Let Her Speak for Herself: Nineteenth-Century Women Writing on Women in Genesis

Introduction

1 Introduction All writers must go from now to once upon a time; all must go from here to there; all must descend to where the stories are kept; all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past. And all must commit acts of larceny, or else of reclamation, depending how you look at it. The dead may guard the treasure, but it’s useless treasure unless it can be brought back into the land of the living and allowed to enter time once more–which means to enter the realm of the audience, the realm of the readers, the realm of change. ~Margaret Atwood1 Biblical scholars must bring out hidden treasure from interpreters long ignored and forgotten by the academy. A significant number of Englishspeaking women published works of biblical interpretation in the nineteenth century. Most of these women’s writings have been forgotten; their voices are no longer heard. Until now, these important texts have been overlooked by most academic reconsiderations of the religious life and theological education of nineteenth-century Britons and Americans. The time has come to let these women reenter time and speak for themselves. The recovery of women’s lost writings is important because these works invite us to reconsider both the roles women played in the religious life of their communities and the influence such women had both on other women and men through their roles as educators and scriptural interpreters. These writings shed light on women’s culture in the nineteenth century and provide important data on women’s roles in society and in the church. They give wit- ness to the variety of approaches and literary genres used by women interpret- ers . They contain lost exegetical traditions and insights of women and offer remarkable examples of gendered exegesis as women read the Bible through 1 Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: AWriter onWriting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 178–79. 2 Let Her Speak for Herself the distinctive lens of their culture and gender identity. The writings, then, raise a number of important questions about how culture affects interpreta- tion , how women interpret differently than men, and gendered exegesis. The writings also show how the scriptures functioned in the lives of women devotionally and practically. They show women’s involvement in the religious education of children, young people, and adults. The collection unearths a lost witness to the impact of changes in biblical studies on lay women and men (for example, the rise of historicism, travel, archaeology, evolution). The writings suggest that the scope or definition of what is generally considered to be the genre of biblical interpretation be expanded to include the writings of those who stood outside the academy. Finally, these voices call us to search the records further to recover other lost voices of women who interpreted the Bible, who provide important, empowering models for readers today who are faced with the task of interpreting the scriptures. There are many challenges for the modern reader in reading and under- standing these nineteenth-century interpretations of the Bible and allowing the women writers to speak for themselves. We need to consider them in their social, religious, and cultural contexts, as well as to understand our own world and the way we read and react to these texts. The World of Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America Home and family were the center of most women’s lives in the nineteenth century. Scholars often use the terms “the cult of domesticity” and “true womanhood” to describe the collection of attitudes that developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries regarding women’s roles in the family and society and women’s virtues.2 These attitudes developed as industrialization and urbanization moved the center of men’s work from the home to the factory, and from the country to the city. The increasingly sepa- rate spheres of men’s and women’s lives are also associated with the privatiza- tion of faith and feminization of Christian piety.3 Despite the feminization 2 For a discussion of these terms see Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18 (1966): 151–74. 3 Callum G. Brown. The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularization 1800– 2000 (London: Routledge, 2001), 35; Barbara Welter, “The Feminization of American Religion: 1800–1860,” in Clio’s Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women, ed. Mary S. Hartman and Lois Banner (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 137...