5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A deep historic, but contemporary look at domestic violence, February 24, 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: Religion and Domestic Violence in Early New England: The Memoirs of Abigail Abbot Bailey (Religion in North America) (Paperback)
Abigail Bailey keeps a diary of her thoughts and feelings relating to her abusive marriage. Abigail's perspective is historic, as she lived in New England in the early foundations of America, but also contemporary, as she writes of the pains, hopes, and struggles of living with an abusive husband. Abigail Bailey's faith played an integral part of her decision-making process, and anyone who wants to understand how Christianity and spirituality contributes to the plight of the abused wife is urged to read this book. It gives a birds-eye view of the inner dynamics of the abusive relationship and Christianity's relationship to those dynamics. While the memoirs stand on their own, the editor does a thourough job of explaining the social, political, and historical contexts of Abigail's life. The only downfall is that it is "heavy" reading, as the language Abigail used is old-English, and one may need to labor more than usual in reading and interpeting it. It is well worth it, though!
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
As It Was in the Beginning, Is Now ..., June 4, 2010
This review is from: Religion and Domestic Violence in Early New England: The Memoirs of Abigail Abbot Bailey (Religion in North America) (Paperback)
... but let's hope it shall NOT forever be! The title of this study suggests a causal linkage between religion and domestic violence. That ISN'T the hypothesis the editor actually intends to present, though it may well be a question worth asking. Rather, editor Ann Taves offers the Memoirs of Abigail Abbot Bailey as a source document for the study of the religious mentality of devout 18th C "covenant" Congregationalists - what we usually call Puritans. Taves's 48-page introduction is as coherent an explication of "covenant" theology as I've ever read, written with respect and impartiality. Taves makes a good case that "covenant" theocracy contributed much to the evolution of democracy -- yes, that IS counter-intuitive! -- to the egalitarianism of American culture, and especially to the foundations of gender equality and universal suffrage. As Taves recounts, the emphasis on religion as a covenant was matched with a perception of marriage that stressed mutuality rather than patriarchal authority. For covenanters like Abigail Abbot, marriage was to be above all a spiritual companionship, a "friendship" as well as a practical domestic management unit. Abigail marries a man whom she knows is not a 'true Christian' in the covenant sense, but whom she hopes to convert and whom she expects to live with in faithful friendship. She persists in calling her husband, Asa Bailey, her "friend" until his abuse and infidelity justify her in denominating him her "enemy". And that change in perception, believe me, takes a lot of malignant misbehavior over many years!
Physical and emotional abuse is only the beginning of Asa's mistreatment of his long-suffering wife. Eventually he seduces a serving woman, whom he sends away when confronted. Then he attempts to rape another serving woman. He forces incest, over a period of sixteen months, on his own eldest daughter. He brutalizes all of his ten children in one way or another. When Abigail finally, against all the habits of her mind and the norms of her community, demands a separation, Asa does his utmost to deprive her and her children of any share of the family property. But Abigail, once aroused, is a dauntless fighter of Old Testament vigor. And Asa, seen through Abigail's account, is as hateful a hypocrite and domestic tyrant as any in literature.
Edited first by her local minister and published at the request of friends in 1815, after her death, Abigail Abbot Bailey's memoirs were the earliest public record of domestic violence in America. As such, the memoirs are an invaluable source of historical insight into the lives of Americans in the era of the Revolution. The years of Abigail's marriage, covered in her memoirs, were from 1767 to 1792. Students of that era could find no clearer depiction than this of the attitudes of New Englanders toward divorce, respectability, privacy, adultery, communal property, and patriarchy than this.
The Memoirs might also be regarded as the first great novel in American literature, assuming that a "novel" doesn't need to be pure fiction. Abigail's story is extremely dramatic and touching, and arrives at a film-worthy climax in her escape from her husband's fiendish plot to carry her off, without her children, to the wilds of back-country New York. Abigail wrote well, amazingly well, or else her first publisher/minister was an editorial genius. The narrative of Abigail's travails and eventual resistance is skillfully interpolated into Abigail's ecstatic sermon on the mercies of her omniscient and omnipotent God, so that her depiction of events and her scripture-based interpretations of those events are in thoughtful equipoise. Abigail knew her scriptures well! She read her Bible daily and she found solace therein, and she quotes verse after verse both to shed light on her own decisions and to enlighten the Reader for the betterment of his/her soul. I suppose many modern readers will be impatient with Abigail's sermonizing piety, but it's central to the narrative. It was the 'submission' taught to her by her religion - submission to God first, but also to her condition as a married woman - that explains Abigail's behavior, her unwillingness to turn against Asa or to ruin his status in the community. From a modern sociological point of view, Abigail was certainly a 'co-dependent', a woman who passively allowed herself and her children to suffer outrageous abuse. Even then, there's a suggestion that her neighbors and co-religionists regarded her behavior with disapproval, both before her divorce, for allowing her husband to get away with incest, and after her divorce, for defying the patriarchal conventions of property. If Abigail's 'lessons' in covenant theology become tiresome, the reader can easily enough skim through them and follow the story.
That story, stripped of its scriptural verbiage, is shockingly familiar. Modern. Right next door to many families in America today. The statistics of child and spousal abuse throughout the USA, particularly in communities that assert their righteous conservatism, prove that fervid religiosity and domestic violence are as odiously comfortable together as they were in the 1780s.
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