UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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Author: search.filters.author.Berman, Cassandra NicoleSubject: search.filters.subject.family

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    Women's Apostate Narratives and the Fate of the Family in Antebellum America
    (2012) Berman, Cassandra Nicole; Lyons, Clare; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This thesis explores women's apostate narratives in antebellum America, focusing on best-selling literature castigating Shakers, Catholics, and Mormons. The narratives I analyze were also associated with mob activity against these religious communities. I argue that the narratives and their attendant mob activity did not function primarily as commentary against non-mainstream religious communities. Rather, they were fundamentally concerned with the fate of the patriarchal Protestant family. The texts depicted communities on the fringe of society, and their authorship was attributed to women who could not claim full rights as American citizens. In many ways these groups were relatively powerless, as were the female apostates who criticized them. In the antebellum period, however, these religious communities and the women who wrote against them became vehicles for profound commentary on the patriarchal family, an institution seen as central to maintaining social order and forging national identity in the newly United States.