Redeeming the Southern Family: Evangelical Women and Domestic Devotion in the Antebellum South

CHAPTER 4 “Unto Whom Much Is Given”: Childbirth, Child Rearing, and Coming of Age in the Evangelical Home

133 chapter 4 “Unto Whom Much Is Given” Childbirth, Child Rearing, and Coming of Age in the Evangelical Home In spite of her heavy burdens as the matron to more than sixty young women boarding at the Wesleyan Female College in Murfreesboro, North Carolina, Anne Davis found time to write to her oldest son, Robert, away at college and far from her supervision, to warn of the new threats to his immortal soul. Indeed, she reminded him that evangelical southerners believed that “moral, upright young men, are the very ones the wicked beset more stealthily, & cautiously, & often more successfully bring over to their vices.” In addition to prescribing regular doses of prayer and Bible reading, Davis clung to the hope that the moral and spiritual lessons learned in an evangelical home would not be lost as her son made his way to manhood: “You have had the advantage of me, in that, you have started for the kingdom of Glory, so much younger, your habits of sin are not so inveterate as mine were. You have also been blessed with religious instruction, and knew much more of the things that belong to our eternal peace at 5 years of age than I did at 20.” Nevertheless, Anne Davis feared that Robert might squander all of the spiritual advantages that she and her husband, Joseph, a 134 Chapter Four Methodist clergyman, had worked so diligently to bequeath to their children . Virginia Baptist Lucy Gwathmey, who reminded her children as they entered into adulthood, “Unto whom much is given . . . will much be required,” would have shared Davis’s concerns.1 Despite the significance of domestic piety in the lives of antebellum southern evangelicals, it never foreclosed criticism within the family. Indeed , as both Anne Davis and Lucy Gwathmey suggest, inheritance of an evangelical identity only heightened maternal expectations for exemplary piety. Clergymen and laypeople alike spoke of the home as a sanctuary, but evangelical beliefs inspired conflict as well as consensus within the family. Thus, even as evangelical women became less and less visible at camp meetings and in other public settings, their work deepened and even broadened as they set out to nurture and discipline the piety of those they loved. Women soon discovered, however, that their new interpretive roles in family piety carried considerable risk.2 Scholars of the antebellum South have long questioned the application of an emerging northern, middle-class model of womanhood that stressed women’s superior morality and piety alongside the need for womanly submission and domesticity. Because northern women ultimately turned many of the claims of superior morality and piety into calls for political and public reform, many scholars of southern history have stressed that only the more limiting claims of the “cult of domesticity”—womanly submission and domesticity—apply in the context of the South’s ongoing commitment to patriarchal authority. To uncouple religious and moral values from northern women’s growing political activity, scholars of the southern household have stressed its fundamental differences from its northern counterpart: southern patriarchs’ continued dominance of labor and relationships within the household, in contrast to northern, middle-class men who increasingly worked outside of the home; the existence of slavery, which required men to simultaneously establish “white women’s inferiority (in terms of gender) and their superiority (in terms of race)”; and a rural landscape that prevented the mobilization of grassroots women’s reform movements on par with those in the urbanizing North.3 But the gap between prescription and practice often varied widely. Although antebellum southern evangelical men retained authority in the public and private spheres, because they prized domesticity, they honored women’s contributions to the construction of the home as sanctuary and even countenanced occasional migration into the public sphere as long as those actions did not “Unto Whom Much Is Given” 135 threaten male prerogative or the social order.4 Prescriptive literature by southern evangelicals simultaneously celebrated womanly stewardship and manly authority within the household, but women could still cross from the private to the public sphere in the name of faith and family. Like their northern counterparts, southern women looked to motherhood as the foundation of their domestic authority. Elite women in both regions merged motherhood, domesticity, and child rearing into a “sacred profession,” as Sally McMillen so aptly puts it. Unlike their northern counterparts , however, southern women found their work circumscribed by patriarchal authority and never possessed...