The Valiant Woman: The Virgin Mary in Nineteenth Century American Culture by Elizabeth Hayes Alvarez (review)

The Valiant Woman is a fascinating study of the ways in which nineteenth century American Christians, Catholics and Protestant alike, looked to the figure of the Virgin Mary and found in her a mirror for their perspectives on the role and nature of women in an era when class mobility was fluid and gender expectations were shifting in response to an emerging market economy. Elizabeth Hayes Alvarez draws upon her interdisciplinary training in Religious Studies to illuminate the complex ways that religion, refracted through the prism of the symbol of Mary, was practiced and imagined by U.S. Christians across denominations. Her sources are varied: she especially relies upon popular culture, commercial religious art, popular novels, magazines, and travel guides, to reveal her findings.

The author explores her topic in four chapters that roughly map out the decades from the 1850s to 1900. Prior to the nineteenth century Mary had played only a minor role in American culture but with increased immigration and the expansion of the U.S. Catholic population that changed. Marian imagery and allusions became wide spread. Although official divisions and theological differences between Protestants and Catholics were acute, this did not prevent the figure of Mary from playing a significant cultural role in defining womanhood across denominations.

Alvarez exposes the underlying context for this phenomenon as rapid industrialization, urbanization, and the emergence of the market economy. The traditional Christian virtues of humility and self-sacrifice based on a communitarian ethic were no longer appropriate for Americans now engaged in the competition of the capitalist work world. Yet those traditional virtues continued to be upheld, albeit in a separate sphere populated by women who carried them forward, freeing men for economic success and individual achievement. In this cultural imagining the domestic sphere became (especially for the upper and middle classes) the realm presided over by females exhibiting the “gentler” spiritual virtues. From this the “cult of true womanhood” emerged. In nineteenth century U.S. culture, Mary became less a theological symbol and more the ideal of American womanhood promoted by Christians across denominations.

The complex tale of this cultural construction is told in narrative sequence. The Valiant Woman begins with the 1854 papal pronouncement of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, an event welcomed by American Catholics already steeped in Marian piety but received less than enthusiastically by most Protestants. The long established concerns were the “worship” of the Virgin that seemed to put her on equal footing with Christ and the “un-American” bondage of the Catholic conscience. Thus the dogma served to heighten denominational differences: varying Protestant groups coalesced in their opposition to the Catholic “other,” while Catholics solidified their distinctive religious identity. But the dogma also served as a backdrop upon which hotly debated shifting American gender roles were played out. Foment about women’s rights and the emerging “New Woman” was at the forefront of national awareness as was the reaffirmation of women’s subordinate gender roles. Mary played a pivotal role in popular presentations of these debates.

Chapter two turns to the “elevation” of the feminine that flowered in the 1850s and 60s. Both Catholic and Protestant polemicists focused on the 1854 proclamation. In these debates, Mary came to be viewed as the ideal feminine, her purity especially valued. While for Catholics Mary remained a model for all believers, as virtues such as humility and self-sacrifice were historically inscribed in that faith, Protestants tended to promote her specifically as a model of female behavior. Still, the allusion to “separate spheres” in both discourses was prominent. Alvarez chooses examples from popular culture - prints for home decoration, women’s magazines, kindergarten manuals designed to enhance character, and travel literature - to make her point. Currier and Ives distributed sentimental depictions of mothers and children and Raphael’s “Sistine Madonna” was viewable in homes and schools throughout the nation. With Mary...