Delivery and Deliverance: Religious Experiences of Childbirth in Eighteenth-Century America

Abstract

AbstractThis paper argues that childbirth served as a prism for religious experience in early America, not just among the women who experienced it but also among the members of their households and communities. Examining childbirth as the source of religious experience can shed light on the social and physiological dimensions of early American spirituality by illuminating a religious culture of childbearing that shaped the piety of anyone who came into contact with it. We might expect that childbirth molded women's spirituality. But this article proposes that not just women but also others in their midst experienced religion differently because of their proximity to childbirth. Pregnancy, labor, and infant loss forced women and men to confront mortality and became means through which they carved out spiritual life, created ritual, and forged religious community. Using the body as a category of analysis, this paper reveals a space where the physical and spiritual persons intersect, and it argues that spiritual responses to childbirth as a physiological event were part of the longer arc of religious experience than we have previously appreciated. In doing so, it offers new ways to center women and gender in the narrative of early American religious history.