New England Women Writers, Secularity, and the Federalist Politics of Church and State by Gretchen Murphy

Abstract

Reviewed by: New England Women Writers, Secularity, and the Federalist Politics of Church and State by Gretchen Murphy Scott Slawinski NEW ENGLAND WOMEN WRITERS, SECULARITY, AND THE FEDERALIST POLITICS OF CHURCH AND STATE, by Gretchen Murphy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 222 pp. $80.00 hard-back; $71.20 ebook. In New England Women Writers, Secularity, and the Federalist Politics of Church and State, Gretchen Murphy recovers an overlooked literary tradition embedded within Federalist New England writings. Even though Federalism as a vibrant political tradition gradually faded after Thomas Jefferson’s election, Murphy argues that rather than abandoning Federalism, some women writers were “adapting its philosophy and curating its legacy” (p. 4). While tackling key political issues of church and state, Judith Sargent Murray, Sally Sayward Wood, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Catherine Sedgwick, and Harriet Beecher Stowe preserved Federalism’s legacy. Murphy’s book is a fresh approach and a welcome addition to scholarship exploring the New England tradition. Through the culture of letters, these writers addressed the civic role of (Protestant) Christianity in a republic, balancing the Federalist belief that an established Christianity was necessary for moral instruction and social stability and the Democratic-Republican advocacy of religious liberty and separation of church and state. They advanced “liberal, privatized Christianity as an essential feature of American self-government” (p. 4). Murphy’s introduction effectively outlines the debate over established religion and moral authority central to Federalist philosophy. She describes the balancing act performed by these women writers as they sought to represent a religion that was free of the state yet met state directives, one that fulfilled a social purpose but was not merely utilitarian, that was uncoupled from male-centered authority and was accessible to women, that softened but did not remove coercive measures, and that could withstand a secularity stemming from the growth of competing belief systems (p. 14). Confronting fewer occasions for political participation after the War of 1812, women writers turned to historical narratives of the 1790s, often emphasizing the anti-Christian Jacobin threat. Murphy’s investigation unfolds this valuable literary, political, and religious history. Murphy situates Murray’s The Gleaner (1798) within controversies concerning state support of religion, the perceived threat from Jacobin France, and the conflict between Federalism and Universalism. While championing private belief, Murray “refused to relinquish the Federalist notion that religion was essential to self-government” (p. 35). Murphy [End Page 157] focuses her attention on the Virgilius essays, the play Virtue Triumphant, Anna Letitia Barbauld’s short story “The Curé on the Banks of the Rhone” (1791), and Maximilien Robespierre’s report calling for state-supported deist beliefs. These pieces are understudied, and Murphy satisfyingly looks beyond Murray’s interest in women’s rights to consider her investment in other significant issues of her day. While both Murray and Wood seek to reconcile religion as a private matter and a public concern, Wood’s Julia and the Illuminated Baron (1800) marks a shift toward the nineteenth-century ideology of domesticity, wherein religion and moral instruction reside in a privatized feminine sphere. Instead of juxtaposing religious belief and Enlightenment rationalism, “Wood portrays faith as rational, modern, and naturally self-evident in contradistinction to the Illuminati’s primitive superstition” (p. 61). Wood rejects the religious pluralism Murray envisions for a privatized, state-supported Protestantism, and she contrasts reasonable Christianity with the Illuminati’s unreasonable disbelief. Murphy’s interesting analysis takes discussion of Julia and the Illuminated Baron in a fruitful direction that reveals a less reactionary, more progressive Wood. Murphy rightly views Julia and the Illuminated Baron as a complex web of influences that includes the Illuminati controversy, the spread of democratic ideals, domesticity and the privatization of belief, anti-Catholicism, and a rejection of her father’s religious beliefs. Murphy’s analysis of Sigourney’s early career especially attends to her 1815 poetry collection and 1824 reminiscence of Connecticut life. This focus is quite welcome since Sigourney’s literary output between 1800 and 1820 is frequently overlooked, and her later poetic fame often draws significant critical attention. Sigourney “affiliated with Federalism in her War of 1812 poetry, used the public discourse of ‘steady habits’ to signal deference to the state’s ruling...