What Did Early American Religious Liberty Mean for American Women?

I was one of the many beneficiaries of Prof. Norton’s non-coddling undergraduate classroom environment, her refusal to tolerate conventional assumptions, and her rigorous attention to the relationship between ideas and social change. My research path veered away from hers, but the approach stuck.

Recently, my focus has been religious tolerance and intolerance in the U.S and I’ve even nosed my way into the nineteenth century. So I haven’t gotten any closer historiographically. But there’s a question I’m now pondering that brings me back to my roots (had I been a better student of Prof. Norton’s, I would have arrived here earlier). The question is: How did religious toleration impact early American women? Despite the prodigious work being done on their religious experiences, we really have no idea whether late eighteenth-century provisions for religious exercise meant anything to them. No one has systematically investigated the extent to which early American women could dissent from their husbands and fathers. Nor do we know much about the liberties servants enjoyed at a time when the “family” extended well beyond the nuclear family. How far could beliefs and practices diverge from those of male heads-of-house? Could early American women attend places of worship that they chose themselves? Could they believe what they pleased?

There is some intriguing evidence in the constitutional  record. For example, Maryland and Pennsylvania’s seventeenth-century toleration acts provided for the protection of “his or her Religion/faith,” while late eighteenth-century statutes only used male pronouns and possessive forms. However, contemporaries had very little to say about the rights of women generally, and even less to say about their religious rights. By probing the border of social, intellectual history, and legal history, and making particular use of the burgeoning research on female religious experience, I hope to raise some useful questions.