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

Harris, Jane

Redeeming the Southern Family: Evangelical Women and Domestic Devotion in the Antebellum South. By Scott Stephan. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008. ix + 304 pp. $44.95 cloth.

Evangelical faith provided the ideals for family life and supplied the language by which the women and men in the elite antebellum southern families examined in Scott Stephan's Redeeming the Southern Family: Evangelical Women and Domestic Devotion in the Antebellum South expressed the realities of their everyday lives. Evangelical piety distinctly shaped familial relations culturally dominated by patriarchal authority and female domesticity. Using journals and correspondence, Stephan portrays the lived experiences of a number of elite southern families, taking the reader along from courtship to the early years of marriage through the anxieties of pregnancy, childbirth, and parenthood to deathbeds. Stephan's valuable contribution to the literature on southern religion is his connection between religion and ordinary life experiences.

Stephan argues that evangelicalism provided a language and images that encouraged the elite southern women in his study to find meaning in family life. Within the evangelical household, women acquired informal power in their roles as wives and especially as mothers charged with the spiritual nurture and direction of their children. Other scholars of religion in the South, such as Donald Mathews and Christine Leigh Heyrman, have interpreted the influence of evangelicalism on southern women's empowerment. However, as Stephan argues, along with a growing sense of power to affect some dimensions of their and their family's lives, evangelical women felt anxiety, anticipation, joy, loneliness, doubt, passion, and sorrow. Stephan's study portrays the potent mix of piety and emotion that created a distinct family dynamic among southern evangelicals, which was not seen either in their nonreligious southern neighbors or their evangelical northern counterparts.

The book begins with accounts of the revivals that introduced evangelical faith to the South's poor folks, black people, and womenfolk (21). Although Stephan does not describe what he means by evangelicalism, he does suggest in his case studies how the Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches dominated the region's landscape. According to Stephan, the institutional churches, for all their importance within the South's rural communities, were not as central in the lives of elite white evangelicals as the home, the institution that became the true sanctuary for these women and men.

Women constituted the majority in the South's evangelical churches, and their everyday lives were shaped by their faith. Stephan's case studies reveal how evangelicalism influenced the possibilities for and meanings of southern womanhood at each stage of life. In courtship, piety proved attractive, and pious women exercised a great deal of control as they wrestled with the tension between religious obligations to care for their parents and their desire for marriage. Meanwhile their suitors employed appeals to God and the spiritual advantages of family life in winning the hand of their intended. Throughout the courtship state, women, in particular, were cautioned about sin and its consequences (61). Upon reaching the decision to marry, the couple imagined the evangelical ideal of their marriage as shared faith, mutual affection, and spiritual fulfillment.

Evangelical ideals did not adequately prepare men and women for the realities that confronted them as husbands and wives but did supply the rhetoric to voice their experiences to one another, primarily through letters. Among the families in Stephan's study, both clergy and non-clergy couples often experienced extended separations that brought unexpected loneliness. Women were left to cope with situations in which they were assumed to have no authority, since that rested with their husbands, but that required attention. The language of duty and devotion became the means by which evangelical women dealt with the stresses of their lives (118) and handled the care of their families, even as they bore the responsibility for creating a happy marriage.

The evangelical woman's burden intensified when she became a mother. Pregnancy and childbirth acquainted her with the prospect of her own mortality. The frequency of infant mortality acquainted her with grief, for which the language of faith often provided the explanation that God willed that child not suffer the evils of this world, which often offered little solace for the grieving mother. As the guardian of piety and morals, the evangelical mother bore the weight of concern for the salvation of her children, for the evangelical ideal of the reconstruction of the family in the afterlife required that the entire family be saved.

As life drew to a close, evangelical women and men were expected to experience the Good Death, which involved profundity at the deathbed, the need for the dying to communicate final thoughts and beliefs, and the centrality of family (193). Women attended the deaths of family members and were usually the narrators of the Good Deaths of loved ones. Sudden deaths, the incapacity of the dying to speak, or the absence of family at the time of death so compromised the ideal of dying that evangelical families often struggled to find meaning and God's will in those losses. In such cases, female family members assumed responsibility for circumstances beyond their control (220), rather than abandon belief in the sanctification of suffering and the hope for "heaven as an eternal and happy home where a perfected family reunion would occur" (212).

The Civil War, to which Stephan turns in his conclusion, required that evangelical men and women struggle with the Good Death and with God's will in new ways. As he did throughout this engaging study, Stephan recorded the words of a wise southern woman to show that "discerning between the work of man and God in a time of civil war would have seemed daunting had southern women not had extensive experience routinely performing such tasks before the war" (231). This fine book deserves attention by those interested in gender, southern religion, and the culture of the antebellum South.

doi: 10.1017/S000964071000140X

Jane Harris

Hendrix College