Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-07, Section: A, page: 2741.

Adviser: Jon Butler.

This dissertation tests the assumption that clergymen and women in the nineteenth-century formed a natural alliance and enjoyed a peculiar influence over each other by examining the pastoral relationship from the perspective of the minister, the female parishioner, and the Victorian culture at large. Primary sources include pastoral manuals, seminary students' and pastor's journals, women's diaries and correspondence, trial pamphlets of clergy accused of sexual crimes against women, sentimental and sensational novels, and The Scarlet Letter. The study focuses on a variety of Northern Protestant denominations between 1800 and 1880.

Women were not well served by the nineteenth-century clergy. The professionalization of the ministry worked to distance clergy from the feminine sphere and to redefine the ministry as a masculine enterprise amid shifting ideals of masculinity. Seminaries emphasized scholarship, controversial theology, and preaching, while neglecting pastoral work outside of the pulpit. Pastoral manuals largely ignored women as a particular constituency and advocated delegating pastoral work to pastor's wives. Women often criticized the preacher, his manner, his pretentious learning, his contentious argument, or his ignorance. Dissatisfied with pastors and their infrequent attentions, women sought pastoral care from family, friends, or published tracts.

The image of a peculiar alliance between clergymen and women emerges most powerfully in the popular literature, but subversive messages reproduced the tension and conflict of the real. Trial pamphlets warned both men and women of the perils of the pastoral relationship, discouraging intimacy. Trials also worked, paradoxically, to silence women's protests and to rescue clergymen from the feminine sphere. Conflicting images surfaced even in pious memoirs, sentimental "parsonage" novels, sensational exposes, and in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.