Nineteenth-Century American Women Write Religion: Lived Theologies and Literature ed. by Mary McCartin Wearn (review)

Mary McCartin Wearn’s edited collection Nineteenth-Century American Women Write Religion: Lived Theologies and Literature offers a point of entry into the rich currents of Christian experience that shaped women’s literary production in the period. Surveying a range of women’s writing in mainline Protestant traditions and their offshoots (such as Swedenborgianism and Mormonism), Wearn’s anthology introduces its readers to new source materials, offers new accounts of Christianity’s influence on major women writers in the period, and explicates the forms of Protestantism at the heart of many nineteenth-century women’s forays into public life.

At the heart of this collection’s project is an insistence on the diversity of nineteenth-century women’s religious experience. Here readers will find discussions of autobiographical writing by African American and white women from Mormon, Shaker, and Holiness traditions; explorations of how women interwove Christianities into political and social reform; and accounts of women’s resistance to and remaking of the Protestant orthodoxies they inherited from others. Wearn positions this plurality as a “corrective” to Ann Douglas’s The Feminization of American Culture, which, she contends, “elides the deep pluralism in nineteenth-century religion and argues for a mass culture mediated through an anti-intellectual, sentimentalized, and essentially homogeneous female religiosity” (8, 14). In contrast to what she describes as Douglas’s “reductive stance on nineteenth-century religion,” Wearn advocates for a vision of women’s religious writing that accounts for women’s blending of intellect and affect and for the “emancipatory potential” of women’s religious practice (7, 9). As she puts it, “[b]y embracing the paradoxes of religion in nineteenth-century women’s culture—both its reactionary and revolutionary potential—this collection of essays begins to articulate the proliferation of ways nineteenth-century women expressed belief, explored faith, and practiced religion in their personal lives and communities” (9). Wearn and her contributors want readers to see the nineteenth-century women who wrote religion as creative thinkers and active participants in the making of the period’s religious landscape. Gregory Eiselein, for instance, argues that Louisa May Alcott’s emphasis on religious feeling anticipates William James’s “phenomenological approach to religion” (129), while Benjamin G. Sammons suggests that Rebecca Harding Davis sought to craft a mode of what he calls “incarnational reading”—reading that traces a middle way between sentimental and scientific models of philanthropy and that moves the reader to “a real-world performance of a text’s ethical imperatives” (61). In this, Nineteenth-Century American Women Write Religion inherits the legacy of Jane Tompkins’s foundational argument in Sensational Designs that literary scholars must attend to the richness and skill with which nineteenth-century women wrote, even as it also reminds us of women such as Davis and Sarah Piatt, whose relations to the culture of sentiment were complex and ambivalent.

As it sketches women’s varied responses to sentimental culture, Nineteenth-Century American Women Write Religion underscores the common agency that women found in the Christianities they practiced. In particular, this collection highlights how these formations allowed them to become public and especially to engage in forms of self-authorship. In the collection’s opening essay, for example, Nancy F. Sweet reads an understudied convent-escape narrative, Miss Bunkley’s Book, to show how women authors used the conventions of the anti-Catholic convent exposé “to popularize modes of resistance to normative gender ideologies” (19). Unlike the more commonly read Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery, Miss Bunkley’s Book refuses to sensationalize the convent, presenting instead “deliberative reflections on the implications of Catholicism for women’s religious experience” that ultimately legitimate the narrator as a thinking, reasoning religious subject (23). Valerie D. Levy similarly stresses how women abolitionists such as the Grimké sisters relied on Protestant Christianities to validate their activism, even as they were willing to change their religious allegiances to accommodate their political...