Toc for Early American Studies Vol. 17.4 Fall 2019
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H-AmRel ToC for Early American Studies Vol. 17.4 Fall 2019 Discussion published by Paul Chase on Wednesday, October 23, 2019 Following is the Table of Contents for the latest issue of Early American Studies Vol. 17.4 Fall 2019 Published by the University of Pennsylvania Press "Ineradicably Untidy": Women and Religion in the Age of Atlantic Empires Nicole Eustace, Ann M. Little Mary Maples Dunn (1931–2017) transformed early American religious history in 1978 with unapologetic matter-of-factness, urging scholars to devote serious attention to the question of why women throughout American history participated in religious life in greater numbers than men did, even though they usually enjoyed far less formal power in churches. Some forty years earlier, in 1937, Edmund Morgan had responded to the tercentenary of the founding of Massachusetts with an article decrying the errors of three female biographers of Anne Hutchinson who dared to portray her as the "mother of the twentieth-century woman." In that essay, Morgan argued that the Hutchinson trial resulted from nothing other than a uniquely seventeenth-century doctrinal dispute that Hutchinson rightly lost on principle. In her article "Saints and Sisters: Congregational and Quaker Women in the Early Colonial Period," Dunn placed Hutchinson's status as a woman back at the center of analysis, using her trial as a starting point for describing the different paths that women's potential for prophecy and leadership took in two seventeenth-century Protestant denominations and two different regions in colonial British America. "Women of Our Nation": Gender and Christian Indian Communities in the United States and Mexico, 1753–1837 Jessica Criales This article compares the experiences of indigenous women in Christian Indian communities across Mexico and the United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Focusing primarily on convents for indigenous nuns in Mexico and two Christian Indian tribes, Brothertown and Stockbridge, in the United States, it argues that women in Christian Indian communities leveraged the dual nature of their identities—as both indigenous and Christian—in order to gain recognition, authority, and autonomy within and beyond their communities. By becoming abbesses, schoolteachers, or simply "exemplary Christians," these women gained influence over colonial and national authorities on the basis of their Christian identity, while advocating for indigenous people and strengthening indigenous networks. They adapted to changing economic conditions and used creative strategies for fund-raising, thereby ensuring the financial stability of their communities. They also asserted new understandings of the relationship between ethnic identity and allegiance that diverged from the perspectives of colonial and national officials, as well as indigenous men. These broad similarities in indigenous women's responses to colonial and imperial rule in multiple Citation: Paul Chase. ToC for Early American Studies Vol. 17.4 Fall 2019. H-AmRel. 10-23-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/15697/discussions/5139493/toc-early-american-studies-vol-174-fall-2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-AmRel locations suggest that gender and ethnicity, more than geopolitical context, shaped indigenous women's strategies for survival across the Americas. "Mother of all the living": Motherhood, Religion, and Political Culture at the Ojibwe Village of Fond du Lac, 1835–1839 Catherine J. Denial Catharine Ely, daughter of a French father and Ojibwe mother, moved to the Ojibwe Village of Fond du Lac (currently Duluth, Minnesota) with her Anglo-American missionary husband, Edmund, in 1835. Having spent ten of her eighteen years boarding at a mission school, Catharine had adopted the domestic ideals and parental principles of American evangelical Protestantism; her approach to mothering, captured by her diary, was quite different from that of the local Ojibwe women. By exploring the contrasting cultural understandings of motherhood present in each community, we glimpse a new facet of the resistance Ojibwe people offered to Edmund and Catharine's plans for their conversion, and to the United States' larger colonial venture in the Upper Midwest. Motherhood on a Mission: Missionaries, "Heathens," and the Maternal Ideal in the Early American Republic Cassandra N. Berman This essay examines motherhood in the context of the United States' first foreign missionary movement. In the early nineteenth century, as the first generation of missionaries departed for foreign locations—including India, Burma, and the Sandwich Islands—concern began to mount over the behavior of foreign mothers who were neither white nor Christian. In popular texts, such women were frequently depicted as harmful mothers who abused, neglected, or killed their own children, and their conversion to Christianity was touted as the only path toward their reformation. This trope of the purportedly harmful, "heathen" mother served as powerful motivation for American women who hoped to evangelize overseas by marrying missionaries. In joining missions, they planned to convert foreign women, transform family and gender relations, and protect supposedly vulnerable children. Yet as their own writing frequently revealed, missionary wives themselves largely failed to conform to the rigorous strictures of early republican maternity. Using the edited and published memoirs of missionary wives as a lens, I argue that maternity served a far more complex role in American public life than has previously been acknowledged. "To have a gradual weaning & be ready & wiling to resign all": Maternity, Piety, and Pain among Quaker Women of the Early Mid-Atlantic Janet Moore Lindman Interactions among the spiritual, emotional, and corporeal were significant factors in the history of white women, childbirth, and child death in the early American republic. Though the social, cultural, and medical meanings of parturiency and motherhood have been studied by historians of early America, the spiritual aspects of reproduction have largely been ignored. Female Friends infused childbearing with religious meaning to contain its accompanying pain and fear as well as to express its joy and pleasure. This form of childbirth incorporated the mind and body into a spirituality built on obedience, modesty, perseverance, and discipline. The succession of pregnancy, delivery, nursing, child rearing, and sickness (both related and unrelated to reproduction) in a Quaker woman's life Citation: Paul Chase. ToC for Early American Studies Vol. 17.4 Fall 2019. H-AmRel. 10-23-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/15697/discussions/5139493/toc-early-american-studies-vol-174-fall-2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-AmRel induced not only physical frailty but also spiritual reflection. Pregnancy and childbirth raised the possibility of an early death at the same time they afforded women the means to interact with God and to ask for his mercy and support. Piety channeled the existential and emotional dilemmas posed by pregnancy, childbirth, and child loss. By surveying the religious significance of bodies, pain, and emotion among early American Friends, this essay contends that the experiential aspects of Quaker motherhood were thoroughly steeped in spirituality. Mounting the Poyto: An Image of Afro-Catholic Submission in the Mystical Visions of Colonial Peru's Úrsula de Jesús Rachel Spaulding This essay considers how Africans and their descendants may have expressed their socioreligious identities within the early modern Iberian Catholic world. The author argues that the seventeenth- century Afro-Peruvian mystic Úrsula de Jesús situates herself within both Catholic and Yorùbá orishá religious practice. In a close reading of Úrsula's spiritual diary entries, the author speculates that Úrsula intentionally inflects the meanings of the words poyto to signify a Poitou mule and pollino to refer to a little donkey. In doing so, Úrsula reframes an image of mounting that may be read concurrently as a transformed representation of Catholic submission and as an image of Yorùbá ritual spirit possession. Within the transculturated religious space of colonial Lima, the author suggests that Úrsula rearticulates Catholic rhetoric to reframe her Afro-religious practice and perform the role of a spiritual authority. The essay explores how Úrsula de Jesús would have transposed an African past into her religious expression in her Catholic convent to encounter both mystic visions and orishá spiritual possession in a unified religious experience. Black Women, Eldership, and Communities of Care in the Nineteenth-Century North Frederick Knight This essay compares the spiritual and material terms of aging among black women in the post- emancipation North. It contrasts the public representations of African American women elders and the more prosaic, material work that black women and broader northern free black communities performed in coping with the challenges of aging. Early American biographies of black women elders characterized them as pious exemplars of Christian virtue. They also showed how they used collective practices to cope with aging. Other sources reveal this communal ethos. The records of churches, mutual aid societies, black women authors, and others show how free black communities brought together religious and material resources