“A Religious Recognition of Equality”: Liberal Spirituality and the Marriage Question in America, 1835-1850

Studying texts by Lydia Maria Child, Sarah Grimke, and Margaret Fuller, this article seeks to recover the early phases of a dialogue that moved marriage away from an institution grounded in ideas of unification and toward a concept of marriage grounded in liberal ideas about equality. It seeks to si...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Religions
Main Author: Garvey, Gregory (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: MDPI [2017]
In: Religions
Further subjects:B Lydia Maria Child
B marriage reform
B Transcendentalism
B Sarah Grimke
B Margaret Fuller
B Liberalism
Online Access: Presumably Free Access
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Summary:Studying texts by Lydia Maria Child, Sarah Grimke, and Margaret Fuller, this article seeks to recover the early phases of a dialogue that moved marriage away from an institution grounded in ideas of unification and toward a concept of marriage grounded in liberal ideas about equality. It seeks to situate the “marriage question” within both the rhetoric of American antebellum reform and of liberal religious thought. Rather than concluding that these early texts facilitated a movement toward a contractarian ideal of marriage this article concludes that Child, Grimke, and Fuller, sought to discredit unification as an organizing idea for marriage and replace it with a definition that placed a spiritual commitment to equality between the partners as the animating core of the idea of marriage.
ISSN:2077-1444
Contains:Enthalten in: Religions
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.3390/rel8090183