ABSTRACT
The first woman authorized to preach by the AME Church, Jarena Lee’s supremely self-conscious autobiographical act—her self-published The Life (1836)—illuminates key intersections between female selfhood, prophetic religion, and race. Lowe’s close reading of the ways in which Lee articulated her mystical experiences (including other worldly impressions, voices, and especially dreams) highlights her intentional effort to claim an irrefutable religious and public authority. In her “lived theology,” she is both a subject, deferent to “God’s will” and also an active agent capable of decoding God’s intentions and thus charting her own life course. Her gender, race, and lack of education had honed her ability, she argued, to detect “the way and law of God.” This chapter demonstrates that Jarena Lee and in turn, other female writers, made explicit use of spiritual autobiographies to define themselves as independent moral and public authorities as well as to demand a more expansive theology that included their visions for American society.
