| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Karin E. Gedge. Without Benefit of Clergy: Women and the Pastoral Relationship in Nineteenth-Century American Culture. (Religion in America Series.) New York: Oxford University Press. 2003. Pp. viii, 290. $49.95.

Lyman Beecher, vigorous defender of Calvinist orthodoxy and patriarch of a large and influential family of reformers, was skittish about his prospects as a young minister-in-training. His parishioners, he feared, would not be as appreciative of his pastoral talents as his peers and future historians would prove to be. "The people watch me as narrowly as a mouse is watched by a cat," he complained in his diary (p. 146). This cat-and-mouse relationship between American pastors and their (largely) female congregants—distant, adversarial, suspended uneasily between the need for mutual cooperation and the fear of unhealthy dependency—neatly captures the essence of Karin E. Gedge's argument. Far from being the "uneasy alliance" first sketched by Ann Douglas some thirty years ago in The Feminization of American Culture (1977), an alliance forged by practical necessity (women outnumbered men in the pews in all churches throughout the century) as well as by common interest, the relationship between ministers and the women they served in the nineteenth century was marked by mutual distrust, dislike, and even fear. Examples of ministers who abused their power by emotionally and sexually manipulating the impressionable women in their charge were everywhere on display in nineteenth-century popular culture, but sorting out who was the prey and who the predator in these fraught relationships is no simple matter, as the young Beecher learned to his discomfort.

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