Without Benefit of Clergy

"Both contemporary popular accounts and twentieth-century scholarship have portrayed nineteenth-century women and clergymen as natural allies who enjoyed a particular influence over each other. In Without Benefit of Clergy, Karin Gedge tests this thesis by examining the pastoral relationship from the perspective of the minister and the female parishioner, as well as the larger culture.". "Gedge draws on evidence from a wide range of previously untapped primary sources including travelers' accounts, transcripts and graphic images from trial pamphlets, sentimental and sensational novels as well as The Scarlet Letter, pastoral manuals, seminary students' and pastors' journals, and women's diaries and letters. Religious women who sought counsel, she finds, worried whether their minister would respect them, help them, and honor them. Surprisingly, she concludes, the answer was frequently negative. The dangers of the relationship are strikingly illuminated by the literature surrounding criminal trials of ministers accused of abusing both their pastoral office and individual women. Seminaries, however, worked to distance clergy from women by emphasizing scholarship, controversial theology, and preaching at the expense of pastoral care. Pastoral manuals ignored women as a constituency and advocated delegating pastoral work to ministers' wives. The pastoral relationship rarely mirrored the sensational intimacy described in the popular press, where it was seen as a subversive threat to families, religion, and the republic. Rather, ministers often recorded frustration, disdain, and avoidance in their relationships with women, while women reported neglect, disappointment, and disillusionment in their relationships with pastors. Receiving little help from the professional ministry, Gedge shows, women turned to family, friends, and published tracts for pastoral care. Without Benefit of Clergy is a compelling argument against the widely accepted thesis of the "feminization" of American clergy and an important contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century American religious life."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction, Spiritual, Mental Health. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.