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Without Benefit of Clergy: Women and the Pastoral Relationship in Nineteenth-Century American Culture

Karin E. Gedge, New York, New York: Oxford University Press, Religion in America series, 2003, 9.8x6.4" hardound, 290 pages.

The common view of the 19th century pastoral relationship, found in both contemporary popular accounts and 20th century scholarship, was that women and clergymen formed a natural alliance and enjoyed a particular influence over each other. In this book, Karin Gedge tests this thesis by examining the pastoral relationship from the perspective of the minister, the female parishioner, and the larger culture. The question that troubled religious women seeking counsel, says Karin Gedge, was: would their minister respect them, help them, honour them? Surprisingly, she finds, the answer was frequently negative. She supports her conclusion with evidence from a wide range of primary sources including pastoral manuals, seminary students' and pastors' journals, women's diaries and letters, pamphlets, sentimental and sensational novels, and The Scarlet Letter.

Review Excerpts:

"Gedge's kaleidoscopic re-viewing of pastors' relationships with female congregants is timely, witty, thought-provoking, and so convincing that it puts all previous portrayals in the shade."--Nancy F. Cott, author of The Bonds of Womanhood: 'Woman's Sphere' in New England, 1780-1835

"Karin Gedge's Without Benefit of Clergy reconstructs the vast, sad pattern of ministerial adultery and betrayal of female worshipers that Nathaniel Hawthorne scandalously memorialized in The Scarlet Letter. Gedge's amazing research in nineteenth-century men's and women's diaries, divinity school documents, and sensationalist newspapers reveals how Victorian culture and misshapen ministerial training betrayed clergy and women alike. Without Benefit of Clergy illuminates hidden tensions about gender and sex within Victorian Protestant congregations still redolent in twenty-first century American religion." --Jon Butler, author of Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People

"Without Benefit of Clergy is an immensely rewarding book about the pastoral relationship in nineteenth-century America. Karin Gedge is a beautiful writer, and she manages to capture the explosive mixture of intimacy, neglect, love, anxiety, and abuse that marked women's relationships with their clergymen. Rarely has a historian so devastatingly exposed the problems created by the gender ideology of 'separate spheres.'" --Catherine A. Brekus, author of Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845

"Without Benefit of Clergy provides an intimate look at the relationship between ministers and their parishioners from the inside out. Casting doubt on the allegedly close bond between Protestant women and the clergy, Gedge mounts a provocative challenge to the idea that 19th century Protestantism was 'feminized' theologically or practically due to the disproportionate influence of women on the clergy." --Ann Taves, author of Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James

"Gedge attacks a contemporary stereotype . . . evidenced in countless movies and novels set in that era. The authors of such plots probably automatically assumed this, from reading earlier tales. What Gedge offers is a close scrutiny of contemporary primary sources. These include letters and diaries of women. She found repeated, separate and independent accounts of male clergy abusing their pastoral duties and also sexually abusing some of their female parishioners, in stark constrast to some of the sanitised fiction of the time.

But perhaps the modern reader would not be too surprised by her findings. Recent revelations (a ironic word in view of its religious connotations) of modern clergy doing likewise have become all too common. It is no difficult stretch to imagine their earlier counterparts to be equally mortal. All men are fallen, as the Christian catechism says." --W. Boudville, 2004

Karin E. Gedge, Assistant Professor of History, West Chester University.

Title: Without Benefit of Clergy: Women and the Pastoral Relationship in Nineteenth-Century American Culture

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