Publicizing domestic piety: the cultural work of religious texts in the Woman's Building Library.

The Woman's Building Library at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 included many texts that could be classified as "religious." In bringing a large body of women's publications together in one place, the Woman's Building's organizers called attention to women's past achievements in order to carve out a larger space for women's public participation. Yet the project of expanding women's sphere coincided imperfectly with the domestic model of piety that most religious publications embodied. This essay explores tensions between the Woman's Building's goals of advancing women's power to shape the public sphere and the library's religious contents.

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The "home," wrote nineteenth-century Methodist Phoebe Palmer, is women's "legitimate sphere of action." But, Palmer qualified, God occasionally called women "out of the ordinary sphere of action" to assume positions of high public responsibility. (1) Palmer represented herself in Promise of the Father (1859) as acting under such an unusual, divinely authorized calling to preach before thousands of male and female auditors in transatlantic revival meetings, to campaign for temperance and social reforms on behalf of orphans, prisoners, and immigrants, and to publish prolifically on moral and religious subjects. Palmer did not, however, support women's political suffrage or clerical ordination, which she viewed as pushing women outside their legitimate domestic sphere. The tension between Palmer's domestic model of piety and her public reform ambitions reflects upon a broader cultural ambivalence.

Ever since the publication of Barbara Welter's 1966 article "The Cult of True Womanhood" historians have identified piety as the first pillar of nineteenth-century American ideals of womanhood. (2) Yet pious ideals simultaneously reinforced the cultural assumptions of domesticity and destabilized those assumptions by encouraging women to publish a vast number of religious texts. The Woman's Building Library (WBL) at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 included a significant number of religious volumes that are in many respects similar to the eight that Phoebe Palmer contributed to that collection. In bringing a large body of women's publications together in one place for the first time ever documented, the Woman's Building's organizers called attention to women's past achievements in order to carve out a larger space for women's public participation. (3) Yet the project of expanding women's sphere coincided imperfectly with the domestic model of piety that most religious publications embodied. This essay explores tensions between the Woman's Building's goals of advancing women's power to shape the public sphere and the religious contents of the WBL.

I focus on those texts in the WBL that may in some sense be classified as "religious," recognizing that the category of religious publication was permeable and unstable in nineteenth-century America. Certain texts, such as histories, memoirs, and fiction, that may not, to the twenty-first-century critic, appear to address religious issues functioned in the nineteenth century to serve religious ends. Such purposes include recording God's providential works, providing patterns for Christian character formation, and deploying sympathy and sentiment to provoke beneficent action on behalf of others. (4)

Answering the question of how many books in the WBL were religious involves interpretation. A database prepared from the more than 7,000 volumes cataloged for the WBL includes 5,045 entries corresponding to titles in the American portion of the collection. (5) Counting only those texts classified under the Dewey "religion" (200-299) numbers, there are 658 religious titles. (6) I work with a broader list of 1,593 entries (hereafter "religion database"), which includes titles that are, by my reading, explicitly religious in content; texts published by a denominational or nondenominational religious society or by a trade press that specialized in religious titles; and texts of unclear content written by authors who in known texts discussed religious subjects extensively. The adoption of these criteria for my analysis almost certainly led to the exclusion of some titles intended to serve religious purposes and to the inclusion of others that are not explicitly religious in content. The resultant list is useful, nevertheless, in providing an overall picture of the kinds of religious publications that populated the WBL. The WBL, in turn, represents a revealing, although not entirely representative, subset of nineteenth-century women's religious publications that reflects cultural tensions between domestic ideals of piety and women's efforts to reform the public sphere.

Women's Authorship and the Expansive World of American Publishing

The rapid expansion of the American print market in the latter half of the nineteenth century offered women unprecedented opportunities to participate in shaping public culture without seeming to transgress the boundaries of domestic piety. Many influential cultural arbiters, such as clergy and publishers, perceived a close connection among the domestic fireside, moral influence, and the ancient Christian practice of private devotional writing. These arbiters cast the publication of women's writings as an extension of a traditional religious activity. (7) By the second half of the nineteenth century market demand for American-authored materials had reached peak levels, opening a larger cultural space for women's religious publishing. (8) In 1820 American publishers introduced seventy British texts for every thirty American texts. By 1856 the ratio had reversed: eighty American books appeared for every twenty British. (9) Publishers who needed American authors and who were cognizant of steady market demand for religious texts increasingly welcomed women's contributions. The preponderance of post-1850s publications in the WBL correlates with the explosive growth of the nineteenth-century American print market as a whole. Of the dated entries in the religion database, only 35 titles appeared prior to 1850, compared with 1,091 titles published between 1850 and 1893.

Prior to the nineteenth century, booksellers circulated a relatively small supply of mostly imported or pirated books. During the second quarter of the nineteenth century book and periodical production in the United States increased 500 percent, and the overall value of books sold rose from $2.5 million to $12.5 million annually. Growth in the variety of texts available kept pace with overall production. In 1804 American publishers offered approximately 1,300 titles for sale. From 1820 to 1850 at least 25,000 titles circulated--approximately the same number of works as the total published during the entire 1639 to 1791 time period. By the 1850s an American publishing industry had begun to shed its long-held disrepute as younger sibling to the British book trades. Four hundred publishing firms, three thousand booksellers, and more than four thousand printing offices made texts available across America. New York, Philadelphia, and Boston publishers controlled three-quarters of the market. (10) Consistent with this overall tendency, New York publishers, which dominated the WBL, contributed 450 religious titles, followed by Philadelphia with 324, Boston with 194, and, more distantly, Chicago with 71. As the print market expanded regionally and nationally women authors took advantage of new publishing opportunities.

Women who published religious texts included in the WBL struggled to balance cultural ideals of domestic piety with new opportunities for professional authorship. A majority of women represented in the WBL contributed just one or a few volumes, but the relatively large number of titles attributed to a select number of authors suggests their professional status. The prominence in the WBL of at least two of the best represented authors, Frances Willard and Julia Ward Howe, might also be explained in part by these women's roles in sponsoring the Woman's Building. A total of thirty-seven women wrote eleven or more library volumes each. This group of prolific women authors includes such well-known figures as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan Warner, Lydia Maria Child, Catharine Beecher, Hannah Whitall Smith, Emily Judson, Elizabeth Prentiss, and Julia Ward Howe. Another forty-four authors, including Phoebe Palmer and Frances Willard, produced between five and nine books that found their way into the library. A few authors were unusually prolific and well represented in the WBL, for example, Frances Burge…