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

Historians of the antebellum United States have usually emphasized the differences between northern and southern women. While northern women were able to turn the ideology of "separate spheres" into a justification of their involvement in temperance, antislavery, and the women's rights movement, southern women were supposedly constrained by a patriarchal culture built on slavery. Echoing Mary Boykin Chesnut (1823–86), whose diaries were frank about the ugly similarities between sexual and racial inequality in the South, southern historians have emphasized white women's powerlessness to create social change.

In his new book, Redeeming the Southern Family: Evangelical Women and Domestic Devotion in the Antebellum South, Scott Stephan argues that white southern women enjoyed more authority than historians have realized. Influenced by the groundbreaking scholarship of Christine Heyrman and Cynthia Lyerly, Stephan acknowledges that evangelical churches became less egalitarian during the 1820s in order to attract more members, but he also claims that evangelical women continued to serve as fund-raisers, Sunday school teachers, and leaders of Bible study groups. Most important, they were expected (like northern women) to serve as religious leaders within the household. Even though they were supposed to be subordinate to their fathers and husbands, they were empowered by their belief that they had been called to redeem their families.

Using elite women's personal journals and correspondence, Stephan paints a compelling portrait of women's religious lives in the antebellum period. To chart their experiences through the entire life course, he examines not only courtship, marriage, childbirth, and child rearing but also rituals around death and dying. Rejecting simplistic arguments about evangelical religion as either liberating or oppressive, he argues that women's domestic piety gave them a sense of purpose and meaning, and this is ultimately why so many of them joined evangelical churches. "As women struggled to redeem their families," he explains, "they found their taxing work uniquely meaningful, offering historians an explanation for women's persistent domination of antebellum southern evangelical congregations in spite of the clergy's rhetorical celebrations of male authority" (7). At the same time, however, Stephan emphasizes that evangelical women were forced to shoulder the blame when husbands or children failed to live as good Christians, meaning that their religious authority could be more of a burden than a source of satisfaction. If their children refused to convert, for example, they expressed guilt about their maternal failings.

Redeeming the Southern Family is a thought-provoking book, but because Stephan relies on a relatively small number of manuscripts written by elite women, the papers of twenty-one families, it is not clear whether his conclusions can be extended to southern women more broadly. Future historians will have to determine whether other evangelical women, including lower-class and enslaved women, also claimed to have special religious authority within their families. Moreover, because Stephan did not supplement women's personal documents with sermons, church records, or religious treatises, the women in this book appear only through the lens of the family, and the result is that we do not know how their denominations may have shaped their ideas and practices. He emphasizes the similarities among evangelicals more than the differences, ignoring the heated antebellum debates over free will, infant damnation, and original sin. Even if women did not write about these debates explicitly in their letters or journals, it is hard to imagine that they were unaffected by them.

Echoing the language of scholars Robert Orsi and David Hall, Stephan describes his book as a study of "lived religion" (8). Since this is an odd term, it is worth asking why Stephan is drawn to it—and, more generally, why it has become popular in religious studies. He argues that the lived religion approach is especially valuable because it views religion as a dynamic force that is deeply shaped by ordinary life. On one hand, the scholarship on religious practice has yielded important insights about power and resistance, and the best studies are remarkably sensitive to the relationship between practice and ideas. On the other hand, the danger of the lived religion approach is that it suggests that some parts of religion are not "lived," and Stephan's book is built on the implicit assumption that nineteenth-century evangelicalism can be studied without reference to theology. Stephan focuses instead on "cosmology," which he defines overly broadly as "the way in which southern evangelicals ordered their world" (7). What is missing in his book is an examination of what evangelical ministers preached and what their female congregants actually thought about God, free will, gender, or suffering. He rarely asks how Methodist, Presbyterian, or Baptist women may have either absorbed or rejected their denominations' teaching about human agency, original sin, or any of the other Christian ideas that influenced their daily lives. This is a regrettable omission in a book that is otherwise so meticulously researched.

Despite this criticism, Stephan's book represents an important contribution to our understanding of southern evangelical women's religious lives. Like the other historians who have studied domestic religion, such as Colleen McDannell, Stephan reminds us that the home as well as the church has served as a crucial locus of religious meaning.