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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 May 2022
This paper argues that childbirth served as a prism for religious experience in early America, not just among the women who experienced it but also among the members of their households and communities. Examining childbirth as the source of religious experience can shed light on the social and physiological dimensions of early American spirituality by illuminating a religious culture of childbearing that shaped the piety of anyone who came into contact with it. We might expect that childbirth molded women's spirituality. But this article proposes that not just women but also others in their midst experienced religion differently because of their proximity to childbirth. Pregnancy, labor, and infant loss forced women and men to confront mortality and became means through which they carved out spiritual life, created ritual, and forged religious community. Using the body as a category of analysis, this paper reveals a space where the physical and spiritual persons intersect, and it argues that spiritual responses to childbirth as a physiological event were part of the longer arc of religious experience than we have previously appreciated. In doing so, it offers new ways to center women and gender in the narrative of early American religious history.
The author gratefully acknowledges the following people for their assistance in preparing and revising this article: Ann Braude, Kimberly Klimek, Laura Arnold Leibman, Janet Moore Lindman, Bill Philpott, Erik Seeman, and the anonymous reviewers for Church History.
1 Hambrick-Stowe, Charles E., The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 146–147Google Scholar.
2 Entries on October 19, 1752 and June 8, 1753, Diary of Experience (Wight) Richardson, Sudbury, Mass., 1728–1782, transcribed by Ellen Richardson Glueck and Thelma Smith Ernst, 1978, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. The diary is hereafter cited as the Richardson Diary.
3 Clarke, Samuel, A Short Relation, Concerning a Dream (Boston: Andrew Barclay, 1769), 3–4Google Scholar. Karin Wulf and Catherine La Courreye Blecki provide context for Clarke's jeremiad, which Milcah Martha Moore reproduced in her commonplace book. See Courreye Blecki, Catherine La and Wulf, Karin, eds., Milcah Martha Moore's Book: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 97–98, 153n131Google Scholar.
4 1 Peter 2:2–3. This catechism was first published in 1656 but remained in print and was eventually used in the New England Primer. Cotton, John, Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes in Either England: Drawn out of the Breasts of Both Testaments, for Their Souls Nourishment, but May Be of Use to Any Children (Boston: Samuel Green, for Hezekiah Usher, 1656)Google Scholar; Stabile, Susan M., “A Doctrine of Signatures,” in A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America, ed. Lindman, Janet Moore and Tarter, Michele Lise (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 122Google Scholar.
5 Lacey, Barbara E., ed. The World of Hannah Heaton: The Diary of an Eighteenth-Century Farm Woman (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), 47–48Google Scholar.
6 I refer mainly to Protestant and Catholic faiths, as well as African and indigenous syncretic religion that engaged Christian practice. Although Jewish, Muslim, and African and non-Christian indigenous beliefs were significant, they are beyond the scope of the argument for this paper.
7 Lindman, Janet Moore, Bodies of Belief: Baptist Community in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 208)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially chapters 3, 4, and 5; Bell, Catherine, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)Google Scholar, especially chapter 5.
8 Winiarski, Douglas L., Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakening in Eighteenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 63n66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Koch, Philippa, The Course of God's Providence: Religion, Health, and the Body in Early America (New York: New York University Press, 2021)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, introduction, chapter 5. Koch identifies providentialism as a Protestant concept, but evidence suggests Catholics also borrowed from some aspects of it as it related to childbearing.
9 Andrew Cambers and Michael Wolfe, “Reading, Family Religion, and Evangelical Identity in Late Stuart England,” The Historical Journal 47, no. 4 (December 2004): 875–896; Nancy Christie, “‘He Is the Master of His House’: Families and Political Authority in Counterrevolutionary Montreal,” William and Mary Quarterly 70, no. 2 (April 2013): 341; Kathleen Wilson, “Rethinking the Colonial State: Family, Gender, and Governmentality in Eighteenth-Century British Frontiers,” American Historical Review 116, no. 5 (December 2011): 1295–1297.
10 Mary Fissell observes that the contested meanings of reproductive bodies reflected a crisis in gender roles prescribed by patriarchalism in seventeenth-century England. See Mary E. Fissell, Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England, revised 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 11, chapters 6–7.
11 Sir Alexander Mackenzie, Voyages from Montreal, on the River St. Lawrence, through the Continent of North America, to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans in the Years 1789 and 1793 (Philadelphia: John Morgan, 1802), quoted in Nora Doyle, Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 39, 200–201. Mackenzie refers to “Chepewyan” women, which probably means “Chippewa,” which we know today as Ojibwe. Susan E. Klepp, Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility and Family Limitation in America, 1760–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 16; Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), especially chapters 1 and 3.
12 Richard W. Wertz and Dorothy C. Wertz, Lying-In: A History of Childbirth in America (New York: Free Press, 1977); Rose Lockwood, “Birth, Illness, and Death in Eighteenth-Century New England,” Journal of Social History 12, no. 1 (Autumn 1978): 111–128; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980); Catherine M. Scholten, Childbearing in American Society, 1650–1850 (New York: New York University Press, 1985); Judith Walzer Leavitt, Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Jan Lewis and Kenneth A. Lockridge, “‘Sally Has Been Sick’: Pregnancy and Family Limitation among Virginia Gentry Women, 1780–1830,” Journal of Social History 22, no. 1 (Autumn 1988): 5–19; Sylvia D. Hoffert, Private Matters: American Attitudes toward Childbearing in Infant Nurture in the Urban North, 1800–1860 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988); Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Vintage, 1990); Morgan, Laboring Women; Klepp, Revolutionary Conceptions; Doyle, Maternal Bodies.
13 David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989); David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 16–21; Erik R. Seeman, Pious Persuasions: Laity and Clergy in Eighteenth-Century New England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Michelle Marcetti Coughlin, One Colonial Woman's World: The Life and Writings of Mehetabel Chandler Coit (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012); Catherine A. Brekus, Sarah Osborn's World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); Douglas L. Winiarski, “Lydia Proutt's Dreadfullest Thought,” New England Quarterly 88, no. 3 (September 2015): 356–421; Winiarski, Darkness Falls on the Land of Light; Janet Moore Lindman, “‘To have a gradual weaning & be ready & wiling to resign all’: Maternity, Piety, and Pain among Quaker Women of the Early Mid-Atlantic,” Early American Studies 17, no. 4 (Fall 2019): 498–518.
14 Among the landmark scholarship to connect the body with ritual is Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, especially chapters 4–5. Scholarship on spiritual healing includes Pamela Klassen, “The Politics of Protestant Healing: Theoretical Tools for the Study of Spiritual Bodies and the Body Politic,” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 14, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 68–85. Other work focuses on the physiological, neurological, and chemical sources of thought, emotion, and desire, but much of this scholarship ignores childbirth. See William LaFleur, “Body,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Robert C. Fuller, Spirituality in the Flesh: Bodily Sources of Religous Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Robert C. Fuller, The Body of Faith: A Biological History of Religion in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). For work that does situate the childbearing body in social and religious contexts, see Lindman and Tarter, eds., A Centre of Wonders; Lindman, “‘To have a gradual weaning & be ready & wiling to resign all’”; Pamela E. Klassen, “Sacred Maternities and Postbiomedical Bodies: Religion and Nature in Contemporary Home Birth,” Signs 26, no. 3 (Spring 2001): 775–809; Fissell, Vernacular Bodies; Martha L. Finch, Dissenting Bodies: Corporealities in Early New England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). Scholarship on religion and emotion includes John Corrigan, “‘Habits from the Heart’: The American Enlightenment and Religious Ideas about Emotion,” Journal of Religion 73, no. 2 (April 1993): 183–189; John Corrigan, Eric Crump, and John Kloos, Emotion and Religion: A Critical Assessment and Annotated Bibliography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2000); John Corrigan, ed., Feeling Religion (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2018); John Corrigan, Business of the Heart: Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Monique Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bordieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion,” History and Theory 51, no. 2 (May 2012): 193–220; Heather D. Curtis, “House of Healing: Sacred Space, Spiritual Practice, and the Transformation of Female Suffering in the Faith Cure Movement, 1870–1900,” Church History 75, no. 3 (Sept. 2006): 598–611; Phyllis Mack, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Martha Thomhave Blauvelt, The Work of the Heart: Young Women and Emotion, 1780–1830 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), especially chapter 5; Nicole Eustace, Passion Is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), especially chapter 5.
15 Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, 98–100.
16 Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?”; Fuller, The Body of Faith, ix.
17 Doyle, Maternal Bodies, 63.
18 Mary Fissell shows that identification with Eve resulted in part from Protestants’ emphasis on original sin, which shifted women's self-image from one reflecting Mary to one reflecting Eve. Philippa Koch, by contrast, argues that Mary remained an important maternal figure for Protestants as well as Catholics into the nineteenth century (after which Mary remained important for Catholics). See Koch, The Course of God's Providence, 155–162; Fissell, Vernacular Bodies, 46–47. On Quaker women, see Lauren F. Winner, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practice in the Elite Households of Eighteenth-Century Virginia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 51. On race and labor pain, see Morgan, Laboring Women, 40, 47. Because Europeans assumed that African and indigenous women did not bear the curse of Eve, they did not meet the standards of white womanhood.
19 On Mothers in Israel, see Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1998), chapter 4.
20 Koch, The Course of God's Providence, 155–162.
21 For affliction, see Winiarski, “Lydia Proutt's Dreadfullest Thought,” 362–363; Winiarski, Darkness Falls on the Land of Light, 63n66.
22 Fuller, Spirituality in the Flesh, 131–135; Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?,” 18; Fuller, The Body of Faith, xi; Elaine Forman Crane, “‘I Have Suffer'd Much Today’: The Defining Force of Pain in Early America,” in Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America, ed. Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Fredrika J. Teute (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 372–375.
23 Ruth Bloch, “The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America,” Signs 13, no. 1 (Autumn 1987): 37–58; Richard Dagger, Rights, Citizenship, and Republican Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), chapter 1; Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella, Introduction to Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, reissue edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), xv–xvi; J. A. G. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, revised edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), chapter IIB; Philip Gould, “Virtue, Ideology, and the American Revolution,” American Literary History 5, no. 3 (Autumn 1993): 564–577. As Bloch demonstrates, the concept of virtue later took another turn in which it came to mean feminine morality and sexual purity.
24 Talal Asad, on the other hand, questions the link between pain and moral agency or empowerment. See Asad, “Agency and Pain: An Exploration,” Culture and Religion 1, no. 1 (May 2008): 45–51.
25 Eustace, Passion Is the Gale, 298; Lindman, “To have a gradual weaning & be ready & wiling to resign all,” 503; Ruth Bloch, Gender and Morality in Anglo-American Culture, 1650–1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), chapter 3; Doyle, Maternal Bodies, 4–7. The eighteenth-century model of resignation mediated religious responses to pain for later generations of women. See Curtis, “House of Healing.”
26 For perspectives on pain perception in historical contexts, see Joanna Bourke, “What Is Pain? A History ‘The Prothero Lecture,’” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. Sixth Series, 23: 155–173; Klassen, “Sacred Maternities and Postbiomedical Bodies,” 775–809; David B. Morris, “What We Make of Pain,” The Wilson Quarterly 18, no. 4 (Autumn 1994): 8–26.
27 Lindman, “To have a gradual weaning & be ready & wiling to resign all,” 502.
28 Entry on December 22, 1747, Richardson Diary. Richardson gave birth to her son, Luther, on July 14, 1748. See also Seeman, Pious Persuasions, 189.
29 Susan E. Klepp and Karin Wulf, eds., The Diary of Hannah Callender Sansom: Sense and Sensibility in the Age of the American Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 197, 212–214. Women often used words like “unwell” to describe the discomforts of pregnancy and labor. Sansom gave birth to her first child on June 1, 1763.
30 Lacey, ed., The World of Hannah Heaton, 54.
31 Cotton Mather, Elizabeth in Her Holy Retirement: An Essay to Prepare a Pious Woman for Her Lying In (Boston: B. Greene, 1710), 2; Catherine M. Scholten, “‘On the Importance of the Obstetrick Art’: Changing Customs of Childbirth in America, 1760 to 1825,” William and Mary Quarterly 34, no. 3 (July 1977): 427–428.
32 For literature on the Puritan theology of affliction, see Ross W. Beales, “The Smiles and Frowns of Providence,” in Wonders of the Invisible World, 1600–1900, ed. Peter Benes, Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, Annual Proceedings (Boston: Boston University Press, 1995); Crane, “I Have Suffer'd Much Today”; Winiarski, “Lydia Proutt's Dreadfullest Thought,” 362n6; Winiarski, Darkness Falls on the Land of Light, 63n66.
33 Figures for maternal deaths in early America were far lower than comparable rates in Great Britain, possibly because the American population was mostly rural. Higher maternal death rates correlated with cities, where disease spread more easily. According to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, maternal death rates in rural New England in the early republic ranged from 1 to 6 per 1,000 births—far fewer than corresponding numbers for London or Dublin. In Newport, Rhode Island (urban, but not a metropolis), Ezra Stiles recorded 10 maternal deaths out of 1,600 deliveries between 1760 and 1764. Maternal death rates were higher in the South (between 6 to 20 deaths per 1,000 deliveries), partly because of the higher incidence of disease and poor maternal care for enslaved women. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale, 172–173; Seeman, Pious Persuasions, 56, 189; Doyle, Maternal Bodies, 129–130.
34 Devotional prayer books and advice books were published on both sides of the Atlantic and circulated widely. Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 24–26.
35 Mather, Elizabeth in Her Holy Retirement, 6–7. Emphasis is in the original text.
36 A “winding sheet” is a shroud in which a corpse is wrapped for burial. John Oliver, A Present to Be Given to Teeming Women, by Their Husbands, or Friends (Boston: Benjamin Harris, 1694), 3. Emphasis in the original text.
37 Catholic and Protestant women often chose to take communion before childbirth. Winiarski, “Lydia Proutt's Dreadfullest Thought,” 376; Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 22–23.
38 Coughlin, One Colonial Woman's World, 41–44.
39 Lacey, ed., The World of Hannah Heaton, 74.
40 Susan M. Stabile, “A Doctrine of Signatures,” 122; Entry on July 14, 1748, Richardson Diary. Richardson mistakenly identified this verse as part of Psalm 45, whereas it is actually from Psalm 50. For more on Richardson, see Seeman, Pious Persuasions, especially chapter 6.
41 Quoted in Doyle, Maternal Bodies, 81.
42 An author of a memoir (lebensläufe) typically wrote part of the document, and the surviving spouse or congregants would complete it posthumously, as Margaretha Edmonds's fellow congregants did. Katherine M. Faull, Moravian Women's Memoirs: Their Related Lives, 1750–1820, (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997), xxxi, 33–34.
43 Winner, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith, 59.
44 Infant mortality rates are more difficult to generalize than maternal mortality rates, since the statistics varied depending on urban or rural setting, race, class, and family size. Susan Klepp estimates that among eighteenth-century families in Philadelphia, families bearing 4 to 6 children experienced an infant mortality rate of 163 stillbirths or infant deaths per 1,000 births. Families with nine or more children experienced 224 stillbirths or infant deaths per 1,000 births. In New England, infant death or stillbirth occurred in 10 to 30 percent of all births, with greater frequency in poor families. Klepp, Revolutionary Conceptions, 61n7; Winiarski, “Lydia Proutt's Dreadfullest Thought,” 377; Maris A. Vinovskis, “Angels’ Heads and Weeping Willows: Death in Early America,” in Gerald B. Moran and Maris A. Vinovskis, ed. Religion, Family, and the Life Course: Explorations in the Social History of Early America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 215.
45 Eustace, Passion Is the Gale, 289–93, 300–301.
46 Undated entry in February 1753, Richardson Diary. This was not an infant loss, as her son had recently turned four, but her emotional response was similar to other mothers’ reactions to lost infants.
47 Winiarski, “Lydia Proutt's Dreadfullest Thought,” 390.
48 Entry on October 12, 1752, Richardson Diary.
49 Ann Randolph Page, letters to Mary Lee Custis, September 10, 1806, and March 29, 1807, Section 9, Mary Lee (Fitzhugh) Custis Correspondence, 1800–1807, Mary Lee Custis Papers, 1694–1917, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond.
50 Coughlin, One Colonial Woman's World, 41.
51 Entry on July 14, 1748, Richardson Diary.
52 Entries on January 17, 1749/50 and August 26, 1760, Mary Dodge Cleaveland Diary, 1742–1762, John Cleaveland Papers, MSS. 204, box 2, folder 11, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Rowley, Massachusetts. The phrase “living mother of a living child” was in common use. See, for example, Lindman, “‘To have a gradual weaning & be ready & wiling to resign all,’” 503. References to God's appearance at the childbed were similarly common. See Seeman, Pious Persuasions, 57.
53 Margaret Morris, 1760, quoted in Eustace, Passion is the Gale, 297–298.
54 Quoted in Doyle, Maternal Bodies, 52.
55 Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale, especially chapters 5 and 7; Koch, The Course of God's Providence, especially chapters 3 and 5.
56 Kathleen Brown, “Murderous Uncleanness: The Body of Female Infanticide in Puritan New England,” in A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America, ed. Janet Moore Lindman and Michele Lise Tarter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 86–87.
57 Rebecca J. Tannenbaum, The Healer's Calling: Women and Medicine in Early New England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 411. After Samuel Sewall's first child was born in 1677, his cousin “said we ought to lay scarlet on the Child's head for that it had received some harm.” Samuel Sewall, Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–1729, vol. 1, Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 5th Series (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1878), 40.
58 Whereas New England families used the Bible, Anglican families used the Book of Common Prayer for similar purposes. This tradition had a long history in Europe. David Cressy, “Books as Totems in Seventeenth-Century England and New England,” The Journal of Library History 21, no. 1 (Winter 1986): 98–99, 101; Winner, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith, 111.
59 Winner, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith, 28–29
60 Richard Wertz and Dorothy Wertz coined the term “social childbirth”; see Wertz and Wertz, Lying-In, 2; see also Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale, 61, 380n65.
61 Tannenbaum, The Healer's Calling, 50; Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety.
62 A “midwife” was a person who oversaw labor, regardless of that person's gender. The word root for “mid” means “with,” so a midwife was literally someone who was with the wife (which was interchangeable in middle English for “mother”). Patricia Watson reports that 21 percent of New England ministers owned books on midwifery, which exceeded the percentage of physicians who did. See Patricia Watson, “The ‘Hidden Ones’: Women and Healing in Colonial New England,” in Peter Benes, ed. Medicine and Healing, The Dublin Seminar for New England Folk Life Annual Proceedings, 1990 (Boston: Boston University, 1992), 25–33; Tannenbaum, The Healer's Calling, 76, 78. For more on Gershom Bulkeley, see Thomas Jodziewicz, “The 1699 Diary of Gershom Bulkeley of Wethersfield, Connecticut,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 131, no. 4 (December 1987): 425–441. For more on Ebenezer Parkman, see Francis G. Walett, ed., “The Diary of Ebenezer Parkman, 1719–1728,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 71 (1961): 93–227 and subsequent volumes. See Richard J. Hooker, ed., The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution: The Journal and Other Writings of Charles Woodmason, Anglican Itinerant (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953), 53.
63 Tannenbaum, The Healer's Calling, xii–xvi.
64 John Ruston Pagan, Anne Orthwood's Bastard: Sex and Law in Early Virginia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 80–82; Tannenbaum, The Healer's Calling, xvi.
65 Wertz and Wertz, Lying-In, 7, 35; Winner, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith, 200n35.
66 Tricia T. Pyne, “Ritual and Practice in the Maryland Catholic Community, 1634–1776,” U.S. Catholic Historian 26, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 35–36.
67 Lacey, ed., The World of Hannah Heaton, 48.
68 Katherine M. Faull, ed. Speaking to Body and Soul: Instructions for the Moravian Choir Helpers, 1785–86 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), 136.
69 New England families posted prayer bills (or prayer notes) to request prayers for a newborn or postpartum mother. Winiarski, “Lydia Proutt's Dreadfullest Thought,” 374; Samuel Sewall, Diary of Samuel Sewall, 36, 40, 394, entries on February 16, 1674, April 1, 1674, November 21, 1694, and November 22, 1694; Judith S. Graham, Puritan Family Life: The Diary of Samuel Sewall (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000), 20, 24–48; Tannenbaum, The Healer's Calling, xi, 48, 61.
70 Francis G. Walett, ed., “The Diary of Ebenezer Parkman, 1719–1728,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 71 (1961), entry on September 14, 1725, 1118–1119.
71 John Craig, “Autobiography, 1709–1770,” 25–26, Virginia Historical Society.
72 John Corrigan, “Emotion and Religious Community in America,” Religion Compass 4, no. 7 (July 2010): 452–461.
73 The length and events of the lying-in period varied widely. Poorer families and large families could not afford to lose a month of the mother's labor, and enslaved women were allowed minimal time. Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale, 188–193; Tannenbaum, The Healer's Calling, 48; Winner, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith, 49; Adrian Wilson, “The Ceremony of Childbirth and Its Interpretation,” in Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England: Essays in Memory of Dorothy Mclaren, ed. Valerie Fildes (London: Routledge, 2014), 75–76.
74 The Baptists favored baptism only after a conversion experience. Quakers objected to using water as a purifying symbol because they believed infants were born without sin. See E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 53–55, 76–77, 125, 248, 269.
75 Parents had limited choices for baptism if they lived far from churches of their own choosing, so they might settle for clergy of other denominations. See Anne S. Brown and David D. Hall, “Family Strategies and Religious Practice: Baptism and the Lord's Supper in Early New England,” in David D. Hall, ed. Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of a Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 41–68; Graham, Puritan Family Life, chapter 2; Winner, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith, 35–55; Adrian Wilson, “The Ceremony of Childbirth and Its Interpretation,” 79–80; Nicholas M. Beasley, “Domestic Rituals: Marriage and Baptism in the British Plantation Colonies, 1650–1780,” Anglican and Episcopal History 76, no. 3 (September 2007): 343–353.
76 The Halfway Covenant, which Puritans adopted in 1662, was a compromise that offered baptism to children of baptized but unconverted church members, so these children could join the congregation. Some version of this agreement remained in place in many Congregational churches through the nineteenth century. See Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), chapter 5; Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 58–61.
77 In plantation colonies, laws to ensure that baptism did not confer freedom removed obstacles for clergy who proselytized to enslaved people. Beasley, “Domestic Rituals,” 352–353; Winner, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith, 40.
78 Faull, Speaking to Body and Soul, 136.
79 Sewall, Diary of Samuel Sewall, vol. 1, 1, 40.
80 Beasley, “Domestic Rituals,” 344; Hooker, The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution, 13.
81 Catholic Christian Instructed was first printed in London in 1737 but was available in the North American colonies. Pyne, “Ritual and Practice in the Maryland Catholic Community” 40–42; Richard Challoner, The Catholick Christian Instructed in the Sacraments, Sacrifice, Ceremonies, and Observances of the Church (Philadelphia: C. Talbot, 1786).
82 Ashley Bowen frequently noted his roles in baptisms (either as a parent or godparent), and he recorded who stood for his own children's ceremonies. See Philip Chadwick Foster Smith, ed., The Journals of Ashley Bowen (1728–1813) of Marblehead, vol. 1 (Boston: Peabody Museum of Salem and The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1973), 232; Winner, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith, 42.
83 Winner, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith, 35–47; Beasley, “Domestic Rituals,” 343–48.
84 Pyne, “Ritual and Practice in the Maryland Catholic Community,” 27n35, 35–37.
85 The Vestry of St. Paul's Parish, Petition Against Rev. William Tibbs, February 15, 1715, mss 2018, Maryland Center for History and Culture, Baltimore, Maryland.
86 Beasley, “Domestic Rituals,” 350–351.
87 Its origins may lie in the Jewish mikvah, a ritual bath that marks women as cleansed and ready to resume sexual relations with their husbands after menstruation or childbirth. Puritans rejected the rite because they believed it derived from Catholicism. However, New Englanders often noted a mother's return to church after childbirth. See Ross W. Beales, “Nursing and Weaning in an Eighteenth-Century New England Household,” in Families and Children, ed. Peter Benes, Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife: Annual Proceedings, 52, 62.
88 David Cressy, “Purification, Thanksgiving, and the Churching of Women in Post-Reformation England,” Past and Present, no. 141 (1993); Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 197–232; Donna K. Ray, “A View from the Childwife's Pew: The Development of Rites around Childbirth in the Anglican Communion,” Anglican and Episcopal History 69, no. 4 (December 2000): 443–473; Winner, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith, 47–49; Pyne, “Ritual and Practice in the Maryland Catholic Community” 36–37.
89 Richard Challoner, The Catholick Christian Instructed, 187–188.
90 Ray, “A View from the Childwife's Pew,” 456–457.
91 The lovefeast is a common Christian ritual (notably among the Methodists and Moravians). It was meant to teach humility and reinforce spiritual fellowship. Craig Atwood, Community of the Cross: Moravian Piety in Colonial Bethlehem (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 161–165, 179.
92 Moravians grouped their members into choirs, which were divisions that governed prayer, worship, living arrangements, household economy, and sexual behavior. Atwood, Community of the Cross, 173–178; Faull, Speaking to Body and Soul, 1–22.
93 Entry on April 17, 1744, Kenneth G. Hamilton, ed., The Bethlehem Diary, vol. 1, 1742–1744 (Bethlehem, Penn.: Archives of the Moravian Church, 1971), 194. Choirs held quarter-of-an-hour services, so named because of their length, which featured daily texts, hymns, or prayers.
94 “A Letter to John Rutledge,” in Hooker, The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution, 275.
95 For the role of religion in the North Carolina Regulation, see Marjoleine Kars, Breaking Loose Together: The Regulator Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), chapters 4–6.
96 Winner, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith, 40.
97 Entry on November 29, 1744, Hamilton, ed., The Bethlehem Diary, vol. 1, 212.
98 The Indian Tribes on the St. John's, Passamaquoddy, and Adjacent Rivers, Petition to John Carroll, May 17, 1791, Maryland Province Archives, box 57, folder 13, mss 202 K3, Georgetown University Booth Family Center for Special Collections, Washington, D.C.
99 Ray, “A View from the Childwife's Pew,” 445.