Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T10:28:55.616Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Mary Lyon, the Founding of Mount Holyoke College, and the Cultural Revival of Jonathan Edwards

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Joseph Conforti
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Recent studies of the Second Great Awakening have stressed the strong appeal of evangelical religion to female worshippers. The revival has been portrayed as a “women's awakening” that nurtured “bonds of womanhood,” promoted female benevolence, and shaped antebellum canons of domesticity. Mary Lyon (1797-1849) and the founding of Mount Holyoke Seminary, which opened in 1837, have not gone unnoticed by historians of a women's awakening. In a follow-up essay to her important study of Catherine Beecher, for example, Kathryn Kish Sklar established the educational significance of Mount Holyoke and situated Lyon's efforts in the context of the Second Great Awakening. Mount Holyoke's innovations included secure financial support funded by the evangelical community at large; a resultant low cost that enabled students from modest and even poor backgrounds to enroll; and an intellectually rigorous curriculum that eschewed “ornamentations” such as dancing and the cultivation of gentility.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , Winter 1993 , pp. 69 - 89
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 1993

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. Sklar, Kathryn Kish, “The Founding of Mount Holyoke College,” in Women of America: A History, ed. Berkin, Carol Ruth and Norton, Mary Beth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 177–201.Google Scholar On women and the Second Great Awakening, see Cott, Nancy F., The Bonds of Womanhood: “Women's Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977);Google Scholar Epstein, Barbara Leslie, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981);Google Scholar and Ryan, Mary P., Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

2. Green, Elizabeth Alder, Mary Lyon and Mount Holyoke: Opening the Gates (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1979), 337-38.Google Scholar Older studies of Lyon also ignore or downplay her Edwardseanism; see, for example, Beth Gilchrist, Bradford, The Life of Mary Lyon (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910).Google Scholar One has to return to mid-nineteenth-century interpretations of Lyon's life to begin to recover the evangelical subculture that profoundly influenced her.

3. Cole, Arthur C., A Hundred Years of Mount Holyoke College: The Evolution of an Educational Ideal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940), 102-3.Google Scholar A useful recent social history of Mount Holyoke's first students completely ignores the Edwardsean orientation of Lyon and the seminary and sees her as a disciple of Charles G. Finney. See lisa Natale Drakeman, “Seminary Sisters: Mount Holyoke's First Students, 1837-1849” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1988).

4. On the cultural revival of Jonathan Edwards and the creation of an American revivalistic tradition during the Second Great Awakening, see Conforti, Joseph, “The Invention of the Great Awakening, 1795-1842,” Early American Literature 26 (1991): 99–119;Google Scholar and Conforti, Joseph, “Edwardsians, Unitarians, and the Memory of the Great Awakening, 1800-1840” in American Unitarianism, 1805-1865, ed. Wright, Conrad (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society and Northeastern University Press, 1989), 31–50.Google Scholar On the growth of the New Divinity movement, see David Kling, “Clergy and Society in the Second Great Awakening in Connecticut, 1798-1820” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1985); and Conforti, Joseph, Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement: Calvinism, the Congregational Ministry, and Reform in New England between the Great Awakenings (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1981), chap. 11.Google Scholar

5. My generalizations about the publishing history of Edwards's works are based on the comprehensive bibliographies in Johnson, Thomas H., The Printed Writings of Jonathan Edwards: A Bibliography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940;Google Scholar repr., New York: Burt Franklin, 1968); and Lesser, M. X., Jonathan Edwards: A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981).Google Scholar

6. Butler, Jon, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 164-65;Google Scholar Butler, Jon, “Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretative Fiction,” Journal of American History 69 (1982): 305-25;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Conforti, “The Invention of the Great Awakening,” 100-106.

7. Todd, John, Address at the Laying of the Corner Stone of the Edwards Church, July 4,1833 (Northampton, Mass.: J. H. Butler, 1834), 50.Google Scholar

8. Hitchcock, Edward, The Power of Christian Benevolence Illustrated in the Life and Labors of Mary Lyon (Northampton, Mass.: Hopkins, Bridgman, 1851; repr., 1855), 212-13.Google Scholar Hitchcock's work went through nine editions in its first decade of publication. See also Thayer, William, Poor Girl and True Woman: or, Elements of Woman s Success Drawn From the Life of Mary Lyon and Others (Boston: Gould, Lincoln, 1859).Google Scholar

9. See Conforti, Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement, chap. 11. Lyon's great-grandfather was an Edwardsean who withdrew from the church at South Hadley and moved to Ashfield after Edwards's pure church admission requirements were abandoned. See Green, Mary Lyon and Mount Holyoke, 6.

10. Quoted in Sklar, “The Founding of Mount Holyoke College,” 182.

11. On Emerson's life and activities, see Emerson, Ralph, Life of Rev. Joseph Emerson, Pastor of the Third Congregational Church in Beverly, Mass., and subsequently Principal of a Female Seminary (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1834).Google Scholar

12. Emerson, Joseph, Articles of Faith, and Form of Covenant, Adopted by the Third Congregational Church in Beverly, at Its Formation, Nov. 9,1802… ,To Which Are Added Resolutions of President Edwards (Boston: E. Lincoln, 1807);Google Scholar Johnson, The Printed Writings of Jonathan Edwards, 101-2.

13. Emerson, Joseph, The Evangelical Primer, Containing a Minor Doctrinal Catechism and a Minor Historical Catechism, … (Charlestown, Mass.: Samuel T. Armstrong, 1809;Google Scholar repr., Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1824); Emerson, The Life of Joseph Emerson, 192.

14. Quoted in Sklar, “The Founding of Mount Holyoke College,” 185.

15. Emerson, Life of Joseph Emerson, 284. See also Fisk, Fidelia, Recollections of Mary Lyon, with Selections from Her Instruction to the Pupils in Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary (Boston: American Tract Society, 1866), 1,47–50.Google Scholar

16. Green, Mary Lyon and Mount Holyoke, 27,162; Hitchcock, The Power of Christian Benevolence, 389; Emerson, Life of Joseph Emerson, 154.

17. Hitchcock, The Power of Christian Benevolence, 261.

18. Green, Mary Lyon and Mount Holyoke, 26.

19. Cuyler, Theodore, ‘'Mount Holyoke and Mary Lyon,” in Reminiscences of Mary Lyon (Chicago: C. H. Blakely, 1880), 36.Google Scholar Lyon's clerical supporters and fund-raising activities are detailed in Hitchcock, The Power of Christian Benevolence, 187-238. For an interesting history of the origins and early development of New England men's colleges, including the activities of the evangelical American Education Society (which Amhersf s Heman Humphrey served as president), see Allmendinger, David F., Jr., Paupers and Scholars: The Transformation of Student Life in Nineteenth-Century New England (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975).Google Scholar

20. Hitchcock, The Power of Christian Benevolence, 466.

21. Sweet, Leonard I., The Minister's Wife: Her Role in Nineteenth-Century American Evangelicalism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 38.Google Scholar

22. Humphrey, Heman, The Shining Path: A Sermon Preached in South-Hadley at the Funeral of Miss Mary Lyon, March 8,1849 (Northampton, Mass.: J. and L. Metcalf, 1849), 14;Google Scholar Allmendinger, Paupers and Scholars, 119.

23. Hitchcock, The Power of Christian Benevolence, 23,132-57; Green, Mary Lyon and Mount Holyoke, 26.

24. Fisk, Recollections of Mary Lyon, 77-78.

25. Ibid., 260; see also Cuyler, Reminiscences of Mary Lyon, 30.

26. Fisk, Recollections of Mary Lyon, 93,104; Hitchcock, The Power of Christian Benevolence, 453.

27. Quoted in Drakeman, “Seminary Sisters,” 86; see also Fisk, Recollections of Mary Lyon, 103-4,148-79.

28. Quoted in Drakeman, “Seminary Sisters,” 95.

29. Hitchcock, The Power of Christian Benevolence, 247; Fisk, Recollections of MaryLyon, 183-84.

30. See the suggestive discussion of Lyon as a moral philosopher in Drakeman, “Seminary Sisters,” 38-39.

31. Douglas, Ann, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977).Google Scholar Susan Juster has recently argued, after analyzing conversion narratives written during the Second Great Awakening, that the religious “process of self-abasement and unconditional surrender” to the Divine may be seen as an “allegorical rendering of prevailing notions of gender and authoritarian relations.” Evangelical men, far more than women, appear to have been attracted to a legalistic, contractual, “rule governed approach” to salvation consistent with the piety to moralism transition in American theology. Juster, “ ‘In a Different Voice': Male and Female Narratives of Religious Conversion in Post-Revolutionary America,” American Quarterly 41 (1989): 34, 39,47. See also Richard Rabinowitz's discussion of female devotionalism and quest for personal holiness in The Spiritual Self in Everyday Life: The Transformation of Personal Religious Experience in Nineteenth-Century New England (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989), 153-216.

32. See Hutchinson's and Sarah Edwards's conversions in Edwards, Jonathan, The Great Awakening: A Faithful Narrative, ed. Goen, C. C. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 191-99, 331-41.Google Scholar On Edwards's promotion of female spirituality, see the discussion in Karlsen, Carol F. and Crumpacker, Laurie, The Journal of Esther Edwards Burr, 1754-1757 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 6–7,21;Google Scholar and Porterfield, Amanda, Feminine Spirituality in America: From Sarah Edwards to Martha Graham (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), esp. 42–44;Google Scholar see also Porterfield, Amanda, “Women's Attraction to Puritanism,” Church History 60 (1991): 196–209.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On Hopkins, see West, Stephen, ed., Sketches of the Life of the Late Rev. Samuel Hopkins, D.D. (Hartford, Conn.: Hudson, Goodwin, 1805), 41–42.Google Scholar

33. Conforti, Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement, chaps. 7 and 8; Valeri, Mark, “The Economic Thought of Jonathan Edwards,” Church History 60 (1991): 54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a suggestive recent work that explores the relationship between evangelical religion and a changing economic order, see Hackett, David G., The Rude Hand of Innovation: Religion and Social Order in Albany, New York, 1652-1836 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).Google Scholar

34. Hitchcock, The Power of Christian Benevolence, 235. Hitchcock reprinted Lyon's fund-raising circulars.

35. Ibid.

36. Quoted in Sklar, “The Founding of Mount Holyoke College,” 196.

37. Hitchcock, The Power of Christian Benevolence, 212-13.

38. Fisk, Recollections of Mary Lyon, 108; Drakeman, “Seminary Sisters,” 65-101; Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women's Colleges from Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s (New York: Knopf, 1984), 18.Google Scholar On the rural New England backgrounds of Mount Holyoke students, see Allmendinger, David F., “Mount Holyoke Students Encounter the Need for Life Planning, 1837-1850” History of Education Quarterly 19 (Spring 1979): 27–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39. Fisk, Recollections of Mary Lyon, 37.

40. This is Leonard Sweef s term; see The Minister's Wife, 91. For a help ful study of missionary activities at Mount Holyoke, see Thomas, Louise Porter, Seminary Militant: An Account of the Missionary Movement at Mount Holyoke Seminary and College (South Hadley, Mass.: Mount Holyoke College, 1937).Google Scholar

41. Lyon, Mary, Missionary Offering, or, Christian Sympathy, Personal Responsibility, and the Present Crisis in Foreign Missions (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1843), 16,52-53,83,95-96.Google Scholar

42. Ibid., 16.

43. Conforti, Joseph, “Jonathan Edwards's Most Popular Work: The Life of David Brainerd’ and Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Culture,” Church History 54 (1985): 188–201;CrossRefGoogle Scholar see also Brumberg, Joan Jacobs, Mission for Life: The Judson Family and American Evangelical Culture (New York: Free Press, 1980;Google Scholar repr., New York: New York University Press, 1984), chap. 1; and Gillespie, Joanne, “ The Clear Leadings of Providence': Pious Memoirs and the Problems of Self-Realization for Women in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the Early Republic 5 (1985): 197–221.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

44. Hooker, E. W., The Cultivation of the Missionary Spirit in Our Literary and Theological Institutions (Boston: T. R. Marvin, 1845), 10.Google Scholar

45. Conforti, Joseph, “David Brainerd and the Nineteenth-Century Missionary Movement,” Journal of the Early Republic 5 (1985): 309-29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

46. For background details, see Petit, Norman, Introduction to The Life of David Brainerd, by Edwards, Jonathan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).Google Scholar

47. Sprague, William B., Annals of the American Pulpit, 9 vols. (New York: R. Carter, 1857), 3:116.Google Scholar

48. The romanticizing of the Brainerd-Jerusha relationship is discussed in Patricia Tracy, “The Romance of David Brainerd and Jerusha Edwards,” in Three Essays in Honor of the Publication of “The Life of David Brainerd,” ed. Wilson H. Kimnach (New Haven, Conn.: privately published, 1985), 28-36.

49. Grimshaw, Patricia, Paths of Duty: American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth-Century Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989),Google Scholar esp. chap. 1; see also Zwiep, Mary, Pilgrim Path: The First Company of Women Missionaries to Hawaii (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991);Google Scholar and Beaver, R. Pierce, American Protestant Women in World Mission: History of the First Feminist Movement in North America, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980).Google Scholar

50. See, for example, Peabody, William P. O., Life of David Brainerd (New York: Harper, 1837), 363-65.Google Scholar

51. Grimshaw, Paths of Duty, 9.

52. Fisk, Recollections of Mary Lyon, 161-74; Hitchcock, The Power of Christian Benevolence, 346-71; Cuyler, “Mount Holyoke and Mary Lyon” 36; Thomas, Seminary Militant, 29-35.

53. Edwards, Jonathan, Account of Abigail Hutchinson, A Young Woman, Hopefully Converted at Northampton, Mass. 1734 (Andover, Mass.: Flagg, Gould, 1816);Google Scholar Johnson, The Printed Writings of Jonathan Edwards, 103-4.

54. The Life of President Edwards (Philadelphia: American Sunday School Union, 1832), 123; Dwight, Sereno Edwards, The Life of President Edwards, in Works of President Edwards, 10 vols. (New York: S. Converse, 1829), 1:171-89;Google Scholar Miller, Samuel, Life of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Harper, 1837), 12, 55–56.Google Scholar The “companion” description is used by Leonard Sweet, who also quotes the marriage manual; see The Minister's Wife, 26.

55. This female hagiography included missionary memoirs and works such as the following: Sharp, T., The Heavenly Sisters, or Biographical Sketches of the Lives of Eminently Pious Females … (New Haven: Whiting, 1822);Google Scholar Knapp, Samuel L., Female Biography; containing Notices of Distinguished Women in Different Nations and Ages (New York: Carpenter, 1834);Google Scholar and Hale, Sarah Josepha, Women's Record; or Sketches of Distinguished Women, from Creation to A.D. 1854 (New York: Harper, 1854).Google Scholar

56. Sklar, “The Founding of Mount Holyoke College,” 198.

57. Kuklick, Bruce, Edwards, Jonathan and American Philosophy” in Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience, ed. Hatch, Nathan O. and Stout, Harry S. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 248-9;Google Scholar Clifford, James, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 337-38.Google Scholar