began during the sixteenth century, the century of Protestant Reformation, with the intensely pietistic and strictly reformed English Puritan community. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, many Puritans emigrated to New England to create a godly community that maintained its integrity for almost a hundred years. During the century that followed, women of different ethnicities across the North American colonies became involved in an expanded, diversified pietism. This reconstruction of Puritans' introverted spirituality has come to be known as evangelicalism, a religiosity that owed much to community ritual even as it retained the primary goal of the individual sinner's salvation. Once established, evangelicalism prospered throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, counting extraordinary numbers of women among its strongest adherents. This book examines the ways these religious systems defined, understood, and constrained women, and the various ways that women responded to these restrictions and to the urgings of God in their hearts.

Such work of the Spirit was not unknown to English women before the Reformation. The fourteenth-century mystic Margery Kempe received several visions and experienced a close communion with Christ, recording her earthly travels and mystical experiences in the Book of Margery Kempe. Although married and the mother of fourteen children, she and her husband pursued a spiritual lifestyle that included a fairly ascetic regimen, vows of chastity, and pilgrimages to Canterbury and the Holy Land. Her prayers and meditations seem to have been influenced by her visits to Julian of Norwich, a woman known to Margery (and to others) as an expert in spiritual guidance.¹

Julian, too, is easily described as a mystic, but unlike Margery she had taken vows early in her life. She spent most of her adult career as an anchoress, a woman who lived an ascetic, solitary life confined to her cell, or anchorhold. At the age of 30, Julian received a series of sixteen revelations over two days, and she devoted the next twenty years to meditation and prayer in an effort to understand what had been revealed to her. Her revelations focused primarily upon the Trinity and the sufferings of Christ, and her writings reflected a continuous concern for the trials of human experience and the struggle of the soul to be united with the divine. At one point she spoke of the presence and absence of the Spirit in the life of the soul. “To experience well-being is to be touched and illumined by grace, and with true certainty of endless joy.” This joy, however, might quickly disappear in the absence of God, to be followed by the dejection and weariness that would come with the sense of abandonment.

And then presently God gave me again comfort and rest for my soul, delight and security so blessedly and so powerfully that there was no fear, no sorrow, no pain, physical or spiritual, that one could suffer which might have disturbed me. And then again I felt the pain, and then afterwards the delight and the joy… And in the time of joy I could have said with St. Paul: Nothing shall separate me from the love of Christ; and in the pain I could have said with St. Peter: Lord, save me, I am perishing.

In a beautiful exposition that foreshadows the Puritan belief in the unconditional freeness of the Holy Spirit's grace, Julian added that neither the sorrow nor the happiness were deserved:

For in this time I committed no sin for which I ought to have been left to myself, for it was so sudden. Nor did I deserve these feelings of joy, but the Lord gives it freely when he wills, and sometimes he allows us to be in sorrow, and both are one in love.²

Such early records of revelations and union with the divine are scarce indeed, and from women they are even rarer. It will never be known how many women actually experienced the supreme joys described by Julian and Margery; but, even for those not inspired, the medieval church provided support. Convents offered a home and a discipline for those few women who felt called to take Jesus as their immediate bridegroom. Women who wished to avoid marriage and dependence upon an individual man could also join one of these female communities. For women who chose marriage, there were multitudes of saints and devotions to the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. Yet, while marriage was a respectable choice, and the choice of most Christians, the Church placed a premium upon chastity for men and, especially, women. In their vows of celibacy and poverty, nuns were thought to overcome their feminine bodies and, in consequence, achieve heightened spiritual awareness, holiness, and authority.³ Men, too, benefited from the chastity of women, since chaste women would no longer lure men into the trap of sensuality and away from their spiritual purposes.

The Reformation arrived in England in 1533 and proceeded at a rather slow pace. Until the accession of Elizabeth in 1558, the progress of reforming bishops was haphazard, tied as it was (for good or ill) to the will of monarchs, who from reign to reign changed the direction of the church. Politically, the English Reformation removed the institutional church from the purview of the papacy by placing it in the hands of English bishops under the headship of the monarch. Religiously, this process worked to distance the English Church from much of the theology and practice of the Church of Rome. The Reformation removed or undermined many of the emotionally satisfying rituals of the medieval church, and priests were no longer recognized as an especial, sacred caste with particular access to God. The veneration of Mary and the saints was attacked, and many special festivals and feast days were eliminated. In essence, all mediation between the individual soul and God was replaced with the priesthood of all believers, a belief acted out with direct prayer to God, the father, and Jesus Christ, his son and the savior of humanity. Sociologically, the reformers challenged the conviction that celibacy was superior to marriage, and marriage was now valued for its role in promoting divine providence. All persons, including ministers, were to marry.

It might be argued that the Reformation brought little change to the lives of English men and women. In 1600 as in 1500, most adults in all classes married, bore children, and supported their families as best they could. However, the Reformation did change the ideological touchstone of holiness. Not only was the superiority of celibacy discounted; celibacy was barely an acceptable choice. Reformed theologians agreed that man was duty-bound to marry and follow the example of the patriarchs (though stopping short of their multiple wives). New Testament caveats invoked by Roman Catholics were explained away. Paul's preference for celibacy, “It were good for a man not to touche a woman,” was clarified: “…because mariage, through mans corruption, and not by Gods institution, bringeth cares and troubles.” Later in the same chapter, when Paul argued with vehemence for the superiority of virginity, the Calvinist commentator explained that “He doeth not preferre singleness as a thing more holie than mariage, but by reason of incommodities, which the one hathe more than the other.”⁴

The first century of reform saw the publication of detailed domestic manuals that filled hundreds of pages with descriptions of Utopian households. The vocation of spouse and parent was spiritually elevated. The family became the most sacred of humane institutions: “the familie is a little Church, and a little commonwealth.”⁵ Undoubtedly, many aspiring young ministers were pleased that the unhappy demands of the chaste life would no longer be required. In place of the special spiritual status granted to a few men and women by virtue of their celibacy and consecration, the mandate for marriage gratified all men. Each became a patriarch, to follow in Abraham's footprints, he who “was a King, a priest, a Prophet in his owne Family.”⁶

But what of women? The destruction of the Catholic Church was followed by the destruction of those few institutions that provided some opportunity, however limited, for female autonomy. The anchoress, bricked into her hermitage, nevertheless lived autonomously through her own choice. If she was not free to move about the countryside, she was also not required to attend to the demands of male “protectors.” Gone were the convents, sneered at by men of distinction, but nonetheless a haven from male restriction and interference. Medieval convents may have required a male priest to perform sacramental rituals, but these were female communities, governed by women for the comfort and encouragement of women.⁷ Protestant women were destined to be married, to labor in the household, and to subject themselves to the rule of their husbands. This calling was lodged in women's natural inferiority: their intellectual weakness, making them unable to distinguish between good and evil, and their spiritual weakness, rendering them unable to assert their wills to follow the good.

With the rising importance of the family as a spiritual unit, and the central role played by the housewife, Amanda Porterfield has argued that the status of women improved.⁸ While the anchoress or nun may have enjoyed greater autonomy than her married peer, might even have exercised some power or influence, this independence and authority grew out of a holiness possible only in her celibacy. In other words, by denying her sexuality and overcoming her femaleness, the “genderless” individual claimed spiritual power. After the Reformation, this argument continues, women were honored in their femaleness as essential members of the family. This vision articulated in the domestic manuals was also reflected in countless eulogies and memorials.

Here lies,

A worthy matron of unspotted life,

A loving mother and obedient wife,

A friendly neighbor, pitiful to poor,

Whom oft she fed and clothed with her store;

To servants wisely awful, but yet kind,

And as they did so reward did find.

A true instructor of her family,

The which she orderd with dexterity.⁹

So Anne Bradstreet praised her late mother Dorothy Dudley, praise that echoed across the seventeenth century and beyond, as sons, husbands, and pastors praised mothers, wives, and widows. Loving, charitable, kind, and wise, she ordered her family.

Yet, this argument seems rather narrowly drawn and shortsighted. Seclusion and celibacy seem an extraordinary price to pay for what many twentieth-century scholars judge extremely limited power. In medieval eyes, the price may not have been so dear, nor the power so limited. In disbelieving the satisfaction that some women claimed to find within monastic lives, scholars are accepting the reformers' limited definition of female fulfillment instead of hearing and believing women's own words. Consider what was meant by housewife: a superior laborer, a middle manager who, in the best circumstances, governed her female servants and young children under the headship of her spouse. Wives may have been honored for their sterling qualities and valued for their skills; some exercised considerable influence over their households. Still, however great the honor and value, housewifery did not bring autonomy. As Margaret Newcastle mourned: “Men, that are not only our Tyrants, but our Devils, keep us in the Hell of Subjection, from whence I cannot Perceive any Redemption…”¹⁰ The worthy Dorothy Dudley was also an obedient wife.

The Reformation returned all women to a life that most women had lived anyway; it reconfirmed old lines of patriarchy within household and family—a case of new language for old structures. Religiously, however, there was a change for the ordinary believer. The medieval conviction that an individual could reach union with the Holy Spirit remained, but Protestant reformers, committed as they were to the elimination of a special, sacred caste of priests, monks, and nuns, believed that this experience was available to everyone. When reformers looked to the Bible for exemplary women, they found Bathsheba the housekeeper, Susannah the chaste wife, and Mary the submissive. They also found in Paul's Epistles and the Acts of the Apostles the names of many women honored as preachers and community leaders. In the final chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, Paul explicitly addressed and commended nine women in his long list of salutations. Try as they might, reformers could not deny that among women the “gifts of miracles and tongues were common to many as well as the gift of Prophecy.”¹¹ The best they could do was dismiss prophesying women to the specific, miraculous years of the early Christian church, the years during which God actively revealed his scriptural word.

Most English reformers were content with this solution to the problem, but not all. Puritans and their evangelical descendants did not want to dismiss such knowledge out of hand. They were deeply interested in the strength of such seemingly ordinary persons; they envied their charisma and marveled at the power of their speech. In such individuals, Puritans and evangelicals found promise in the ability of ordinary persons like themselves to reach God, and they revelled in the hope of that astonishing moment when God would touch their lives. This conviction in the mystical ability of the individual soul to experience God stood at the center of Puritans' and evangelicals' spiritual strength. Male religious leaders would be committed to patriarchal structures based upon an understanding of gender that regarded women as essentially inferior—physically, intellectually, and emotionally—to men. However, the value placed upon order (and its reward of male power) frequently competed with an ethos that embraced the sacred potential of all individuals, women as well as men, to discover God and attain union with the divine.

Puritans and evangelicals will be discussed in some detail in subsequent chapters, but at this point it is important to clarify the paradoxical nature of the religiosity that these two communities shared. Both seventeenth-century Puritans and their evangelical descendants judged the work of the Spirit of paramount importance among believers. All individuals sought to hear and feel God in their souls, and pastors led their congregants toward that mystical communion. However, each cultural system also engaged competing demands to establish order amidst the swirling chaos of society and sin. Whether that order was grounded in the seventeenth-century belief in divine providence, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment system of natural philosophy, or the nineteenth-century romantic vision of separate spheres, women were consistently placed in a subordinate position to men. Moreover, the elite men who controlled positions of secular and religious authority were not disinterested interpreters of scripture and the Spirit in light of providence or natural philosophy. Surely, at some level, magistrates, ministers, and (in the later period) white men generally wanted to maintain their power. The only way that women could overcome their disabilities was through the intervention of the Holy Spirit; and the voice of the Spirit was so powerful that the only way male leaders could maintain their patriarchal headship was to silence, or at least limit, that voice.

The follow...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Women, the Spirit, and the Reformation
• PART I The Puritan heritage
• PART II The rise of evangelical religion
• Notes
• Bibliographic essay: further reading and research projects
• Index