Women and Their Clergy: The Pastoral Relationship in Victorian America

Team Members/Contributors

Karin Erdevig Gedge Yale University Contact Me

About this dissertation fellowship

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural study of the problems of gender in the pastoral relationship. It attempts to assess how well the institutional churches, through their male clergy, served the majority of their congregations -- women -- by examining a variety of cultural sources. Pastoral manuals, clergymen’s journals and memoirs, women’s diaries, and correspondence between women and clergy help to recreate the face-to-face relationship in the churches. Novels, sensational newspapers, nativist tracts, and accounts of clerical trials and scandals indicate that the relationship occupied a significant and problematic place in the cultural discourse of the period. Comparing the experiences and theologies of evangelical Protestants with Roman Catholics should offer interesting insights into the debates over celibacy and auricular confession which were crucial to understanding the problems inherent in the pastoral relationship with women. Research to date suggests that a combination of theological, social and cultural factors prevented male pastors from successfully defining and carrying out a specific ministry to women. Both clergy and their female parishioners encountered enormous difficulties in negotiating cross-gender relationships outside the family, despite the very clear rhetoric prescribing familial models. At one extreme are the many pastors who, in their own self-interest and for the welfare of the community, abdicated responsibility for serving women and delegated that ministry to wives or other pious laywomen. At the other extreme are the notorious scandals demonstrating that, in reality and in the popular imagination, the opportunities for exploitation by both parties to the relationship were significant. In between are the men and women who negotiated the cultural and religious restrictions placed upon them, and successfully engaged in a mutual guest for spiritual salvation.

Image Title Year Type Contributor(s) Other Info
  Without Benefit of Clergy: Women in the Pastoral Relationship in Victorian American Culture 1994 Dissertation Karin Erdevig Gedge
Without Benefit of Clergy: Women and the Pastoral Relationship in Nineteenth-Century American Culture 2003 Dissertation Book Karin Erdevig Gedge