Help us to be the always hopeful
Gardeners of the spirit
Who know that without darkness
Nothing comes to birth
As without light
Nothing flowers.
Bear the roots in mind.
--May Sarton
Vines almost trip me. Running wild, out of control, they grow into the pathways and around the bases of many of the headstones. The garden keepers have pulled them off the church walls, but they have let these stray elements be. Lush flowers I can’t name fill the air with the sweetness of soon-to-be-honey, their colors startling against the gray of the stones. Branches reach across the barriers between beds and tumble into each other. Fertile. Rich. Full. Not to be contained. This is no English style garden, with tight little rows and manicured hedges. The churchyard next door, belonging to another denomination, seems sterile by comparison.
This is the churchyard of my new church, the Unitarian church on Archdale Street, and I’ve just moved here. I love this old graveyard, one of the oldest in Charleston, one of the oldest in the country. I walk the paths behind my running daughter as we wait for the service to begin. The sound of church bells stops me, ringing loud in the stillness. They seem almost an insult to the quiet of the place where dead lie. I look up at the headstone right in front of me.
Caroline Howard Gilman.
I can’t breathe. Caroline Howard Gilman. She’s here.
In some corner of my memory, I knew that she was married to a minister of this church. But that corner seems so far away, back in graduate school, years ago. When I was primarily a scholar. When I camped in the rare book room, reading nineteenth century women writers. When I lived the life of the mind. I tried to remember what I had learned about this woman writer whose body lay in the ground in front of me.
She published a magazine. For children. For adults, too? “The Rosebud,” I think it was called. She also published another one, for women, with the goal of educating and enlightening them. She published three novels, too. Hmm. I can’t remember the titles. “Recollections of a Southern Matron?” I do remember that she became one of the most famous southern antebellum women writers. My friend Cindy Stiles did her dissertation on her. I chose a different southern woman writer from the same period. But my brain, like a hard drive too full of junk, is accessing information slowly.
I reach out and touch the stone. Tall, with big letters, it towers over the others. Marble makes a cage for a large urn, cold to the touch. Hers is only one side of the stone. Her husband is on one of the other sides. Her daughter on another. The marble is smooth and weather-worn, the letters not as deep as I imagine they once were.
She designed this garden, I remember. This controlled chaos was her invention. Born in Boston, she came from the nature-orientated, freedom-loving land of the liberal Transcendentalists to live in conservative Charleston. She may have had to give up living among such intellectuals as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. She may have had to change the way she dressed, acted, and talked. She may have had to learn to be quiet amid those whose politics she found offensive. But she brought her garden with her. And I am standing in it. I spin around, trying to see it through her eyes, this spot of land that her imagination shaped. All I can see is beauty.
I catch up to my daughter and take her hand. My daughter brought me out of the world of libraries and moldy books and obsessing about the past. She brought me out of the ivory tower, into the now, and into a life of doing. She helped make me whole. And I am here now, starting over, in a new town, trying to make a life for her and me that will be rich. Full. Fertile. Like this garden.
I lead her back to the Gilman plot of earth. And I tell her about Caroline Howard Gilman. I want her to know who made this garden she loves so much. I want her to understand that our church has strong foremothers as well as forefathers. I want her to know that regardless of where she goes, or what she does, or what accommodations she must make, she can grow her own gardens, whole and lush and fruitful.
And now I want to share that story with you. I want to share this story with you because she helped me understand better how to live as a liberal in the conservative South.
Caroline Howard Gilman married Samuel Gilman in 1819. The UU website reports that Samuel Gilman served the Archdale Street Church, the only Unitarian congregation in South Carolina, for almost 40 years and became a central figure in Charleston's social and intellectual life. This plaque was placed here to honor him, and his portrait hangs over there. His wife played a major role in the development of the church, just as most ministers’ wives do. In the early nineteenth century, women didn’t have many careers open to them. Gilman built a career for herself in the role of the minister’s wife, using that special relationship with the divine as justification for doing what other women could not. Women writers were not socially acceptable, and Gilman herself shared those feelings earlier in her life. “When one of her poems appeared in her school newspaper without her permission she cried that she was "as alarmed as if I had been detected in man's apparel!" (http://www.librarycompany.org/women/portraits/gilman.htm). However, she later began to see how her writing could serve a higher purpose.
Gilman became part of a long tradition of women who used their positions as servants of the divine to become writers. Enheduanna, the high priestess of ancient Ur, who wrote the first poem we have found in any language, “The Exaltation of Innana,” around 2500 BC, gained the access to education and the power to publish through her religious status. The Buddhist nuns who wrote the Therigatha in 600 BC, the first anthology of poems in any language, claimed “marriage” to their religion freed them from the traditional roles of women in India. Hildegard of Bingen, a writer and composer in the 10th century AD in the area we now call Germany, debated the pope and won, claiming that the visions she received proved that her special relationship with the divine allowed her special status in her community. Julian of Norwich, an anchoress of the 12th century AD, who wrote extensively about religious and philosophical concerns, used her status as a holy woman to publish. Caroline Howard Gilman joined these women and more when she started a publishing career with her role as a “sanctified woman” protecting her from cultural censorship.
But there was something going on in Gilman’s time that was different. She was not an isolated woman forging a place for herself in the public realm with the justification of “but I’m spreading the divine word.” Gilman was part of a cultural movement that eventually brought women out of second class status and into full citizenship: the rise of domestic ideology.
Women of Gilman’s generation still heard echoes of the words of Abigail Adams, who wrote to her husband John Adams in March 1776: "I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors." With the rhetoric of freedom all around them, women of the age couldn’t help but wonder – is that freedom for me, too? Enough women began to ask that question that a new rationale for keeping women civilly dead had to be invented. And this is how it goes.
The cult of domesticity told women that they were more moral than men. Women, then, need to be the one to raise the children, and they must be protected from the dirt of public life so they can remain pure for this sacred duty. The home needs to be a place where dirtied men can come in from the filth of the public word and be cleansed and make whole. Women can go that, and it is women’s duty to be the educators of the nation. Therefore, women shouldn’t have legal rights, shouldn’t be citizens, shouldn’t handle money because they, too, would become dirtied and unable to do their duty properly.
Women took this idea and ran with it. They reasoned, “So if we are more moral, as you say we are, then why can’t we turn this whole nation into one big home and use our influence for the good of all? We absolutely should. It’s our sacred duty to educate our nation.” Gilman, then, was one of many women of her time, such as Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, Lydia Maria Child, Caroline Lee Hentz, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who took seriously, as sacred, their roles as moral educators of the nation. Thus, we see the rise of the reform movements with women leaders, such as prison reform, abolition of slavery, and universal suffrage. Gilman had her own vision of reform that she promoted in her writing.
She sought to educate women in the importance of their roles by publishing magazines for children (which would be also read by the mothers in their roles as educators) and directly for women themselves. She made the middle-class housewife a hero with a significant contribution to make to society. Scholar Stephanie Robinson says “Gilman contributed significantly to the cultural phenomenon of domesticity in the early nineteenth century. While domesticity shifted the criteria of female worth away from wealth and title and toward inner character and ability, Gilman also delineated a new system of measuring female worth: housekeeping..” (http://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f/umi-uncg-1314.pdf) To Gilman, the whole nation was a house, and women were its best housekeepers. She participated in a wave of publications that taught women how to be the keepers of the home, both real (her own home) and metaphorical (of the nation).
She also saw herself as a mediator between the north and the south. One scholar reports that “As the tensions between North and South increased and the nation braced itself for conflict, she refused to cast her lot with either side, and focused instead on the shared values and cultural institutions that she believed could unite the divided states. In the 1830s she published Recollections of a Housekeeper and Recollections of a Southern Matron, domestic novels set in the North and South respectively, to illustrate the similarities between northern and southern households and the ability of domestic, maternal sentiment to transcend regional and political differences.” (http://www.librarycompany.org/women/portraits/gilman.htm). What could unite the country was a shared vision of housekeeping. And her voice sounded large in the years leading to the Civil War.
Now, you may wonder, “Why have I never heard of this woman?” And I can tell you why.
Remember that she was a northerner in a southern city, this very city that would eventually lead secession and the Civil War. To survive here, she made accommodations – and one of them was her support of slavery. Her husband, Samuel Gilman, never publically supported slavery, nor did he speak against it. He remained silent on the issue in public, through supported it in private by owning house slaves. He saw Unitarian congregations decimated across the south when ministers took an anti-slavery stand. So, he let his wife make the public accommodations. She is reported to have been an ardent supporter of slavery. And when I first found this out about her, I wanted to stop studying her and turn my attention to someone more worthy, say the Grimke sisters. They were from Charleston, but fought against slavery. They faced the same social pressures as did Gilman. Yet, they did not make similar accommodations. They, I thought, were much more worthy of my energy. I thought as many feminist scholars thought. We have plenty of forgotten 19th century southern women writers who were abolitionists. Why reclaim one who supported slavery? But I stopped myself.
As a UU, should I shut someone out because she had a view different from mine? Not very UU of me, is it? So, I decided to keep studying her, even if it did challenge my sense of right and wrong, to see what led this woman to be who she was.
Amd what I found surprised me. She was like many other southern women who made public statements in favor of slavery: this support was not consistent or firm. For example, Cindy Stiles reports that she published in one of her magazines, a letter from a supposed northern tourist in which the tourist asks “If all the slaves are so happy, why does Charleston need so many soldiers to stop slave rebellions.” Gilman often attributed anti-slavery rhetoric to other speakers, but published it nonetheless. In allowing different voices to be heard in her publications, she showed some ambiguity toward the institution.
Also, I learned how slavery fit into her view of the domestic sphere. She saw herself and other southern women as the moral guardians of not only their husbands and children, but also of their slaves. She rationalized that slaves were part of the sacred domestic union that she promoted throughout her writing, and thus, were uplifted through their contact with these sanctified women. She saw problems with slavery, but she honestly believed she was part of reform movement helping make slavery a better institution from the inside out.
Does any of this excuse her pro-slavery stance? No, of course not. But does it mean we can’t read or learn about her now? I think we can’t ignore the very human failings of people who came before us. We have a tendency to ask too much of our heroes. So, yes, Gilman was flawed, but I can’t ignore all the good she accomplished despite that flaw. And, through Gilman, we can see a lesson for us today.
Like Gilman, we also live in a time of sectional conflicts, but now it’s less about regions and more about red state, blue state. And we are in the thick of it. You and I are here as part of a liberal religion in the heart of the south, and we have drawn attacks, like the gunman in Knoxville TN who killed UUs because they were UUs. We live in a city that openly mocks many of the values we hold dear. We live in a state that banns the marriage of gay partners our church performs. We are, like Gilman, in a land where we must make accommodations to survive.
For example, I believe that the gay rights movement is the civil rights fight of our generation. And I don’t want to pay the karmic bill that comes with discrimination. But if you go out into the parking garage right now, you won’t see a gay rights sticker on my car. I’ve considered it, and decided against. I teach gender in my classrooms, and that includes getting my students to discuss gay rights and asking themselves the question, “are these human rights?” But I do that through raising questions, not making assertions. The assertions would be inappropriate in a classroom. But they wouldn’t be on a bumper sticker. I am not pleased with myself to confess I am afraid. I am afraid my car will be keyed. That my daughters and I might be targeted for attack. That, oh my goodness, I might be called a lesbian. I know where I live. I know what might happen. It takes incredible political and social courage to come out as a gay person. It also takes a bit to come out as a gay rights supporter. I know my flaws.
So generations from now, will I be judged by how I made accommodations to the time and place in which I lived? When I think of it this way, I am even less likely to judge Gilman. Instead, I seek to put judgment aside and simply learn the lesson her story has to teach. We can create beautiful gardens that people love for generations, despite our personal flaws. We can use our words to improve the lives of women, children and families. We can make good in the world, even if we aren’t always on the right side of history. However, I also learn that we should be aware of the accommodations we make to fit in, to stay safe, to thrive in a place where our morals are not shared by the majority. And I, for one, am inspired by Gilman to question those accommodations and to challenge myself to have more political and social courage. Hey, maybe, just maybe, I’ll make myself strong enough to put that bumper sticker on my car, to speak more openly, to come out as a gay rights supporter.
And, hey, I think maybe I just did.
A sermon given at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Charleston, SC, on October 26th, 2009
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