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Yearning for the New Age
Laura Holloway-Langford and Late Victorian Spirituality
By Sarah Diane Sasson Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2012 Sarah Diane Sasson
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-00187-0
CHAPTER 1
Sex, Suffrage, and Religious Seekers
In the decades after the Civil War, Brooklyn was a center for activist women who rejected Victorian notions of womanhood and who sought ways to express their spiritual yearnings beyond the bounds of mainstream religion. Overwhelmingly white, middle-class, and of Protestant heritage, this first generation of "New Women" broke down social and economic barriers and entered the work force as professionals and wage-earners. Many women lacked the opportunity for higher education, but a large number nevertheless followed careers as writers, journalists, and lecturers. Some obtained scientific and medical training allowing them to teach other women about their bodies and to lobby for sex education in the schools. Many women were active in movements for women's rights, while still others worked for an equitable economic system based on cooperation rather than competition. Despite their varying professional paths, they joined together to create organizations that supported women's quest for education, meaningful work, and self-development. These efforts to enlarge women's lives and to reform society were inspired and sustained by a changing religious climate. Rejecting traditional sources of authority and reformulating liberal Protestantism, such women were freed to envision a New Age of social, sexual, economic, and spiritual equality.
Women's organizations created a social space where members could express and contest new ideas, and where they could experiment with new social, political, and religious roles. A number of scholars have detailed the role of such societies as sites for "intimate" practices of reading and writing and as forces in progressive politics. Women's clubs, however, also nourished unconventional ideas and encouraged women to become religious and social leaders. Located between the private, domestic world of family life and the public world of work and politics, they established a milieu in which women could expand their religious knowledge and diversify their spiritual vocabularies.
Through the organizations they established and led, Laura Holloway-Langford and her friends transmitted radical ideas to the bourgeois women of Brooklyn. Unlike Helena Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society, or Mary Baker Eddy, who originated Christian Science, these women are largely forgotten; yet they were the cultural workers who disseminated new ideas to the American public. Because of their Anglo-Protestant heritage and their economic and social standing, they were able to "defy proprieties, pioneer new roles, and still insist upon a rightful place within the genteel world." Through the reforms they championed, the speeches they gave, and the papers they published, Laura Holloway-Langford and her colleagues helped to make Brooklyn comparable to Boston as a center of feminist and religious ferment. Their patronage of alternative religious views lent respectability to ideas that were once deemed radical but that by the twentieth century had come to seem ordinary.
CHANGING RELIGIOUS IDEAS
By 1870, a generation of Protestants in Brooklyn had been raised on a heady diet of rationalism and Transcendentalism, seemingly contradictory philosophies that were nevertheless often intertwined in the minds of those seeking new forms of spirituality. For many seekers, Emerson was a touchstone for their inner lives. Religiously liberal women frequently quoted him, finding in his writings sanction for their belief in an indwelling God who could be known intuitively. Through Emerson and other Transcendentalists, many intellectual Brooklyn women were also introduced to Eastern philosophy. At the same time, however, they were influenced by intense forms of Protestant rationalism, exemplified by the Free Religious Association that had been formed in 1867 and that opposed all forms of supernaturalism. Emerson was one of the Association's early members and a speaker at its first gathering. From its inception, the leadership of the Free Religious Association supported women's rights. Ednah Dow Cheney, a Boston social reformer and member of the New England Women's Club, was one of the founders. Speakers at the first convention included Robert Dale Owen, the utopian socialist and spiritualist; Lucretia Mott, women's rights activist; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, advocate of racial and sexual equality; and Isaac M. Wise, the liberal reform rabbi. At his temple, Wise had initiated accepting women as equals in the minyan required for synagogue prayers. Participants in the Free Religious Association were, for the most part, Unitarians, liberal Universalists, or Quakers, but the gathering included spiritualists, Jews, and the "unchurched." Professing an all-inclusive religion of humanity, the Association was also committed to the "scientific" study of religion.
Most Brooklyn women were not led to doubt the religious orthodoxies of their youth by studying the new biblical scholarship that challenged the supernatural claims of the Bible and the divinity of Jesus. Nor, with the exception of a few intellectuals such as Dr. Clemence Lozier, who advised alumnae of the New York Medical College to read "Darwin, Tindall, Herbert Spencer, Buckle, and Agassiz," did they read the original work of the seminal thinkers of their day. Instead, they came into contact with these ideas through popular magazines, newspapers, and even in works of fiction. For example, The Phrenological Journal was widely read, and in one single issue in 1870 readers could have found articles discussing evolution, the marriage problem, communism and taxation, dreams, dress reform, and the relative influence of Confucius versus Muhammed. The Phrenological Journal also kept close tabs on the Free Religious Association, and it reported how Octavius Brooks Frothingham, its first president, described the "religion of the future." According to him, it would be neither Catholic, nor Protestant, nor "technically Christian," but would be a democratic religion of humanity. The editor of the Phrenological Journal added his own version of the coming New Age: "We see [man] rising from his present sensualism into a higher mentality, and culminating in the perfect man God intended him to be. Buddhism, Mohammedanism, Judaism, Romanism , Protestantism will have their day, and man will outgrow his sectarian creed. Whether he can ever outgrow Christianity, is a question which no man of this generation can decide."
Yet a number of Laura Holloway-Langford's friends believed that they had indeed outgrown Christianity, and they worked for social reforms that would create a society that eschewed claims of religious exclusivity. In 1863, when she was only twenty, Mary C. Putnam had severed her membership in the Baptist Church, declaring her disbelief in the "orthodox system of Divinity" and rejecting doctrines of the Trinity, the Atonement, and Eternal Punishment. Putnam, whose father was the publisher George P. Putnam, received a medical degree from the New England Hospital in Boston and a doctorate from the Sorbonne. Subsequently, she married Abraham Jacobi, a German-Jewish immigrant and distinguished pediatrician who was head of the New York Medical Society. The Jacobis professed no religious creed, and considered themselves citizens of the world of liberal ideas.
Whether or not they affiliated themselves with a religious organization, progressive women in Brooklyn shared ideas that were widespread among the most liberal Protestants. They rejected Calvinism, especially the doctrines of original sin and the need for atonement. They decried sectarianism, and most believed that the "superstitions" of the past would be replaced by a universal religion. Rather than looking to the Church for answers, many women, like their male counterparts, turned to science as the source of knowledge. They had faith in evolution as the key to social and religious progress. Most of them discerned no contradiction between rational approaches to knowledge and a belief in a corresponding unseen world of the spirit. Many also argued that occult laws governed the spiritual world just as physical laws controlled the material world. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, many progressive women in Brooklyn considered themselves mystics, spiritualists, psychics, students of the occult, Theosophists, Buddhists, or Vedantins, some identifying simultaneously with several of these categories. By the end of the century, a new metaphysical lexicon—which included terms such as materialization, karma, reincarnation, and astral bodies—was almost as familiar to this group of Brooklyn women as the vocabulary of sin and redemption had been to the previous generation.
Ann Braude has shown that American women who adhered to "heterodox" theologies also tended to support a reform agenda including women's rights. Barbara Goldsmith has confirmed the connections between suffrage and spiritualism. Likewise, Joy Dixon has demonstrated that theosophy and feminism in England often went hand-in-hand. In the years immediately after the Civil War, many white, middle-class Brooklyn women held ideas about sexual relationships that would, in other parts of the country, have seemed even more radical than their religious ideas. They argued that sexual relations should be consensual and not under male control, that neither marriage nor motherhood should be the ultimate goal for every woman, and that divorce should be an option for a loveless marriage, which was considered death to the spirit. Yet far from advocating sexual permissiveness, many women were active in the social purity movement. They sought to apply the standards of sexual chastity to men equally as to women, redefining the ideal union between man and woman as spiritual. What they had in common was a rejection of Protestant orthodoxies that supported traditional gender arrangements, and they sought new spiritual understandings of what it meant to be a man or a woman.
BECOMING A WRITER
Laura C. Holloway-Langford's writing career debuted with an obscure novel, Laure: the History of a Blighted Life, by L. C. H., published in 1869 and reprinted in 1872. Since the 1850s, the failure of marriage had been a major theme in popular domestic novels by women. Sometimes these were lightly disguised autobiographies, like the popular Ruth Hall by Sara Payson Willis Parton, in which the heroine is left destitute when her husband dies but after many tribulations gains fame and fortune as a journalist. It would not be surprising, then, for Laura Holloway-Langford to hope that she might catapult herself from poverty by writing domestic fiction. Though originally advertised as an autobiography, Laure does not portray the external facts of Laura Holloway-Langford's life. Nevertheless, at an emotional level the book describes the suffering and shame that Holloway-Langford endured because of her marriage as well as her eventual realization that she was responsible for her own happiness.
The heroine of the novel is a French school girl who turns down the suitors chosen by her family in order to marry a mysterious American, Joseph B. Hilton (whose initials, of course, rehearse Junius B. Holloway). When he learns that his wife is pregnant, Hilton abandons Laure and returns to the United States. Infant daughter in arms, Laure pursues him, even though she admits that her "love and devotion had all been wasted upon one who was false and unworthy." Hilton physically abuses Laure, threatens her life, and even kidnaps the child (whom the brave Laure steals back). Having heard that Hilton has died in the Civil War, Laure plans to remarry, but she is distressed to discover that he is still alive. None too soon for the reader, Laure realizes that she can depend only on herself. After a friend counsels her that it will be easier to find work in a city where she is not known and can portray herself as a widow, Laure moves to St. Louis, where she teaches French and music. At the novel's conclusion, the narrator states: "Hilton is still alive, a lonely and miserable man ... poor and friendless.... As for me I am 'living my own life.'"
What made it possible for Laura Holloway-Langford to live her own life was the success of her book, Ladies of the White House, first published in the same year as Laure. After leaving Nashville, she hit upon the idea of writing a collection of biographies of First Ladies. She was probably inspired by her friend, Martha Patterson, the daughter of Andrew Johnson who assumed the role of First Lady during her father's administration, due to the infirmity of her mother. With the help of President Johnson, Holloway-Langford obtained reminiscences from still-living relatives of the first families. When the book was complete, she mailed him a copy. From his home in east Tennessee, Johnson wrote: "I have no corrections to make & endorse as written. God bless you in all your efforts to make a good name." The patronage of the President jump-started her career as a writer, and the success of The Ladies of the White House brought Laura Holloway-Langford to the attention of the New York literary world.
The first edition of the book, which was sold by subscription, became a bestseller, with sales reported to have reached 100,000 copies. The title page of the book quoted Schiller:
"Honor to women! To them it is given To garden the earth with the roses of heaven."
In the introduction, Holloway-Langford wrote: "The Ladies of the White House have had no biographers. The customs of the Republic, which returns to private life those who have served it, effectually deterred the historian from venturing on such difficult and obscure ground. The space allotted to them has been confined to descriptions of their personal appearances on public occasions, or, perhaps, a mention of their names in sketches of their husbands." In subsequent editions, she argued that women's contributions to the nation should be included in the country's historical memory. Ladies of the White House, then, was an early prototype for the later work of feminist historians. Yet, as Claudia J. Keenan has pointed out, Holloway-Langford's work also perpetuated the valorization of domesticity. She notes that while Ladies of the White House emphasized the "modesty, devotion, and faithfulness" of the Presidents' wives, it also portrayed them as having "been tested by life" and having overcome some "personal difficulty or sorrow." Keenan observes that Holloway-Langford's "own disappointments echo through her stories of the first ladies." Identification with the lives of women who had overcome adversity would shape Holloway-Langford's lectures and writing for the next decade.
After the publication of Ladies of the White House, Holloway-Langford secured a contract for another book, Homes of Famous Americans. Once again she solicited President Johnson's help, writing a flirtatious letter asking him to send her a description of his home. Additionally, she appealed to his sympathy:
My Friend, do not grieve my heart by a refusal to write, if need be, more than once about this matter. I try to be, and am, lively and full of hope, but my life is sadly checkered, and there has been much to suffer which should have been spared me. But I am inspired with a strong desire to achieve success, and ... I will try to carve a name in history. And think of it: the very name I bear is not my own and I despise it.
Yet it was under the name "Holloway" that she was establishing her literary reputation.
Although she continued to write some fiction and poetry, Laura Holloway-Langford soon assumed the professional identity of journalist, a career that did not require self-revelation. Many early female journalists used pseudonyms, which, even when the author's identity was known, nevertheless created a persona that provided distance between the personal and professional life. Sara Jane Lippincott, an editor of Godey's Lady's Book and the first woman on the payroll of the New York Times, wrote under the name "Grace Greenwood"; Jane Cunningham Croly, the first female journalist to syndicate her writing, used the byline "Jennie June"; Sara Payson Willis Parton, whose popular column ran from 1856 until her death in 1872, published under the name "Fannie Fern"; and Kate Hillard, early in her career, used the name "Lucy Fountain." Laura Holloway-Langford, too, occasionally published under "S. E. Archer," a pseudonym that disguised not only her identity, but also her sex. Later in her life Holloway-Langford asserted that journalism was an appropriate career choice for women because of "the anonymous character of newspaper writing," and she advised female writers to "learn to sink their personality." She believed that as journalists women should not only conceal their personal lives but hide their opinions as well.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Yearning for the New Age by Sarah Diane Sasson. Copyright © 2012 Sarah Diane Sasson. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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