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Authorizing Mothers
A Study of the First Maternal Association of
Utica, New York, 1824 - 1833
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Part V: Calvinist Childrearing Methodology (continued)
No evidence is available to establish for each member of the Maternal
Association the childrearing methods used by her parents. Yet as previously
discussed, orthodox Calvinist childrearing methods required parents to
annihilate the selfhood of each infant. Philip Greven has examined the
consequences of Calvinist childrearing methodology, providing the basis
for inferences regarding the effects of parental attempts to annihilate
selfhood on the members of the Maternal Association who we may reasonably
assume were subjected to some variant of Calvinism.
In Spare the Child: the Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological
Impact of Physical Abuse, after providing evidence that as parents
sought to destroy the selfhood of infants prior to their beginning to
speak, they used physical means of inflicting pain, Greven examines the
consequences of such abusive childrearing methods. The negative results
are anxiety and fear, anger and hate, apathy, melancholy and depression,
obsessiveness and rigidity, ambivalence, dissociation, paranoia, sadomasochism,
domestic violence, aggression and delinquency, authoritarianism, and the
apocalyptic impulse. Greven's discussion of the lack of empathy resulting
from such traumatic childhood experiences is particularly relevant to
the discussion of the relation of First Maternal Association's relation
to the perpetuation of patriarchy, the subject of this essay.
The commodification of the child, the denial of its subjectivity, was
perpetuated most readily by parents with little empathy for the suffering
of their offspring. The growth of maternal tenderness acknowledged by
the tract represented a growth in empathy. In The Protestant Temperament,
Greven found that in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in
the United States, those who actually engaged in the severest attacks
on the selfhoods of their children tended to be from the poorer classes,
while more affluent moderates would verbalize doctrines but in practice
ameliorate them, and the gentility ignored them altogether indulging their
children's desires. Given the class background of most members of the
Maternal Association then we may suppose that they had benefited from
some melioration of orthodox childrearing techniques. No evidence is available
to enable us to know how vigorously members of the Maternal Association
were traumatized, but we can be certain that they were educated to internalize
the self-hatred the orthodox doctrine required, and that it is likely
that each evidenced some of the disorders the Greven identifies. We do
know, for example, that Rev. Aikin's wife, Maternal Association member
Delia Aikin, was so mentally deranged at times that her husband interrupted
his ministerial duties to travel with her, for only through leaving Utica
could she regain her senses.
Peter Gregg Slater has provided a study that is particularly helpful
in perhaps determining more precisely theory and practice of childrearing
that members of the Maternal Association endured as children and confronted
as adults. His work confirms that members' families, even though orthodox
Calvinists, probably were ameliorating Calvinist methodology. In his work
Views of Children and of Child Rearing During the Early National Period:
a Study in the New England Intellect, he writes that
The doctrine of original sin continued to be held with force in the
eighteenth century, but was also subject to neglect by certain Calvinist
divines, though no open challenge arose before the middle of the century.
At that time conflicting tendencies emerged. In some quarters, the depravity
of man received heightened emphasis. The seventeenth century Puritans
had claimed that considerable remnants of God-like greatness coexisted
in man with his loathsome corruption. The claim had been advanced partly
for theological-metaphysical reasons, and perhaps partly because in
an age and place where religion was the major preoccupation, the lash
of total depravity did not have to be wielded with excessive harshness.
This amelioration of Calvinist efforts to annihilate children's selfhood
would be then an important factor explaining the emergence of maternal
tenderness.
However, Utica's First Presbyterian was a major center for revivals and
the doctrine of human depravity was especially emphasized during those
events as a means of goading individuals to be born again in the Covenant.
Charles Grandison Finney and other revivalists of the Second Great Awakening
who came to First Presbyterian emphasized the doctrine of human depravity
to terrify individuals into renouncing what positive feelings about themselves
that they had managed to achieve. The conversion process was built upon
the stage of conviction in which the individual developed the conviction
of his/her utter unworthiness and dependence upon divine grace for forgiveness
in order to join the saints. Finney, for example, in his lecture, "How
to Promote a Revival," tells his audience "to break up your hearts…to
bring the mind into such a state, that it is fitted to receive the word
of God." That state was to be achieved through self-examination of the
following enumerated sins: ingratitude, want of love of God, neglect of
the Bible, unbelief, neglect of prayer, neglect of the means of grace,
the manner of performing duties—want of feeling—want of faith—worldly
frame of mind—so that words were nothing but the mere chattering
of a wretch, that did not deserve that God should feel the least care
for him, want of love for the souls of fellow-men, want of care for the
heathen, neglect of social duties, neglect of watchfulness over one's
own life, neglect to watch over brethren, neglect of self-denial, worldly
mindedness, pride, envy, censoriousness, slander, levity, lying, cheating,
hypocrisy, robbing God, bad temper, and hindering others from being useful.
He advises that
when you have gone over your whole history in this way, thoroughly,
if you will then go over the ground the second time, and give your solemn
and fixed attention to it, you will find that the things you have put
down will suggest other things of which you have been guilty, connected
with them, or near them. Then go over it a third time, and you will
recollect other things connected with these…. Unless you do take up
your sins in this way, and consider them in detail, one by one, you
can form no idea of the amount of your sins.
Not to deny the self was not merely sinful. Finney writes that those
who do not practice self-denial "will be in hell!"
But by the nineteenth century, there were three general orientations
to the self. In addition to the Calvinist innately depraved self, there
was the Enlightenment self as tabula rasa and the sacred self
of Romaniticism. In Changing Conceptions of Original Sin, historian
Hilrie Smith found from a close study of prominent theologians and others
struggling with patriarchal doctrine that they often evidenced contradictory
beliefs. In the mid-eighteeenth century, for example, leading Congregationalist
minister Jonathan Mayhew who opposed the Great Awakening for its emphasis
on innate depravity and who himself denied imputed sin, nevertheless sometimes
spoke to youth "as though he believed in the doctrine of native depravity."
"Affluent Bostonians," Smith writes, "might continue to repeat the federal
doctrine of original sin on Sunday, but they felt more at home with Mayhew's
conception of man on Monday."
While it is probable that at least some if not most members of the Maternal
Association were subjected to orthodox childrearing methods, and others
to less harsh rejections of selfhood, there seems little doubt that each
member had been reared to reject herself in some fashion. For within Presbyterian
theology parents were instructed that not to lead a child to reject herself
would insure her damnation. Whether their wills were broken in infancy
or through conditioning during their early years, we can be sure that
Maternal Association members had been taught to reject their desires and
feelings. Members of the Maternal Association would have inherited not
only a negative orientation to selfhood, but a community that demanded
selflessness of them. Further, those members of the Maternal Association
who became members of First Presbyterian had to have given testimony to
that church or a previous one proving that they had renounced their individual
wills so as to be born again in the will of God.
Public perception of the 1803 Sangerfield controversy had been in the
hands of the Congregationalists who wrote and published the narrative
of the "vindication" of infant baptism. They claimed that their positive
views of infant depravity and the necessity of infant baptism had won
the field. The theological war had not, however, been won. In 1829, five
years after the founding of First Maternal Association and three years
before Mother's Magazine was first published, public control
of a second dispute over orthodoxy was in the hands of the challenger.
Dolphus Skinner, pastor of the First Universalist Church and Society in
Utica, initiated a public correspondence with Reverend Aikin, then minister
of First Presbyterian. A more devastating critique of Rev. Aikin's aristocratic
hauteur and his defense of orthodoxy, specifically infant depravity and
the necessity of infant baptism, is hard to imagine.
Skinner published the first twelve letters in his Evangelical Magazine
and Gospel Advocate. During the course of publishing his letters,
Skinner writes that his magazine's readership rose from seventeen hundred
to seven thousand. He then republished all twenty-four letters to Aikin
as well as six letters to Rev. D. C. Lansing, pastor of the Second Presbyterian
Church in Utica in book form in 1833. While acknowledging Aikin's "eminent
learning and distinguished talents," Skinner ridicules him as "a stickler"
for the Abrahamic Covenant and the "principal leader in the cause of bigotry,
intolerance and error" in Utica. Devastatingly, Skinner demonstrated through
reasoned discourse that the doctrines of the fall, original sin and covenant
were not biblical, but were contradictory and contrary to sound reason
and respect for divine will.
Universalism denied the doctrine of imputed guilt descending from Adam
and its consequent belief in infant depravity. It denied the doctrine
of divine election and reprobation and asserted the possibility of universal
salvation. From Skinner's perspective, Presbyterianism degraded divinity
and humanity, and Skinner intended his letters to Aikin to expose orthodox
leadership and doctrines to public scrutiny. Firmly situated in Enlightenment
thought, Skinner argued that Calvinist dogma impeded an understanding
of character formation and that individuals needed to be reared free from
tyranny of degrading notions of themselves. He correctly denounced Aikin
and other Presbyterians for advocating government support for Sunday schools
as a means of insuring docile future generations. (Husbands of members
of the Maternal Association were leaders of the Western Sunday School
Union of the State of New York: In 1827, William Williams was President,
and of 27 managers, 12 were married to women in the Maternal Association.)
With good reason, Skinner accused Aikin of hopelessly using the Sunday
school movement to subvert the Constitution and establish theocracy. Rev.
Aikin never answered the letters. "Mr. Aikin," Skinner wrote, "so far
as the public and these letters are concerned, remains silent as the house
of death." A third orthodox minister of the First Presbyterian Church
had lost his public voice. In 1835, Rev. Aikin left Utica to accept a
call in Cleveland, Ohio.
Thus, members of the Maternal Association, many of whom would have been
traumatized in infancy so as to insure that they repressed their genuine
feelings and desires, who in any case would have been reared to repudiate
themselves as sinners were being educated throughout the 1820s that the
doctrines that their church promoted were deplored by other thoughtful
people. At the end of the decade, their husbands and their inherited way
of life had been subjected to public scorn. Skinner had thrown down the
gauntlet and no one had met the challenge. Contemporary psychologists
might speak of the situation that women faced in First Presbyterian Church
as one in which there was cognitive dissonance, a situation that generates
change.
In 1824, when Mrs. Erastus Clark, Mrs. William Clark, Mrs. Thomas Emmons
Clark, Mrs. Oren Clark, Mrs. Sarah K Clarke, Mrs. Walter King, Mrs. Charles
Hastings and Mrs. Thomas Hastings determined to form their own organization,
they not only had credibility in the community, they had the support of
the most powerful men in the community who were experienced initiators
of civic, financial and cultural organizations. The founders also had
years of successful organizing experience themselves. Sophia Clark, like
her husband Erastus, was a preeminent figure. She was the founder in 1806
of the Female Charitable Society, identified in The Utica Almanac of 1810
as one of four Village Corporations. Ryan refers to the society as representing
"an innovation of the frontier and a breach of the customary order of
the family and the sexes. The officers of the Female Charitable Society
appeared before the public independently of the household head, listed
by name, and with such awesome titles as "president," "treasurer," "trustee."
It was Sophia Clarke who was elected scribe and appointed treasurer. Among
the society's subscribers between 1806 and 1813 were twelve future members
of the Maternal Association: Sophia Clarke, Sally Hoyt, Eliza Williams,
Abby Wells, Sally Breese (Sarah Breese Lansing), Sophia Williams, Jerusha
Wells(Jerusha Wells Clark), Mary Thomas, Abigail Handy, Sally K. Clark,
Eunice Camp (Eunice Camp Potter), and Martha Seward.
The Second Great Awakening's revival cycle began in 1799, cresting again
in Utica in 1813, 1815, 1819 and 1821 before reaching its crescendo between
1825 and 1837. Ryan argued that women "created the organizational underpinning
of the revivals that would follow." In 1814 in the midst of the revival,
the charitable society changed its name to the Oneida Female Missionary
Society. This was the first such organization in the United States "to
be financially independent of the male religious establishment." By 1824,
the year the Maternal Association was founded, Oneida Female Missionary
society had extended its reach beyond Oneida County, with seventy auxiliaries,
and in support of dozens of missionaries, it contributed more that $1,000
annually. While Ryan does not offer detailed support, she asserts that
"these women orchestrated the revival" that catapulted Charles Grandison
Finney to fame. She concludes that "the organizational and financial sophistication
of this women's group invites comparison with the trading networks and
political parties [Federalist] of Utica's merchant capitalists" to whom
they were married. She emphasizes that
by joining the Female Missionary Society women of the upper class publicly
assumed the moral and religious responsibilities of their mercantile
households and a major role in social reproduction. By efficiently and
successfully fulfilling such social obligations, these women undoubtedly
enhanced the elite status of their mates and added cultural and religious
reinforcement of the male links in the local trade networks.
On the other hand, Ryan explains that women's benevolent activities redefined
public space, expanding women's social role organizationally independent
of their husbands. "Although not within the established centers of public
power, their self-created societies and offices commanded considerable
notice in the press and the community."
Thus when the founders organized First Maternal Association of Utica,
Presbyterian women in Utica had long demonstrated their ability to breach
Calvinist prescriptions regarding women's silent, passive and subordinate
status. The act of forming a maternal association was another step out
of passivity, one step in a long road toward self-defined selfhood and
the constructions of motherhood for themselves. A woman-constructed motherhood
had perhaps greater ramifications even than women's activities in earlier
organizations, for in 1824 the descendants of the Puritans in Utica were
struggling with a wide range of forces competing for and affecting the
orientation of the citizenry toward the self, and clerics and pious men
as the result of enlightenment psychology saw that the future of Calvinsim
to a great degree could depend upon their controlling how women reared
their children. So in taking the step of forming Utica's first Maternal
Association, the founders entered a highly charged field of forces contending
for control of how the next generation was to be reared. As the founders
sought to empower themselves as mothers, they faced a set of established
and evolving patriarchal institutions arrayed to block their efforts.
These were the same institutions that their husbands commanded and that
they themselves were called upon to cherish and support.
Actually, the First Presbyterian Church within which the founders began
the Maternal Association was by a wide margin predominantly female. An
examination of the Session Records shows that the membership from 1797
to 1850 included 417 males and 784 females, approximately twice as many
women as men. In addition, male members stayed fewer years in the church.
Men stayed an average of 6.8 years, while women stayed an average of 8.1
years. The members of the Maternal Association seem to have contributed
significantly more to the stability of the church than the average member
of the church, as measured by length of stay. We have complete information
for 57 of the 71 members of the Maternal Association who were also members
of the First Presbyterian Church. These 57 women stayed an average of
24 years. The average length of stay for the 41 husbands for whom there
is complete information was 20 years. Women were the mainstay not only
because they were enduring members, but also, as was discussed earlier,
they were responsible for the revivals that increased the membership of
the church. The First Presbyterian Church then, filled with Utica's elite,
while ruled by men, was dependent upon women. It was within this institution
that the first Maternal Association was founded in 1824 by women who were
civilly dead.
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