Around the Family Altar: Domesticity in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1865 -1900

Abstract

With this slim volume, Julius H. Bailey has skillfully handled a large topic, “domesticity” and the nineteenth-century African American family. Centering his analysis on the African Methodist Episcopal Church (ame), Bailey brought new insight to the examination of the denomination's idea of the Christian home. Arguing first that there were “two interconnected uses of domesticity in the ame church,” Bailey contended that various constituents within the ame vied for the ascendancy of their version of domesticity (p. 3). One group placed primacy on child rearing as a means to race advancement. Here Bailey broke new ground by exploring the previously unexamined emphasis on proper child rearing in black families as an avenue to “respectability.” The second group underscored the difficulty black women faced in their attempts to assert themselves in the ame church and in other places outside the “private sphere,” and they highlighted the inherent gendered nature of domesticity. For Bailey, the construction of domesticity relied as much on conceptions of manhood and masculinity as on femininity and the home world of the black woman. African American men had a direct stake in the construction of domesticity, and the way it functioned in the family influenced their experiences as men in the wider world. Throughout the nineteenth century, the “marketplace of ideas” (p. 4) regarding the home and the proper roles for black men, women, and children constituted “a black domestic ideology” (p. 6).