Early Nineteenth-Century American Women Hymnists
by Susan VanZanten Gallagher
Social historians have identified a common nineteenth-century structure of norms called the "cult of domesticity," emerging during an economic period in which middle-class American women lost their status as independent managers of home industries and became instead the social repository of moral virtue. Excluded from the newly emerging business world, women were relegated to the sphere of the home. While men were to be active in political and economic life, women were to maintain religious and ethical ideals within the home, training children in the proper religious path and exercising a beneficent influence on men. The cult of domesticity relies on the notion of gender-defined "separate spheres," a concept that has influenced the claim that America became increasingly secularized during the nineteenth century as religion was privatized, and politics and business took over the public arena. However, more recently, scholars have criticized the notion of separate spheres as a misleading binary structure that is too simplistic to reflect the complex facets of nineteenth-century life. Labels such as "the domestic" and "separate spheres" reflect nineteenth-century ideology but not necessarily nineteenth-century reality. Closer study suggests that the ideology of domesticity was employed in complex and contradictory ways, depending on contexts created by race, class, nationality, or religious tradition.
American antebellum hymnody, both those hymns frequently published as well as those written during the period, reveals that Christianity at times defied the separate spheres mentality. Well before the postbellum advent of the prolific Fanny Cosby, women were increasingly writing hymns, for private consumption but also for growing public use. Poems first intended for the eyes of a single reader soon became more widely distributed and used in congregational singing, camp meetings, Methodist conferences, or urban revivals. Private and public, the sacred and the secular, came together in the hymns. Many of the hymns composed during this period employ domestic imagery, particularly the metaphor of the home, in a different manner than we find in the prescriptive domestic literature, such as Catherine Beecher’s A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841), and domestic fiction, such as Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ The Gates Ajar (1868). In several hymns, including some written by women, the earthly home is cast in a less idealized light, while the home that is found in heaven is a place where human beings are reunited with loved ones, where laborers will find rest, and where natural and urban beauty peacefully coexist. The emphasis on the heavenly home as a place of physical consumption that is found in the prescriptive literature and fiction does not appear. While Ann Douglas argues that the common conflation of heaven and home in hymns and novels reinforces the domestic ideology of the earthly home as spiritual center, we more commonly find the heavenly home of hymns contrasted with an earthly home of trouble, toil, and tears.
Some of the hidden tensions of domestic ideology emerge vividly in one of the first enduring hymns written by an American woman: "I love to steal awhile a way," by Phoebe Hinsdale Brown. A woman who had grown up in poverty and with little formal education, Brown was living with her house-painter husband, an invalid sister, and four young children in a small, unfinished frame house on the edge of Ellington, Connecticut, in 1818. In her autobiography, she describes the lack of what Virginia Woolf called "a room of her own": "there was not a place, above or below, where I could retire for devotion without a liability to be interrupted. There was no retired room, rock, or grove where I could go . . ." Frazzled by her trying domestic circumstances, Brown would retreat each evening to the aromatic garden of a near-by estate. She describes how she "used to steal away from all within doors, and, going out of our gate, stroll along under the elms that were planted for shade on each side of the road. And, as there was seldom anyone passing that way after dark, I felt quite retired and alone with God. I often walked quite up that beautiful garden, and sniffed the fragrance of the peach, the grape, and the ripening apple, if not the flowers. I never saw anyone in the garden and felt that I could have the privilege of those few moments of uninterrupted communion with God without encroaching upon any one." This time alone provided a desperately needed escape from a crowded home, needy children, and demanding domestic duties.
One evening when Brown was visiting a friend, she met the wealthy woman who owned the estate, who condescendingly asked Brown why she walked so often in her garden. "There was something in her manner more than in her words, that grieved me," Brown writes, "I went home, and that evening was left alone. After my children were all in bed, except my baby, I sat down in the kitchen, with my child in my arms, when the grief of my heart burst forth in a flood of tears. I took pen and paper, and gave vent to my oppressed heart in what I called ‘My Apology for my Twilight Rambles, addressed to a Lady." Written with one hand while she was holding a child in the other, this poem was later published in the widely popular collection Village Hymns for Social Worship (1824), under the title "Twilight Hymn," with some significant changes. The poem originally began:
Yes, when the toilsome day is gone,
And night with banners gray,
Steals silently the glade along
In twilight’s soft array,
I love to steal awhile away
From little ones and care,
And spend the hours of setting day
In gratitude and prayer.
As the verse subsequently appeared in Village Hymns, edited by the Reverend Asahel Nettleton, four stanzas, including the first with its reference to "the toilsome day," were eliminated. The editorial changes functioned to mute the implied domestic criticism: "from little ones and care" was changed to "From every cumbering care." Another omitted stanza proposes an alternative home:
I love to meditate on death!
When shall his message come
With friendly smiles to steal my breath
And take an exile home?
The next stanza was preserved:
I love by faith to take a view
Of blissful scenes in heaven;
The sight doth all my strength renew,
While here by storms I’m driven.
Heaven as home, in this hymn, provides a haven from the daily domestic demands of "little ones and care"; the silence and solitude of the garden "where none can see or hear" allows a communion with God not possible in the small cramped house, a space for penitence, prayer, meditation, and hope. Rather than idealizing the earthly domestic space, "I love to steal awhile away" posits an alternative domestic space in heaven that will release the home bound woman from "life’s toilsome day." The domestic setting for a poverty-ridden, working-class woman such as Phoebe Brown is not a spiritually refreshing location. Rather, the home, for Brown and many others, was a crowded, noisy, demanding arena of hard labor.
The story of this hymn is one strand in the complex phenomena of the democratization of American religion that accompanied the substantial antebellum growth in Baptist, Methodist, and Holiness associations and denominations. This expansion contributed a new realistic focus to hymnody, as women from all classes and lower-class men began writing hymns. While the domestic description of heaven in nineteenth-century hymns might at times reinforce the idealized possibilities of the earthly home, it more often envisions a better home in the world to come.
About the Author
Dr. Gallagher earned her Ph.D. at Emory University, and is currently Professor of English and Director of University Scholars at Seattle Pacific University. Her published books include Literature through the Eyes of Faith, A Story of South Africa: J.M. Coetzee’s Fiction in Context, Postcolonial Literature and the Biblical Call to Justice, and the forthcoming Literature and The Renewal of the Public Sphere, edited with Mark Walhout.