By the time Elizabeth Birch Wilson published A scriptural view of woman’s rights and duties in 1849, a number of American women had already penned defences of woman’s rights.Footnote 1 Sarah Grimké’s Letters on the equality of the sexes first appeared seriatim in 1837 in the New England Spectator and William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator; the letters were published as a book a year later.Footnote 2 Three women associated with the Christian Connection, Deborah Peirce, Harriet Livermore and Rebecca Miller, defended in print between 1820 and 1841 a woman’s right to preach during meetings for worship.Footnote 3 The Oberlin College student Antoinette Brown, the first woman in America to be ordained, published an article in 1849, the same year as the publication of Wilson’s book.Footnote 4 Yet Wilson’s tome eclipsed them all; hers was longer than all of them added together. At 376 pages, it would prove to be the longest – and densest – defence of woman’s rights by an American woman of the nineteenth century. Only Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The woman’s Bible would be longer, but that was an edited compilation rather than a single-author work.Footnote 5
Alongside its length, another distinctive characteristic of Wilson’s book is how dutifully she adhered to her Presbyterian roots at a time when many woman’s rights activists had left established Churches, formed a new religious group or, like Lucretia Mott, remained within their Churches as ‘critics and provocateurs’.Footnote 6 While advancing a critique of Presbyterianism, including her own Associate Reformed Church, for ‘excluding women from the right of suffrage by a constitutional interdict’, Wilson neither portrayed herself primarily as a provocateur nor did she ever leave the Presbyterian Church.Footnote 7 This observation provides the starting point of this study, in which we explore the ways in which Wilson integrated Presbyterian polity and hermeneutics in A scriptural view of woman’s rights and duties.
To anchor her Presbyterian heritage, we will first detail essential biographical data that are available for the first time in contemporary scholarship. These data, which include a marriage record in a local newspaper, the gravestone of Elizabeth and Martin Wilson’s son, a census report and an Irish genealogical record, remove the shroud of biographical obscurity that, to date, has concealed Wilson’s rich Presbyterian heritage. The study continues with an analysis of how she co-opted Presbyterian polity to argue for woman’s rights, including the right of woman’s suffrage in the Church. It continues with an analysis of her observance of Presbyterian principles, as articulated in the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Larger Catechism, as she marshalled scriptural arguments in defence of woman’s rights. In these ways we will demonstrate the extent to which Elizabeth Wilson’s upbringing and lifelong membership in the Presbyterian Church indelibly shaped the contours and content of A scriptural view of woman’s rights and duties.
Elizabeth Birch Wilson’s Presbyterian heritage
The data unearthed through archival research and made available in the present study considerably expand our knowledge of Elizabeth Wilson, whose legacy has been largely lost to contemporary scholarship.Footnote 8 She had been described by Lucretia Mott in two letters to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Elizabeth McClintock as ‘the daughter of a Scotch Presbyterian minister’.Footnote 9 In addition, she customarily signed her name on published writings as Elizabeth Wilson, Cadiz, Ohio. These two pieces of information are essential keys to unlocking more about Wilson and her Presbyterian heritage.
In the 1850 United States Federal Census for Ohio, an Elizabeth Wilson is registered as living in Cadiz, and her birthplace is listed as Ireland. Also in Cadiz, graveyard records indicate that Elizabeth and her husband, Martin, were buried in the Old Cadiz Graveyard, along with an infant son, Thomas L. Birch Wilson.Footnote 10 The son’s middle name, not Elizabeth’s surname, offers evidence of a Birch family connection. This discovery is corroborated by an Irish genealogical record of the Birch family, published by Aiken McClelland, in which Elizabeth is listed as the oldest child of Thomas Ledlie Birch and ‘his second cousin Isabella, daughter of John Ledlie of Carnan’. Further significant information can be garnered from this genealogical record: Wilson’s father, Thomas, was ‘a Presbyterian Minister at Saintfield but was forced to emigrate [to the United States] in 1798’, the year of the Irish Rebellion.Footnote 11 Finally, there exists a marriage record of Dr Wilson to Miss Birch, published in the local newspaper, The Reporter, in Washington, Pennsylvania, the town where Thomas Birch settled his family in 1800.Footnote 12
Compiling these arteries of evidence leads to the recognition that Wilson was not just ‘the daughter of a Scotch Presbyterian minister’ but the daughter of the notorious Thomas Ledlie Birch, a seemingly irascible, politically iconoclastic, theologically conservative minister from the Ulster Presbytery in Ireland, who emigrated with his family to the United States in 1798. This newly accessible biographical information proves indispensable for situating Wilson’s unprecedented defence of woman’s rights within the context of Scots-Irish Presbyterianism.
Biography
Born in 1784, Elizabeth, the oldest of four children, grew up in Saintfield, Ireland. Her father, Thomas Ledlie Birch, was the minister of First Saintfield Presbyterian Church from 1775 to 1798. Saintfield was in the Ulster Presbytery, which was a subscribing presbytery. Such a presbytery required ministers to subscribe, with their signature, to the Westminster Confession of Faith as a condition of their ordination and ministry.Footnote 13 This fidelity is not surprising, since Presbyterianism in Ulster came by way of a large migration of Scots, who held tightly to the Westminster standards, including the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms, which were adopted by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland between 1645 and 1648.Footnote 14
The year of Elizabeth’s birth, her father bought a farm at Ballyloughan, near Saintfield, in County Down, which he named Liberty Hill, most likely to express his opposition to all things tyrannical. A member of his Saintfield congregation remembered that his sermons focused upon ‘freedom and liberty’.Footnote 15 He became known in the Ulster Presbytery for backing the overthrow of tyrannical regimes. He supported, for instance, the American Revolution and encouraged his Saintfield congregation to hold fasts ‘for the humiliation of Britain in desolating America’.Footnote 16
In 1792, to advance parliamentary reform and Roman Catholic emancipation, Birch formed a Society of United Irishmen in Saintfield.Footnote 17 His actions became increasingly polemical until, in 1798, as chaplain to the United Army in County Down, he preached an incendiary sermon before the battle of Ballynahinch. After the United Irishmen’s defeat, Birch was arrested, tried and eventually acquitted – but only once he agreed to sail to the United States and never return to Ireland.Footnote 18 He sailed from Belfast on 16 August 1798 on board the Harmony and reached New York in September. His family, including Elizabeth, who would have been a teenager at the time, sailed with him.Footnote 19
Birch preached initially in Presbyterian churches in New York before moving to Philadelphia, where many Ulster immigrants had settled. Then, in August 1800, he and his family travelled three hundred miles west to Washington, Pennsylvania, another stronghold of Ulster Scots-Irish.Footnote 20 The attraction of Washington was a call from former Saintfield parishioners, ‘a number of my old hearers and neighbors from Ireland’, who twice invited Birch to start a church.Footnote 21 He commented later, ‘I removed there, at great expense, as a place adapted to a stranger in my situation, with a numerous family, and the small wreck of a desolated fortune.’Footnote 22 Despite ongoing conflict with the presbytery, Birch remained in Washington, purchasing a 274-acre farm, Point Pleasant, five miles west of town, in 1804.Footnote 23
In Washington, Elizabeth met Dr Martin L. Wilson, and they married in October 1813. By 1820, according to census records, they had settled in Cadiz, Ohio, sixty miles farther west. In Cadiz, Elizabeth shared an affinity with many of the residents, who were also Scots-Irish Presbyterians.Footnote 24 By 1810, Presbyterians in Cadiz supported two churches. The Wilsons joined the Associate Reformed Church, known in Presbyterian circles as the Seceder Church, because their ecclesial ancestors seceded from the Church of Scotland in 1733 over the practice of landlords selecting parish ministers on behalf of the members.Footnote 25 The other church in town was an Associate Presbyterian Church. On 26 February 1859, a few months before Elizabeth died, these two churches, following the merger of their denominations, formed the First United Presbyterian Congregation in Cadiz. Martin Wilson was one of two men from the Associate Reformed Church to sign the merger document.Footnote 26
Elizabeth and Martin’s only child, Thomas L. Birch Wilson, named after his paternal grandfather, was buried in 1825, at the age of six weeks and two days, in the Old Cadiz Graveyard. Elizabeth (d. 1859) and Martin (d. 1872) were eventually buried alongside him. Three other Birch family members were also buried in the same graveyard: Elizabeth’s mother, Isabella (d. 1836), her brother Hamilton (d. 1847), and her niece Elizabeth Jane Gordon (d. 1842), who died at the age of eighteen.Footnote 27
This historical foreground allows us to draw a fuller picture of Elizabeth Wilson as author, woman’s rights advocate and biblical interpreter. She was, first of all, reared in a staunchly Presbyterian home. Her father referred to himself ‘as an “old side Presbyterian”’, or, as a friend put it, Birch was ‘truly Calvinistick’.Footnote 28 His Presbyterian worldview would have been unequivocally biblical, nurtured ‘through the preaching and study of scripture, recitation and reference to the confessions of faith believed to aptly summarize scripture’.Footnote 29
This foreground also demonstrates that the Ulster Presbytery in which Wilson was raised in Ireland was one that vigorously defended ‘intellectual fidelity to Westminster standards’.Footnote 30 Endemic to these standards was a commitment to freedom from tyranny.
Implicit in these confessional statements are the right and duty of every person to think for himself, right of civil and religious liberty for all, subject only to the restraints imposed by the Scriptures themselves, and right of free expression within the same bounds of limitation. Those who have held these creeds have always been champions of liberty and have resisted human tyranny no matter what form it may take, whether secular or religious.Footnote 31
Finally, the foreground demonstrates that, in the United States, Wilson belonged to two Scots-Irish Presbyterian communities, one in Pennsylvania and one in Ohio. It indicates that she remained a lifelong member of a Presbyterian church. Finally, it documents how even her husband, as a leader in their Presbyterian church, signed a church merger document. Thus, as the child of an Ulster Presbytery minister, a teenager in Scots-Irish Presbyterian communities and an adult member of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, she was formed by Westminster standards – the same principles she would elucidate with polemical acuity in A scriptural view of woman’s rights and duties.
Presbyterian polity in A scriptural view of woman’s rights and duties
Wilson’s strict conformity to Presbyterianism explains why, in her book, when she transitioned from woman’s rights in general to ‘woman’s standing in a church capacity’, she focused on the ambivalence in Presbyterian polity toward woman’s rights in the Church. In her second paragraph on the topic, she wrote, ‘It is a fundamental principle, in Presbyterial church government, that church members have a right to a voice in the election of church officers. But constitutional guarantees of rights, are like ropes of sand with respect to women. Custom and usage are all that women have to depend upon.’Footnote 32 She then drew her readers’ attention to the ‘fierce controversy’ that
has been waged in the pseudo-free church of Scotland, in consequence of church members not having the right of suffrage, for the deprivation of which they consider themselves entitled to the sympathy and benevolence of the Christian world. But for whom did they so boisterously claim the right of suffrage? Just for male members. It never occurred to them that women were entitled to a voice in the choice of those to whom their spiritual interests were, in a great measure, committed.Footnote 33
Wilson’s initial salvo concerning the right of Church members to vote addresses a core value of Presbyterian polity, given its ‘system of pure representative government’.Footnote 34 This dimension was particularly valued in the Ulster Presbytery; Wilson’s father, Thomas Ledlie Birch, fiercely embraced this ideal: in his preaching and organising, he evinced a penchant for freedom from tyranny.
Wilson then launched a second salvo against the ‘pseudo-free church of Scotland’ for allowing only male members to vote. Whatever she may have meant with this expression, this reality characterised several Scottish Churches during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Lesley Orr Macdonald traces more than a century of debate over whether women communicant members in several Presbyterian Churches that had seceded from the established Church in Scotland had the right to vote. Macdonald’s discussion begins in 1736 with the Secession Church, the ecclesial ancestor of Wilson’s Associate Reformed Church in Cadiz, which ‘declared in its Testimony that ministers and other office bearers were to be set over congregations by the call and consent of the majority of members in full communion’. In case some interpreted this declaration to include women, it was clarified that voting was ‘restricted to male heads of families’.Footnote 35
Macdonald’s overview extends into the 1840s, the decade during which Wilson was occupied with writing her book, with an analysis of women’s voting rights in the formation of the new Free Church in Scotland in 1843. The ‘bone of contention’, according to Macdonald, concerned ‘whether women in full communion with the Church could be counted as individual members with full rights and responsibilities, or whether these could be fulfilled by men speaking and acting on their behalf’.Footnote 36 The report to the Free Church General Assembly in October 1843 was criticised by some ministers for not expressing ‘a definite opinion’ on the matter and leaving it to each presbytery to make its own decision; others, like James Begg, considered the report’s flexibility to be its strength, because it left the decision up to each presbytery and to ‘female members, if they choose, to claim and exercise their rights’. The report existed in a provisional form until it became a Declaratory Act in 1846, which exempted it from ‘being subject to the “mature debate” and prescriptive legislation’.Footnote 37 Macdonald observes that ‘This was far from a declaration of equal rights, and betrayed a continuing tendency to regard women, not as an integral part of the Church, but as a group whose relationship with the institution was regarded as problematic and unsettled.’Footnote 38
After having discussed the debate over a woman’s right to vote in the Scottish Churches, Wilson turned her attention to her adopted homeland – not to Protestant Churches at large but to Presbyterianism in the United States. ‘In a majority of the branches of the Presbyterian churches, in the United States’, she generalised, ‘we suppose women are at present permitted to have a voice in the election of church officers, though it is by no means a settled right.’ The unfortunate scenario, in her opinion, was that the decision was left to ‘the grace and condescension of church officers’.Footnote 39 This was true for the mainline Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA), where there was ‘diversity of opinion’ at the time, according to the Revd Samuel Miller, about whether all baptised members, including women, could vote in Church matters. Miller explained that ‘a large majority of the most judicious and enlightened judges’ did support all baptised members voting; of course, his statement implies some dissent. He then went on to discuss whether women who were the head of a family could vote: ‘And where there are female heads of families, who bear the relation of membership to the Church … and who are not represented by some qualified male relative, on the occasion, it has been judged proper to allow them to vote in the choice of Ruling Elders, as is generally the case in the choice of a Pastor.’Footnote 40 Again, his statement evinced ambiguity, not unanimity, underscoring Wilson’s comment that women’s voting in the Church was not ‘a settled right’.
After documenting the debate over a woman’s right to vote in Presbyterian Churches in Scotland and the United States, Wilson narrowed her scope to – and directed her ire at – her own Church, the Associate Reformed Church, the Synod of which, in 1849 (the year she published her book) affirmed afresh and unanimously the restriction of voting to male communicants only.Footnote 41 The disparity between her Scots-Irish Presbyterian heritage, with its resistance to tyranny, and the constraints of her Church’s polity, with its denial of woman’s suffrage, offered Wilson the opportunity to level the charge of ‘ecclesiastical tyranny’, not just against her Church in general, but more particularly against its ‘supreme judicatory’, for which the question of suffrage was ‘of so little importance that it merited no claim on the deliberations of such an august assemblage’.Footnote 42
The discussion at this point underscores that Wilson’s concerns were wholly Presbyterian. She referred to the fierce debate in Presbyterian Churches in Scotland. She referred to the de facto practice of allowing women to vote in many American Presbyterian Churches. And she indicted her own denomination, the Associate Reformed Church, for its failure to offer women the right to vote. Wilson reprised this theme later in the book, writing, ‘Until lately, women were even denied a voice in the selection of their spiritual rulers, and in one branch of the Presbyterian church (the Associate Reformed) they are still excluded from the right of suffrage by a constitutional interdict.’Footnote 43 After this dispassionate reference to her Church’s constitution, she then unleashed a fusillade of fury in a passionate series of rhetorical questions: ‘Is not this unmitigated ecclesiastical tyranny? Has a woman the right of conscience of the exercise of private judgment under this state of things?’ Then the coup de grâce: ‘Is popery any worse?’Footnote 44
Four years after Wilson published her book, the General Synod of the Associate Reformed Church in the United States, by a slim margin of eight votes, allowed women who were full communicant members to vote in the selection of a pastor. As one historian of the Church commented, ‘Finally, despite gloomy predictions that allowing feminine franchise would corrupt the Church and ruin the ministry, the motion was sent down to presbyteries in overture where it was passed by a rather close (103–95) vote.’Footnote 45
Presbyterian hermeneutics in A scriptural view of woman’s rights and duties
Elizabeth Wilson, like other antebellum women before her – Deborah Peirce, Harriet Livermore, Sarah Grimké and Rebecca Miller, among others – championed woman’s rights on the basis of the Bible. This phenomenon was inevitable, given the ascendancy of the Bible in antebellum American culture. Nathan Hatch, in The democratization of American Christianity, documents how the ranks of Christian ministers in America increased from 1,800 to 40,000 between 1775 and 1845.Footnote 46 Between 1815 and 1848, according to Daniel Walker Howe, ‘Americans were erecting church buildings at a rate of a thousand a year.’Footnote 47 The Bible, too, was growing in influence and accessibility during this era. By 1829 the American Bible Society announced ambitious plans to ‘put a Bible in every American home’.Footnote 48 The proliferation of Bibles emerged in tandem with an expansive religious publishing industry. A surge in the accessibility of Bibles, commentaries, concordances and atlases, accompanied by a continued rise in literacy rates, characterised much of antebellum America.Footnote 49
Wilson engaged this swell of influential commentators through a compendium of commentaries known as the Comprehensive commentary. Footnote 50 ‘Our extracts from commentators’, she explained, ‘have, we believe, been taken from the Comprehensive Commentary, with very few exceptions, a popular work; recently compiled, or selected.’Footnote 51 She did not, however, accept the findings of commentaries uncritically. On the contrary, toward the book’s conclusion she pondered at length her harsh approach to the leading commentators of her day. Noting that her task throughout the book was, as its title portends, to give a scriptural view of woman’s rights and duties, she explained that, in doing so, she studied
what has been said on this question by expositors of the holy scriptures. We believe they have given very perverted views of the rights and duties of women, and their opinions have, in a great measure, governed public sentiment on the position of woman in the human family, and are highly pernicious to the interests of both man and woman, and are powerful obstacles in the way of her elevation.Footnote 52
It was up to her, she believed, to counter these errant interpretations:
We are compelled to say that the perverted public sentiment respecting the standing of woman has been, and is being imbibed from a large majority of our Old and New Testament commentators, and others who write and speak on religious subjects. This is the reason why we have animadverted so freely on commentators and others. Our smiting is not designed to wound, but to heal. The morals of a country cannot be expected to rise higher than its religious principles.Footnote 53
Still, despite her deep engagement with the Comprehensive commentary, Wilson’s hermeneutics are drawn principally from the foundational documents of her Presbyterian heritage. Her view of Scripture mirrors the Westminster Confession, which specifies the infallibility of Scripture: ‘The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself’ (1.9). Similarly, she began A scriptural view of woman’s rights and duties – the first page of the first chapter – with the declaration that the Bible is ‘the unerring standard of decision’, as opposed to ‘the baseless fabrics of men’s devices’.Footnote 54 On the next page, she continued similarly, ‘As the Bible is the magna charta of our rights, the unerring standard of our duties, – where they are minutely detailed, either by precept or example, or legitimate inference, – to the oracles of God we therefore appeal for decision.’Footnote 55 She concluded that chapter by recognising that interpretations may vacillate from culture to culture but that Scripture remains immutable:
As moral, and responsible beings, men and women have the same sphere of action, and the same duties devolve upon both; there is not one moral law for man, and another for woman. But no one can doubt, that the duties of each vary according to circumstances, and according to our respective relations. The sphere of man and woman, are mere arbitrary opinions; differing in different ages, and countries, and dependent solely on the will and judgment of erring mortals. The word of God is the only infallible rule of faith and practice: nor is man’s opinion of that word, the standard of our duty, but each one is to search the scriptures daily, for herself, and judge whether those things are so, that she hears taught.Footnote 56
Wilson also adopted the principle of the analogy of Scripture or, to put it more prosaically, Scripture interpreting Scripture, which is fundamental to the Westminster Confession: ‘when there is a question about the true and full sense of any Scripture (which is not manifold, but one), it must be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly’ (1.9). Her adoption of this principle is evident in her interpretation of 1 Corinthians xiv.34–5, in which Paul advises: ‘Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.’
Wilson chided a certain ‘preacher’, with whom she sustained a protracted, chapter-long argument, for failing to consider other biblical texts that would undermine his belief ‘that women were totally prohibited from speaking in promiscuous assemblies’.Footnote 57 The preacher, for instance, ‘never hinted at the 11th chapter of the same epistle’, in which women can pray or prophesy (1 Cor. xi.4–5). Instead, he ‘led his hearers to believe that every portion of revelation would comport with the opinion he then gave on this subject. He said there were many portions that corroborated it.’Footnote 58
Wilson’s rejoinder? ‘Where are those portions of scripture that corroborate it? We say produce those portions.’ She then reiterated that only 1 Timothy ii.12 (‘But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence’) corroborates 1 Cor. xiv. 34–5, though, she quipped, in 1 Tim. ii.12, ‘substantially the same thing is said, as in the passage under review’ (that is, in 1 Cor. xiv.34–5).Footnote 59 In essence, she claimed that both texts are one and the same, and ‘these are the only portions of scripture that can be tortured into any such idea’.Footnote 60 In contrast, ‘there are many portions, both in the form of precept and example, which conflict with these two isolated texts: these cannot be reconciled on the principle of women being prohibited from speaking publicly in the church, as we have in other places amply demonstrated’.Footnote 61 In other words, one text – two that speak the same, in this case – must be interpreted in light of many other texts in Scripture.
Wilson continued with a clarification of her interpretative method, the analogy of Scripture:
One passage of scripture is sufficient to establish a principle, if no conflicting portions, or examples, or facts, exist; but in this case the very reverse of this is true. The views on these two portions of scripture, as they are generally understood, come in direct conflict with all other portions which have any bearing on the subject. Would not the analogy of faith teach us that these two isolated portions should be governed by the mass of testimony which preponderates so mightily on the opposite side?Footnote 62
Hers was not a haphazard gathering of proof texts but a method that allowed her to set what she believed to be the preponderance of Scripture against two texts. In the tenor of the Westminster Confession, ‘when there is a question about the true and full sense of any Scripture (which is not manifold, but one), it must be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly’. In her opinion, Paul’s mandate for women to be silent in 1 Cor. xiv.34–5 exhibited a distinct ambiguity. Which women were silenced? And why? The remainder of Scripture, in which women, from Abigail to Pilate’s wife to the women during Pentecost and at Corinth who prophesied, is unambiguous for Wilson. Therefore, the ambiguous case of 1 Cor. xiv.34-5 is, along the lines of the Westminster Confession, clarified ‘by other places that speak more clearly’.
Wilson shared these dual commitments to the infallibility of Scripture and the analogy of Scripture with other nineteenth-century Protestants. Mark Noll has amply documented how ‘antebellum women Bible interpreters fully shared the era’s central Protestant convictions as well as the conventional ways of understanding the Bible’.Footnote 63 In fact, ‘well into the 1840s interpretations advanced to justify female public speaking – and sometimes even ordination – came uniformly from women who affirmed traditional biblical authority in order to advance traditional Protestant goals’.Footnote 64
What, then, renders Wilson’s approach to Scripture Presbyterian rather than generally ‘traditional Protestant’? The answer to this question lies deep within A scriptural view of woman’s rights and duties, in her explicit reference to ‘a rule laid down in the Westminster Confession of Faith … That where a sin is forbidden, the contrary duty is commanded’.Footnote 65 This rule, she granted, originated with ‘wiser heads and abler pens than our own’.Footnote 66 The actual source of this quotation is not the Westminster Confession but the fourth rule of question ninety-nine of the Larger Catechism, which contains eight rules for the interpretation of the Ten Commandments. That Wilson should have extracted this line from the fourth rule of the ninety-ninth question of the Larger Catechism reveals the level of her knowledge of her Church’s foundational documents.
It is not surprising, given her Presbyterian upbringing, that Wilson was so thoroughly acquainted with foundational Westminster documents. Although we do not know specifics about her education in Ireland, it is likely that, as the daughter of an Ulster Presbyterian minister, she attended public catechisms, in which the local minister worked his way through the Westminster Confession and catechisms. All who resided in the district, adults and children alike, were expected to attend. How frequently these catechisms were held depended upon ‘a number of factors including the size of the congregation and the age, health and zeal of the minister’.Footnote 67 Given her father’s zeal for Westminster standards, as well as the size and influence of his Saintfield congregation, it is likely that he held regular public catechisms. Wilson would also have had access to her father’s library, which, according to the Ulster Presbytery’s expectations, was to be maintained at a high level; regular examinations by the presbytery were intended to ensure that it was.Footnote 68
Wilson, however, did more than cite the rule embedded deep in the Larger Catechism; she put it to use to undermine the widely held contention that women must not teach men. What is the sin that is forbidden? She answered acerbically: ‘In this case, the woman is forbidden to commit the heinous sin of imparting instruction or removing ignorance.’Footnote 69 What would that mean, mused Wilson, in actual practice? ‘It is a woman’s duty, according to the above rule, to labour incessantly to promote ignorance, to blind the understanding, to throw every obstacle that is in her power in the way of the progress of knowledge.’Footnote 70 Her argument continues with a reductio ad absurdum: ‘No matter though your husband is wallowing with his fellow-creature in the gutter, and does not know the first letter in the alphabet, still it is his official duty to be your teacher.’Footnote 71
It is an indication of her thorough immersion in Presbyterianism that Wilson cited a line lying deep within the Larger Catechism. Yet she did not merely cite the text of the Catechism; she cited it with the purpose of dismantling a restrictive interpretation of 1 Cor. xiv.34–5. This strategy is part of the legacy and literature Wilson inherited from her Scots-Irish Presbyterian lineage.
Initial reception of Wilson’s A scriptural view of woman’s rights and duties
Wilson’s interpretation of the Bible elicited a variety of responses, though even mixed reviews demonstrate the book’s initial reach, which extended at least from Boston, through Pennsylvania and into Wilson’s hometown of Cadiz, Ohio. The renowned abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison lauded Wilson’s book at its appearance and published substantial extracts from it in successive issues of his Boston newspaper, The Liberator. Footnote 72 Garrison introduced ‘a work that will make its impress on the age – a work long needed on a subject second to none in importance and extent. It is written with decided ability, and its scriptural vindication of the equality of woman is triumphant. We shall refer to it frequently.’Footnote 73 The editor of The Anti-Slavery Bugle similarly praised the book: ‘the author exhibits a thorough knowledge of her subject and much argumentative skill in defending her own views and assailing those of her opponents’. Despite a sub-par ‘literary performance’, he commended Wilson for ‘braving a corrupt and tyrannous public sentiment’ and writing a book that ‘deserves the thanks of the friends of Equality and Progress’.Footnote 74
Reprints of reviews in Wilson’s hometown paper, The Cadiz Democratic Sentinel, illustrate the book’s reach among Pennsylvania newspapers, including the Luminary, the Pennsylvania Freeman, the Philadelphia North American and Gazette, the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post and the Pittsburgh Post. Footnote 75 Reviews, the writer explained, appeared in ‘papers of influence’ and ‘contain nothing more than deserved encomiums’ about a book that ‘will be a powerful lever in the hands of the advocates of this Reform’.Footnote 76
Reviews of her book, though many, were not uniformly positive. Wilson acknowledged this, noting:
We were well aware that it was the most unpopular question which could have been presented to the public, and would have to encounter opposition of a more or less malignant type … it was noticed in a number of religious periodicals in the city of Philadelphia, and censured with virulence, mingled, in some, with no small portion of buffoonery. Extracts were given, torn from their contexts, and placed in connections they did not occupy in the book.Footnote 77
The abolitionist Henry Grew was among critics who responded to Wilson’s book. Grew and Wilson went several rounds in The Liberator, correcting each other’s interpretations of biblical texts, including Genesis ii.18 and iii.16; 1 Cor. xi.3, 7–9 and xiv.34–8; Ephesians v.22–3; Colossians iii.18; 1 Tim. ii.11–14; Titus ii.4–5; and 1 Peter iii.1–6. Grew sought to undercut the thrust of Wilson’s argument with questions such as ‘If those declarations of the Spirit of Truth do not teach any difference between them [male and female], what can we prove from the Bible?’Footnote 78
A review penned by Joseph Cooper, the editor of the Evangelical Repository, a publication of the Associate Reformed Church, was respectful but dismissive. He began by expressing ‘personal respect which we entertain for the authoress’ and conceding that his ‘feelings’ on the subject are now
somewhat different from those with which we formerly regarded it, and that our views in relation to the rights and duties of woman have undergone considerable modification. It is impossible to read this work … without feeling that the positions which have been ordinarily maintained are associated with difficulties which call for serious consideration … it is the will of God that the female sex should have a wide and extended sphere of influence.Footnote 79
Nevertheless, Cooper launched into a sustained critique of the book’s repetitiveness, Wilson’s lack of courtesy in addressing interlocutors and the weakness in her argument critiquing husbands’ headship – the heart and soul of the book.Footnote 80 When he printed Wilson’s rebuttal to his review, no doubt as a concession to her status, Cooper prefaced it with a lengthy explanation that the inclusion of her rebuttal was not to be construed as precedent for other authors whose books received unfavourable reviews.Footnote 81
References to Wilson’s book seem to have subsided prior to 1881, when the first volume of The history of suffrage, edited by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage, was published. The editors included Wilson’s book in a list of great works promoting women’s equality over a four-hundred-year span of history by authors such as Christine of Pisa, Hildegard of Bingen, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Grimké sisters.Footnote 82 The editors noted that her book ‘aroused some attention to the general question by clearly demonstrating the equality of man and woman in the creation, as well as the independent, self-reliant characteristics sanctioned in woman, by the examples of the sex given in the Bible’.Footnote 83
The significance of Elizabeth Wilson
This study of Elizabeth Wilson’s A scriptural view of woman’s rights and duties commenced, not with the pages of published history or modern scholarship, but with a local newspaper’s marriage record, a son’s gravestone, a census report and an Irish genealogical record. These snatches of history coalesce to reveal, for the first time, the Scots-Irish Presbyterian heritage that shaped America’s most comprehensive nineteenth-century biblical defence of woman’s rights written by a woman.
Recognition of the centrality of Wilson’s Presbyterianism calls for an amendment of Mark Noll’s characterisation of nineteenth-century American defences of woman’s rights. In his prodigious America’s book, Noll underscores the American values that suffuse these defences. He notes that ‘the constant reiteration of ideological principles like liberty, equality, democracy and individual rights accompanied the expanding influence of these Protestant and Protestant-like movements. The biblicism that flourished as the Protestant heritage evolved in this free environment reached far and wide.’ Noll continues: ‘For women not to share in the driving forces of the era would have been unthinkable.’Footnote 84
This is true of Elizabeth Wilson – but not entirely true. Hers was not a thirst for liberty forged in Washington, Pennsylvania, where her family eventually settled, but a hunger for freedom from tyranny that grew in the fertile soil of her Irish homeland, particularly the Ulster Presbytery. Nor was her biblicism a peculiarly American commitment; her principles of biblical interpretation can be traced centuries earlier to the Westminster Confession of Faith, along with the Larger and Shorter Catechisms, as it was transmitted through Scots-Irish Presbyterianism. Finally, her commitments are not so much the product of amorphous and expansive ‘Protestantism and Protestant-like movements’ writ large, but of a form of Presbyterianism that its adherents transported from Scotland to the Ulster Presbytery in Ireland, then across the ocean to Scots-Irish communities in the United States. No doubt Wilson’s sensibilities were kept alive in the United States by ‘the national commitment to religious free exercise’, but those impulses originated earlier and elsewhere.Footnote 85
An assessment of Wilson’s Presbyterian heritage allows us to ascertain the unique position she occupies in the history of nineteenth-century American women who penned defences of a woman’s right to preach. Without consideration of Wilson, it might be possible to create an artificial bifurcation between women who, operating without denominational constraints, were advocates of woman’s rights in the public sphere, and women in the Church who, negotiating denominational constraints, settled for a limited sphere, yet one in which women could preach.
Wilson can be distinguished, on the one hand, from many woman’s rights advocates because she remained in the Church, despite its near complete disavowal of the rights she championed. Wilson’s predecessor Sarah Grimké, though she spent more than a decade with the Quakers, found herself in conflict with them about her and her sister Angelina’s public activism by the time she penned Letters on the equality of the sexes. Wilson’s situation also differed from her contemporaries Matilda Joslyn Gage and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for whom the Church was a principal source of woman’s oppression. In contrast, Wilson argued for the full equality of women while remaining an active member of the Associate Reformed Church.
On the other hand, Wilson argued for woman’s rights within the ecclesial constraints of the Associate Reformed Church, which, until 1853, refused by interdict to allow women even to vote on the matter of choosing a pastor. In this respect, her situation differed markedly from her predecessors Deborah Peirce, Harriet Livermore and Rebecca Miller, adherents of the Christian Connection, who carved out a limited sphere in which women could speak in meetings for worship but not in meetings for church administration.Footnote 86 It differed, too, from her contemporaries Antoinette Brown and Lucretia Mott, who remained in communities in which women could preach. Brown, who became a minister in the Congregational Church, was, in fact, the first woman to be ordained in America. Mott was a recorded Quaker minister. Wilson was offered no such respite or recourse, yet she persisted – researching and writing, according to Lucretia Mott, for ten years – to produce a capacious defence of woman’s rights in the home, the Church and the public sphere.Footnote 87
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