UCLA

Eighteenth and nineteenth-century Black Christian women in the United States contributed socially, politically, and intellectually to the transatlantic abolitionist movement through their use of proto-Black feminist and womanist theological language. Tried as By Fire is a five-chapter Black feminist intellectual history that studies Black Christian women from the Early Republic through the end of the Civil War. It examines how their writings and actions expanded Evangelical Christian ideas about freedom, race, and gender in the New England and mid-Atlantic regions. It focuses primarily on freeborn Northern preaching women, Jarena Lee, Maria W. Miller Stewart, and Zilpha Elaw. However, it also grapples with the liminal nature of Black freedom by exploring the abolitionist theologies of Black enslaved women who became free, Phillis Wheatley, Sojourner Truth, and Jane Johnson. Wheatley, Truth, and Johnson embodied abolitionist theology by insisting upon dictating the terms of their own lives.

Tried as By Fire joins recent intellectual history projects on nineteenth-century Black women’s political work in the Northeastern United States. However, it differentiates itself from these scholarly projects by situating Black Christian abolitionist women as un-ordained ministers to the nation and the Atlantic world more broadly. They framed abolition as a theological framework, and they deployed their theology to call for the creation of a new heaven and a new earth in which everyone would be free. Tried as By Fire engages with Black Christian women’s writings and actions and treats them as abolitionist political theory. Black Christian women in the Northeastern United States remade Evangelical Christianity through their distinctive ways of engaging with it. This dissertation tracks their visions through textual sources such as spiritual autobiographies, essays, speeches, and sermons. It also proposes Black feminist and womanist archival reading methods that will allow scholars to read against the grain of the archives of Black unfreedom to uncover how Black women, even those who did not write political essays and speeches, embodied abolitionist theologies. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century abolitionist theologians’ political frameworks are instructive in our present moment. Their epistemologies offer a Black feminist genealogy and generative political theory for contemporary activists who continue to demand abolition.