Rewriting the Past

• Main Author: Gutacker, Paul J.
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford University Press 2023
• Subjects: Fuller; Hale; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197639146.003.0006; https://academic.oup.com/book/chapter-pdf/58067715/oso-9780197639146-chapter-6.pdf

Abstract Chapter 5 explains how the recovery of women’s place in Christian history shaped the development and contestation of women’s rights. In 1835, Lydia Maria Child published a history of women that offered a new female-centric interpretation of the Christian past. Child’s argument was enlisted by Sarah Moore Grimké, Lucretia Mott, and Margaret Fuller, who used it to argue for women’s rights. At the same time, advocates of domesticity picked up the narrative of women in Christian history for their own purposes. Across the North Atlantic in the 1840s and 1850s, authors increasingly put forward examples of godly motherhood in order to encourage women in their domestic callings. These two diverging interpretations of women in the Christian past were exemplified in works written in the 1850s by Child and Sarah Josepha Hale, respectively. By the middle of the century, scholars and popular authors alike recognized the place of women in Christian history, even as the implications of this past were disputed.