Search Results

The gender ideology of separate spheres that emerged in nineteenth-century America prescribed public roles for men and private roles for women while, at the same time, asking clergy and women to serve together as moral guardians of the republic. The cultural no-man’s land they occupied proved to be dangerous territory. Four highly publicized trials reveal nineteenth-century Americans’ fascination and horror with clerical sexual misconduct and crimes against women: the 1832 murder trial of New England Methodist minister Ephraim Avery; the 1844 presentment for moral “impurities” of the Episcopal Bishop of New York, Benjamin Onderdonk; the 1857 criminal adultery trial of Boston pastor Isaac Kalloch; and the 1875 church hearing and civil trial for adultery of the renowned preacher, Henry Ward Beecher. The verbal and graphic images generated in each of these trials tapped deep cultural anxieties, showing clergy and women regularly transgressing the too permeable boundaries of separate spheres and calling into question their roles as moral guardians and the utility of gender ideals in regulating social and sexual behavior.

At the same time that ministerial misconduct exposed the flaws in separate spheres ideology, the accounts of two dozen clergymen’s trials disclose the ways they worked to repair and reinforce the damaged boundaries. Caught in a disgraceful liaison that threatened a career, ministers usually escaped conviction or severe punishment. In the course of these trials, clergy were rescued from the dangerous domestic sphere and “masculinized,” portrayed as valiant combatants in monumental political or theological battles that secured their positions in the public sphere and acknowledged their value to the church and to society. Only two of these men were Catholic priests, yet most enjoyed a cultural immunity similar to the medieval privilege of “benefit of clergy.” Women, however, were “feminized,” depicted as vulnerable victims in need of the protection of fathers and husbands within the domestic sphere and suffering public ignominy if they strayed beyond it. In short, clergy learned to stay out of the domestic sphere and women to stay in it.

Law reform efforts aimed at increasing transparency often focus on the possibilities of public access to knowledge about the law. This chapter examines the efforts of both law and literature to educate the naive reader. It describes the proliferation of printed sources, among them newspapers, periodicals serializing works of fiction, and trial pamphlets.