No silent witness : the Eliot parsonage women and their Unitarian world / Cynthia Grant Tucker.

"In this compelling and beautifully written text, Cynthia Grant Tucker unearths the complexity of the lives of wives, sisters, and mothers of ministers, highlighting the ways in which women challenged the divisions between the private and public, personal and political, and secular and sacred,...

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Online Access: Full Text (via Internet Archive)
Main Author: Tucker, Cynthia Grant
Format: eBook
Language:English
Published: Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2010.
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Summary:"In this compelling and beautifully written text, Cynthia Grant Tucker unearths the complexity of the lives of wives, sisters, and mothers of ministers, highlighting the ways in which women challenged the divisions between the private and public, personal and political, and secular and sacred, as they sought to express their creativity in ways that were personally fulfilling and socially transformative. In her honest recounting of the ambiguities of these lives marked by both privilege and limitation, Tucker gives us a deeper and richer understanding of the complexity of human experience."--Sharon D. Welch, author of After Empire: The Art and Ethos of Enduring Peace.
"Cynthia Tucker's No Silent Witness is a veritable archive of fascinating documentary material. Readers can enter the world of one of America's most prominent, long-lived, and far-flung Unitarian families, and join the Eliot women there as they work both directly and indirectly to impress their strongly held values on an expanding nation."--Megan Marshall, author of The Peabody Sisters: ThreeWomen Who Ignited American Romanticism.
"In Prophetic Sisterhood, Cynthia Tucker demonstrated that women's networks are as fascinating as their individual lives. Here she brings her trademark style of group biography to the wives and daughters of Unitarianism's most distinguished clerical family. Tucker reveals almost the whole of Unitarian history (and much morel) through the eyes of women, challenging scholars of other traditions to map the friendships and ministries of the àmphibious creatures' who inhabit parsonages."--Dan McKanan, Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer in Divinity, Harvard Divinity School.
This Group Biography Follows three generations of Eliot women--ministers' daughters, mothers, and wives--from one of America's foremost Unitarian dynasties. By shifting the focus from pulpits to parsonages and from sermons to private confessions, Cynthia Grant Tucker both deepens our understanding of challenges faced by women who served as clergymen's unordained partners in difficult ministries, and humanizes a famously staid and cerebral religious tradition.
Spanning 150 years, from the early nineteenth century forward, the chapters unfold as a series of closely connected stories, each shaped by a woman's defining experiences. At odds with the preachers' optimistic descriptions of God's creation and plan, these experiences range from the deaths of young children and the anguish of infertility to the suffocation of small-town life, loneliness, doubt, and financial distress. One woman survives with the help of a rare female confidante in the parish. Another is braced by the unmet friends who read her stories and poetry in popular magazines. A third escapes from an ill-fitting role by succumbing to neurasthenia, leaving one wasting condition for another. Finally, the matriarch's granddaughters script larger lives for themselves by bypassing marriage and churchly employment to follow their hearts into same-sex unions and major careers in public health and preschool education.
The connecting thread in this book is the women's battle to make themselves heard over the din of a ruthlessly positive liberal religion, whose wisdom fails to reflect their daily reality. Tucker's keenly perceptive narrative makes room for rank-and-file parish women, whose similar struggles magnify those of the parsonage women in whom they confide. --Book Jacket.
Physical Description:1 online resource (viii, 344 pages : illustrations)
Bibliography:Includes bibliographical references (pages 301-307) and index.