If there's anything more important than his ego...
I think I would have been far less irritated with Paul Johnson's A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 if I hadn't read the preface he wrote for the twenty fifth anniversary edition first.
Finally, my crimes against women. A Shopkeeper's Millennium attempts to throw light on the process whereby Northern politics came, quite abruptly in the 1830s, to be organized by religion. I argued that changes in relations between work and domestic life were at the heart of religious change in Rochester; then I followed evangelical men out into male politics and male public life. New studies in women's history quickly called my strategy into question: they stayed indoors and reconstructed the mother-centered middle-class family, pointing out that women far outnumbered men in evangelical churches, and disclosing the domestic character of the message preached in those churches. These studies argued forcefully that middle-class evangelicalism (and middle-class culture generally) was about gender, not class. They argued just as forcefully that most of the cultural work that made the middle class was performed by women. I nodded to all that, but not with the emphasis that could have warded off justifiable criticisms of my male-centered study. Yet I continue to argue (as I argued in 1978) that the privatization and feminization of meddle-class domestic life is unthinkable without reference to larger transformations in society, that the middle class family and its culture were deeply implicated in those transformations and in the ways in which they worked out in history.
"Nodded to all that." Oh good grief, yes, nodded. Here, let me transcribe all three paragraphs in a hundred and sixty page book where women appear. They're on pages ninety eight and ninety nine.
Initially, these pressures fell on the already converted. It was the prayers of Christians that led others to Christ, and it was their failure to pray that sent untold millions into hell. Lay evangelicals seldom explained the terms of salvation in the language of a Reverend Whitehouse - or even of a Charles Finney. But with the fate of their children and neighbors at stake, they carried their awful responsibility to the point of emotional terrorism. Finney tells the story of a woman who prayed while her son-in-law attended an anxious meeting. He came home converted, and she thanked God and fell dead on the spot. Everard Peck reported the death of his wife to an unregenerate father-in-law, and told the old man that his dead daughter's last wish was to see him converted. "We are either marching towards heaven or towards hell," wrote one convert to his sister. "How is it with you?"
The new measures brought sinners into intense and public contact with praying Christians. Conversion hinged not on private prayer, arbitrary grace, or intellectual choice, but on purposive encounters between people. The secret of the Rochester revival and of the attendant transformation of society lay ultimately in the strategy of those encounters.
While Finney led morning prayer meetings, pious women visited families. Reputedly they went door-to-door. But the visits were far from random. Visitors paid special attention to the homes of sinners who had Christian wives, and they arrived in the morning hours when husbands were at work. Finney himself found time to pray with Melania Smith, wife of a young physician. The doctor was anxious for his soul, but sickness in the village kept him busy and he was both unable to pray and unwilling to try. But his wife prayed and tormented him constantly, reminding him of "the woe which is denounced against the families which call not on the name of the Lord." Soon his pride broke and he joined her as a member of Brick Presbyterian church. Finney's wife, Lydia, made a bolder intrusion into the home of James Buchan, a merchant-tailor and a Roman Catholic whose wife, Caroline, was a Presbyterian. Buchan, with what must have been enormous self restraint, apologized for having been out of the house, thanked Finney for the tract, and invited him and his wife to tea. (It is not known whether Finney accepted the invitation, but this was one bit of family meddling which may have backfired. In 1833 Caroline Buchan withdrew from the Presbyterian Church and converted to Catholicism.) In hundreds of cases the strategy of family visits worked. As the first converts fell, the Observer announced with satisfaction that the largest group among them was "young heads of families."
Oh, all right, I misrepresent the limited discussion of women in this monograph slightly. I mean, after all, the next paragraph has a reference to a "sister in Connecticut", and on a few spaces in the ensuing pages we have references to "men and women", which might not seem like much, unless you've read A Shopkeeper's Millennium's first chapter, which is about family ties created by marriage. Oddly, considering that we are, after all, talking about the nineteenth century and thus the marriage involved must be heterosexual, the only people named or mentioned in this context are men. Young men do not, say, marry Mr. Scott's daughter, Nancy. Instead, they become Mr. Scott's son in law. You might almost think it was all very Roman, Johnson was just using the wrong term, and these were relationships created by adoption.
I have to confess that I don't want to know what Johnson would have done with women in Rochester if he'd paid more attention to them than these three paragraphs, because sweet Betty Lou Jane the misogyny's thick on the ground there as it is. Notice how women dying of emotional stress is his first and therefore probably intended to be most telling example of "emotional terrorism". And how women "torment" men and "break" their pride. Yeah, this is fantastic analysis of gender that clearly demonstrates that Johnson has a deep and profound understanding of feminist theory, and it is only the brevity with which he touches on this subject matter that stops his study from doing justice to the issue of gender in the nineteenth century. (Oh, and the argument of all feminist studies is totally that class doesn't matter at all and gender is the only operative category. Do you need a crown for that straw man? Pins so that he's sharp enough to rule a city? This might be the general thrust of some writing focused on women, but it's certainly not the argument of all the scholarship and saying it is suggests that either you don't read for argument very well, or you're being disingenuous.)
This entry was originally posted at http://tiamatschild.dreamwidth.org/26003.html. Please feel free to comment there using OpenID. Or here! It'll be read either way, is what I'm saying.
Finally, my crimes against women. A Shopkeeper's Millennium attempts to throw light on the process whereby Northern politics came, quite abruptly in the 1830s, to be organized by religion. I argued that changes in relations between work and domestic life were at the heart of religious change in Rochester; then I followed evangelical men out into male politics and male public life. New studies in women's history quickly called my strategy into question: they stayed indoors and reconstructed the mother-centered middle-class family, pointing out that women far outnumbered men in evangelical churches, and disclosing the domestic character of the message preached in those churches. These studies argued forcefully that middle-class evangelicalism (and middle-class culture generally) was about gender, not class. They argued just as forcefully that most of the cultural work that made the middle class was performed by women. I nodded to all that, but not with the emphasis that could have warded off justifiable criticisms of my male-centered study. Yet I continue to argue (as I argued in 1978) that the privatization and feminization of meddle-class domestic life is unthinkable without reference to larger transformations in society, that the middle class family and its culture were deeply implicated in those transformations and in the ways in which they worked out in history.
"Nodded to all that." Oh good grief, yes, nodded. Here, let me transcribe all three paragraphs in a hundred and sixty page book where women appear. They're on pages ninety eight and ninety nine.
Initially, these pressures fell on the already converted. It was the prayers of Christians that led others to Christ, and it was their failure to pray that sent untold millions into hell. Lay evangelicals seldom explained the terms of salvation in the language of a Reverend Whitehouse - or even of a Charles Finney. But with the fate of their children and neighbors at stake, they carried their awful responsibility to the point of emotional terrorism. Finney tells the story of a woman who prayed while her son-in-law attended an anxious meeting. He came home converted, and she thanked God and fell dead on the spot. Everard Peck reported the death of his wife to an unregenerate father-in-law, and told the old man that his dead daughter's last wish was to see him converted. "We are either marching towards heaven or towards hell," wrote one convert to his sister. "How is it with you?"
The new measures brought sinners into intense and public contact with praying Christians. Conversion hinged not on private prayer, arbitrary grace, or intellectual choice, but on purposive encounters between people. The secret of the Rochester revival and of the attendant transformation of society lay ultimately in the strategy of those encounters.
While Finney led morning prayer meetings, pious women visited families. Reputedly they went door-to-door. But the visits were far from random. Visitors paid special attention to the homes of sinners who had Christian wives, and they arrived in the morning hours when husbands were at work. Finney himself found time to pray with Melania Smith, wife of a young physician. The doctor was anxious for his soul, but sickness in the village kept him busy and he was both unable to pray and unwilling to try. But his wife prayed and tormented him constantly, reminding him of "the woe which is denounced against the families which call not on the name of the Lord." Soon his pride broke and he joined her as a member of Brick Presbyterian church. Finney's wife, Lydia, made a bolder intrusion into the home of James Buchan, a merchant-tailor and a Roman Catholic whose wife, Caroline, was a Presbyterian. Buchan, with what must have been enormous self restraint, apologized for having been out of the house, thanked Finney for the tract, and invited him and his wife to tea. (It is not known whether Finney accepted the invitation, but this was one bit of family meddling which may have backfired. In 1833 Caroline Buchan withdrew from the Presbyterian Church and converted to Catholicism.) In hundreds of cases the strategy of family visits worked. As the first converts fell, the Observer announced with satisfaction that the largest group among them was "young heads of families."
Oh, all right, I misrepresent the limited discussion of women in this monograph slightly. I mean, after all, the next paragraph has a reference to a "sister in Connecticut", and on a few spaces in the ensuing pages we have references to "men and women", which might not seem like much, unless you've read A Shopkeeper's Millennium's first chapter, which is about family ties created by marriage. Oddly, considering that we are, after all, talking about the nineteenth century and thus the marriage involved must be heterosexual, the only people named or mentioned in this context are men. Young men do not, say, marry Mr. Scott's daughter, Nancy. Instead, they become Mr. Scott's son in law. You might almost think it was all very Roman, Johnson was just using the wrong term, and these were relationships created by adoption.
I have to confess that I don't want to know what Johnson would have done with women in Rochester if he'd paid more attention to them than these three paragraphs, because sweet Betty Lou Jane the misogyny's thick on the ground there as it is. Notice how women dying of emotional stress is his first and therefore probably intended to be most telling example of "emotional terrorism". And how women "torment" men and "break" their pride. Yeah, this is fantastic analysis of gender that clearly demonstrates that Johnson has a deep and profound understanding of feminist theory, and it is only the brevity with which he touches on this subject matter that stops his study from doing justice to the issue of gender in the nineteenth century. (Oh, and the argument of all feminist studies is totally that class doesn't matter at all and gender is the only operative category. Do you need a crown for that straw man? Pins so that he's sharp enough to rule a city? This might be the general thrust of some writing focused on women, but it's certainly not the argument of all the scholarship and saying it is suggests that either you don't read for argument very well, or you're being disingenuous.)
This entry was originally posted at http://tiamatschild.dreamwidth.org/26003.html. Please feel free to comment there using OpenID. Or here! It'll be read either way, is what I'm saying.