Abstract
Emancipation from the power of moral corruption was at the heart of these writers’ works, and in this chapter I will demonstrate how each woman strove to promote in mankind a true and just sense of morality. Investing this higher moral code with a feminized perspective allowed women’s sympathetic virtues to be more clearly identified and appreciated. The depravity that engulfed the black slave trade and the immorality that reduced women to simpering playthings1 witnessed distinctive literary responses—satire and sensibility mingled with political discourse—and their strategies will be closely examined in this chapter.
The well intentioned and well-principled author, who has uniformly thrown all his weight, though that weight be but small, into the right scale, may have contributed his fair proportion to that great work of reformation.
—Hannah More, The Works of Hannah More
Can we suppose that the omniscient God would have given these unqualified commands to powerless, incapable unimpressible beings?
—Hannah More, Practical Piety
The Woman’s Bible, vii.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See Clare Midgley: Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns 1780–1870 (London: Routledge, 1994).
R. Hole, ed., The Selected Writings of Hannah More (London: William Pickering, 1996), xxviii.
C. Krueger, The Reader’s Repentance: Women Preachers, Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Social Discourse (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 94.
G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 224.
M. A. Schofield and C. Macheski, (eds.), Fetter’d or Free?: British Women Novelists 1670–1815. M. Myers, “Hannah More’s Tracts for the Times: Social Fiction and Female Ideology” (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1986), 265.
N. F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood “Woman’s Sphere” in New England 1780–1835 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 126.
B. Ford, (ed.) The New Pelican Guide to English Literature: Vol 9: American Literature (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1988), 167.
K. W. F. Stavely, Puritan Legacies, Paradise Lost and the New England Tradition 1630–1890 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 201.
G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, Sex & Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 352.
L. Davidoff and C. Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and women of the English middle class 1780–1850 (London: Routledge, 1987), 335.
See N. F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood, “Woman’s Sphere” in New England 1780–1835 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 133.
O. Cromwell, Lucretia Mott (New York: Russell & Russell, 1958), 29.
See O. Banks, Faces of Feminism: A Study of Feminism as a Social Movement (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1981), 32.
Lucretia Mott wrote to Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1851, “It is from the pen of a woman too, in great part, which adds to the interest of the article—for no man can write on woman’s wrongs, as an intelligent sufferer of our own sex can.” Cromwell notes in Lucretia Mott, “Following the English pioneer, Mary Wollstonecraft, American women had not been silent.” Indeed, Catharine Beecher was an eloquent orator on behalf of women’s rights and Sarah Grimke suggested, “the inferior status of women could be traced to faulty inter-pretations of the Scriptures.” O. Cromwell, Lucretia Mott (New York: Russell & Russell, 1958), 150.
M. Wollstonecraft, The Female Reader, 56, vol. 4. J. Todd and M. Butler (eds.) The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: William Pickering, 1989).
The male author of “The Lawes Resolution ofWomen’s Rights” (1632) exposes the loss of identity suffered by a woman on the occasion of marriage. E. Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1649–88 (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1999), 4.
A. D. Gordon (ed), The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony—In The School of Anti-Slavery 1840–1866 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), xxiii
E. C. Stanton, Eighty Years and More Reminiscences 1815–1897 (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 72.
See “Manly Words on Mount Parnassus” and “Returning to the Beautiful”, L. L. Runge, Gender and Language in British Literary Criticism, 1660–1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1–39
W. Wilberforce, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes in this Country Contrasted with Real Christianity (London: Griffith, Farran, Okeden and Welsh, 1797), 230.
Barbara Welter identifies in “The Feminization of American Religion 1800–1860” M. S. Hartman and L. Banner (eds.) Clio’s consciousness raised; new perspectives on the history of women (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
R. B. Shoemaker, Gender in English Society 1650–1850 (London: Longman, 1998), 216.
P. Springborg (ed.) Mary Astell, Some Reflections Upon Marriage, in Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 18.
Copyright information
© 2010 Arleen M. Ingham
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ingham, A.M. (2010). The Religious Is Personal Is Political. In: Women and Spirituality in the Writing of More, Wollstonecraft, Stanton, and Eddy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230109940_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230109940_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-28693-5
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-10994-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)