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

Stephan's book is an intriguing study of southern evangelical women and their unrelenting efforts to ensure that faith and grace defined their own and their families' lives. He focuses on several case studies, primarily those of privileged, well-educated antebellum women throughout the South to portray their vital role in the home.

That southern white women comprised a significant proportion of church members is well known, but less understood is their responsibility as family redeemers. As Stephan argues, within the confines of their homes, evangelical women enjoyed a good deal of latitude as they encouraged family faith and wielded moral and spiritual authority over husbands and children. Piety defined their lives, and in many white southern homes, domestic devotion became another important means to absorb God's word.

In five lengthy chapters, Stephan examines women's worship patterns and domestic acts and rituals, including those involved in courtship, marriage, child birth, child rearing, and mourning. Evangelical ministers and laity alike celebrated these roles, sensing that women could transform and uplift their families at home just as the clergy tried to do in church. Women's exhaustive efforts could generate positive results but also could leave them with deep disappointment and a profound sense of failure. Husbands might behave uncharitably or dishonestly, and children might fail to pursue "the path to eternal salvation" through conversion (148). Typically, dutiful women welcomed their responsibility and sense of self-importance, though Stephan also cautions that they "often shouldered the blame for their entire families' shortcomings and sins"(207). Not surprisingly, women's efforts tended to focus on their own families; slaves fell outside their definition of household.

In a world that often disappointed or saddened them, evangelical women struggled to make sense of God's ultimate plan. When a child died, mothers often blamed themselves for loving a youngster too much or resigned themselves someday to joining that child in heaven. They tended to define illness and personal tragedy as God's "most potent corrective" for rectifying wayward behavior (185). Women transformed a diseased state "from a curse to a blessing," believing that illness held religious significance by reinvigorating an individual (185). Their daily efforts sought to eradicate a host of sinful temptations in the home and in the public world. Sins to avoid included alcohol, dancing, novel reading, Sunday frivolity, and dueling; predictably, slavery was absent from the list. Stephan's monograph can leave readers in a guilt-ridden, exhausted state unless they are as devout and self-flagellating as the majority of women cited within. Despite what seems to be a joyless existence for these ardently self-scrutinizing individuals, evangelical women embraced their responsibilities.

Stephan has produced a thoughtful, informative examination of a group of southern wives and mothers who yearned to lead lives free of sin and to ensure, albeit with mixed results, that their husbands and children did the same. In Redeeming the Southern Family, Stephan adds a fresh new voice to the many historians who sense the profound contribution of white women to a religious South.