Drawing on literature, correspondence, sermons, legal writing, and newspaper publishing, this book offers a new account women's political participation and the process of religious disestablishment. Scholars have long known that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American women wrote pious, sentimental stories, but this book uses biographical and archival methods to understand their religious concerns as entry points into the era's debates about democratic conditions of possibility and the role of religion in a republic. Beginning with the early republic's constitutional and electoral contests about the end of religious establishment and extending through the nineteenth century, Murphy argues that Federalist women and Federalist daughters of the next generation adapted that party's ideas and fears by promoting privatized Christianity with public purpose. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catharine Sedgwick, Lydia Sigourney, Judith Sargent Murray, and Sally Sayward Wood authorised themselves as Federalism's literary curators, and in doing so they imagined new configurations of religion and revolution, faith and rationality, public and private. They did so using literary form, writing in gothic, sentimental, and regionalist genres to update the Federalist concatenation of religion, morality, and government in response to changing conditions of secularity and religious privatization in the new republic. Murphy shows that their project both complicates received narratives of separation of church and state and illuminates the problem of democracy and belief in postsecular America.

About the Author
Gretchen Murphy is the Arthur J. Thaman and Wilhelmina Dore Thaman Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire (Duke University Press) and Shadowing the White Man's Burden: U.S. Imperialism and the Problem of the Color Line (New York University Press).

Reviews
New England Women Writers, Secularity, and the Federalist Politics of Church and State is a genuinely significant contribution to the study of women writers, early debates over religion and secularity, and the enduring nature of a supposedly dead political tradition. Moreover, it spotlights several underappreciated texts worthy of further study and highlights an era of literary history that is often squeezed into obscurity between the turbulent 1790s and the "American Renaissance." Murphy should thus be heartily applauded for digging deep into what is often mischaracterized as a shallow period of literary history. * Scott Slawinski, Western Michigan University, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature *
Gretchen Murphy provides a generative starting point for tracing the intersectional relationships among religion, gender, politics, religion, and literature in future scholarship. * Keri Holt, American Literary History *
In this fresh approach to the field, Murphy's study moves beyond the well-established what and why of women's literary engagement with the political and religious arenas to connect the details of when, where, and how. * Jenifer B. Elmore, Palm Beach Atlantic University, Early American Literature *



Book Information
ISBN 9780198864950
Author Gretchen Murphy
Format Hardback
Page Count 240
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 430g
Dimensions(mm) 222mm * 145mm * 21mm