Women, Religious Tolerance, & Digital Humanities: Examining Women’s Rhetoric of Tolerance in Britain, 1750-1850
Katie Heatherly
“What changes when we incorporate women in the narrative?”
A professor asked this question of my Women’s History and Theory seminar in the Fall of 2021, and we spent the entirety of the semester discussing the importance of understanding women’s perspectives, actions, and navigation of patriarchy throughout historical narratives. As an aspiring women’s historian, the question has become central to my historical research. Thus, when Dr. Daniel Watkins tasked our Christianity and Enlightenment seminar with examining questions of religion and enlightenment through digital humanities, I knew my topic would incorporate gender analysis.
Many enlightenment scholars, such as Peter Gay, have defined the enlightenment as a fundamentally anti-religious phenomenon comprised of a very small “flock” of philosophes—elite white western European men.[1] Histories such as Gay’s fail to include the voices of women, among many others, and fail to consider the ways religion and enlightenment might have worked in conjunction. As historians have attempted to provide narratives which demonstrate the intersection of religion and enlightenment, including the growth in religious tolerance, they have often reconstructed Gay’s framework of white western elite men. Thus, it is the purpose of this project to examine datasets of published and unpublished sources regarding religious toleration authored by women to compare them to sources written by men.[2] This project seeks to shed light on women’s writing and rhetoric regarding the development of religious enlightening, specifically the language of religious toleration.
In examining the results of this project, several points of interest might provide a basis for further research. First, based on the results of this study, women used strikingly similar language to men in their published sources. In this project, I examined the published work of women such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Wortley Montagu, Catharine Macaulay, Hannah More, and publications such as the Christian Lady’s Magazine. These women participated in the mainstream discourse regarding tolerance and often paired their discussions of religious tolerance with their advocacy for women’s rights. This conjunction of interests suggests that the widening of doctrinal tolerance might have fostered a reexamination of passages of scripture limiting women’s authority. In their participation in the public sphere, women seemed to use similar language as men. Further research might expand on this claim, examining if women’s public rhetoric was a conscious effort to gain respect and prove women’s capacity for reason.
Furthermore, scholars might examine the ways women carved out spiritual authority despite limits to their authority. Interestingly, the word cloud of women’s published sources resembles the word cloud of men’s sermons. Words such as “church” and “God” appear most frequently in both word clouds which is expected, but both men’s sermons and women’s published sources also feature words such as “government,” “power,” and “liberty” which gesture at interesting similarities. It should be noted that while these women’s voices appeared in various types of published sources such as magazines, novels, published address, and letters, they did not take the form of sermons. One might investigate if women turned to other mediums to express their ideas as many avenues, including the pulpit, were often closed to them.
As women wrote about toleration with rhetoric consistent with the language of men, there are noticeable omissions in women’s word clouds such as the lack of “war.” It is also important to recognize that “church” appears most prominently for women, which might support what scholars have called the “feminization of religion,” often referring to women’s prevalent presence in church life. It would make sense for “church” to make up women’s language when discussing religion and toleration if they were more involved in churches than men.
However, when analyzing women’s private letters, some words begin to appear around the edges of the word cloud that demonstrate more prominently the differences in women’s rhetoric when compared to men’s. Women’s letters include topics such as health, breakfast, secretaries, and houses in relation to religious toleration. Furthermore, many of the letters use the word “tolerable” to refer to aspects of women’s daily lives and experiences. They discuss topics such as health, consolation, home, and appetites. While this data is limited, it might indicate that women formed distinctive rhetorical communities. This would point to women’s shared subculture of theological thought made up of “shared distinctive values, symbols, interpretations, and perspectives,” of which toleration might be a part.[3] We might view the language in some of these subcultures as forming the foundations of feminine religious language and experience.
One could conclude that in the public sphere, women often referenced religious toleration more directly, discussing policy and politics and using similar language to men. Yet, it seems conceptions of toleration made their way into, or were perhaps rooted in, women’s private lives as well, blurring distinctions between the two spheres and gesturing at the limits of women’s authority and the ways women created their own cultures of enlightenment, formed through the republic of letters.
[1] Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (New York: Norton, 1977).
[2] It should be noted that the datasets compiled for this project were fundamentally shaped by the work of several scholars of women and enlightenment. See Karen O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Sue Morgan and Jacqueline de. Vries, Women, Gender, and Religious Cultures in Britain, 1800-1940. 1st ed. (Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2010); Julie Melnyk, Women’s Theology in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Transfiguring the Faith of Their Fathers (New York: Garland, 1998).
[3] Morgan and de. Vries, Women, Gender, and Religious Cultures, 32.