I. Introduction
People who recorded their religious experiences in eighteenth-century America certainly seemed to have childbirth on their minds. Whether they felt the “new birth” of conversion—or something else, like devotion or doubt—they drew from the vocabulary of labor, delivery, and maternity.Footnote 1 When Experience Wight Richardson of Massachusetts mourned her young son's death, she prayed that God would restore her faith “with all the quick[en]ing powers,” metaphorically invoking the moment when a mother first feels signs of a living fetus.Footnote 2 And when Congregationalist Samuel Clarke described a vision he experienced “after a long and tedious confinement”—a word that signified a new mother's bed rest—he imagined that “my loins were filled with pain . . . as the Pangs of a Woman that travaileth.”Footnote 3 Breastfeeding metaphors invoked pure doctrine, as in John Cotton's catechism Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes in either England: Drawn Out from the Breasts of Both Testaments for Their Souls Nourishment, as well as the Bible, which was called the “Milk of God's Word.”Footnote 4 And “weaning” suggested the denial of grace, as when doubt-plagued Connecticut diarist Hannah Heaton worried that “god is agoing to wean me from the milk and draw me from the breast.”Footnote 5 Terms like quickening, loins, travail, pangs, and milk call childbirth to mind, but these writers used them to explain profound religious experiences. Their choices suggest that the vocabulary of childbearing resonated with far more people than those who physically experienced it.
Examining childbirth as the source of religious experience can shed light on the physiological and social dimensions of early American piety.Footnote 6 Childbirth was a prism for religious experience—which might include prayer, conversion, wrestling with doubt, encounters with institutional Christianity, or simply sensing a divine presence—for mothers along with their households and communities. It is unsurprising that childbearing affected women's spirituality. Pregnancy, labor, and infant loss forced them to confront mortality and became means to forge spiritual identity. But childbirth shaped others’ religious lives, too. Husbands, childbed attendants, and fellow churchgoers followed familiar rituals and cultural scripts that framed religious and emotional responses to pregnancy and labor. Just as childbirth informed the language of religious experience, religion imbued childbirth with greater meaning.
This spiritual culture of childbirth, which drew from a range of inherited traditions, was grounded in the distinctive nature of early American religious life. Eighteenth-century America was peopled by cultural and religious groups that existed in combination nowhere else. Their beliefs and practices differed in fundamental ways, but they shared overlapping sets of rituals and doctrines that informed a complex, overarching religious culture. One component of this culture was using the body for spiritual expression. The body figured into rituals like baptism, kneeling in prayer, and ingesting wine and bread for communion. Physical experience enhanced emotional experience during convulsive and ecstatic conversions, spiritual healing, and deathbed visions. Some believers, especially Moravians and Catholics, used the image of Christ's body and fleshly wounds to heighten devotion. Not every faith stressed the physicality of religious experience in the same way, but enough faiths did in some way that bodily sensation and movement were common facets of religious life.Footnote 7
When it came to childbirth, the physical experience of religion became conflated with intellectual and emotional understanding. In the eighteenth century, when Enlightenment-inspired interrogations of faith and science stood in tension with emotional religious sensibilities, many American Christians shared a belief in providentialism: trust in and submission to God's will and a quest to understand divine intervention. Providentialism fostered active introspection and mindful acceptance of God's plan, which empowered Christians even as illness or childbirth robbed them of control. It promoted what Philippa Koch calls “redemptive motherhood,” which encouraged women to achieve a higher spiritual status by enduring trials in pregnancy and labor.Footnote 8 In doing so, they created a narrative of childbirth that interwove physical, emotional, and spiritual transformation.
This narrative enhanced mothers’ spiritual power, but it came together within a social framework that privileged white men's authority. According to ideals of household governance, families functioned as microcosmic states and churches that managed behavior, imposed order, and supported social hierarchy. Householders were to exercise power in their homes and over dependents, including in religious matters.Footnote 9 Mastery depended on relationships between governors and the governed; spouses, parents, and children; and slaveholders and the enslaved. Childbearing likewise called attention to relationships: sexual unions, friendships, kinship, and maternal and paternal ties. But relationships governed by mastery did not always work like those governed by childbearing. Childbirth reinforced women's places in a patriarchal system by demanding their submission, but it also gave them the spiritual authority that temporarily nudged the system of mastery off its axis.Footnote 10 As a result, households and communities underwent fluctuations in the balance of spiritual power that defined gender roles in home and church.
These power dynamics also reinforced a racial hierarchy. The spiritual experience and rewards of childbirth were open primarily to white women. Europeans and white Americans commodified and exploited indigenous and African women's bodies; they assumed those women did not feel pain or spiritual awe in childbirth as white women did. Slaveholders expected postpartum mothers to return to work quickly, with their productivity unaffected by labor and delivery. And because most Native cultures prized stoicism regardless of gender, white observers concluded that indigenous women did not suffer in childbearing; as a Scottish traveler noted of Ojibwe women, “child-birth is not the object of that tender care . . . among the savages as it is among civilized people.” Labor pains accordingly became signs of respectability, piety, and racialized femininity.Footnote 11 The expectations for childbearing among white women were culturally conditioned.
Childbearing in early America is well-studied, but most scholarship has situated pregnancy and maternity within medical and social contexts, separate from religious experience.Footnote 12 Religious historians have begun to explore those connections, and this article builds on their work by showing how pregnant, laboring, and postpartum women became hubs of spiritual life.Footnote 13 To do so, it draws from a growing literature on the body and emotions, which explores how people derive spiritual meaning from physical stimuli along with emotions like grief or ecstasy.Footnote 14 It applies Catherine Bell's theory of the “ritualized body,” which exists in a spiritual space and structures the surrounding environment and human relationships that play out therein. Bodily experience connects to emotional experience.Footnote 15 As Monique Scheer suggests, emotions constitute “practical engagement with the world,” conditioned by historical and cultural contexts.Footnote 16 Laboring women's bodies integrate emotional, physical, and spiritual understanding.
But the religious experience of childbirth was not solely the province of mothers. A typical married woman of childbearing age endured repeated intervals of pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing over decades of her life. If we imagine the number of women in any community undergoing these cycles, we can extrapolate the impact of childbirth on them, their families, and their churches. The spiritual drama of birth placed women at the center of the religious life in their homes, surrounded by other women, with their husbands at the periphery. Life in congregations ebbed and flowed with anxiety about churchgoers’ labor, mourning of lost mothers and infants, and collective relief after safe deliveries. Although childbearing demanded women's submission, it also vested them with power.Footnote 17 Examining the spiritual experience of childbirth sheds light on a gendered religious culture that revolved around mothers.
II. Childbearing, Pain, and Women's Spirituality
The religious culture of childbirth was marked most of all by its spiritual impact on pregnant and laboring women. Delivery was a test. Cultural and religious expectations, which framed the physical experiences of pregnancy and childbirth, ritualized and conditioned women's responses. They drew upon religious models of virtuous womanhood to navigate pain and distress, and to search their souls for signs of sin and redemption. In doing so, they sought to exert control over their circumstances in the moments when they felt most vulnerable.
Women's maternal roles placed them at the junction of competing and sometimes paradoxical expectations. They drew on three models of Christian womanhood: the daughter of Eve, the mother in Israel, and Mary. Daughters of Eve, like their namesake, shouldered the burden for original sin, including suffering in childbirth. Labor—oppressive, painful, and dangerous—called Eve to mind.Footnote 18 Eve's association with childbirth was so pervasive that even Quakers, who rejected the doctrine of original sin, voiced thoughts of affliction as they anticipated labor. But maternity also conferred status as mothers in Israel, whose piety—apparent through qualities like submissiveness and patience—conferred sanctified status among their families and communities.Footnote 19 Mothers in Israel shared traits with Mary. Although we often consider Mary to be the object of Catholic devotion, early modern Protestants venerated her as well for her example of maternal love. Because Mary appears most prominently in the Bible as a pregnant and postpartum woman and as a grieving mother, she offered a model of pious motherhood.Footnote 20 These complementary ideals of maternity suggested that women accept the agonies of labor with forbearance to prove their mettle as wives and mothers.
These models existed alongside two other concepts that informed the experience of childbirth: the theology of affliction and the philosophy of virtue. The theology of affliction held out pain as a reminder of depravity even as it promised salvation for those who persevered. Pain served a godly purpose; God sent violence, distress, and trials like illness and childbirth to remind people of their helplessness and innate sinfulness.Footnote 21 The theology of affliction is generally linked to reformed Protestantism, but many cultures understand pain as a test of spiritual fortitude. World religions provide examples of figures who are transformed through pain and affliction, as well as ascetic rituals, like self-flagellation and fasting, that help the faithful experience the sacred through pain.Footnote 22 Suffering, then, offers a path to virtue. Virtue was an elastic concept in the eighteenth century, carrying implicitly masculine qualities like strength and manly courage, along with the Machiavellian model of self-discipline and theological virtues of faith, hope, and love.Footnote 23 For women in labor, virtue suggested piety, submission, and resignation—but not weakness. Rather, laboring women exhibited strength by trusting God's plan.Footnote 24 Just as the religious model of the pious mother scripted an emotional response to affliction, the Enlightenment model of the virtuous mother encouraged deliberation and restraint.Footnote 25
Childbearing women experienced birth as a religious and physiological event because their bodily ordeal framed their spiritual and emotional responses.Footnote 26 Expected to endure discomfort without complaint and to avoid divulging intimate details, they wrote little about pregnancy symptoms as they prepared themselves for the trials to come.Footnote 27 But they often made note of quickening, which awakened body and spirit to pregnancy. Experience Wight Richardson wrote in December 1747, “If I be with child, O my courig fails me,” and asked God to “look on my distressed condition & many dangers threaten me . . . [and] be thou the strength of my heart.”Footnote 28 Her anxiety may have sprung from her age; at forty-three years old (having last borne a child fifteen years earlier), her pregnancy was likely unexpected and alarming. But her language of supplication was typical. Hannah Callender Sansom, a member of a prominent Philadelphia Quaker family, was typically reserved in writing about childbearing. But in November 1762, when she likely felt the first signs of her first pregnancy, she remarked that she was “very unwell.” She observed that “a hard lesson to flesh and blood [is] to bear affliction” and asked God to “preserve me.” Months later, she mourned her father's death just “when I may be like to feel the pangs of a Parent!” As if to quiet her sorrow, she prayed that “our afflictions work together for good” and that “they be sanctified unto us.” Though her father's death and child's imminent birth triggered grief and panic, she reminded herself to “let thy Happiness take its rise in Resignation.”Footnote 29 Pregnancy brought into focus feelings of helplessness and dependence, which women like Richardson and Sansom framed within the constructs of motherhood and its qualities of submissiveness and forbearance.
For women who bore the curse of daughters of Eve but also aspired to convey the selfless love of mothers in Israel and Mary, childbearing served a complex purpose. Mothers interpreted pain as consequence of sin and test of faith, and they resigned themselves to distress as a path to absolution. Hannah Heaton, like many women, believed labor was “satans time to try to tempt me to sin against god by holding up ghastly death before me.”Footnote 30 But even as pain indicated guilt for original sin, it also provided laboring women, as Cotton Mather promised, an “Excitement for those Exercises of Piety, that Secure to them . . . Eternal Blessedness.”Footnote 31 Childbirth was both an imposition and an opportunity; just as it brought pain and trauma, perseverance could attest to a woman's godliness.Footnote 32 Only by submitting to the agonies of childbirth could women prove their mettle as dutiful wives and virtuous mothers, reaping spiritual rewards for their efforts.
Much of the religious rhetoric surrounding childbirth stemmed from anxiety about labor. Although the likelihood of dying in childbirth was lower than most people perceived, the fear was very real.Footnote 33 And it was no wonder. Ministers constantly reminded pregnant women of their proximity to death, often in handbooks intended to guide families in prayer over the childbed.Footnote 34 Cotton Mather wrote that upon conception, “your Death has entered into you” and that “preparation for death is that Most Reasonable and Most Seasonable thing to which you must now Apply your self.”Footnote 35 Similarly, John Oliver warned “Women in this condition” to consider both material and spiritual necessities for labor, warning that they might need “no other linen shortly but a Winding sheet and no other chamber but a grave.”Footnote 36 Their reminders terrified women, but they also underscored the fact that childbirth might be an expectant mother's last chance—on the precipice of death—to demonstrate maternal virtue.
Women took these warnings to heart. They armed themselves with protective rituals, including prayer, meditation, or participation in communion, to ease their way and safeguard their babies.Footnote 37 Martha Coit, who bore ten children, wrote of “being near unto death” and “under fears and troubles” as each birth approached. She “beged of the lord for to send me som soporting promiss” and consoled herself by reading Bible verses to prepare for labor.Footnote 38 Hannah Heaton wrote in 1755 of “a turn of extreme fear and terror upon me about the hour I cannot escape and now it draws near.” She spent time in secret prayer to steel herself for childbirth.Footnote 39 Esther Edwards Burr and Experience Wight Richardson both recited specific Psalms during labor, the latter concentrating on “four promises in the scripture,” including God's pledge to “call on me in the day of trouble and I will deliver thee.”Footnote 40 Sarah Logan Fisher asked for God's help “during this fiery trial, which sometimes appears to be more than my nature can support.”Footnote 41 Regardless of their methods, these women's strategies of self-preservation reflected both their perceived helplessness and desire to seize control.
Others were less verbal but no less deliberate in calming themselves through rituals. Margaretha Edmonds, a Moravian woman in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, prepared her memoir (the spiritual autobiography that Moravians wrote to document lives of faith) just before her first child was born in 1756, as if she anticipated that she would not survive to complete this work (Edmonds did survive childbirth but she did not return to her memoir during her lifetime).Footnote 42 Some, like Mary Scott Randolph of Virginia, sewed their newborns’ baptismal gowns prior to giving birth. Elite Anglicans like Randolph often celebrated baptism at home and elaborate christening gowns were part of this rite. By sewing them during pregnancy, women could make sure their infants would have this heirloom even if their mothers did not survive.Footnote 43 Such rituals might have soothed these women, but rarely did they fully mitigate their fears. While death did not pose a statistically ominous threat, it nonetheless loomed palpably over pregnant women.
Understanding affliction as a consequence of sin and as a means of seeking absolution allowed women to make sense of the agony of birth. This was true even when labor pains ended in infant loss. Unlike maternal mortality rates, which early Americans overestimated, infant mortality rates really were quite high, and most families experienced loss at some point.Footnote 44 When infants died, mothers tried to reconcile searing grief with a quest to understand how their losses revealed God's intentions. Grief was central to an emotional style of piety, which opened the believer to God—not just for ardent evangelicals, but also for more reserved Quakers who embraced “religious affections” as a way to heighten spirituality. But grief only advanced piety if it was tempered with resignation to God's will. For that reason, bereft mothers mitigated sorrow with submission.Footnote 45 After her young son died, Experience Wight Richardson feared she had “sined against God in distressing myself about the state of my child that is dead but I pray to God to give me a right sperit about this thing.”Footnote 46 Richardson steadied herself in her grief with hopes that her loss could somehow serve God.
Many women feared that wishing too hard for their children to live would be a selfish sort of grief, because they were hoping for an outcome that God did not see fit to grant. Ministers cautioned them to bear grief with patience and trust that God was wiser in his wishes than they were in their own.Footnote 47 Accordingly, they should endure grief with the same resignation with which they endured childbirth. Richardson imagined that God saved her from a fate in which, years in the future, she might become ashamed of a son who “might have been a man grown” to become “very wicked.”Footnote 48 Similarly, Ann Randolph Page consoled Mary Lee Custis by assuring Custis that her baby daughter, in dying, had been spared life's troubles. Much like Richardson, Page noted that Custis's loss paled in comparison to “many a parent who has vicious children, who behold them living in the error of their way.” This child would be safe “from the dangers that daily assail us from our spiritual enemies” and had instead had “gone back to the omniscient Spirit.” Page urged Custis to accept her loss with “placid resignation” and “composed reliance on the Almighty.”Footnote 49 The prospects of their own or their infants’ deaths were terrifying. But fear and grief could lead to steadfast resolve. Faith and affliction were inseparable; if God was as responsible for affliction as for faith, then grief was part of an ordered universe in which labor pains, maternal death, and even infant loss served a purpose.
Many women found that surviving childbearing (even after loss) could bring spiritual peace, and mothers reflected on the aftermath of childbirth much like converts reflected on the aftermath of the new birth. They understood God to have intervened to protect them, their children, and their faith. Martha Coit, even after five of her ten children died (four of them in infancy), reflected on “gods gracious dealings with me in the times of sharp travail in Childe bareing.”Footnote 50 After her son Luther was born in 1748, Experience Wight Richardson wrote, “God hath dalt wonderfully with me.” She reflected that she had been “much afraid my travel which I had to pass through,” but that “God was pleased to help me beleve.”Footnote 51 Mary Dodge Cleaveland, who repeatedly thanked God for making “me the liveing mother of another liveing child,” believed that “the Lord has appeared for me in the perilous our of childbaring” and resolved that “my spared life and all that I Call mine be devoted to the Lord.”Footnote 52 Margaret Morris, a Quaker woman, “praise[d] the Glorious name” of God for her “safe delivery in childbirth.” Although she endured doubt, plagued by her “unbelieving heart” and physical pain, she credited God for sustaining her: “Gracious God . . . suffered me not long to remain in doubt for thy arm assisted and I was delivered.”Footnote 53 Even in the precarious postpartum stage, when mothers and infants remained vulnerable, it was possible to achieve a measure of assurance. So thought Quaker Elizabeth Drinker, who suggested that “women who live to get over the time of Child-bareing . . . experience more comfort and satisfaction than at any other period in their lives.”Footnote 54 Were these women fully convinced in their gratitude? We cannot know for sure. But in their reflections on childbirth, they exerted great effort to channel affliction into order.
III. The Childbed and Household Religion
And they did not do so alone. For however solitary the experience of childbearing might seem, birth took place in overlapping social and spiritual spaces that rarely left women isolated. Eighteenth-century midwives and other childbed attendants claimed temporary power over households with laboring women. They did so at a time when Enlightenment science took shape within a framework of providentialism, so that medical practitioners saw themselves as carrying out God's will. Unbeknownst to them, midwives stood at the precipice of a new age of medicine, when they would be pushed aside by formally trained male physicians.Footnote 55 But in the meantime, the very ordinary event of childbirth conferred extraordinary authority on women, which undercut a patriarchal family order. In the household, pregnancy and delivery created sacred space that revolved around the childbed.
When a laboring woman's body occupied the home's spiritual center, she demarcated the sacred space around her with objects that blurred boundaries between religion, ritual, and folk tradition. Events like birth and death, which engaged both religious and medical ways of knowing, called household objects into ritual use. Childbeds assumed specific purposes for laboring women even if they reverted to everyday use after the period of lying-in. Women designated certain linens for the childbed, which they might pass down to their daughters.Footnote 56 Many New Englanders believed that placing red cloths over an infant's face could protect the child from bad air.Footnote 57 Other items carried more obvious religious meaning. Sacred books were used for worship at any time, but they served as spiritually charged totems during childbirth. It was common, for instance, to place a Bible or prayer book on a laboring woman's head to ease her pains.Footnote 58 Wealthy Anglican families, who often preferred to baptize children at home, used silver bowls for this ceremony. Silver suggested not just wealth but also divinity (which was why it was the material of choice for sacred objects), and families passed these bowls to descendants.Footnote 59 Between baptisms, they might sit on display as reminders of past births and markers of children's places in the family. Like other objects, they designated spiritual space for childbirth.
Those spaces gave shape to a social culture of birthing. Studies of childbirth in early America have shed important light on women's medical networks: female relatives and friends, including midwives, who aided laboring women.Footnote 60 The midwife and her assistants played religious as well as social roles, performing rituals that made the mother's body the focal point of the home. Some historians have likened these gatherings to women's prayer groups in form and function, and the women around the childbed often reinforced the church's presence.Footnote 61 It was common, especially in New England, for ministers’ wives and adult daughters to provide medical care, including midwifery, for their congregations. Among the relatives of New England clergy who practiced medicine were Bridget Fuller of Plymouth, Elizabeth Davenport of New Haven, Elizabeth Greenleaf of Boston, and Dorothy Bulkeley Treat of Glastonbury. The clergy, too, were often more familiar with midwifery than physicians were. Ministers who owned books on midwifery and assisted with deliveries included Daniel Greenleaf (Elizabeth's husband), Gershom Bulkeley (Dorothy Bulkeley Treat's father), Thomas Palmer, John Fiske, and Ebenezer Parkman. While touring the Carolina backcountry in 1768, Anglican itinerant Charles Woodmason wrote that he, too, delivered a woman in labor “who could get but two Women, and no Midwife to attend her.”Footnote 62 Possessing skills and lacking alternatives, he found himself performing that role.
Sometimes, the midwife represented the church in a more formal capacity. Where the Anglican church was established, midwives acted as deputy priests, licensed by the Church of England. Licensing—which had precedent in Europe—was intended to prevent midwives from acting against the church's interests (by practicing witchcraft or charging exorbitant fees, for instance). But it also conferred religious and social authority.Footnote 63 It was the midwife's job to solicit confessions of paternity from unmarried laboring women, which she was then required to report to a priest, thereby enforcing sexual and religious mores.Footnote 64 In Virginia and New York, the Anglican church licensed midwives to perform emergency baptisms of infants who might not live long enough for a priest to arrive. Some obstetrical kits included baptismal syringes so a midwife could baptize a dying infant in utero, just to be safe.Footnote 65 Catholic midwives (along with other laity) were authorized by Jesuit priests to perform “conditional baptisms” in an emergency (which a priest would repeat later for infants who survived).Footnote 66 But midwives’ religious roles were not always so formal. Sometimes, they simply offered prayer and comfort, as the midwife did at a birth Hannah Heaton witnessed in 1754. When the laboring mother cried out that she was “a sinner” who deserved “no mercy,” the midwife reassured her, insisting “yes you do.”Footnote 67 Perhaps she offered reassurance as an afterthought, but in doing so, she helped make the childbed a site of prayer.
For husbands, too, childbirth reoriented household religious life. It seems obvious that men witnessed their wives’ childbearing at home, but accounts of childbirth have tended to diminish men's presence. Even though men rarely joined the women who oversaw the birth, they remained close around the periphery. Moravians advised husbands to bless their wives at the start of labor, suggesting they should “lay a hand on her head and ask the Savior to be near her . . . and to help her.”Footnote 68 Other men were deeply affected by their wives’ labor, even without formal prescription. Samuel Sewall, whose wife, Hannah, bore fourteen children, brewed “groaning beer” for her, comforted her before the midwife arrived, and offered food and drink to childbed assistants. He also personally experienced these births as spiritual events. As Hannah labored through the night with their first child, she urged Samuel to “goe to prayer” before sending for the midwife. He continued to pray alongside his father until he heard his infant's cry. When Hannah was in labor with their twelfth child, Samuel prayed with his mother and a minister. The next day, he “put up a Bill for to Thank God for delivering my wife in childbearing.”Footnote 69 Ebenezer Parkman, the Congregationalist minister of Westborough, Massachusetts, “Engaged in a Short but fervent Devotion” when his wife Mary was in labor with their first child, worried that “I had not been Earnest enough with God yet.” After “I cryed unto God most high . . . he brought Salvation” in the form of a healthy daughter.Footnote 70 Presbyterian minister John Craig of Virginia also experienced his wife's childbearing as a sacred event. When Isabella Craig went into labor in 1745, he underwent a spiritual trial, “meditating and offering up my requests to heaven Suitable to the present circumstances.” He soon felt tormented, imagining himself before Satan. He found that he “could Not Express on[e] Sensible Sentence” as he endured “Dreadfull horror anguish and agony.” Craig concluded that God had allowed this crisis to reveal his helplessness “in the midst of love and pity for a dutifull wife in pangs of child Bearing and a keen Desire to See my first Born.”Footnote 71 Like Sewall and Parkman, Craig experienced his wife's labor and delivery from the outside, looking in. But also like these men (and their wives, we might imagine), he understood that physical and spiritual agony gave way to order and peace.
What can we make of these husbands’ spiritual experiences of their wives’ childbirth? They all had to accept feeling helpless as their wives gave birth, and the loss of power might have felt jarring to them. Childbirth dislodged them from their roles as masters and shunted them to the periphery of a social and spiritual order that revolved around the childbed. Not quite bit players in the drama, but not in control either, husbands’ spiritual crises reflected their efforts to grapple with anxiety and uncertainty over their wives’ and children's fates, along with a momentary surrender of mastery. That surrender, and these husbands’ emotional responses to it, reflected the extent to which childbirth reordered households.
IV. Childbirth, Church, and Community
So, too, did childbirth reorder religious communities by channeling joint spiritual effort toward postpartum mothers and their infants. The prayerful anxiety that pervaded households extended into communities where laboring women had social ties. One way to grapple with uncertainty is to contain it with ritual, which can temper fears by ordering people's relationships through a set of predictable and mutually understood practices. Ritual strengthens communal emotional ties because it is both performative and expressive, dramatizing shared religious experience.Footnote 72 Some rituals were not exactly religious; the month of lying-in that typically followed birth had more medical than religious purposes, although it also reestablished ties within a religious community through social visits.Footnote 73 But two other rituals were crucial to forming religious relationships between the mother, her child, and their biological and spiritual kin; these were baptism, which introduced the newborn to the religious community, and churching, which marked the mother's reentry into public spiritual life.
Infant baptism, for those who practiced it, was among the most significant rituals that forged social and religious links between parents, their children, and their congregations. Most importantly, it paved a child's path from household to church. Religious groups differed as to when and where baptism should take place, but during the colonial period, most North American Christians favored infant baptism, which safeguarded the child's spiritual status and promised to usher him or her into heaven should the child die before experiencing conversion.Footnote 74 When parents had a child baptized, they chose to tie that child to a religious community; the choice of church, clergy, godparents, and even the infant's name all reflected parents’ decisions to locate themselves and their children within religious, familial, and social networks.Footnote 75 Churches, in turn, set the bounds of those networks by limiting baptism to children of members or believers.Footnote 76 Along the same lines, the hesitation among slaveholders and some churches to baptize enslaved people also reinforced social and spiritual boundaries.Footnote 77 Baptism, then, was part of an ongoing conversation between families and churches about how to define religious community and decide where families fit within its bounds.
Even when an infant appeared healthy, families felt a sense of urgency to have the child baptized. Moravians preferred that baptism take place as soon as a congregation could gather after the birth, with “not more than five sponsors” to present the infant.Footnote 78 Among Puritans and Congregationalists, either the father, the midwife, or the mother's lying-in nurse took the infant to be baptized as soon as possible, as the mother was not well enough to do it herself. Samuel Sewall usually brought his children to be baptized as Hannah Sewall recovered from childbirth, but their midwife, Elizabeth Weeden, brought their firstborn to church, arriving in the middle of the minister's sermon to minimize the time the infant spent away from home. Sewall recorded all of his children's baptisms, often with a note of impatience, as in 1690, when “the Baptism of my little daughter is deferred to the next Lord's Day” because his minister was preaching elsewhere on the Sabbath after her birth.Footnote 79 Other families had even more reason to be impatient, as they had to wait longer for clergy. When Charles Woodmason arrived in South Carolina's backcountry settlements, he often met parents who had been waiting for a clergyman of any denomination to baptize their children. It was not unusual for him to baptize dozens of children on a single Sabbath; in the year 1767 alone, he baptized nearly eight hundred people, performing the ritual so often that he complained that “I was almost tir'd in baptizing of Children.”Footnote 80 But however weary Woodmason might have been, parents continued to flag him down so their children would go no longer than necessary without this rite.
The choice of where to baptize infants, and in what company, highlights the role this sacrament played as a social and religious initiation rite. This was especially true of Catholics and Anglicans, for whom baptism was a particularly elaborate ceremony. For guidance, Anglicans used The Book of Common Prayer and Catholics used The Catholick Christian Instructed, both of which provided the liturgy and included prayers and hymns (the latter also described rituals for those who performed them without clergy).Footnote 81 In both faiths, baptism required the presence of godparents, who usually came from the family's social network. Ashley Bowen, a Massachusetts Anglican, was typical in frequently standing as a godparent at the baptisms of the children of his friends and kin, just as many of these same people stood for Bowen's own children. The godparents’ relationship to the infant signaled not just social connections but also relationships of power. Anglican slaveholders often served as godparents for enslaved children (and adults who chose baptism), which bolstered the authoritative structure of religious community in slaveholding societies.Footnote 82 Whether a godparent's identity reflected a family's social capital or lack thereof, their presence at a baptism served as a visual reminder of the personal ties that connected an infant to his or her parents, kin, church, and community.
Although baptism typically occurred in church (as the clergy preferred), both Catholics and Anglicans often preferred to hold the ceremony at home. Home baptisms allowed the postpartum mother to observe the ritual, expedited the rite for infants with medical problems, merged religion with hospitality (because such events were usually followed by a celebratory feast), and established the home as the primary setting for a child's religious life.Footnote 83 For Maryland Catholics, the location was not really a choice. Restrictions on their religious liberty enacted between 1689 and 1704 ultimately forced Catholics out of public worship and inside private quarters, where they kept home altars and availed themselves of Jesuit itinerants rather than stationed priests.Footnote 84 Although the Anglican elite are often known to have chosen home baptism in a quiet contest for authority against the clergy, families of more modest means also decided to baptize their children at home, especially if they lived far from churches and rarely saw ministers. By choice or not, home baptisms highlighted the ritual's importance as a link between the infant, the parents, and the community.
The clergy maintained that home baptisms were neither convenient nor scriptural and tried to dissuade families from requesting them, but parents pushed back, criticizing clergy who would not travel to perform the rite. The Anglicans in St. Paul's Parish in Baltimore protested in 1715 that their priest, William Tibbs, “refuses to go to private houses to baptize children that are sick and not able to be brought to Church without being paid for it.”Footnote 85 The complaints went both ways; in 1726, the rector of St. Philip's Parish in South Carolina bemoaned parents who “refuse bringing their Children to Church” for baptism but seemed at a loss to do anything about it.Footnote 86 The struggle over where to baptize infants reflected tensions between parishioners and clergy, but it also suggested something about the religious significance of childrearing—that is, the location of baptism reflected a family's spiritual sense of self; parents understood the church to revolve around the household instead of the other way around. Parents strengthened the family's status as a spiritual unit by initiating their infants into a world in which religious life began at home.
Just as baptism integrated newborns into religious communities, congregations also formally welcomed postpartum mothers back into public religious life. Among Catholics, Anglicans, and Moravians, the most popular means to do so was churching: a ceremony (with roots in European Catholic and Protestant practice) in which the clergy formally recognized mothers’ return to church after the period of lying-in.Footnote 87 Churching originally served as a purification rite featuring special prayers to mark a woman as physically and spiritually cleansed from childbirth. But in early modern practice, the emphasis shifted from purification to thanksgiving for a safe delivery.Footnote 88 The Catholic ceremony retained some elements of the older purification rite, although The Catholick Christian Instructed now designated “churching” as an occasion for women to “give thanks to God for their safe delivery.” During the ceremony (which appears to have been optional), a woman would appear at the doorway of her church wearing a white veil. A priest would then sprinkle her with holy water before offering a blessing, at which point she would enter the church and kneel at the altar and the priest would offer more prayers.Footnote 89 Although the prayers’ emphasis was on giving thanks, the ceremonial entry into the church retained elements of the older cleansing ritual.
The Book of Common Prayer, too, originally treated churching as a purification rite. But it dispensed with the language of purification in 1552, when a revised liturgy referred to “The Thanksgiving of Women after Childbirth.” The 1662 revision, which remained in use in North America through the nineteenth century, suggested reserving a special place in the church for postpartum mothers. The prayer book prescribed Psalm 116, which spoke to the mother's harrowing experience of childbirth (“The snares of death encompassed me . . . then I called on the name of the Lord”), and Psalm 127, which commended her husband's success in expanding his household (“Happy is the man who has his quiver full”), along with other thanksgiving prayers.Footnote 90 The use of Psalm 127 suggests that churching began to take on a new purpose: it was not just thanksgiving for a healthy delivery but also a formal restoration of the husband's role of master and sovereign of his family after a temporary disturbance of the household order.
Different religious groups established distinctive rituals to usher mothers back into public religious life. Moravians, who imposed communal governance of family life, established guidelines for all phases of marriage and childbirth, including churching. The Bethlehem congregation had two separate rituals to welcome infants and mothers. One of these was an annual festival on July 2, when pregnant women, new mothers, and their infants all received a blessing during a love feast. This ceremony was a liturgical event featuring prayers, hymns, and scriptural readings celebrating birth and infancy, such as Luke 1:41–44, in which John the Baptist comes to life with the Holy Spirit in Mary's womb.Footnote 91 Churching, which celebrated individual families rather than pregnant and postpartum women as a larger group, took place after baptism, and it coincided with a new mother's reentry into the Married Person's Choir and resumption of sexual relations with her husband.Footnote 92 Typically, when a couple brought their infant to church for the first time, the mother (or sometimes both parents) and child received a special blessing. Such was the case when Susanna and Christof Pyrlaeus presented their infant daughter, Johanna Elis, to the Married Person's Choir in Bethlehem in April 1744. During regular devotions, the child “was presented to the Lord and the congregation and was given a blessing as were her parents for the upbringing of this little seedling.”Footnote 93 Because the congregation blessed the child and her parents together, the Moravian churching ceremony restored the family unit after a period of disruption and brought its members back under the congregation's watch.
Churching, which remained popular through the eighteenth century (and longer for some) even as it declined in importance as a liturgical event, made the mother's body a site of public prayer. By offering thankful prayers for a woman who survived giving birth and ritualizing her resumption of normal activities, Catholics, Anglicans, and Moravians merged the physical, social, and spiritual in a public setting. Churching was important enough that some Anglicans complained bitterly when they could not avail themselves of the practice because they lived far away from churches or clergy. Among the grievances of the North Carolina Regulators in 1769 was that they had to “travel 2 or 300 Miles [to have] my Child Christen'd . . . and as for Churching of Women . . . and other Spiritual Offices we are entirely destitute.”Footnote 94 The Regulators were insurgents whose agrarian revolts were informed by political and religious radicalism, and they believed churching was important enough to list with their other demands. For them as for others, religious ritual empowered communities and informed identity.Footnote 95
We do not know the full extent to which African and indigenous Christian converts embraced rituals like churching, though there is some evidence that they did. At least one Anglican pastor, Adam Dickie of Drysdale Parish in Virginia, proposed to offer the ceremony to enslaved women. It is difficult to determine how many others did the same or how enslaved women responded, but it is possible that churching might have offered a rare and welcome acknowledgment of their status as mothers when motherhood itself was so fraught.Footnote 96 There is evidence that American Indian Christian converts also embraced churching. Rahel (Rachel) Post, a Wampanoag who had married Moravian missionary Christian Post, eagerly brought her infant, Ludwig Johanan, “into the congregation for the first time” in November 1744, when “the mother and child were committed in prayer to the protection of our dear Saviour.”Footnote 97 In 1791, when the Mi'kmaq, Passamaquoddy, and Wolastoqiyik (formerly known as Maliseet or St. Johns) chiefs petitioned Archbishop John Carroll for a priest to serve their villages, they explained that “our Women [are] depriv'd of attending the Holy Rites of the Church after Child Birth.”Footnote 98 It is unclear why these converts embraced this custom. Perhaps churching ritualized the unknowable.Footnote 99 Or perhaps something more was at work; when indigenous and African women claimed the right to perform childbearing rituals, they engaged in cultural dialogues and negotiations over who deserved to be recognized as virtuous and godly mothers.
Rituals like baptism and churching focused the community's attention on childbirth. They offered scripts for families and friends to follow as they dealt with the aftermath of birth, which could include not just exhaustion and confusion, but also illness, death, and trauma. In establishing a spiritual order of operations, these rituals provided a measure of predictability and reassurance during a fragile time. Even more than that, they forged essential pathways between the childbed, the household, and the church. By reinforcing relationships of affection and authority, postpartum rituals oriented religious life around mothers and infants.
V. Conclusion
Women's private physiological ordeal thus became the stuff of public and shared religion. Even though a laboring woman's religious experience of childbirth was her own in many ways, it was not entirely so. Much like religious conversion, it happened within constructs that informed her reactions to pain and suffering. Maternal piety provoked thoughts of submission, affliction, and salvation. Women wrote of childbirth as a spiritual struggle not just with physical pain and life-threatening danger, but also with prescribed qualities of motherhood and womanhood. But as much as we think of childbirth as a woman's own experience, it was in fact shared. We have underestimated the extent to which husbands, circles of friends, and members of spiritual communities internalized the experience of childbirth in ways that shaped their piety and paralleled laboring and postpartum women's experiences. This broader framework of understanding transformed the private into the public through the shared language of pregnancy and birth.
Framing religious experience in biological terms means we can use the body as a category of analysis to understand the experiences of anyone who encountered pregnancy and childbirth. In other words, participants’ and observers’ responses to childbirth as a physical and spiritual event were part of the same arc of religious experience. Childbearing upended women's lives, provoked crises of faith, and tied pain to salvation. It rearranged households because it disrupted the gendered dynamics of authority and duty in the home, if only temporarily. It also had the potential to upend communities, as friends and neighbors shared anxiety over the fates of women and children. At the same time, those same communities reordered religious life after disturbance wrought by childbirth. Postpartum rituals at home, along with religious ceremonies like baptism and churching, formalized religious bonds and restored arrangements of power and authority by incorporating new families into churches. Taken together, the shared experience of childbirth and its impact suggests we can better understand the gendered culture of early American religion if we consider women's experiences as the rule, rather than the exception, in shaping communal piety.
