Women’s History Review, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1998

Representation and Self-representation: Hannah Whitall Smith as family woman and religious guide [1]

KERRI ALLEN University of Adelaide, Australia

ABSTRACT This article focuses upon representations of Hannah Whitall Smith (1832-1911) and finds that most accounts of her portray her as a family woman, despite the fact that she was a social and political activist who wrote two best- selling religious guides based upon her own experience. But the author finds that in these works Hannah Whitall Smith represents herself as a domestic woman and denies any theological intent rather seeking to gain a voice by using a strategy of theological naivety.

Hannah Whitall Smith (1832-1911) was a mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, a wife, a daughter, a sister and an aunt, a feminist, a Quaker, a preacher, a writer, a social activist, a friend. She was the matriarch of a family many of whose members became famous. One of Hannah’s daughters, Mary Berenson, was a feminist and an art critic whose second husband was . Her other daughter, Alys Russell, feminist and social activist, was Bertrand Russell’s first wife. Her son, , was a well-known man of letters. Mary’s daughters, Hannah’s granddaughters, Ray Costelloe Strachey, feminist author and social activist, and Karin Costelloe Stephen, one of the first Freudian psychoanalysts and Cambridge lecturer, married into the . Hannah Whitall Smith’s female-centred life included her sister Mary Whitall Thomas and her niece M. Carey Thomas, a feminist educator who became the first Dean and the second President of Bryn Mawr College for women in Philadelphia. Hannah and her husband, Robert Pearsall Smith, whom she married at the age of 19, were Americans who settled permanently in England in 1888 following Mary’s marriage to her first husband, Francis Costelloe. Born into a devout Quaker family in Philadelphia, Hannah’s faith was a continuing theme in her life. Despite a period of rebellion during which she and her husband, Robert Pearsall Smith, preferred the revivalist rhetoric of

227 KERRI ALLEN HANNAH WHITALL SMITH evangelicalism and of Methodist camp meetings, she was a lifelong Quaker. Her great granddaughter Barbara Strachey [8], her granddaughter Ray Her religion reflected the major changes which Quakerism underwent in the Costelloe Strachey [9], and her children Mary Costelloe Berenson [10] and nineteenth century, a time during which many Friends embraced Logan Pearsall Smith [11], all left loving representations of Hannah Whitall evangelicalism and left behind their Quietist [2] past. She became influential Smith. According to Barbara Strachey, her other daughter, Alys Russell, and in Quaker and non-Quaker evangelical circles in England.[3] her other granddaughter, Karin Costelloe Stephen, were equally devoted to Hannah Whitall Smith’s networks also extended beyond religious her.[12] Hannah’s “first pleasure ... was her family” according to Barbara circles to encompass social and political activists, and members of the Strachey.[13] Her attitude to child-rearing has been attributed to her grief intelligentsia. Through her involvement in temperance circles in Britain and over the early deaths of four of her seven children. Out of this experience the USA, she knew both and Frances Willard, whom Hannah formed the “conviction that all children should be given everything she introduced to each other.[4] During the 1870s and early 1880s, while they wanted”.[14] Mary’s daily letters to her mother reveal a deep bond still in the USA, Hannah had been President of her local branch of the between mother and daughter. At the age of 13, in 1877, Mary began a Women’s Christian Temperance Union and later National Superintendent of letter to Hannah: “My dearest, sweetest, darlingest mother, Oh! how I love the British Women’s Temperance Association. From their home, Friday’s thee. I wish thee could know how much I love thee”.[15] Much later, in Hill in Fernhurst near Haslemere, amid a colony of artists, intellectuals and 1902, Mary wrote: musicians, the Smiths entertained some of the well-known names of the era; I waked up this morning thinking of all sorts of pleasant things – and Tennyson, writer Israel Zangwill, artist William Rothenstein, members of the one of the most rejoicing thoughts was that I have thee ... Thee can’t Fabian Society, Graham Wallas and Sidney Webb, and Beatrice Potter (later imagine what solid comfort lies in the thought, which is always, present Webb), who was to be a lifelong friend of Alys, for example. Rothenstein at the back of my mind, that thee is there.[16] described these gatherings thus: Later generations of descendants were no less enthusiastic about Hannah Old Mrs Smith was a Quaker of strict and narrow principles, rigidly held. Whitall Smith. , in a tribute to her grandmother, wrote of “how Her children, while respecting her faith, talked freely before her, great a woman she was, and how her strength and her wisdom, her encouraged their friends to do likewise; and as they brought to the vehemence, her wit and her common sense were all blended together” and house anyone they thought interesting, whatever his or her views might how she “was a perfect grandmother”.[17] Ray Strachey’s daughter, Barbara be, there were lively discussions.[5] Strachey, never knew her grandmother personally. But she too was “not Yet despite an extraordinary life, mention of Hannah Whitall Smith tends to exempt from the family weakness for writing about itself”, and authored two occur primarily in other people’s stories. In this article I focus on Hannah books on her family which recalled Hannah Whitall Smith as “a remarkable Whitall Smith, or rather representations of her, by exploring two of the woman”, as “an adoring mother” and “an even more adoring multiple readings possible of Hannah’s character: firstly, the version put grandmother”.[18] forward by some of her close family members; and secondly, the narrative of Although Hannah Whitall Smith’s descendants were not Quakers self which Hannah constructed through her literary activity. It is the themselves, their work can be situated within a broader Quaker tradition representations themselves which are the subject of this article.[6] What is which placed a high value on the writing of celebratory accounts of the lives important is not the ‘real’, or what really happened, but how her life has of family members. This phenomenon may perhaps be traced to the Quaker been constructed and revealed through writings by and about her. I turn belief in their own distinctiveness – non-Quakers were referred to as the first to biographical accounts of her life authored by members of her family, ‘world’s people’. Every human life was sacred, each person carried within most of whom were prolific writers of letters, diaries, journals and of books him or herself the ‘Inner Light’, the search for which was the central and essays. Many of these publications contain reproductions of a number of preoccupation of Quakers. The use of biography can be read as a way of Hannah Whitall Smith’s letters. My main interest is, however, in some of her honouring and attempting to capture for later generations that inner person. own work; she became an extremely successful author of self-help Christian Perhaps, too, in a religion which has always been marginal, biographical and texts in which she used her own life experiences. It is important to be other writings were an important means of self-validation. mindful, as Kali Israel points out in her work on Lady Dilke, of the “multiple What is puzzling is why the representations of Hannah by her family relationships between lives, images, and stories found in the intersections fail to take much account of her life as a feminist, a social activist, and an between self-representations, representations by others, and wider Victorian intellectual whose spiritual writing had a wide-ranging and long-lasting cultural discourse about femininity, work, and knowledge”.[7] influence. Her family members were well aware of her work. Ray Strachey, herself a literary figure and social activist, for instance, writes how she and

228 229 KERRI ALLEN HANNAH WHITALL SMITH her sister Karin knew as children that very “many people slept with her understand its methods or its terms”.[25] Her position was one that took the books under their pillows and altered their lives by her wisdom”. prevailing myth of ideal womanhood for its foundation. Christianity and the Nevertheless, for them Hannah Whitall Smith remained simply their demands of capital created in the USA, between 1820 and 1860, a “cult of indulgent Gram whose “nose turn[ed] up in a smiling way” and whose true womanhood”.[26] Confined to the private sphere and to the roles of “wrinkles [had] a smiling turn at their ends”.[19] Can these family narratives wife, mother, daughter and spinster, public roles for women were severely be read differently? Feminist scholars have pointed out how there is no clear circumscribed. Hannah Whitall Smith was working within a tradition that distinction between biography and autobiography.[20] For instance, Carolyn was largely female as books written by women, for women, and about Steedman’s study of Margaret McMillan shows how McMillan elided these women were “the mainstay of the national publishing industry”.[27] Within genres when purporting to write the life of her sister, Rachel McMillan. The this milieu she and other women writers of this ilk were able to define for representations of Hannah Whitall Smith left by her family members were themselves a literary vocation which allowed them to “re-envision women’s centrally concerned with the private and familial person, with her lives and represent them authoritatively” and, in the process, secure a relationship to the authors, rather than with her as a public figure. significant public voice for themselves.[28] Consequently, we learn at least as much about the authors themselves as The Christian’s Secret has been read by Debra Campbell as a about their subject. Why, for example, did Ray Strachey write a tribute to prominent example of the literature in which women attempted to discipline her grandmother in which she is described consistently in glowing terms? other women.[29] It has been, Campbell suggests, relied on by conservative Could there be an implicit comparison being made between her Protestant women well into the twentieth century, to encourage women to grandmother who obviously loved her and her mother, Mary Berenson, accept their family roles. Rooted in her own experiences as a wife and whose love may have been less obvious to her? Her mother had left her mother, Hannah exhorted her audience to accept submission to the will of children and her husband to be with Bernard Berenson in Italy and, God. She wrote, for instance: “surrender thy whole being to Him to be although she saw her daughters regularly, Hannah Whitall Smith eventually possessed by Him, and finally believe that He has taken possession, and is assumed primary responsibility for their upbringing. dwelling in thee”.[30] Campbell reads Hannah’s first book as an “act of How did Hannah Whitall Smith represent herself to others and to grudging submission” to a husband she neither loved nor respected.[31] At herself through her literary activity? Privately she wrote daily to her family. the height of the Evangelical fervour Robert Pearsall Smith became involved Although these letters are undoubtedly a rich source of information in in the ‘Higher Life’ movement and was much sought after as a preacher in relation to Hannah’s construction of herself, the following discussion is Europe and the USA. A scandal involving inappropriate sexual intimacy confined to two of her published works, the most significant of a number of between him and two of the female members of his congregation abruptly books which she wrote: The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life and The ended his career. Hannah Whitall Smith’s loyalty to her husband ostensibly Unselfishness of God and How I Discovered It. The first was written in 1875 survived this, although it must have been severely shaken and, indeed, her when she was in her forties, and the second in 1903, towards the end of her faith in him and in men seemed never to recover.[32] Her poor opinion of life.[21] Both were enormously successful, selling millions of copies, men and of marriage was only compounded by her religious mission, where appearing in multiple editions, and being translated into several languages. she met women who started confiding their unhappiness to her until Why did Hannah Whitall Smith write? Not, as for so many women writers, as eventually the “word ‘husband’ aroused an automatic disapproval and an income earning activity, for she had a comfortable income from the disgust”.[33] Husbands were, however, useful: Hannah once wrote family glassworks. Neither did she feel a need to contribute to “Daughters are wonderful luxuries, they are well worth a bad husband, at nineteenth-century theological debates, as did some other Quaker women, least, mine are”.[34] She confided her fears for her daughters to a friend: “I particularly in England. She expressly disavowed any intentions in this do not want my daughters to marry at all. I think marriage is a frightful risk; direction, beginning the Preface to The Christian’s Secret with “This is not and I do not like men”.[35] a theological book”.[22] Her purpose was to share her secret of a happy life, While Hannah Whitall Smith’s poor opinion of men in general and her “in order that others may be helped into a happy life also”.[23] No mention husband in particular may have been a factor in her writing, her work could of theology is made in The Unselfishness of God either, her intention in that equally be read as an exemplar of the nineteenth-century evangelical book being once again to share a revelation, to tell “the processes leading to conversion narrative in which the repudiation of an independent will and this discovery (of the unselfishness of God) by my own soul”.[24] complete submission to the will of God was a central requirement for Hannah Whitall Smith found a position from which to speak by the salvation.[36] Themes of rebelliousness and anger were often present in very denial of theological intent: “I have never studied Theology, and do not these accounts. Barbara Epstein argues that for many the conversion

230 231 KERRI ALLEN HANNAH WHITALL SMITH experience involved a broad challenge to male authority oriented daughter Mary Berenson wrote to Karin Costelloe: “Oh if we could only particularly to the “supremacy of their husbands and fathers”.[37] For the believe she is now having half the joy she so confidently expected”.[46] rebellious and strong-willed Hannah Whitall Smith any kind of submission Campbell reads The Unselfishness of God as a “mature theology” springing was challenging. When she and her husband first went to England as directly from her life experiences, a theology which placed the onus on God preachers they were invited to meet the leading evangelicals who would and not on women as had her previous work.[47] In it Hannah Whitall “judge whether their doctrine was perfectly sound according to the strictest Smith equated motherhood with unselfishness and love, ideas which standards”. Hannah Whitall Smith did not believe in the doctrine of Eternal coalesced in her conception of God as mother-hearted, a view which has Torment and despite urging from her husband “to conceal this heresy”, she found favour in other religious traditions.[48] This God offered comfort and told the gathering where she stood on the matter.[38] She was saved by love. She wrote: Lady Georgina Cowper Temple, who is reported to have said, “My dear, I Most of my ideas of the love and goodness of God have come from my don’t believe in it either”.[39] Taken to task at another time over her failure own experience as a mother, because I could not conceive that God to believe in this doctrine, she wrote: “I must have freedom to hold my own would create me with a greater capacity for unselfishness and views” and “if they don’t like my way they can ... walk in another road”.[40] self-sacrifice than He possessed Himself; and since this discovery of the Barbara Welter locates The Christian’s Secret within the genre of the mother-heart of God I have always been able to answer every doubt that ‘how-to’ book, a type of literature which became popular in the nineteenth may have arisen in my mind, as to the extent and quality of the love of century in “an optimistic society impressed with the strength of its will”.[41] God, by simply looking at my own feelings as a mother.[49] Hannah Whitall Smith’s call to submission was principally directed to the women of the USA, for they were the majority of her readers. It was a The use of maternal rhetoric as justification for a position or an activity was powerful example of this type of literature, made more effective, Campbell not unusual for many nineteenth-century women.[50] For Hannah Whitall argues, through the use of an intensely personal approach.[42] Hannah Smith, thinking of God in this way helped her cope with life’s problems. It Whitall Smith was as charismatic on paper as she appears to have been in also functioned, as does most autobiographical writing by women, to render person. Welter’s view of this book is slightly more benign than Campbell’s: the private public, thus destabilising the traditional opposition between the she views it as a means of sharing the “Quaker ideal of silent prayer and two spheres of women’s lives.[51] The private, nurturing world of women reflection”.[43] Both Hannah Whitall Smith’s Quakerliness and her personal took on a wider theological and spiritual significance. Writing in this way approach are apparent in the following passage: can be read as a subversive act, as a “divinely sanctioned challenge to masculine authority”.[52] Now dear friends, this is all exceedingly practical, and means, surely, a As with many women, the act of writing functioned as a “form of life very different from the lives of most Christians around us. It means, comfort”. Geraldine Jewsbury, for example, once described writing as that we really and absolutely turn our backs on the world and its “something into which one flings oneself on all occasions of fashions, and its amusements, and its ways. It means that we are a provocation”.[53] Such an occasion occurred for Hannah after the death of peculiar people, not only in the eyes of God but in the eyes of the world her son Frank, who died at 18, when she wrote a book about his life.[54] around us; and that wherever we go, it will be known from our habits, Writing autobiographically, as she explicitly did in The Unselfishness of our dress, our conversation, and our pursuits, that we are followers of God, allowed her to make some sense of her life experiences, to secure a the Lord Jesus Christ ...[44] coherent subjectivity. Although her work pre-dates the ‘therapeutic culture’ Her language and her symbolism here borrowed liberally from her Quaker of a self defined in psychological terms, her Quaker concern with the inner background: Quakers thought of themselves as a ‘peculiar people’ whose self dealt with the same problem of how to live the good life.[55] The daily lives were lived in accordance with rules in relation to dress, speech, Quaker idea of personal reflection placed, in common with other Protestant habits and amusements, among others. religions, “the burden of selfhood on the individual”.[56] The question of Her second book, The Unselfishness of God, subtitled A Spiritual governing the self was an ethical question and concerned the kind of person Autobiography, is more obviously a narrative of Hannah’s search for a we aspire to be. coherent sense of self. Presented linearly as the story of her spiritual Through the use of autobiography Hannah Whitall Smith was able to journey beginning with her childhood, it arrives at a satisfying conclusion in promulgate a vision of the type of person she wished to be. That person was which she wrote, “I await the moment [of death] with joy”.[45] This reflects a one who had control over her feelings and who could find God through the marked tendency in Hannah Whitall Smith’s writings to focus on the reasoned reflection. The Quaker concern with the inner self was fraught expected pleasures of the afterlife. Shortly after her death in 1911, her with difficulty for Hannah Whitall Smith since it meant turning “our minds

232 233 KERRI ALLEN HANNAH WHITALL SMITH inward, upon our feelings and our emotions”.[57] This was highly reveals, even to babes, secrets that He has hidden from the wise and unsatisfactory: “If I had my way, the whole subject of feelings and emotions prudent.[66] in the religious life would be absolutely ignored”, she wrote.[58] Her Having pre-empted potential criticism, she paved the way to speak exactly as solution was to ignore one’s feelings and focus instead on the ‘facts’: she pleased. Her strategy in The Unselfishness of God was slightly different. During all the years when I was struggling over my feelings, I never There she was able to reflect on her life, to present herself to herself and to succeeded in making them what I thought they ought to be; and as a others within a discourse in which she herself appeared as unimportant consequence the religious part of my life was a misery to me. But after I beside the message she wished to impart, while paradoxically claiming a learned that the facts of religion were far more important than my position as a model of how to live a Christian life. feelings about those facts, and had consequently given up looking at my Hannah Whitall Smith was an exceptional rather than a representative feelings, and sought only to discover the facts, I became always happy in nineteenth-century woman. She was a member of the prosperous my religious life ...[59] classes with all that such a social position implies: servants and the Her difficulties around feelings were also apparent in her concerns for her leisure to pursue her charitable works and her writing. Her background granddaughters. She wrote: “as ‘feelings’ are the cause of most of the also gave her an entrée to aristocratic and intellectual circles. Yet there unhappiness in the world, both Mary [her daughter] and I are determined to is much we can learn through scrutiny of her life and her work. ward them off from Ray and Karin [her granddaughters] as long as we Hannah was able to gain a voice, some authority and a degree of possibly can”.[60] An excess of emotion had also been the cause of her husband’s public disgrace. Retrospectively Hannah Whitall Smith was able power through reclaiming the domestic using a strategy of theological to narrate a life, her life, in which the control of emotion became not only naivety. Her work can be read as enabling for herself and for the desirable but formative. women for whom she wrote. Religious conversion has been argued to Hannah Whitall Smith’s struggle with her emotional life sat rather be empowering for women, who, through the experience of conversion oddly with her longing for a “mystical experience of God”.[61] In The could claim a moral agency.[67] Religious rhetoric provided a means Unselfishness of God she was able to imagine a romance with Him. The of self-expression not otherwise available to many nineteenth-century book is divided along the lines of four epochs, each of which represents a shift in her faith, the last being presented as the “most fascinating of all the women. epochs in my spiritual romance”.[62] Evoking God as a romantic partner The representations of Hannah Whitall Smith explored here raise a was, according to Susan Juster, not uncommon in conversion narratives, number of issues of importance for feminist history. Why, for many of which had sensual and/or sexual overtones. The “peculiar passion” instance, have the contributions of women such as Hannah Whitall of many women’s narratives clearly called for the involvement of the heart Smith not been examined more extensively? I have touched only rather than the mind.[63] Yet Hannah Whitall Smith’s narrative called for briefly on some of the activities, interests and enterprises in which she the involvement of the mind rather than the heart. At the same time, however, she found a safe and acceptable outlet for her feelings by granting engaged during a long and active life. Then there is the question of responsibility for her emotional life to a loving God about whom she could how feminist historians may read and use biography and autobiogra- know certain indisputable truths. phy, especially given a propensity for elision between the two. Finally, Despite an extensive output of published works, Hannah Whitall Smith I would argue that the often-neglected issues of religiosity and spiritu- never saw herself as a “professional woman of letters”.[64] Patricia Meyer ality may be of crucial importance in understanding women’s lives. In Spacks points out that one of the self-presentation strategies women use in the case of Hannah Whitall Smith it has been possible to see how her writing autobiography is self-deprecation, a strategy Hannah Whitall Smith changing religious convictions were part of a quest for a coherent and used in The Christian’s Secret to good effect.[65] After denying theological intent she asked the reader to “forgive the blundering way” in which her authoritative sense of self. ideas were expressed, suggesting: Say, if you choose, ‘Well, she is only a woman, and cannot be expected, Notes therefore, to understand Theology:’ – but remember that God sometimes [1] This article is part of a larger project, Quaker Families and the Construction of Social Difference, funded by the Australian Research Council. I wish to express

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my appreciation to my colleagues, Alison Mackinnon, Margaret Allen and [20] Susan Groag Bell & Marilyn Yalom (Eds) (1990) Introduction, in Revealing Sandra Stanley Holton for their comments on this article. Lives, Autobiography, Biography, and Gender, p. 3 (Albany, NY: State [2] Quietism, the dominant strand in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century University of New York Press). See also Carolyn Steedman (1990) Childhood, British Quakerism, saw Quakers concerned chiefly with the inward life of the Culture and Class in Britain: Margaret McMillan, 1860-1931 (London: Virago) soul. They avoided and distrusted the ‘world’ in which they included politics, and Liz Stanley (1992) The Auto/biographical I: the theory and practice of philanthropy and other Christian denominations. The Quietist tendency was feminist auto/biography (Manchester and New York: Manchester University suspicious of the “application of intellect to religion”. Press). [3] Sheila Turcon (1983) A Quaker wedding: the marriage of Bertrand Russell and [21] H.W.S. (1875) The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life (Toronto: S. R. Briggs) Alys Pearsall Smith, The Bertrand Russell Archives, 3(2), p. 106, notes that as a and H.W.S. (1903) The Unselfishness of God and How I Discovered It, a measure of her importance among certain ‘weighty’ Friends she personally Spiritual Autobiography (London: Fleming H. Revell Co.). Hannah Whitall approached the Quaker ‘Pope’ Bevan Braithwaite to obtain a dispensation for Smith’s other works include, The Open Secret, or The Bible Explaining Itself Alys to marry Bertrand Russell, a non-Christian, in a Quaker ceremony. (1885) (New York: Fleming H. Revell Co.), Frank, the Record of a Happy Life, being Memorials of Frank Whitall Smith, a Student of a Princeton College, by [4] An account of this can be found in Mary Earhart (1944) Frances Willard, from his Mother, H.W.S. (1873) (London: Morgan & Scott), Group Movements of the Prayers to Politics, p. 322 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Past and Experiences in Guidance, with Ray Strachey (Eds) (1934) (London: [5] Robert Allerton Parker (1959) The Transatlantic Smiths, p. 67 (New York: Faber & Faber). Random House). [22] H.W.S., The Christian’s Secret, p. 5. [6] Kali A. K. Israel (1990) Writing inside the Kaleidoscope: re-representing [23] Ibid., p. 5. Victorian women public figures, Gender and History, 2, p. 41. [24] H.W.S., The Unselfishness of God, p. 19. [7] Israel, ‘Writing inside’, p. 41. [25] H.W.S., The Christian’s Secret, p. 5. [8] Barbara Strachey (1980) Remarkable Relations, the Story of the Pearsall Smith Family (London: Victor Gollancz). [26] Barbara Welter (1966) The cult of true womanhood: 1820-1860, American Quarterly, 18, pp. 151-174. See also Mary P. Ryan (1979) Womanhood in [9] Ray Strachey (1914) A Quaker Grandmother, Hannah Whitall Smith (New America: from colonial times to the present, 2nd edn (New York: Franklin York: Fleming H. Revell Co.). Watts). [10] Barbara Strachey & Jayne Samuels (Eds) (1993) Mary Berenson, a Self-portrait [27] Ryan, Womanhood in America, p. 76. from her Letters and Diaries (London: Victor Gollancz). [28] Christine L. Krueger (1992) The Reader’s Repentance: women preachers, [11] Logan Pearsall Smith (Ed.) (1949) A Religious Rebel, the Letters of ‘H.W.S.’ women writers, and nineteenth-century social discourse, p. 9 (Chicago and (London: Constable & Co. Ltd). London: University of Chicago Press). [12] Another version of her character which will not be explored here is that of her [29] Debra Campbell (1989) Hannah Whitall Smith (1832-1911): theology of the sons-in-law, Bernard Berenson and Bertrand Russell, who, according to Barbara mother-hearted God, Signs: Journal of Women and Culture, 15, pp. 79-101. Strachey, disliked her and resented her influence over their wives. Strachey, Remarkable Relations, p. 13. Berenson’s biographer, Meryle Secrest (1979) in [30] H.W.S., The Christian’s Secret, p. 184. Being Bernard Berenson, a Biography, p. 101 (London: Weidenfeld & [31] Campbell, Hannah Whitall Smith, p. 92. Nicolson), portrays Smith as a man-hating, wilful, controlling and unstable [32] According to Barbara Strachey, Remarkable Relations, p. 48, Smith referred to woman and concludes at one point that “not surprisingly, her only son became a the event as “the subtle doctrine of the Holy Spirit which led my dear husband homosexual and her husband took a mistress”. astray”. [13] Barbara Strachey, Remarkable Relations, p. 55. [33] Ibid., p. 53. [14] Ibid., p. 58. [34] Ibid., p. 59. [15] Barbara Strachey & Jayne Samuels, Mary Berenson, p. 18. [35] Ibid., p. 82. [16] Ibid., p. 101. [36] Susan Juster (1989) “In a different voice”: male and female narratives of [17] Ray Strachey, A Quaker Grandmother, pp. 8, 9. religious conversion in post-revolutionary America, American Quarterly, 41, [18] Barbara Strachey, Remarkable Relations, pp. 15, 13. p. 37. [19] Ibid., pp. 9, 42.

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[37] Barbara Epstein (1981) The Politics of Domesticity: women, evangelism, and [62] H.W.S., The Unselfishness of God, p. 228. temperance in nineteenth-century America, pp. 61-62 (Middletown, CT: [63] Juster, “In a different voice”, pp. 41, 50. Epstein, in The Politics of Domesticity, Wesleyan University Press). p. 47, also discusses the emotionally charged nature of women’s conversion [38] Logan Pearsall Smith (1939) Unforgotten Years, p. 37 (Boston: Little Brown). experiences. [39] Ibid., p. 38. [64] It was possible for nineteenth-century women to regard themselves in this way. [40] Barbara Strachey, Remarkable Relations, p. 44. One such was Geraldine Jewsbury, whose life is discussed in Norma Clarke’s (1990) Ambitious Heights, Writing, Friendship, Love – the Jewsbury sisters, [41] Barbara Welter (1978) Dimity Convictions, the American Woman in the Felicia Hemans, and Jane Welsh Carlyle, p. 8 (London: Routledge). Nineteenth Century, p. 195 (Athens: Ohio University Press). The other type of book containing religious messages was the novel which had, as Welter points [65] Patricia Meyer Spacks (1988) Female rhetorics, in Shari Benstock (Ed.) The out, the advantage of a happy ending with the heroine doubly blessed in having Private Self, Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings, the love of a good man and the love of God. p. 188 (London: Routledge). [42] Campbell, Hannah Whitall Smith, p. 91. [66] H.W.S., The Christian’s Secret, p. 6. [43] Ibid., p. 105. [67] Juster, “In a different voice”, p. 57. [44] H.W.S., The Christian’s Secret, pp. 161-162. [45] H.W.S., The Unselfishness of God, p. 312. [46] Barbara Strachey & Jayne Samuels, Mary Berenson, p. 169. KERRI ALLEN is a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Social Inquiry, University of Adelaide, Level 3, Tower Building, 10 Pulteney Street, [47] Ibid., pp. 92, 95. Adelaide, South Australia 5005, Australia ([email protected]). She [48] As Barbara Welter points out in Dimity Convictions, p. 87, attributing female holds degrees in accounting and in women’s studies. She has published characteristics to God occurred in other religious traditions, the Shakers and the work on the history of accounting. She has been post-doctoral fellow on the Mormons, for instance. Australian Research Council funded project, Quaker Families and the [49] H.W.S., The Unselfishness of God, pp. 213-214. Construction of Social Difference, where she has researched a number of [50] Mary Ryan argues in Womanhood in America, pp. 136-137, that the concept of areas, including education and Quaker identity. “motherhood was used to justify a multitude of extrafamilial activities”. For instance, Frances Willard used it in her temperance work, as did Jane Addams in her settlement house work. [51] Anna K. Kuhn (1990) The ‘failure’ of biography and the triumph of women’s writing: Bettina von Arnim’s Die Gunderode and Christa Wolf’s The Quest for Christa T, in Susan Groag Bell & Marilyn Yalom (Eds) Revealing Lives, p. 13. [52] Krueger, The Reader’s Repentance, pp. 8, 9. [53] Ibid., p. 13. [54] H.W.S., Frank, the Record of a Happy Life. [55] Nikolas Rose (1990) Governing the Soul, the shaping of the private self, p. xii (London: Routledge). [56] Patrick Joyce (1994) Democratic Subjects, the Self and the Social in Nineteenth-century England, p. 18 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). [57] H.W.S., The Unselfishness of God, p. 152. [58] Ibid., p. 159. [59] Ibid., p. 160. [60] Ray Strachey, A Quaker Grandmother, p. 66. [61] Barbara Strachey, Remarkable Relations, p. 53.

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