Redeeming the Southern Family: Evangelical Women & Domestic Devotion in the Antebellum South (review)

Evangelical women in the antebellum South did not have the option of providing clerical leadership in the church, but that did not stop them from asserting their spiritual leadership in the home. Scott Stephan, assistant professor of history at Ball State University, contends that many women used their power and authority in the home to assert their religious influence over their immediate and extended families. Evangelical women took advantage of the responsibility given to them over the home and used their authority to provide spiritual nourishment and guidance to their children and husbands.

To accomplish his task of evaluating the spiritual influence of evangelical women in the antebellum South, Stephan explores three aspects of evangelical family life: cosmology, prescribed morality, and lived experience. His investigation leads him to explain the distinctive worldview of evangelicals that separated them from their nonevangelical friends and neighbors. To understand the prescribed morality of this culture, Stephan uses sermons and published works from the antebellum period that reveal the cultural expectations placed upon women, wives, and mothers. Stephan turns to personal journals and correspondence in order to understand the everyday role of spirituality for evangelical women in the antebellum South. The personal writings elucidate the heavy spiritual burden southern evangelical women believed they were to bear not only for their own sakes but for their families as well.

Stephan focuses on the spiritual impact of evangelical women on the domestic front and intentionally avoids institutional records such as church record books or organizational minutes. This deliberate rejection of institutional records sets his work apart from other similar studies as he focused solely on the spiritual impact evangelical women had over the home.¹

Redeeming the Southern Family, which focuses on Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian women, examines four aspects of domestic life: courtship, marriage, child rearing, and caring for the sick and dying, all of which provided women the opportunity to exert spiritual and moral authority over their families. The first chapter, "Taming the Great Awakening" lays the groundwork for understanding the importance of conversion in evangelical life. For evangelicals, spiritual transformation mattered, and expectations were placed upon individuals after they had converted. Stephan highlights the importance of the clergy in regulating and teaching piety in the congregations, but he asserts that women played a valuable role in echoing the minister's call to piety on a daily basis in the home.

Stephan's attempt to underscore the importance of piety in the evangelical household leads him to define conversion as a "process that unfolded repeatedly over the course of the individual's life and relationships" (23). Conversion of the individual did have a long-term impact on the piety of the individual; however, Stephan's definition of conversion as a recurring event negates the evangelical emphasis on conversion occurring once at a specific place and time. Perhaps Stephan would have been better served to highlight the onus of conversion that continued to have an impact on the life and relationships of the converted.

Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the ways in which evangelical women asserted their spiritual influence in the courtship process and in marriage. "Clergy and kin alike sanctioned women's authority in courtship," according to Stephan (59), and this was true for evangelicals and nonevangelicals alike. The priority of spirituality in the courtship of evangelicals set them apart from nonevangelicals, who were primarily concerned with achieving greater status and honor. In contrast to nonevangelicals, evangelical men viewed a pious wife and family as crucial to satisfaction in this life and as a preparation for eternal life as well. The chapter on marriage, "Improvising the Ideal," points out the struggle evangelical women faced as they were to remain submissive to the authority of their husbands and yet demonstrate faithful piety that positively influenced not only their children but also their husbands. Evangelical women felt responsible for the conversion of their family members, and if not initially [End...