Smitten: Sex, Gender, and the Contest for Souls in the Second Great Awakening

by Rodney Hessinger

In Smitten , Rodney Hessinger examines how the Second Great Awakening disrupted gender norms across a breadth of denominations. The displacement and internal migration of Americans created ripe conditions for religious competition in the North. Hessinger argues that during this time of religious ferment, religious seekers could, in turn, play the missionary or the convert. The dynamic of religious rivalry inexorably led toward sexual and gender disruption. Contending within an increasingly democratic religious marketplace, preachers had to court converts in order to flourish. They won followers through charismatic allure and making concessions to the desires of the people. Opening their own hearts to new religious impulses, some religious visionaries offered up radical dispensations―including new visions of how God wanted them to reorder sex and gender relations in society. A wide array of churches, including Methodists, Baptists, Mormons, Shakers, Catholics, and Perfectionists, joined the fray. Religious contention and innovation ultimately produced backlash. Charges of seduction and gender trouble ignited fights within, among, and against churches. Religious opponents insisted that the newly converted were smitten with preachers, rather than choosing churches based on reason and scripture. Such criticisms coalesced into a broader pan-Protestant rejection of religious enthusiasm. Smitten reveals the sexual disruptions and subsequent domestication of religion during the Second Great Awakening.

228 pages, Hardcover

Published December 15, 2022

Reviews

[Eekind · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well researched, Inquisitive and makes the case as Ohio as a springboard for Enthusiastic Religion

Obviously I was interested in getting more of a feminist education on the 2nd Great awakening. I don’t know if this 100% hits the mark but it does a lot with the contemporary texts available. Granted most of the women documented are either escaping gendered violence or writing Laura Ingram level screeds about upstart Protestant and Mormon faith groups that are converting families to their flocks before skipping town as a rule.

I do think the lens of “Women are specifically seen as sexually vulnerable to charismatic preachers, thus becoming smitten in a more tangible way than men and families being swayed into new sects of Christianity” is a very effective way to talk about how women were positioned in society under patriarchy and religious works were one of the few aspects of public life that it was permissible for a woman striving towards Republican motherhood was allowed to inhabit.

I appreciate why the Mormon and Catholic controversies are being brought forward first based on the authors supposition that both were seen as engaging in some degree to the Enthusiastic Religion movement in the 1820-1840s while still being seen as outliers by larger Protestant denominations and mainstream culture. I do still wish this was a bit more chronological to help keep norms and precedents organized. The perfectionist stuff was pretty messy and poorly plotted. It just felt like I was being taken from one primary text to another without much insights so I tuned more of that out that I wanted to.

Just generally, this book does assume you as the reader have a well rounded knowledge of social structures and controversies of the early 1800s. Like Maria Monk gets named dropped as a fictional outgrowth of Protestant anxieties around Catholic notions of chastity and celibacy post Father Hogan scandal. And I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume 2025 reader immediately know about nunsploitstion anti catholic Penny dreadfuls from 1836. I also don’t 100% know how accessible a lot of the discussion about motherhood and marriage in the early United States is to most readers if they haven’t read The Grand Domestic Revolution or books around the shift from Republican Motherhood to Protofeminism in this era.

I will say this book assumes I know anything about the shakers in the 1830s and whether or not they were working their kids to death and doing the feber method to a kid your letting sleep on the floor with no blankets. The sections like the shakers where the text is almost entirely talking heads saying how abusive these faith groups we’re are actively hard to parce because these primary sources are obviously inflammatory reactionary diatribes but they aren’t followed by context from the author or diametrically opposed primary sources from the faith groups in question. It just makes for a much murkier and inconsistent reading experience from a book that I want to provide me insights and history

[Daniel Silliman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this pretty disappointing. Smitten identifies an interesting nexus of religious and sexual / gender issues in early 1800s American religion, but doesn't seem able to identify the dynamic at work between them.

Maybe this needed a sharper theoretical tool? It definitely needed more thorough research—in the chapter on Mormons, for example, Smitten relies almost entirely on secondary sources to understand Alexander Campbell, even though Campbell is essential to the framing of the argument, and as a result misunderstands some basic things about Campbell's teaching and social position in the religious milieu. Useful for scholars to engage but probably not worthwhile for students or general readers interested in gender and religion.