What Did the Free Exercise of Religion Mean for Early American Women?

This paper will begin by asking why free white women were not the primary subjects when it came to arguments for the free exercise of religion in late eighteenth-century America. After all, they comprised the majority of churchgoers in most congregations. Cotton Mather’s 1692 observation that there are “more Godly women in the World, than there are Godly Men” expressed a common sentiment and attested to a well-documented pattern. Though the proportions varied from denomination to denomination and from decade to decade, the demographic predominance of women in American churches did not change. Moreover, white wives and daughters were as likely to attend dissenting churches as their husbands and fathers, and were much more likely to face household constraints on their worship decisions.

The absence of formal legal protections did not mean that colonial and early national women failed to exercise religious agency. Despite St. Paul’s oft-repeated injunction to “[l]et your women keep silence in the churches,” women occasionally signed church covenants and religious petitions, as well as serving as lay leaders and informal preachers during evangelical revivals. We also know that orthodox clergymen regarded women as especially susceptible to irregular beliefs and practices and especially prone to ensnaring their husbands in the same heretical webs. In other words, there were many reasons for the nation's constitutional framers to have taken cognizance of women when they framed provisions for liberty of conscience. But they never did.

Revisiting pivotal episodes in American religious, constitutional, and women’s history (including Anne Hutchinson’s antinomianism, female revivalism during the Great Awakening, and the reformation of divorce law) this paper will describe patterns of female dissent and its treatment over time, as well as the significance of its exclusion from contemporary and scholarly commentary on both the establishment of religion and its free exercise.