ABSTRACT
While a great deal of scholarly work has been done to recover the writing of nineteenth-century American women, the explicitly theological nature of these texts is often overlooked. Religion is often read as only a coping mechanism for women to deal with racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression, when these texts are also expressions of the lives and dynamic minds of women who developed sophisticated spiritual and textual approaches to the divine, to their denomination(s) or religious tradition(s), and to the mainstream culture around them. Examining the importance of sentimental fiction, Black women’s intellectual traditions, and visions of utopian spaces in the nineteenth century, this introduction contextualizes American women’s theology-making and appeals for social justice.
Authors like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Martha Finley, Jarena Lee, Maria Stewart, Zilpha Elaw, Rebecca Cox Jackson, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Belinda Marden Pratt, and others wrote to have a voice in the moral debates that were consuming churches and national politics. Each of them believed that religion was necessary to maintain a morally healthy nation. Though they each believed in different ways to reach the afterlife, they were all working to make earth a step closer to heaven, to convert others to bring about a life after moral reform. Women do not simply apply, or live out, theologies authored by men. Rather, this anthology is grounded in the radical notion that the theological principles crafted by women and derived from women’s experiences, intellectual habits, and organizational capabilities are foundational to American literature itself.
