Without Benefit of Clergy Women and the Pastoral Relationship in Nineteenth-Century American Culture

by Gedge, Karin E.; Stout, Harry S.

• ISBN13: 9780195130201
• ISBN10: 0195130200
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-11-06
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The common view of the nineteenth-century pastoral relationship--found in both contemporary popular accounts and 20th-century scholarship--was that women and clergymen formed a natural alliance and enjoyed a particular influence over each other. In Without Benefit of Clergy , Karin Gedge tests this thesis by examining the pastoral relationship from the perspective of the minister, the female parishioner, and the larger culture. The question that troubled religious women seeking counsel, says Gedge, was: would their minister respect them, help them, honor them? Surprisingly, she finds, the answer was frequently negative. Gedge supports her conclusion with evidence from a wide range of previously untapped primary sources including pastoral manuals, seminary students' and pastors' journals, women's diaries and letters, pamphlets, sentimental and sensational novels, and The Scarlet Letter .

Author Biography

Karin E. Gedge is Assistant Professor of History at West Chester University in Pennsylvania.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Dim Views of the Pastoral Relationship	3	(8)
PART I The Pastoral Relationship as Perception
The Bellwether; or, What the Traveler Saw	11	(12)
Gone Astray; or, What the Public Feared	23	(26)
Mending Fences; or, What the Public Saw	49	(28)
PART II The Pastoral Relationship in the Literary Imagination
Paradoxical Pastors; or, What the Novelist Imagined	77	(34)
PART III The Pastoral Relationship as Ideal
Forbidden and Forgotten Territory; or, Where the Pastor Feared to Tread	111	(30)
PART IV The Pastoral Relationship in Experience
The Unsteady Shepherd; or, What the Pastor Experienced	141	(22)
Sheep without a Shepherd; or, What Women Experienced	163	(34)
Epilogue: Separating the Ewes from the Rams; or, Seeing through a New Lens	197	(12)
Appendix: Historiographical Essay: Counting Sheep; or, What the Historian Did	209	(12)
Notes	221	(40)
Selected Bibliography	261	(24)
Index	285