Rodney Hessinger's new book on sex and gender during the Second Great Awakening takes a new perspective on some familiar territory. The book rightly starts with the “volatile” early republic, when the “displacement of Americans created ripe conditions for religious competition” (1). Disestablishment and the frontier created a religious marketplace in which entrepreneurial preachers offered their brands of truth to eager but impressionable consumers, destroying traditional notions of religious authority in the process and replacing them with personal charisma alone. Hessinger's contribution to this “well known” phenomenon is “how sex and gender were at the center of debates over religion in the early republic” (7). In particular, the author explores how religious salesmen—both in reality and in critics’ imagination—could easily morph into religious seducers, leaving audiences less enlightened and more “smitten” by their stories and their charm.
This religio-cultural environment was inherently unstable. The enthusiasm of a camp meeting could easily lead “to sex in the woods,” while charges “of seduction and gender trouble ignited fights within, among, and against churches” (8). These gender-based church conflicts are the subjects of Hessinger's five chapters on, respectively, Mormonism, Catholicism, Shakerism, evangelicalism, and Perfectionism. Fatigued by these scandals, Hessinger argues, “many northern Americans lost their passion for religious enthusiasm,” leading to a “subsequent domestication of religion” in the second half of the nineteenth century. This is one claim that I will contest in greater detail below.
My problem with this claim touches on a broader critique: a lack of chronological clarity in some of the most important chapters. The chapter on Mormonism, for instance, focuses on an episode in March 1832 when a mob successfully tarred and feathered Joseph Smith and unsuccessfully tried to castrate him. Attempted genital mutilation clearly fits within Hessinger's focus on sex and gender: castration was the mob's way of emasculating someone who had first emasculated them by “seducing” their women into a new church. But this attack took place a full decade before polygamy was exposed by an apostate in 1842 and two decades before the Church publicly announced its commitment to plural marriage in 1852. Most importantly, this episode took place before Smith had even married his first plural wife, sometime in early 1833.
There is a similar issue in the chapter on John Humphrey Noyes’ Perfectionists. Hessinger frames this chapter with the 1849 critique, Noyesism Unveiled, which was intended to expose the group's unorthodox practice of “complex marriage,” or communal spouse sharing. Hessinger argues that in response to the published attack, “Noyes publicly foreswore any attempts to convert people to his creed,” a surrender that “managed to contain, if not fully extinguish, the fire of perfectionism” (123). This interpretation puts entirely too much weight on this 1849 conflict. Hessinger's narrative of Perfectionism's development from the mid-1830s up to 1849 is excellent, but neither this conflict nor a more threatening one in 1852 stopped Noyes from boldly seeking converts through his publications from the 1850s to the 1880s.
When it comes to the Shakers, Hessinger's argument is accurate and impressively concise. In the 1810s, the Shakers were humiliated when two mothers sued for custody of their children. In these instances, it was the husbands who had been “smitten” by a family-destroying sect and taken the children to a Shaker village against their wives’ wishes. The mothers fought for years to reclaim them, damaging the image of the Shakers as fanatics who hated the “natural affection” between mother and child. In response, Shakers “needed to shore up the maternity of Ann Lee” (82), the group's long-deceased founder, with an image makeover. No longer the “severe judge of sinners” (89), Shaker writings in the 1820s “reimagined Mother Ann Lee as gentle and nurturing” (82) instead. These custody cases were indeed a gender-driven turning point in the overall history of the sect.
Hessinger makes a similarly strong argument in the chapter on Catholicism. Framing it around an 1822 courtroom drama in which a young priest stood trial for assault and attempted rape of a domestic servant, the larger story is the conflict between definitions of religious authority. On one side was the authoritarian Bishop Henry Conwell, and on the other was the charismatic priest, William Hogan. A “democratic preacher in both style and substance” (50), Hogan had “won an especially strong following with his female parishioners” (46) in 1820 and 1821. Bishop Conwell and other more “Old World” (45) members of the hierarchy used this as a way to discredit him in the 1822 trial. Hogan was ultimately exonerated, but the scandal was indeed “an observable turning point in Catholic history,” as Hessinger claims; “The door to a more democratic church was then shut” (67).
The book's most emblematic chapter is on “the reverend rake” (92) who could manipulate women into sexual indiscretion. While exaggerated for literary effect, “the reverend rake” sadly had a basis in reality. Hessinger is right to inform readers about the sexual harassment that regularly occurred at camp meetings, but—as with the chapter on Noyes—he overreaches interpretively when he claims that the “repeated sting of sexual scandal would play a key role in the collapse of the Second Great Awakening in the 1840s in the North” (106). The story of the Awakening's demise is more complex than “sexual scandal alone,” Hessinger admits in a footnote, but “its role,” he continues, “has been underappreciated” (181n52).
Hessinger's work itself should be appreciated for bringing these scandals to light. Unscrupulous preachers in early America were indeed “willing to break apart families if it meant gaining more followers” (151); while on the other side, “bourgeois ideas about . . . sexual behavior, romance, and companionate marriage were constructed in reaction to religious tests” (155). This middle-class reaction to perceived sex and gender disorder was real and culturally powerful. I would merely shift the chronology of this reaction from “the middle of the nineteenth century” (11), as Hessinger argues—presumably meaning the 1840s and 1850s—to the 1870s, and especially the 1880s instead.
