ABSTRACT
Growing up in a very small town in northern New York State, and under close observance, Fielde was brought up in a traditional way, soaking up the beliefs and attitudes of her parents and her community, but, even then, after thoughtful analysis of some subject, when she came to a different conclusion from her peers, she did not yield to the pressure to conform. As an independent teenager, she switched her allegiance from the Baptist creed of her family to a more tolerant Universalist denomination, based no doubt on a close comparison of the two sects. Fielde remained an eager advocate of the basic principles of Christianity, but it is not surprising that in her later years her views came to differ from those of most ordinary churchgoers. Surely Fielde’s vision of a merciful God of Love in a land of grinding poverty and injustice (which she had grimly experienced for a quarter of a century) would differ from that held by an American, coddled in a benign environment of plenty, whose lofty theological convictions had never been put to the test. Her move away from the dogmatic, male-dominated, and authoritarian tradition of Calvin (and of the Reverend Dean of Bangkok) to a more humanistic religion was, in fact, part of a general drift by many Americans who were abandoning the narrow doctrinal beliefs of their elders, and spending their leisure time reading romantic novels rather than the Bible.1
