No Silent Witness: The Eliot Parsonage Women and Their Unitarian World

by Cynthia Grant Tucker

Overview

This group biography follows three generations of ministers' daughters and wives in a famed American Unitarian family. Cynthia Tucker examines the Eliots, their religious tradition, and the Eliot women's largely neglected female vocation. Spanning 150 years from the early 19th century forward, the narrative is shaped into a series of stories. Each of six chapters takes up a different woman's experience, from the deaths of numerous children and the anguish of infertility to the suffocation of small parish life with its chronic loneliness, doubt, and resentment.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199889235
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	07/29/2010
Series:	Religion in America
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Cynthia Grant Tucker is Professor of English, University of Memphis, Member of Editorial Board, Journal of Unitarian Universalist History.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Major Events
Chart of The Eliot Forebears
Chapter 1: The Unitarian Universe
Chapter 2: Calling the Family Together
Chapter 3: The Rush of Words
Chapter 4: Where Words Fail
Chapter 5: The Voice Coach
Chapter 6: Reduced to a Whisper
Chapter 7: Talking Back and Taking Flight
Chapter 8: A Larger Sphere
Chapter 9: New Rules of Engagement
Chapter 10: Old Work and New
Chapter 11: No Parting Word
The Family Roster
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Tucker has created a moving portrait of three generations of Unitarian women and the religious world that both inspired them and limited their choices."—ournal of American History

"In Prophetic Sisterhood, Cynthia Tucker demonstrated that women's networks are as fascinating as their individual lives. Here she brings her trademark style of group biography to the wives and daughters of Unitarianisms most distinguished clerical family. Tucker reveals almost the whole of Unitarian history (and much more!) through the eyes of women, challenging scholars of other traditions to map the friendships and ministries of the amphibious creatures who inhabit parsonages."

—Dan McKanan, Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer in Divinity, Harvard Divinity School

"In this compelling and beautifully written text, Cynthia Grant Tucker unearths the complexity of the lives of wives, sisters and mothers of ministers, highlighting the ways in which women challenged the divisions between the private and public, personal and political, and secular and sacred, as they sought to express their creativity in ways that were personally fulfilling and socially transformative. In her honest recounting of the ambiguities of these lives marked by both privilege and limitation, Tucker gives us a deeper and richer understanding of the complexity of human experience."

—Sharon D. Welch, author of After Empire: The Art and Ethos of Enduring Peace

"In this work, Tucker gives us something unique: three generations of the Eliot women, the
'unordained partners' of 'one of America's premier Unitarian dynasties.'"—Religious Studies Review

From the Publisher