The decades after the American Revolution witnessed the first great outpouring of women's published writing in American history. That women expressed themselves through their writing was not a new development. From the earliest days of settlement, as Sharon M. Harris's recent anthology, American Women Writers to 1800 demonstrates, women composed a vast number of works in a variety of genres. Yet colonial women usually wrote only for a limited audience - for their own satisfaction, for the edification of family members, or for the entertainment of friends in a private social circle. Rarely, and only through exceptional circumstances, did the works of an Anne Bradstreet or a Phillis Wheatley make it into print. What most distinguished the postcolonial culture of women's writing, then, was that substantial numbers of women began to write with the explicit intention of seeking publication for their work.

What effected this change? This chapter explores the transitional period between 1780 and 1830, a time during which women shifted from writing primarily for private audiences to writing for a broader public. One part of the answer lies in the expansion of print culture. While electoral politics continued to exclude women, publication did not. Whereas the “public sphere,” as Jürgen Habermas has called it, consisted of males, the “literary public sphere” easily assimilated women. The enormous increase in the number of books, newspapers, and magazines being published created new audiences, including women. The demand for more material called forth the entry of new writers into the field, especially women.

Clothes-talk

In 1851, when temperance advocate Amelia Jenks Bloomer adopted a shortened shirt worn over what were called, at the time, Turkish “trowsers,”she had no idea that her married name would give to the English language a new plural noun, bloomers. As originally worn by suffragettes like Bloomer herself, or Elizabeth Smith Miller, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (among a host of other, less famous women, and not always those sympathetic to the suffragettes), it was regarded as a garment that could free a woman from the confinements of more traditional styles. In the 1850s a woman's daily garb consisted of ten to twelve pounds of “starched flannel or muslin petticoats,”stays, and a tightly laced corset of whalebone; these underthings were covered by full-skirted dresses “that reached to the ground, sweeping up dirt and debris from country roads and unpaved city streets” (Coon, Hear Me Patiently, 9). Dragging in mud, heavy as lead and hot as Hades, these confining clothes did not promote mobility; indeed, it was generally thought that trousers, when considered merely as an item of dress, were far more comfortable and hygienic than women's wear. Certainly, trousers offered mobility, as African-American abolitionist and diarist Charlotte L. Forten (later Grimké) reported on Saturday, July 15, 1854; she donned the “'Bloomer' costume” so as to climb “the highest cherry tree . . . Obtained some fine fruit and felt for the time 'monarch of all I surveyed'” (Grimké, Journals, 86). And as Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote, after wearing the Bloomer for the first time, “What incredible freedom I enjoyed!” (Stanton, Eighty Years and More, 201; Kesselman, “'Freedom Suit'”).

Born to free parents in Maryland in 1825, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was one of the most well-known women of her day. During her life she was a poet, activist, novelist, and orator. After teaching at Union Seminary in Ohio (later named Wilberforce University), Harper was unable to return to home because Maryland prohibited the entrance of free blacks. Instead, in 1853 she went to Philadelphia - the black cultural and political capital of the nineteenth century. There, she lived in an underground railroad station, a home where fugitive slaves were hidden and where she listened to the tales of runaways. These tales, coupled with her exile from the state of her birth, influenced her decision to become an abolitionist. Because of her education and self-presentation, she became a major orator, giving speeches and reading her poems around the country. During this period, she published her first collection of poetry, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854).

Throughout her career, Harper published essays, short stories, and serial novels in black publications such as the Christian Recorder and the Weekly Anglo-African. From 1865 to 1875 – the period roughly coinciding with Reconstruction (the period following the Civil War) – she traveled extensively throughout the South, lecturing to black and white audiences. She also lived with the freedmen and recorded her observations in a series of letters published in black and abolitionist newspapers.

Where was religion in nineteenth-century American women's writing? Everywhere. Especially with the ideological shift from a patriarchal-centered Calvinism to a more “feminized” nonsectarian Protestantism (see works cited below: Cott, Douglas, Sklar), women were given warrant to write on religious matters. At times, this writing took the form of overtly theological texts, some conventionally pious, others, like Mary Baker Eddy's 1875 Science and Health and Elizabeth Cady Stanton's 1895 The Woman's Bible, radical and revolutionary. More widespread was the way that religion as a topic pervaded virtually every genre of women's (and for that matter men's) writing from Sarah Grimké's abolitionist An Epistle to Christian Women of the South (1836) to Emily Dickinson's intensely spiritual - and skeptical - poetry.

Perhaps the most striking component of nineteenth-century religious writing was the development and proliferation of religious fiction. In 1871, Harriet Beecher Stowe described the current craze for narratives that “teach[] by parables”:

Anyone who is not familiar with the scholarship of the decades following World War Two will find it difficult to imagine that there once was a time when the categories “woman” and “women” were entirely absent from the literature. Until literary critics and cultural historians challenged the canonical and theoretical premises of ColdWar America, the only writing that mattered trafficked in the male quest for authenticity. Women and their writing were either ignored or, if acknowledged at all, consigned to the “other.” Of course, that “other” was the “feminine,” which literary critic Fred Lewis Pattee damned as “fatuous, fevered, furious, fertile, feeling, florid, furbelowed, fighting, and funny.” Pattee’s dismissal in his landmark The Feminine Fifties did more than display a predilection for alliteration. In the decades following its publication in 1940, many a scholar took pleasure in delivering similar judgments, albeit without the alliteration. Nina Baym made short work of Pattee and company, exposing their biases in the now classic “Melodramas of Beset Manhood,” which she published in 1981.

Lamenting the discrepancy between her vision and her experience of America, the young protagonist of Russian immigrant Anzia Yezierska's short story “How I Found America” seeks out her sister's teacher as a potential confidante. She pours out the story of her immigration from Russia and of her disappointment at the hardship and poverty, but most of all at the loneliness and alienation she has experienced in the New World. She is amazed at the depth of understanding manifested by this “born American,” whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower. The teacher, bemused by the intense young girl's amazement, reminds her that “The Pilgrim Fathers” were themselves “immigrants two hundred years ago,” and she goes on to quote the words of celebrated man of letters Waldo Frank: “We go forth all to seek America. And in the seeking we create her. In the quality of our search shall be the nature of the America that we create.” In the exchange, the protagonist believes that she has “found the soul - the spirit - of America!” (Yezierska, “How I Found America,” 297).

If the questing protagonist of the story did not quite find the soul and spirit of America, she had at least discovered a dominant theme of immigrant stories – some written by immigrants, but many by the numerous public figures and settlement workers who wished to legislate immigrant policy and to define, in order to shape, “the immigrant experience.” The theme would be picked up and institutionalized subsequently by many historians of immigration in the second half of the twentieth century, who argued that the immigrant experience was central to – and even constituted – America and that each generation of immigrants reinvigorated the spirit of the nation.

In 1867, young, fledgling author Elizabeth Stuart Phelps wrote a tribute to the work of her equally young contemporary, Rebecca Harding Davis. Davis's work, Phelps exclaimed, “made you feel as if she knew all about you, and were sorry for you, and as if she thought nobody was too poor, or too uneducated or too worn-out with washing days, and all the things that do not sound a bit grand in books, to be written about” (“At Bay,” 780). As this chapter will suggest, both writers expressed reformist sentiments by writing passionately of the pressing social ills of their times. However, Phelps and Davis also developed a literary form devoted, as Phelps noted of Davis's work, to “knowing all about us”and the internal struggles that, she claims presciently, “do not sound a bit grand in books.” Though Phelps and Davis acknowledged their thematic and philosophical kinship, few students of American women writers have explored the sophisticated nature of the reform literature that the two friends developed simultaneously during the next five decades. Their work, and the critical responses it has elicited, has much to teach us: about the limits of generic classifications and the perils of literary history; about the continuing need for critical work that elucidates the many American women writers who remain if not “lost,” at least hidden; and about the utility of creating new connections between an author and her various texts, as well as between an author and her fellow writers. We must look not only to Phelps's and Davis's adult fiction, but also to their essays, autobiographies, and juvenile texts to discover the fullness of their thought. While individually they have failed to compel significant critical attention, the intertextual conversation the two carried on reveals a more complicated notion of reform fiction than is allowed under current understandings of the genre.

Recent attention to women's roles in the Civil War has uncovered several stories of women who dressed as men in order to fight in battle, such as Sarah Wakefield on the Union side. The Confederacy had female warriors as well. One Union soldier remembered how “Another She-Devil shot her way to our breastworks with two large revolvers dealing death to all in her path. She was shot several times with no apparent effect. When she ran out of ammunition, she pulled out the largest pig-sticker I ever seen . . . she stabbed three boys and was about to decapitate a fourth when the Lieutenant killed her.” The terrifying specter of such heroism may have affected the difficulty warrior women who survived faced in receiving antebellum pensions. However many cases may eventually be documented, the murderous intentions behind such a rampage were hardly confined to participation in battle. The northerner Gail Hamilton's “A Call to My Country-Women,” for example, complains that “stitching does not . . . hew traitors in pieces before the Lord” (Atlantic Monthly, March 1863, p. 346). And in a response to Hamilton's piece, an anonymous writer for the Loyal Publication Society declared that “many a Southern woman, during this war, has written to husband, brother or lover, to bring home with him 'a dead Yankee, pickled,' or 'a hand, or an ear, or a thumb, at least'” (New York: May 1863). While such extreme manifestations serve as commentary, they also situate the unease of fictional examples. Marion Harland's Sunnybank (1867) has southern women writing to their soldier boyfriends to ask for “rings, and charms, and watch-chains made of the bones of Federal soldiers slain in battle” which might then be “displayed exultingly by Southern ladies as trophies of their lovers' valor” (165).

When Margaret Bayard Smith wrote the words “let this book speak for me,” she offered a potent proposition (October 1, 1804, diary). With this declaration, she claimed meaning for her writing and significance for herself. Implicitly, she was asking, not asserting, and she was proposing that “this book” was to say what she felt she could not speak. The proposition was fraught with the complications of the post-Revolutionary era in which she lived and of her ambitions, which the age inspired. She employed different writing formats, diaries, letters, publications, to voice her intellect and feelings, as she sought to authenticate her experience to herself, to her children, and to others. Her claim was ultimately historical, for she meant, like others of her generation, to convey her life and her vision of American society to posterity. At her most ambitious, the “me”spoke for the nation (Baym, American Women Writers, 1-9, 11-45, 92-103, 214-39; Ziff, Writing in the New Nation, 28-9, 144-5; Gould, Covenant and Republic, 14-16, 61- 132). She offered in her writings an expansive definition of what it was to be an American. And in her silences can be found the silences in America's history.

Margaret Bayard Smith’s life spanned the transformative period of the new nation. Born during the Revolution (1778) outside of Philadelphia, she died in Washington, DC, in 1844. Her father was Colonel Jonathan Bayard, a prominent merchant, Patriot, legislator, and jurist in Pennsylvania and New Jersey; she grew up in the midst of a well-connected network of mercantile and landed elite families of the mid-Atlantic region.

Introduction: separate spheres

The notion of “the separate spheres” has been used for over a century to endow emerging cultural hierarchies with the obviousness of gender (male/ female) opposition: elite literature v. popular literature; high culture v. mass culture; professional and market culture v. domestic culture; business-place competition v. sentimental equality; public sphere rationality v. domestic feeling. These multiple, seemingly rigid definitions for various complementary and/or oppositional practices have long informed our study of nineteenthcentury women's literature and the historical contexts that shaped its concerns in the United States.

The logic of difference and even opposition supplied by the notion of “separate spheres” has funded a feminist focus on women’s lives, women’s politics and women’s literature since the 1960s. Reacting to historical and literary models that overwhelmingly deemed women’s lives irrelevant to larger historical matters, this newer generation of women academics historicized and theorized a “world of women” that allowed us to appreciate nineteenth-century women’s world, their domestic perspectives, their values, and their social and political subversiveness and opposition. Feminist historians returned to one of the most powerful early descriptions of United States democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and in particular, his celebration of “The Young [American] Woman as Wife” (1835, 1840).

The study of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry is undergoing a renaissance. Aside from Emily Dickinson, nineteenth-century female poets were largely forgotten until the archival investigations of the 1970s, when they were rediscovered and examined by several critics. Despite the already extensive effort to reprint women’s poems, write their critical biographies, pioneer new and more useful anthologies, and compile lengthy and inclusive encyclopedias, scholars have only begun to examine critical approaches to women’s poems and the assumptions they bring to bear on reading and teaching women’s writing. What do these anthologies tell us about nineteenthcentury American women’s writing? How should we judge their poetry?

In “Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets Revisited”(1998),Cheryl Walker contends that women’s writing contains more stylistic variety and vocal complexity than previously ascribed. In The Nightingale’s Burden (1982), she identifies several persistent types of poems: the “sanctuary” poem, in which the protagonist finds freedom in a shelter; the power fantasy; the “free bird” poem, in which the speaker identifies with a bird in flight and symbolically imagines freeing herself; and the marriage poem. Although her essay still identifies generic features in women’s poems, Walker advocates dividing women’s poetry into four temporal and stylistic categories: early national, romantic, realist, and modern. Early national poets, like Lydia Sigourney, appeal to piety and reason, praise decorum, and base their belief in human dignity on democracy.

When Rose Terry Cooke ended her 1884 biographical sketch of Harriet Beecher Stowe calling her “America's greatest woman,” many readers might still have agreed with her. Memories of Uncle Tom's Cabin, as well as the nearly forty other books and hundreds of articles Stowe produced during her long career, had not gone, though Stowe had largely stopped publishing after her last novel, Poganuc People (1878). Nor did those memories ever entirely die. Dramatic adaptations of Uncle Tom's Cabin appeared continuously on the American stage until at least the 1930s, and the 1920s saw critics Constance Rourke and Vernon Parrington noting her importance in American literary history. From then on, Stowe has been gradually taking her place among the nineteenth-century authors who seem most worthy of study.

Particularly as the New Criticism gave way to reader-response criticism, feminist literary criticism, Marxist criticism, and cultural studies, Stowe became a natural choice for critics seeking interesting paradigms to study. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), probably the best-selling book of the century and certainly internationally famous, is a historical phenomenon impossible to ignore; its interpretation has ranged from protests against its racial stereotyping to admiration for its millennial evangelical feminism and its Balzacian scope.

RESURRECTION AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS

The preceding chapters of this volume have concentrated on Jesus of Nazareth as a first-century Jew - his background and beliefs, his words and works, his disputes and violent demise. Most contemporary Jesus books end here. And yet the striking fact is that without an event that occurred after his death, we would almost certainly have no information of any kind about Jesus of Nazareth. As a leading sceptic recently put it, ‘The story of Jesus after his death is also part of his life, since it is only because of this history that we still know anything about him’ (Lüdemann 2000:692).

Ironically, in the canonical sources the resurrection itself is nowhere described, never clearly defined, and quite diversely interpreted. Nevertheless, the New Testament writings unanimously agree on one thing: in some sense that was both inexplicable and yet unmistakable, Jesus was seen alive in personal encounters with his disciples soon after his death.

Our earliest written sources are Paul’s letters to Thessalonica and Galatia. They date from around ad 50, but evidently appeal to a conviction that is already common ground (1 Thess 1.10; 4.14; Gal 1.1). Writing to Corinth five years later, Paul quotes verbatim from a fuller creedal tradition that may well date from the first decade after the crucifixion: having been dead and buried, Jesus ‘was raised on the third day’ and then ‘appeared’ in succession to Cephas (i.e. Peter), the Twelve, an unspecified group of 500, then to Jesus’ brother James, and then to all the apostles together (1 Cor 15.3–7).

One of the most striking features of the history of the early church is the decision to include four gospels in the canon of Christian Scripture. The aim of this chapter is to explore the significance of the fourfold gospel for our knowledge of Jesus. The main argument will be that the four gospel texts bear witness in distinctive ways to the one gospel message at the heart of which is the one person, Jesus of Nazareth. That there are four gospels standing side by side in the canon, none of which has been subordinated to another, is an invitation to recognise that the truth about Jesus to which the gospels bear witness is irreducibly plural without being either incoherent or completely elastic. The fourfold gospel points to the profundity of Jesus' impact on his followers, the inexhaustibility of the truth about him, and the way in which knowledge of Jesus is necessarily self-involving.

Although Jesus of Nazareth is arguably the world’s most influential historical figure, there is no agreed understanding of his aims, message and legacy. If we paint with rather broad strokes, we may divide interpretations of him into two camps. On the one hand, while traditional Christianity has described Jesus with a variety of images, it has regularly and persistently confessed him in terms of his divine identity as Lord, Saviour of the World, Son of God and, in the words of the Nicene Creed, ‘very God of very God’. On the other hand, Jesus has also been characterised not so much as one to be revered and worshipped, but rather as one who taught a way of worshipping and following God. Under this rubric he has been thought of as mystic, moral teacher, religious visionary, political and social reformer, cultural critic and renewal movement leader.

Are these portrayals of Jesus mutually exclusive? If, for example, one understands Jesus primarily as a religious figure to whom worship and faith are directed, then is it also possible to speak of him as a prophet and teacher of a way of worship and faith? For some scholars who pursue historical reconstructions of Jesus, the goal of this quest is to strip away the creedal accretions and affirmations of faith that have shaped the gospels and subsequent Christian belief in order to discover the ‘genuine’ historical figure of Jesus beneath the layers of confession. Finding this Jesus at odds with the Christ of the church’s faith, they prefer him as an example of faith to be imitated or a teacher of truth and of a way of life to be admired. So, for example, Adolf von Harnack, a German scholar of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, asserted that ‘The Gospel, as Jesus proclaimed it, has to do with the Father only and not with the Son’ (Harnack 1957:144).