Hannah Whitall Smith’s Highway of Holiness:mysticism, heresy and feminism in a Quaker “free
lance”
Carole Dale Spencer, Earlham School of ReligionPaper presented for the J.M. Ward Lecture
Guilford College, Greensboro, N. C.September 30, 2013
Introduction
In 1903 Hannah Whitall Smith, a free-spirited
product of Orthodox Quakerism” in the 19th century,
proudly admitted in her spiritual autobiography:
“I have always rather enjoyed being considered a heretic, and have never wanted to be endorsed by any one. I have felt that to be endorsed was to be bound, and that it was better, for me at least, to be a free lance, with no hindrances to my absolute mental and spiritual freedom.”
When I read that line I knew I had found the Quaker
woman of my dreams! A woman who defies
classification even today, a woman who has
illumined my own life as well as my understanding
of Quakerism, as well as a woman whose life
embodied multiple identities and contradictions.
Hannah was Evangelical in orientation (which was
mainstream religion in the 19th century context).
1
Today she is read and revered largely by
Conservative Christians-- yet she was a
universalist, and admitted she held heretical
views. She was progressive, even radical in
politics, a fierce feminist who marched with her
daughters for woman’s suffrage. Later in life she
gave labor union speeches and explored Christian
socialism. A birthright Orthodox Quaker, she was
baptized by water as an adult. An author who wrote
her most famous book on the subject of happiness,
and truly espoused joy in life, she experienced
deep pain and suffering, and both fame and scandal
in her very public life.
As a devout Christian who called religion the
‘grand romance of her life’ she had to contend with
an antagonistic atheist son-in-law, the famous
philosopher, Bertrand Russell, who called religion
pure superstition and a thing of the past. (One can
only begin to imagine the fierce exchanges between
those two nemeses.)
In addition to Bertrand Russell, a startling number
of celebrated people from the secular literary, and
political world, find their way into her story
2
including Bernard Berenson, another son-in-law:
From Susan B. Anthony to William James to Walt
Whitman to Beatrix Potter. Hannah was one of the
most prominent female religious figures of her day,
an international celebrity preacher & best-selling
author. Today she is perhaps the most famous
Quaker that most Quakers have never heard of.
Initially, I knew her, not as a Quaker, but as a
holiness evangelist and the author of The Christians
Secret of a Happy Life, a 19th century self-help book, and
popular expression of Christian mysticism. Her
book became an instant bestseller, going through
numerous editions, is still in print, and now
considered a “spiritual classic,” that continues to
be read by spiritual seekers today.
Later when I was in seminary and working on my
first research paper in Quaker history, I was
surprised to learn that a Quaker had written this
most enduring book to emerge from the literature of
the Holiness Movement. Curious, I decided to read
her spiritual autobiography, The Unselfishness of God,
and discovered a most delightful & unexpected book,
which became a significant primary resource for me
3
in understanding the radical changes that occurred
within the Religious Society of Friends in the
latter half of the 19th century. Her life spanned
the transformation of American Friends into
evangelicalism and English Friends into liberalism,
and she was in the eye of the Quaker storm on both
sides of the Atlantic for most of her life. Her
autobiography is now beginning to enjoy something
of renaissance as it has been rediscovered by
contemporary readers. Through further research I
learned of the surprising friendship and
endorsement Smith received from the famed Harvard
philosopher and pioneer psychologist, William
James, who said that Hannah Whitall Smith’s
Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life “would always be
kept among his literary treasures, and, that if he
were to become a Christian, he would want to be the
kind of Christian the book describes” (Dieter,
1999). One would expect the pragmatist, and
skeptical philosopher, William James to be a critic
of a book which some might call simplistic and
sentimental, yet James cites it as an example of
his thesis, and quotes from it in his pioneering
4
work in psychology in Talks to Students on Some of Life’s
Ideals (1899). In a chapter called ‘The Gospel of
Relaxation’: he writes:
The best manuals of religious devotion accordingly reiterate the maxim that we must let our feelings go, and pay no regard to them whatever. In an admirable and widely successfullittle book called 'The Christian's Secret of aHappy Life,' by Mrs. Hannah Whitall Smith, I find this lesson on almost every page. Act faithfully, and you really have faith, no matter how cold and even how dubious you may feel. ‘It is your purpose God looks at,’ writesMrs. Smith, ‘not your feelings about that purpose; and your purpose, or will, is therefore the only thing you need attend to. . . . Let your emotions come or let them go, just as God pleases, and make no account ofthem either way. . . . They really have nothingto do with the matter. They are not the indicators of your spiritual state, but are merely the indicators of your temperament or ofyour present physical condition.’1
When we think of the Holiness Movement and the camp
meeting revivals of the nineteenth century, of
which Hannah played a major role, we generally
think of intense emotions displayed publically, and
evangelists’ manipulating those emotions, and yet 1 http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/jgospel.html (Nov. 8, 2009).
5
ironically the most widely read devotional book to
emerge from the Holiness Revival is advocating the
very opposite. Pay no attention to your emotions,
it’s only your will and purpose that matter, not
your emotions.
Her legacy however, has been largely confined to
Evangelical Christians, who read her work
selectively, in censored editions, and maintain an
idealized, and sentimental, one-sided view of her,
with a blind eye to her radicalism.
In this presentation I will examine primarily
the sources and nature of her feminism, mysticism,
and universalism, her multiple and contrasting
identities, and how she integrated all into her new
understanding of Quakerism just as it was opening
into the modern world of culture, politics, and the
new science of evolution and psychology.
But First Her story
Hannah Whitall Smith was born in Philadelphia on
February 7, 1832 and died on May 1, 1911 in
6
England. She was raised in a prominent and well-
to-do Quaker family. Her mother was Mary Tatum
Whitall, her father, John Mickle Whitall. (Memoir
writing was part of the DNA of the Smith and
Whitall Families into the 3rd generation. And they
were prolific letter writers. Over 20,000 family
letters are archived, 6000 from Hannah alone).
Her early journals reveal an exquisitely loving,
happy, but strictly plain Quaker childhood. Her
parents were heavily influenced by the more
culturally open views of the British Quaker
reformer, Joseph John Gurney, and were close
friends of his widow, Eliza Kirkbride Gurney, who
resided in Philadelphia. (Celebrated in the annals
of Quaker history for her correspondence and visit
to Pres. Lincoln, in which she was accompanied by
Hannah’s father, John.) The family attended 12th
Street Meeting, the principle home of the
Philadelphia Gurneyites (who might be considered
the “emergent or convergent” Friends of the day).
Hannah was born with a sunny, cheerful nature and
had loving, even doting, parents. Happiness and
joy gush forth from her early journals, ‘the fate
7
of happiness’ she called it, so it seems no
surprise that ‘the secret of a happy life’ becomes
a primary theme in later writings (Smith, 1903,
20). But in her Quaker adolescence she had doubts
that happiness and piety could be reconciled. Her
burning adolescent question was whether Christians
should be sober or joyful. After graduation from a
Quaker day school (the extent of her formal
education) she took her first step outside the
Quaker fold by joining a reading club, a group of
young women (many of whom were nonQuaker) who met
for education and entertainment. She also began a
process of self-education by reading voraciously
history, philosophy, natural science, theology and
mysticism, including forbidden fiction, and began
to expand her Quaker horizons.
At age 18 she writes of a desire to reform the
Society of Friends (a goal shared by many of her
peer group at that age.) But when her best friend
Abbie Folwell chooses to “take up the cross” and
become a plain Quaker she finds that path of reform
unappealing.
She writes in her journal at age 19:
8
“Religion is something to make one happy not miserable and disagreeable—it is full of intense and improving trials, I know, but then the joys of consolation and peace are so exquisite, and the sense all the time of being loved by God and of doing His will must be rich in happiness, that a continual thanksgiving ought it seems to me to fillthe heart and light up the countenance.” HWS diary,vol 5, 27 April 1851. Lilly lib.
She adds: “I love the friends, and value their
doctrine, and their beautiful spiritual belief far
beyond all price, but I am afraid to be one.” She
begins to question the necessity of suffering,
plainness, and peculiarity.
Marriage at age nineteen to Robert Pearsall Smith
(also from a prominent Philadelphia Quaker family)
brought her first real life- struggles and
intensified her spiritual searching.
A month before she was married she decided not to
adopt plain dress. She had considered taking it up
on her wedding day to conform to wishes of her
soon-to-be husband, Robert, and her parents and the
standard of practice of Orthodox Friends. But
after making a detailed list of pros and cons she
9
concluded in a clear leading of spirit not to
become plain. P. 90 (Meg)
In her early 20s, she experienced a crisis of faith
she called her “years of skepticism.” By 1856
(age 24) she publically supported women’s rights,
and joined the “bloomerites” a movement to reform
women’s dress, introduced by feminist Amelia
Bloomer. (Though I have found no evidence that
Hannah ever wore bloomers.) During this period she
and her husband, Robert, resigned from the Society
of Friends to explore the wider religious world,
finding Philadelphia Orthodoxy too sectarian and
parochial (even the more liberal Gurneyite
variety). She first experimented with the
Plymouth Brethren (Smith, 1903, 189), similar to
Quakers in worship style, but not in theology. She
credits them with teaching her how to study the
bible, (she became well known as a Bible teacher),
but soon she left the Brethren troubled by their
narrow Calvinism.
In her spiritual seeking she happened upon a “noon-
day prayer meeting” in 1858 in downtown
10
Philadelphia, part of a popular renewal movement
among urban businessmen and workers, which she
considered at the time “only another effort of a
dying-out superstition to bolster up its cause.”
But out of curiosity she joins in, and describes a
life-changing mystical experience in these terms:
“Then suddenly something happened to me. What it was or how it came I had no idea, but somehow an inner eye seemed to be opened in my soul,” … I do not remember anything that was said. I do not even know that I heard anything. A tremendous revolutionwas going on within me that was of far profounder interest than anything the most eloquent preacher could have uttered. God was making Himself manifestas an actual existence, and my soul leaped up in anirresistible cry to know Him.”
She writes of it many years later in her autobiography:
“ It was not that I felt myself to be a sinner needing salvation, or that I was troubled about my future destiny. It was not a personal question at all. It was simply and only that I had become awareof God, and that I felt I could not rest until I should know him…All I wanted was to become acquainted with the God of whom I had suddenly become aware. (Unself. 172 (also 169ff)
11
She had a clear awakening to the God within, but
doesn’t call it her “conversion” until a Plymouth
Brethren Friend tells her this experience meant she
had become a Christian and was “born of God.” But
she adds in her autobiography that “I had only
touched the surface of the spiritual realities
hidden under the doctrines I had so eagerly
embraced.” (p. 182)
In 1864 her husband, Robert, became manager of the
Tatum-Whitall Glass Co. (Hannah’s father’s company)
and the family moved to Millville NJ where she was
to discover a very different religious and social
culture. The mill workers were all Methodists, and
joining them in their meetings she was introduced
to their teaching on sanctification (called in
those days, The Second Blessing, a crisis
experience of empowerment for change; early Quakers
called it the baptism of the Holy Spirit).
Reflecting on this teaching in light of her Quaker
upbringing she writes:
“The Quaker examples and influences around me seemed to say there must be a deliverance somewhere, for they declared that they had experienced it; although they never seemed able to
12
explain the “what” or the “how” in such a manner asI could understand it. (1903, 232)
With great zeal she convinces most of her family
and friends one by one “the what and the how” of
holiness.
Even though she had officially resigned from the
Society of Friends, she was nevertheless active
among Quakers, and her Quakerism continued to be a
large part of her religious identity. In 1866 she
started a Friends meeting in Millville which met
until the 1890s. But it was never granted official
status. She wrote an article for a Friends
journal, and In 1869 she published a small book:
The Early Friends: Their Message and the Secret of their Power, with
long extracts from early Friends, Isaac Penington
the most frequently quoted. (Their message: the
indwelling Christ, the secret of their power:
Baptism of the Spirit.)
By the 1870s she had become one of the leading
female voices in what became known as ‘The Holiness
Revival,” a spiritual renewal movement that swept
America and England in the second half of the
nineteenth century, and transformed a large portion
13
of the Religious Society of Friends into the
Friends Church.
In England and Europe this Movement became known as
the Keswick or Higher Life Movement and was largely
created by Hannah and her evangelist husband,
Robert Pearsall Smith. Their teaching on holiness
became the known as the “Keswick theology,” at
least in its beginnings. With the Smiths as
leaders, preaching to audiences of thousands, made
up of Oxford and Cambridge students, Anglican and
Free Church ministers, poets, writers, and English
aristocrats, it became the religious version of the
Romantic Movement in Britain. Progressive (for the
time) inclusive and ecumenical, it was heavily
flavored with Quaker spirituality, at least in its
first three years (1873-75). But after the
departure of the Smiths (precipitated by rumors of
Robert’s inappropriate relationship with a women
disciple—the truth of which will probably never be
fully known), Keswick spirituality gradually became
more conservative, even fundamentalistic.
14
Holiness became Hannah’s spiritual path to
empowerment, inner freedom, divine union, joy and
happiness. She would have fully agreed with
William Penn’s statement that Quakers teach that
‘men [and women] must be holy, or they cannot be
happy’ (Cope, 1882, 436).
But Hannah’s Quaker holiness diverged radically
from traditional evangelical teaching in her firm
belief in restitution or universal salvation, the
“restoration of all things” a belief she initially received
by ‘revelation’ through an overwhelming sense of
divine compassion which she called the ‘the mother-
heart of God.’ Her description of this “powerful
illumination” which comprises one whole essential
epoch of her spiritual journey, is edited out of
all subsequent editions of her autobiography
(Smith, 1903, 198-208). By restitution she meant
that no one would be lost from God’s love, everyone
would be reconciled to God, because an infinitely
loving God could not abandon any of God’s children—
nor punish them for eternity—‘salvation must be as
universal as the fall,’ she declared (Smith, 1903,
204). In other words, ‘Love wins.’
15
This belief, which she publically announced, being
at variance with much of Christian tradition,
brought accusations of heresy from her strictly
orthodox friends, including Quakers at that time,
as she describes, somewhat tongue-in-cheek:
As was to be expected in those days, my views on Restitution, which of course I had speedily announced, met with a great deal of disapprovalfrom the Plymouth Brethren, and my other orthodox friends, and I had to undergo a good deal of what might be called persecution, but which I myself rather gloried in, because I felt it was a grand thing to know so much more of God than those did who opposed me.” (Smith, 1903, ch. 24)
Surprisingly her “heresy” was rarely an obstacle in
her speaking invitations or her books contracts.
She candidly reveals that:
“…it seemed likely that the holding of what wasconsidered by many to be such a grave heresy, might have proved a hindrance to my Christian work; and I dare say it may have been so in some quarters. But as I always had far more openings for work awaiting me than I could possibly fill, I never experienced any difficulty. I tried to be courteous enough not to involve people, to whom such views were abhorrent …but the revelation I had had was too
16
glorious for me to withhold it whenever I foundan open door; and as I was never willing to sail under false colours, nor speak anywhere without its being perfectly well known beforehand what a heretic I was, I enjoyed for the most part all the freedom I desired.”
By 1876 after speaking at the Keswick Higher Life
conferences in England she admits to her friends
that “my orthodoxy has fled to the winds. I am
Broad, Broader, Broadest.” HWS to [Mary Beck] 8
Aug. 1876, box 9. Lilly Lib). (Yet she still speaks
at Holiness conferences and finds deep spiritual
fulfillment and inspiration at Camp Meetings.)
She describes her spiritual evolution in these
words:
“I feel myself to have gotten out into a limitless ocean of the love of God that overflows all things.My theology is complete, if you but grant me an omnipotent and just creator I need nothing more. ‘God is love,’ comprises my whole system of ethics.There is certainly a very grave defect in any doctrine that universally makes its holders narrow and uncharitable, and this is always the case with strict so-called orthodoxy. I find that every soulthat has traveled on this highway of holiness for any length of time, has invariably cut loose from its old moorings.” (Phila. Q., 34-5
17
When Hannah writes of having “gotten out into a
limitless ocean of the love of God that overflows
all things,” she is surely echoing George Fox, in
his famous journal entry "I saw, also, that there
was an ocean of darkness and death; but an infinite
ocean of light and love, which flowed over the
ocean of darkness.” (For her, Holiness theology was
an expansion of consciousness, not a limiting or
constrictive one.)
As the Holiness revival became more polemical,
especially within Quakerism, and doctrinally rigid,
Smith distanced herself from those who were
interpreting holiness in a narrow dogmatic
paradigm. She maintained an open, all–embracing,
mystical vision of holiness, as the pure love of
God, which explains at least in part, why she came
to embrace restitution, or universal hope. While
her “heresy” did not preclude her from being
invited to speak at Holiness conferences,
(including Indiana YM in 1877) it did prevent her
from being accepted back into the Society of
Friends when she applied for membership in
Whitewater Monthly meeting (IYM) in 1881 (even
18
though she had the support of her friends Charles
and Rhoda Coffin.) It took five more years of
trying to rejoin Quakers before she was finally
granted membership in Baltimore YM in 1886--the YM
where here sister Mary Thomas, a weighty Quaker
minister, thankfully, was very influential. (Not
long after rejoining Friends she was offered the
opportunity to became “recorded as a Friends
Minister” but she chose to remain a freelance. She
wrote to a friend: “I am much freer now. It would
be I fear a dreadful hamper to me.” (H. to
Priscilla Mounsey, 20 Nov. 1887, box 9, Lilly.)
While her discovery of the “doctrine of holiness”
came through the Methodists, she soon realized it
was the core of her Quaker tradition all along, it
just had not been transmitted to her in a way she
could understand in her earlier life.
Thus, she admitted she had to learn from outside
the Society what were in fact the foundational
principles of Quakerism. She wrote of sharing with
a Quaker friend her “new discoveries” of holiness
teachings:
19
[The Friend]…on hearing what I had to tell, had expressed surprise at its being new to me, as it was, she declared, what the Quakers had always taught. This seemed to throw light upon Quakerism that I had never dreamed of. My mother also said tome one day, but Hannah why does thee call this doctrine new? Thee is only preaching what all the old Friends have always preached. Yes, I answered, “I begin to see that this is the case, but they have never preached it in a way that ordinary people could know what they were talking about. It seems to me that nobody, who did not know it already, could possibly get hold of it from their preaching.” Certainly I never did, although I have been listening to their preaching all my life…But Icame to the conclusion that my mother and my friendwere right. It was true Quaker doctrine that we haddiscovered. (1903, 275-6).
She concluded that Quakers called holiness “the
life hid with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3—a phrase
oft-quoted by Christian mystics and early Quakers)
(Smith, 1903, 276). But she had not understood
their preaching because they never explained “how”
it could be realized. They urged “holiness of life
but failed to tell the secret by which this
holiness was to be attained” (Smith, 1903, 279).
But as she discovered the interior life for herself
20
she came full circle back to her Quaker roots and
understood their meaning anew:
…the true inner meaning of Quakerism dawned upon memore and more fully day by day. It was the “way of holiness” in which they were seeking to walk. They preached a deliverance from sin, a victory over thecares and worries of life, a peace that passeth allunderstanding, a continual being made “more than conquerors” through Christ. They were in short “Higher Life” people, and at last I understood them; and the old preaching, which once had been soconfusing, became marrow and fatness to my soul. The preaching had not changed, but I had changed. Ihad discovered the missing link, and had reached that stage in my soul’s experience to which such preaching ministered. (1903, 280-1)
Smith explained that holiness was the “missing
link,” but not until she came to understand it and
experience it herself did she realize it was the
core of Quaker belief and action:
…nearly every view of divine things that I have since discovered and every reform I have since advocated, had, I now realize, their germs in the views of the Society; and over and over again, whensome new discovery or conviction has dawned upon me, I have caught myself saying, “Why that, was what the early Friends meant, although I never understood it before.” (1903, 55-56)
21
(Which she found most clearly articulated in Isaac Penington.)
She also discovered holiness in the writings of the
French Quietists Madam Guyon & Fenelon, and the
17th century monk, Brother Lawrence, whose book,
The Practice of the Presence of God, she found so important
she had a new version published with her own
introduction in 1895 (and is still being
reprinted).
Hannah as a Christian mystic: The influence of French Quietism
While Hannah wrote in the language of the popular
Christian spirituality of the time, her underlying
theology, I would argue, is the process of divine
union that comes principally from the French
Quietists, Jeanne Guyon and Fenelon.
The spirituality of Smith’s devout Quaker father,
who introduced her to these two mystics, was
indelibly shaped by them (as were many Quakers
throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Hannah’s
father John M. Whitall, gave all his children, when
they became young adults, his most beloved book
22
called Spiritual Progress: or Instructions in the
Divine Life of the Soul, a book of extracts from
the writings of Guyon & Fenelon.
This book always held a special place for Hannah
alongside her Bible because, she writes, “it seemed
to reveal the mystical pathway” (1903, 234).2 She
admitted that she initially did not understand it,
and in the zeal of her early evangelical conversion
actually thought it to be doctrinally “unsound.”
But she realized later:
…all unconsciously to myself its teachings had made a profound impression upon me; and, even while I criticized, I still was often consciousof an underlying hunger after the mystical sideof religion set forth in this book. (1903, 234)
Smith herself, was probably unaware of the strong
historical link between Friends theology, the
practice of silence, and the Catholic Quietist
movement of seventeenth-century France. The most
evident historical link between Quakers and
seventeenth-century Quietists is a another similar
book of extracts called A Guide to True Peace or the
2
23
Excellency of Inward and Spiritual Prayer Compiled Chiefly from the
Writings of Fénelon, Guyon, and Molinos, compiled anonymously
by two Quakers in 1813. This guide to contemplative
prayer was reprinted by Quakers many times
throughout the 19th century. Quakers had been the
first to translate the writings of Guyon into
English in 1727 and the first to publish her works
in America (1738).
J. Rendel Harris, first Director of Studies at
Woodbrooke and one of the most influential biblical
scholars of his time, stated emphatically in a
Lecture at Bryn Mawr College in 1900: “There is no
Society that has been so influenced by Guyon as the
Quakers have been.” Harris also added his personal
tribute to Guyon, crediting her with being "the
teacher from whom I have received more help and
guidance in the things of God than from any other
person." (Founders Lecture, Bryn Mawr, 1900).
Harris’ wife, Helen Balkwill Harris, was a lifelong
friend of Hannah’s (both Harris’ were holiness
Quakers.) Hannah never penned a statement as
explicit as Harris on the influence of Guyon, but
based on the pervasiveness of Guyon’s teachings
24
that infuses all of her writings, it may be true
for her as well. Guyon represents a concrete link
between Quaker Quietist spirituality and the
Nineteenth century Holiness Movement.
When Thomas Upham, a congregational clergyman,
holiness advocate and professor of philosophy,
published his Life of Guyon in 1847 it became the
key to popularizing Guyon in America, particularly
within the holiness movement. A recent Smith
scholar has claimed that this book was “probably
the single greatest influence on Hannah Whitall
Smith’s developing theology” (Meneghal, 2000. P.
63). Upham also wrote a book on spiritual
discernment, called “Inward Divine Guidance.”
Originally Published in 1843 in Boston, it was
later republished in 1887 in Philadelphia with a
preface by Hannah Whitall Smith.
Guyon, the French mystic and heretic, was Hannah’s
spiritual guide, as she was for many Quakers, as
well as Holiness advocates, in the 18th and 19th
centuries. Smith adeptly appropriated the
spirituality of seventeenth century Catholic
mystical writers through the popular spirituality
25
of the Holiness revival in a way that spoke deeply
to Protestant spiritual seekers of her day. Hannah
saw the holiness movement as part of a broad
tradition of Christian spirituality with roots in
both Catholic and Quaker mysticism.
(Interesting side-note: The next scholarly research
on Quakers and Guyon, after Rendel Harris’ work,
was done by Russell Pope at Guilford in 1938. He
provides a general description of Quaker interest
in Madame Guyon in a series of Lectures, called
“Concerning Mysticism” delivered at Guilford
College in the Spring of 1938. (Guilford College
Bulletin 31, 1938, 11-25)
Smith as a Feminist
Smith’s feminism was essentially inborn, and
shaped within her Quaker community. Her Quaker
upbringing prepared her to become a public
religious figure, but her ministry came to fruition
and to the attention of the broader public in the
Holiness movement. She states that the one tangible
and clear teaching of Quakers was ‘the perceptible
26
guidance of the Holy Spirit’ which ‘left every
individual free to serve God in the way that seemed
right’ (Smith, 1903, 82). And she adds
‘Nor was this the case in spiritual matters but earthly matters as well, and it gave to each individual the position of independence which has always to me seemed one of the most vital of human needs…and the most priceless of all the gifts that my Quaker inheritance has brought me’ (Smith, 1903,82).
She underscores this point by announcing that ‘no
male Quaker, not even the most tyrannical, could
curtail the liberty of his womankind, if only they
could say they “felt a concern” for any course of
action’ Smith, 1903, 82).
From her childhood she imagined herself as a
minister, and dreamed of preaching and traveling
all over the world. In the Quaker religious world
from its beginnings to be a minister meant an
itinerant, missionary life, a life of adventure and
spiritual fulfillment. It was the one avenue of
public life always open for women in the Quaker
tradition, and women ministers modeled such a life
for her. Yet, she still could equivocate and bemoan
27
her lot when she wrote to her cousin at age
eighteen,
‘But I am only a woman, and woman are so weak and dependent and never do any good. There is no chanceis there? I shall have to be content to plod on in the same humdrum path, making pies and cooking and scrubbing, and mending stockings and makings shirts, and feel proud if I may claim relationship with great and noble men’ (Smith, L. P., 1950, 4). Later she wrote in the margins—‘ridiculous’
(Strachey, 1982, 21).
But in her better moments she feels assured that
someday she would be called to preach and have a
public life, and imagines herself as Madame Guyon,
or Elizabeth Evans, a famous Quaker preacher. In
1868 shortly after discovering holiness doctrine
through the Methodists, she wrote to her good
friend Anna Shipley,
I believe God has made me a pioneer, so that I do not expect much sympathy or understanding as I go along; and the breaking through of hedges, and fences, and stone walls is not a very pleasant path, I can assure thee. But it is my nature, I cannot help it…” (Smith, 1903, 14).
28
The one life-long regret she voices on numerous
occasions is her lack of a college education.
Though a rare opportunity for women at that time,
plans had been made for her to be tutored soon
after marriage, but she became pregnant almost
immediately and her dream of a college education
was never realized.
In 1852, at age twenty she writes in her journal:
I am too young to be married. The cares of life have crushed all the joyousness out of my spirits….now are overthrown all my fond hopes of a life of study—of becoming a thoroughly educated woman…Greekand Mathematics I must now lay aside, and for the present most of my reading. Well, I suppose I can do it, and still be a good and useful woman. But it is a great trial (Strachey, 1982, 21).
Her personal deprivation led her to become a
staunch advocate for women’s higher education. She
became a mentor to numerous young women, among her
family and friends. Her favorite niece to whom she
gave the most attention and guidance, and had the
most impact, was M. Carey Thomas who became a
pioneer in women’s higher education, the first
female dean of a college (Byrn Mawr) and one of the
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first American women to get a PhD. Thomas, I
believe, was Hannah’s alter ego.
In another letter to her friend Anna Shipley in
1873, the passion Hannah feels around female
education and her own loss is evident: “Girls have
a right to a college education. They ought to be
made to get it, even if it had to be done at the
point of the bayonet (Smith, L. P, 1950, 18-19).
In 1882 Hannah gave her first official public
speech for women’s suffrage. In writing to her
daughter about this experience she relates how she
came to this conviction.
In my speech I said I had come to the advocacy of this reform by the way of the gospel, that Christ came to break every yoke and set free all that werebound, and that I wanted to follow in his steps andshare in his work. I said the gospel did not arbitrarily upset the existing order of things, butit put a mine under all wrong and oppression that finally blew it up. And that therefore women were made free by the working out of the principles of Christ who had declared there is neither male nor female in Him (Smith Letters, 1882a).
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She adds: ‘They make fun of me in these
[newspaper] slips but all reformers must expect
that’ (Smith, 1882a). To her sister, she writes
with candor and humor, about her first suffrage
speech:
Sally, I tell thee it was fun. I took my audience too. I could see the women nudging each other all over the room, as I made some home thrusts. Our Temp. ladies said I surpassed myself. I am going to try it again sometime; and I put it on the religion of Christ which I said put gunpowder underall forms of bondage and slavery. How the heads did nod at that! I guess they were glad to have a little Christianity thrown in (Smith Letters, 1882b).
Smith became spiritual counselor, guide and mentor
to hundreds of women in her lifetime, who met with
her one on one, or who she counseled through her
letters.
Her many experiences of listening to the grievous
stories of women’s abuse and oppression motivated
her to take up the cause of what can only be called
a nineteenth century women’s liberation movement,
which is how she viewed the mission of the Woman’s
Christian Temperance Union. (Which supported the
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then-radical feminist fight for woman suffrage.)
Her radical liberationist rhetoric comes through in
her letters to her daughters. She writes to her
daughter Mary:
I wish thee could have heard some of our women. Two new [leaders] have been developed during the past year—two grand good women, whose lives had been lived in a little narrow circle with no scope for their gifts, until our WCTU came along and gavethem an outlet…Neither of them are married—they were not willing to go into slavery, they declare, let it be ever so gilded (Smith Letters, 1882c).
The most profound irony I’ve discovered in my
research into the life of Smith, is her continuous
appropriation by conservative evangelical women as
a model of women’s submission, despite the fact
that Hannah vehemently opposed any notion of male
headship or female submission. Hannah’s greatest
fear for her daughters was that they would marry
men who held ‘that hateful notion of the authority
of husbands’ (Strachey, 1982, 91). She not only
taught her daughters that marriage should be ‘a
perfect equality between husband and wife as
between man and man’ but also made her views known
to their male suitors. She believed only in
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obedience and submission to a loving, compassionate
God, never (even in her ‘extreme evangelical’ days)
did she endorse women’s subordination to male
authority.
Feminist historians have observed that one of the
self-presentation strategies Christian women use in
writing (even today) is self-depreciation, a
strategy Hannah employed to good effect in The
Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life. She begins her preface
with: ‘This is not a theological book…I have not
been trained in theological schools’ (Smith, 1885,
iii.) But also adds, affirming Quaker spiritual
guidance, ‘the Lord has taught me experimentally
and practically’ (Smith, 1885, iii). She asks the
reader to ‘forgive the blundering way’ in which her
ideas were expressed, suggesting: ‘Say, if you
choose, “Well, she is only a woman, and cannot be
expected, therefore, to understand Theology:” – but
remember that God sometimes reveals, even to babes,
secrets that He has hidden from the wise and
prudent’ (Smith, 1875, 6). In her revised edition
of 1885 this last sentence is deleted. Such
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disclaimers, by women who nevertheless feel
spiritually empowered to write, have a long
tradition reaching back to medieval women mystics,
who begin with the expected literary convention of
self-depreciation then feel they have divine
permission to speak. The argument that God uses
the weak to confound the wise, is found in Margaret
Fell’s writing as well. Fortunately as Smith
became more confident in her voice (and found a
publisher, and an audience) she found no need to
include the disclaimer in her later books.
Conclusion
In 1901 on her 69th birthday, increasingly crippled
by arthritis, she circulated a letter to her
friends informing them she was in process of
writing her autobiography. She revealed that her
purpose in writing it was to share her discoveries
about the nature of God. She announces:
“Not to be outdone by the younger generation, Itoo am preparing something for publication. It is a part of my autobiography, and I call it “How I discovered God.” (her original title) It is the story of my soul life from my early Quaker days, on
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through all the progressive steps of my experience until I reach that peace which cannot fail to come to the soul who has “discovered God”!—I am putting all my heresies into my story, and am trying to show the steps that have led to them; and I flattermyself that it is going to be very convincing! So if you feel afraid of becoming heretics, I advise you not to read it.
In 1902 at the age of 70, Confined to a wheelchair
the last seven years of her life, she gave up
public speaking but remained alert and involved in
social causes. Her granddaughter Ray Strachey took
her in her wheel chair to demonstrate at the
Parliament building before a critical vote on
women's suffrage. Sadly like all of the pioneers
for women’s suffrage she did not live to get the
vote.
She published her spiritual autobiography in 1903,
admitting in a letter to her daughter Mary that
“words seem rather powerless to express spiritual
realities,” (P. 144 Phil Q.) She adds
“Even in my extreme evangelical days, what I got atwas the fact of God’s forgiveness, although I hung it on a hook that I had afterwards to discard…I fully believe that this bottom fact of a good Creator, can be got at through all sort of
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religious beliefs and all sorts of religious ceremonies, and that it does not matter what these are, provided the soul is honest in regard to them.” (P. 144 phil. Quaker)
Even in her much earlier work, Christian’s Secret
of 1875, still strongly evangelical in orientation,
her inter-faith sympathies are transparent. She
writes in her introduction: “I have tried to reach
the absolute truth which lies at the foundation of
all “creeds” and to bring the soul into those
personal relations with God which must exist alike
in every form of religion, let the expression of
them differ as they may.” (iv)
Her summation of her theology at the close of her
autobiography echoes her great spiritual mentor
Madame Guyon when she testifies:
“I had then reached...the real God, behind all the seemings, and my heart had entered into its rest. Ihad discovered that nothing else really matters---neither creeds, nor ceremonies, nor doctrines, nor dogmas. GOD IS; GOD IS UNSELFISH; AND GOD IS ENOUGH. “ p. 304
Her mystical faith sustained her through a life
filled with great joy and deep grief: the deaths
of 4 of her 7 children. It sustained her though a
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humiliating scandal and fall from grace of her
husband at the pinnacle of their international
fame, (dramatic story there’s not time to tell),
and through what was surely a difficult marriage.
Her radical optimism sustained her into her old age
and its physical disability. Her intimate
relationship with a mother-hearted God gave her
absolutely no fear of death and she concluded her
spiritual autobiography by declaring, “I await the
moment with joy‘ (Smith, 1903, 311).
This final statement also confirms her intimate,
life-long identity with the French mystic Madame
Guyon, who concluded her autobiography with almost
identical words “I waited for the end of my life
with delight.” (Prison narratives, ch. 8)
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