Railing, tattling, and general rumour: Gossip, gender, and church regulation in Upper Canada

Canadian Historical Review

Volumn 81, Issue 3, 2000, Pages 380-403

  Marks, Lynne ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0007024187     PISSN: 00083755     EISSN: 17101093     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3138/CHR.81.3.380     Document Type: Review

References (101)

1. Canadian Baptist Archives (CBA), St Catharines Baptist Church, Church Minutes, 30 Nov. 1844 and 1 Feb. 1845; Wicklow Baptist Church, Church Minutes, 22 July and 20 Sept. 1849. Full names have not been used in order to preserve anonymity.
2. For definitions of gossip, see Karen V. Hansen, 'The Power of Talk in Antebellum New England,' Agricultural History 67, 2 (1993): 43-64;
3. Melanie Tebbutt, Women 's Talk? A Social History of 'Gossip' in Working-Class Neighbourhoods, 1880-1960 (Aldershot, England: Scolar Press 1995).
4. See Hansen, 'The Power of Talk';
5. Tebbutt, Women 's Talk?;
6. Mary Beth North, 'Gender and Defamation in Seventeenth-Century Maryland,' William and Mary Quarterly (1987): 3-39;
7. Robert F. Goodman and Aaron Ben Ze'ev, Good Gossip (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas 1994);
8. Steve Hindle, 'The Shaming of Margaret Knowsley: Gossip, Gender and the Experience of Authority in Early Modern England,' Continuity and Change 9, 3 (1994): 391-419.
9. See, for example, L.R. Poos, 'Sex, Lies, and the Church Courts of Pre-Reformation England,' Journal of Interdisciplinary History 25, 4 (1995): 585-608;
10. Laura K. Deal, 'Widows and Reputation in the Diocese of Chester, England, 1560-1650,' Journal of Family History 23, 4 (1998): 382-93;
11. Susan Juster, Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 1994);
12. Jane Kamensky, Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997);
13. Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New York: Vintage Books 1996).
14. The few existing examinations of Upper Canadian church discipline have focused on it in the context of church history. See, for example, Duff Willis Crerar, 'Church and Community: The Presbyterian Kirk-Session in the District of Bathurst, Upper Canada' (MA thesis, University of Western Ontario 1979),
15. and Crerar, '"Crackling Sounds from the Burning Bush": The Evangelical Impulse in Canadian Presbyterianism before 1875,' in G.A. Rawlyk, ed., Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 1997), 123-136
16. Jean E. Friedman, The Enclosed Garden: Women and Community in the Evangelical South, 1830-1900 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press 1985), 11
17. Among Presbyterians, church members could be excommunicated only by the higher level of church court, the Presbytery. See Crerar, 'Church and Community,' 25.
18. The Presbyterians were far more numerous, at about 20 per cent of the population, while the Baptists always made up less than 5 per cent of the total population in this period. See John Webster Grant, A Profusion of Spires (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1988), 224
19. Crerar, '"Crackling Sounds from the Burning Bush,"' 127.
20. Some Presbyterian evangelicals (the United Presbyterians) had left the church before to 1843. See Grant, A Profusion of Spires, 123-124
21. Female participation may not have been the norm in all churches, but it was certainly the case in most smaller communities. See Judith Colwell, 'The Role of Women in the Nineteenth Century Church of Ontario' (unpublished paper, 1985, CBA), 8-9.
22. See also Gregory A. Wills, Democratic Religion: Freedom, Authority and Church Discipline in the Baptist South, 1785 - 1900 (New York: Oxford University Press 1997)
23. Among Baptists, church discipline cases are to be found in the congregational minutes. Presbyterian discipline cases are found in the minutes of the Kirk sessions. The church records examined include surviving church records for the 1798-1860 period from Presbyterian and Baptist churches found in the United Church Archives, the Canadian Presbyterian Archives, the Canadian Baptist Archives, the National Archives of Canada, and the Family History Archives of the Church of the Latter Day Saints. All records found in these archives that began before 1850 were examined for all years up to 1860, while some records that existed for only the 1850s and later years were not included. As well, this study includes records generously given to me by Duff Crerar, based on his research on eastern Ontario Presbyterian churches.
24. Duff Crerar's research into eastern Ontario Presbyterian church discipline suggests that some congregations were more vigilant in policing behaviour than others, and that while some variation may have been based on Free Church/Church of Scotland differences, it was more often based in local congregational peculiarities. See Crerar, '"Crackling Sounds from the Burning Bush,"' 132-135 There appeared to have been very little change over time in the incidence of church discipline over this period, until 1850 (see conclusion). However, given the nature of surviving records and population growth over the first half of the nineteenth century, small decreases in the actual incidence of church discipline would be difficult to identify.
25. A community study approach to church discipline would require the study of two or three communities, combining the study of local church records with a range of other community-based sources.
26. For recent work on Upper Canadian social and gender history, see Cecilia Morgan, Public Men and Virtuous Women: The Gendered Languages of Religion and Politics in Upper Canada, 1791 - 1850 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996);
27. Jane Errington, Wives and Mothers, Schoolmistresses and Scullery Maids: Working Women in Upper Canada, 1790-1840 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press 1995);
28. Katherine McKenna, A Life of Propriety: Anne Murray Powell and Her Family, 1755-1849 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press 1994);
29. and Janice Potter-MacKinnon, While the Women Only Wept: Loyalist Refugee Women in Eastern Ontario (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press 1993).
30. See Morgan, Public Men and Virtuous Women, and Errington, Wives and Mothers.
31. For an excellent discussion of the concept of separate spheres, see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1789 - 1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1987).
32. Certain feminist scholars have begun to challenge the concept of 'separate spheres.' See Linda Kerber, 'Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History,' Journal of American History 75, 1 (1988): 9-39. This critique is useful in reminding us that these spheres were not inviolable and that both men and women moved between public and private worlds. However, the emergence of the concept of a private sphere that was somehow 'personal' and less open to community gaze and intervention remains worthy of further historical study.
33. Marguerite Van Die, '"The Marks of a Genuine Revival": Religion, Social Change, Gender, and Community in Mid-Victorian Brantford, Ontario,' Canadian Historical Review 79, 3 (1998): 528
34. Curtis D. Johnson, Islands of Holiness: Rural Religion in Upstate New York, 1790 - 1860 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 1989).
35. See also Randolph A. Roth, The Democratic Dilemma: Religion, Reform and the Social Order in the Connecticut River Valley of Vermont, 1791-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987),
36. and, in the Upper Canadian context, William Westfall, Two Worlds: The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 1989).
37. See Juster, Disorderly Women, chap. 3.
38. Daniel C. Goodwin, '"The Footprints of Zion's King": Baptists in Canada to 1880,' in Rawlyk, ed., Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience, 197. Many Baptist congregations were originally based around one or another of the American, English, or Scottish ethnic groups, but such patterns changed over time. Particularly in the case of Americans, who made up the majority of Upper Canadian Baptists, ethnicity did not appear to provide the same basis for tightly knit communities as was true of Scottish and Irish Presbyterians.
39. Presbyterian Church Archives (PCA), St Ann's Presbyterian Church, Session Minutes, 20 Sept. 1834; Hamilton's Barton Stone Presbyterian Church, Session Minutes, 14 March 1842
40. See, for example, PCA, Bond Head Presbyterian Church, Session Minutes, 18 Sept. 1836. Also see Poos, 'Sex, Lies and the Church Courts.'
41. CBA, Boston Baptist Church, Church Minutes, 8 March 1828, Murray Meldrum notes
42. For Presbyterians, n = 366, and for Baptists, n = 655. In some cases, particularly among Presbyterians, individuals came before the session and confessed to various sins. However, in most of these cases it is difficult to determine whether they were coming of their own free will or because they had been spoken to by the elders.
43. CBA, Brantford Baptist Church, Church Minutes, 16 Sept. 1843. Also see, for example, PCA, Stamford Presbyterian Church, Niagara Falls, Session Minutes, 22 June 1837.
44. Among Presbyterians 12 per cent of drink cases were clearly reported through gossip (n = 77), and among Baptists, 5 per cent were reported this way (n = 62). Among Presbyterians, 11 per cent of speech-related offences were reported through gossip (n = 47), while among Baptists, 5 per cent were reported in this way. Among Presbyterians 33 per cent of cases of family conflict were reported through gossip (n = 12), while among Baptists, 7 per cent (n = 27) were reported this way. Among Presbyterians, 13 per cent of sexual misdemeanours were reported through gossip (n = 166), while among Baptists, 14 per cent of such cases were reported this way (n = 21).
45. See, for example, Hansen, 'The Power of Talk.'
46. Juster, Disorderly Women, 82
47. Regarding literacy, see Susan Houston and Alison Prentice, Schooling and Scholars in Nineteenth Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1988), 84-85
48. Also see Kamensky, Governing the Tongue
49. and Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers, for discussions of American colonial cultures where face-to-face communities were the norm and oral communication was central.
50. See, for example, Lorraine Code, 'Gossip, or in Praise of Chaos,' in Goodman and Ben-Ze'ev, eds., Good Gossip.
51. Of course, we should not set up firm dichotomies here. Gossip and rumour have been, and are still, used informally by agents of the state - such as social workers. Nonetheless, gossip and rumour are not used in the same official way within state institutions, such as the legal system, as they were within church courts.
52. See Susan Lewthwaite, 'Violence, Law, and Community in Rural Upper Canada,' in Jim Phillips, Tina Loo, and Susan Lewthwaite, eds., Essays in the History of Canadian Law, vol.5: Crime and Criminal Justice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1994), 353-386
53. Also see Allan Greer and Ian Radforth, eds., Colonial Leviathan: State Formation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1992).
54. Bryan Palmer, 'Discordant Music: Charivaris and Whitecapping in Nineteenth- Century North America,' Labour/Le Travailleur 3 (1978): 5-62
55. Cecilia Morgan, '"In Search of the Phantom Misnamed Honour": Duelling in Upper Canada,' Canadian Historical Review 76, 4 (1995): 536, 543
56. Among Presbyterians, such charges made up 72 per cent of all speech-related offences (n = 72), while among Baptists they made up 49 per cent of all such offences (n = 165). In both denominations they were the largest category of such offences. See table 2.
57. See note 19.
58. See Juster, Disorderly Women
59. and George Rawlyk, The Canada Fire: Radical Evangelicalism in British North America, 1775 - 1812 (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press 1994).
60. CBA, Port Burwell Baptist Church, Church Minutes, 1 Nov. 1844
61. CBA, Woodstoock Baptist Church, Church Minutes, 24 Sept. 1825
62. However, these numbers do not include the serious charge of heresy, which was generally referred to the higher-level court of the Presbytery. See Crerar, 'Church and Community,' 25. It is also possible that more quarrels were mediated privately by minister or elders among Presbyterians than among Baptists, and thus did not find their way into the church records.
63. Cited in Juster, Disorderly Women, 88
64. CBA, Port Burwell Baptist Church, Church Minutes, May 1836
65. PCA, Picton Presbyterian Church, Session Minutes, 28 Dec. 1845; Dundas Presbyterian Church, Session Minutes, 20 Jan. 1846; National Archives of Canada (NA), Smiths Falls Westminister Presbyterian Church, 2 April 1858. Such concerns about public opinion occasionally appear in Baptist records, but are much more common in Presbyterian session minutes.
66. See, for example, Susan Mann Trofimenkoff, 'Gossip in History,' Canadian Historical Association, Historical Papers, 1985, 1-10;
67. Hansen, 'The Power of Talk
68. and Tebbutt, Women 's Talk?
69. See Hindle, 'The Shaming of Margaret Knowsley
70. Juster, Disorderly Women
71. Poos, 'Sex, Lies and the Church Courts.'
72. See Morgan, Public Men and Virtuous Women
73. and Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes.
74. See also Kamensky, Governing the Tongue
75. and Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers.
76. PCA, Essa Presbyterian Church, Session Minutes, 27 June 1846
77. CBA, St Catharines Baptist Church, Church Minutes, 21 Aug. 1841; Port Burwell Baptist Church, Church Minutes, 26 Feb. 1820
78. See Rawlyk, The Canada Fire, and Juster, Disorderly Women, for a discussion of women's roles within radical evangelical communities.
79. Women spoke and voted at many Baptist covenant meetings. See Colwell, 'The Role of Women.' Women's right to speak in church was more contested, with congregations clearly having different perspectives on this issue. See, for example, CBA, Woodstock Baptist Church, Church Minutes, 28 Dec. 1844, and Wicklow Baptist Church, Church Minutes, Sept. 1811.
80. In this period, women were rarely allowed to speak on public platforms, even beyond church walls. However, there would have been many more informal public and private spaces where women could make their views of church members and church practices known.
81. For a discussion of men's alternative options in a slightly later period, see Lynne Marks, Revivals and Roller Rinks: Religion, Leisure, and Identity in Late-Nineteenth-Century Small-Town Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996).
82. Crerar, 'Church and Community,' 113.
83. For poor relief to widows among Baptists, see Colwell, 'The Role of Women,' 4. Also see CBA, Oxford Baptist Church, Church Minutes, 1808, and Brantford Baptist Church, Church Minutes, 1 April 1855.
84. For a discussion of the limitations of secular social welfare in this period, see David R. Murray, 'The Cold Hand of Charity: The Court of Quarter Sessions and Poor Relief in the Niagara District, 1828-1841,' in W. Wesley Pue and Barry Wright eds., Canadian Perspectives on Law and Society: Issues in Legal History (Ottawa: Carleton University Press 1988), 179-206.
85. See Lynne Marks, 'Christian Harmony: Family, Neighbours, and Community in Upper Canadian Church Discipline Records,' in Franca Iacovetta and Wendy Mitchinson, eds., On the Case: Explorations in Social History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998),
86. and Lynne Marks, 'No Double Standard? Leisure, Sex, and Sin in Upper Canadian Church Discipline Records, 1800-1860,' in Kathryn Macpherson, Cecilia Morgan, and Nancy Forestell, eds., Gendered Pasts: Essays in Masculinity and Femininity (Toronto and Oxford: Oxford University Press 1999), 48-64.
87. CBA, Woodstock Baptist Church, Church Minutes, 30 April 1831
88. CBA, Boston Baptist Church, Church Minutes, 19 Dec. 1807, and Family History Library (FHL), Iona Station Baptist Church, Church Minutes, 28 Nov. 1829
89. CBA, Boston Baptist Church, Church Minutes, 1 Feb. 1812, Murrary Meldrum notes. Also see FHL, Iona Station Baptist Church, Church Minutes, 2 Dec. 1847.
90. CBA, Brantford Baptist Church, Church Minutes, July 1840
91. Duff Crerar argues that the Free Church Presbyterians retained church discipline practices into the 1860s, after they had been largely abandoned among other Presbyterians, but that even within the Free Church these practices declined by the 1870s. See Crerar, '"Crackling Sounds from the Burning Bush,"' 134.
92. Neil Semple argues that Methodists also largely abandoned church discipline practices after mid-century. See Semple, The Lord 's Dominion: The History of Canadian Methodism (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press 1996), 228-230 By the 1880s the occasional reference to cases of excessive drinking can be found in some Presbyterian and Baptist records, but other sins are not recorded.
93. See, for example, Semple, The Lord 's Dominion, 228-9.
94. Also see Goodwin, '"The Footprints of Zion's King,"' 202,
95. and Johnson, Islands of Holiness, 169.
96. See Semple, The Lord 's Dominion, chap. 13,
97. S.D. Clark, Church and Sect in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1948), chap. 7,
98. and Marks, Revivals and Roller Rinks, chap. 3.
99. This respect for the private sphere does not mean that evangelicals abandoned the moral concerns of Christianity. Personal piety remained important. See, for example, Van Die, '"The Marks of a Genuine Revival."' As well, evangelicals increasingly focused attention on the sins of those outside their church communities - on the poor and the immigrants - who became the focus of evangelical reform movements for temperance and sexual purity.
100. See Margaret Little, 'He Said, She Said: The Role of Gossip in Ontario Mothers' Allowance Administration,' paper presented at the Canadian Historical Association meeting, St Catharines, Ontario, June 1996.
101. Also see Franca Iacovetta, 'Gossip, Contest, and Power in the Making of Suburban Bad Girls, Toronto, 1945-1960,' Canadian Historical Review 80, 4 (1999): 585-623.