The Religious World of Antislavery Women: Spirituality in the Lives of Five Abolitionist Lecturers

Abstract

The Religious World of Antislavery Women: Spirituality in the Lives of Five Abolitionist Lecturers. By Anna M. Speicher. (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2000. Pp xii, 242. Illustrations. Cloth, $39.95; paper, $19.95.) With an ingenuously ambiguous title, Anna M. Speicher introduces the dual focus of this important new work: the serious theology that structured the thought and action of five radical female antislavery lecturers and the mutually supportive Christian-oriented community they created together. Speicher skillfully links the inner structures of belief to the broader social and political world of these key abolitionist women: Sarah and Angelina Grimke, Abby Kelley Foster, Sallie Holley, and Lucretia Mott. As Speicher argues, religion was the fundamental organizing principle for both the mental and material worlds of these women (4). Like the army of women superbly documented in Julie Roy Jeffrey's recent work, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (1998), Speicher's leaders drew upon their religious commitment to act against slavery, viewing reform as the mission to which they had been called. Their theology, based in noninstitutional but quite specific religious principles (9), rejected the doctrines of human depravity and eternal damnation. They embraced instead a loving god who empowered inherently good humans to choose lives of belief and Christian action. Skeptical of clerical authority and impatient with rituals or forms that substituted for the authentic practice of faith, these women rejected sectarianism, and particularly church rivalries; ultimately, all but one left organized religion, although the women continued to practice nondenominational Christianity. For these five women, the era had no greater religious mission than freeing those held in bondage contrary to God's will and the Bible's injunctions; moreover, theological arguments coupled with the practical vicissitudes of abolition work propelled them toward an embrace of the radical notions of the racial and gender equality of all humans. Significantly, Speicher's women were not the evangelically inspired abolitionists who formed the core of the movement for Gilbert Barnes and, more recently, for the late Paul Goodman. Rather, these antebellum women fused their gendered experiences in nondenominational Christianity with their antislavery activism. They illustrate the radicalism of women who, like those studied by Nancy A. Hewitt, went beyond the process of evangelical conversion that often attached women to faith-based reform to affiliate themselves with a broader radical egalitarianism encompassing both race and gender. These female abolitionists sought to reunite sacred and secular, fusing theology and action into a determinedly religious ethos of action. Speicher's emphasis on the centrality of religion in the lives of her subjects is a long overdue corrective to historians of women who, in celebrating a radical tradition, often have secularized the narrative to help today's readers connect with the humanitarian quest for social justice. Speicher also challenges historians of religion who have written these women reformers out of the social and intellectual histories of antebellum Christianity because they distanced themselves from denominational controversy and institutional churches. Thus Speicher recaptures Angelina and Sarah Grimke's profound spiritual searches and the theological foundations of both their antislavery and feminist works; she thereby restores the Christian foundations of their calls for abolition and equality. Similarly, the author traces the distance Mott traveled from the orthodox Quakerism of her Nantucket beginnings to her interest in the Free Religious Association and Unitarianism as all part of her life-long religious quest, not a declension of faith. And she finds in Abby Kelley Foster's orthodox Quaker origins the source for her commitment to abolition as a moral cause and her courage to pursue it as her calling. …