Thesis “God Makes Use of Feeble Means Sometimes, To
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THESIS “GOD MAKES USE OF FEEBLE MEANS SOMETIMES, TO BRING ABOUT HIS MOST EXALTED PURPOSES”: FAITH AND SOCIAL ACTION IN THE LIVES OF EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA Submitted by Beth Darlene Ridenoure Austin Department of History In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the Degree of Master of Arts Colorado State University Fort Collins, Colorado Fall 2014 Master’s Committee: Advisor: Ruth M. Alexander Diane C. Margolf Sue R. Doe Copyright by Beth Darlene Ridenoure Austin 2014 All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT “GOD MAKES USE OF FEEBLE MEANS SOMETIMES, TO BRING ABOUT HIS MOST EXALTED PURPOSES”: FAITH AND SOCIAL ACTION IN THE LIVES OF EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA Historians of women’s history and of African American religious history interpret Evangelical Christian theology in widely differing ways. Women’s historians often have emphasized its complicity with the socially conservative, repressive forces with which women’s rights proponents had to contend as they sought the betterment of American society. Historians of African American women and religion tend to highlight Christianity’s liberating role and potential in the African American experience. These different historiographical emphases prompt reconsideration of religious conservatism and its effect on social activism, particularly as refracted through the lens of race and gender. Considering the ubiquity of Christian religiosity in the rhetoric, the epistemology and the moral culture that informed social discourse in nineteenth- century America, individual religious belief and its effect on women’s social activism as they sought to define and expand their role in American society is an important element of historical analysis and deserves much greater attention by the scholarly community. This thesis is an attempt to draw together themes from various bodies of historiography in order to clarify the interconnectedness of religious belief, gender roles, and race relations in the history of the United States. It examines the lives and beliefs of ten American women, white and black, who adhered to the commonplace, conventional theology of Protestant Evangelicalism and who engaged in the reformist tendencies of the nineteenth century. During the nineteenth century, Protestant Evangelical Christianity became a socially useful and politically relevant ii means of integrating faith and daily life in the context of an evolving ideology of human rights, and served as a path through which Americans, both white and black, were able to appropriate and make effective use of the individual authority that had been idealized in the rhetoric of the American Revolution. Although the actions of nineteenth-century Evangelical women were not always intended to bring about political change, their collective embodiment of an outwardly- focused, socially-active Evangelical faith contributed momentum to the creation of a pattern of discourse within which marginalized Americans of later generations operated as they pressed for legal and political equality as American citizens. This thesis, by examining the ways in which the faith of conservative, Evangelical women empowered them to effect positive change in their own and others’ lives, revisits the issue of religious conservatism and its effect on social activism, probing the question from the angle of empowerment rather than from limitation. iii DEDICATION To my children, with confidence that God, by His grace, is bringing about His most exalted purposes through them. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... ii Dedication ...................................................................................................................................... iv Introduction ......................................................................................................................................1 Chapter One – Beginnings: Acquiring Perspective and Living by Faith in a Broken World ........42 Chapter Two – Conversion and the Individual: Negotiating Authority Structures and Living the Faith .................................................................................................................73 Chapter Three – Activism and Identity: Considerations of Faith, Race, and Literacy in the Consolidation of the Self .....................................................................................103 Conclusion: Evangelical Faith as an Agent of Empowerment in Women’s Lives ......................144 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................150 v Introduction Following the creation of the United States, American society experienced multi-faceted social reform and religious change which, along with a newly formulated and only partially applied notion of human rights, affected nearly every social relationship in the now independent former colony. Reflecting the adolescent status of the new nation in relation to its British political parent, the early national period was characterized by a search for and consolidation of a unique national identity.1 Individually and corporately, Americans, especially those living in the roughly one hundred year period surrounding the founding decade of the United States, had to wrestle with how to apply ideals enshrined in the American founding documents to specific circumstances, to work them out in the concrete reality of their own lives as well as in the abstract as a national community. Inevitably, different regional, religious, racial, gender, and class contexts complicated this application. The lived experience of identity construction, while it was shared in the broadest sense, was profoundly diverse. For some, the benefits of the American Revolution were immediate. For others, they were non-existent, or at least unclear. White men during the American Revolution, for example, by throwing off the structures of power which formerly had bound them in a patriarchal relationship to their civic rulers, assumed a new authority in relation to a state that was “of, by, and for the people.” But for their wives and daughters, political independence from Britain provided little immediate change to the patriarchal structures which they encountered in their own homes and which excluded them from direct participation in their new government.2 1 Kerriann Yakota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary American Became a Postcolonial Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 2 Linda Kerber, No Constitutional Right to be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), 32. 1 Similarly, for non-white men and women, especially those who were enslaved, the notion of human rights and political independence meant next to nothing since the Constitution validated the idea of racial inequality by making provisions for maintaining the institution of slavery. The very nature of identity construction, however, means that the process of figuring out and refining the salient features of identity continues through time, and over the course of American history most of these inconsistencies between ideology and application were noted and contested. In fact, the United States can perhaps best be understood historically as a body of people who have grappled with the meaning of America’s political ideals as they were particularized in different American contexts over time.3 Much of the diversity of experience in this process of constructing an American national identity centered on the issue of an individual’s relationship to authority in all of its social incarnations. Drawing on the Enlightenment ideal of autonomy, or individual self-rule, the framers of the new American government crafted an American ideal in which the autonomous individual was the raison d’être for the new government.4 In a government “of, by, and for the people” every individual citizen could participate directly in the governance of the nation, rather than having decisions made by authority figures higher in the social hierarchy. While a government of autonomous individuals was the ideal, the reality was that with many of the hierarchical structures of the colonial era still in place, those who were not considered heads of families had an indirect, mediated relationship to the state. Nevertheless, the universal language 3 Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007). Hereafter referred to as Human Rights. See pp. 116-126 for Hunt’s analysis of how the framers of the new American government had to negotiate the difficult task of particularizing universal language when they declared the existence of human rights in the context of the new nation. 4 For a fuller discussion of the role of autonomy in the framing of human rights language see Hunt, Human Rights, 27-29. 2 used in the American founding documents made room for questioning such inconsistencies between reality and the vaunted ideal, as has been done throughout American history.5 As the American national identity took shape and its high-flown political rhetoric worked itself out in real time, the relationship of individuals to each other and to institutions of church and state inevitably changed as more and more classes of individuals contested their exclusion from citizenship and its benefits. Such contestation, which sometimes was overt and sometimes was not, took place in the personal