Critics on Adams

The Adams text is probably not especially inspiring for us. However, it has inspired some people in the past. While Mary Wollstonecraft is represented as having cast a somewhat jaded eye over it (immediately below), the text is represented, somewhat begrudgingly, as having influenced Maria Stewart in her fight for women’s rights and the abolition of slavery. Adams’ work doubtless has many flaws, but read through the eyes of someone in the early nineteenth century, apparently it could have an empowering effect. Personally, for all its flaws, I think that that past potential to empower does emerge from the text, and that is one reason why I thought it might be nice to put it on the web - not as a work of great inspiration for us, but as a resource to allow us to see an unusual text that people in the past used for their own inspiration.

But why here? Well, the goody-two-shoes reason is that Adams is all about what makes virtue. This appears, largely, to be chastity. But the real reason for putting it on this site is that Adams keeps his audience’s interest by his ever-present hints towards salaciousness - I mean, if you are going to elevate chastity, think of all those examples of the unchaste that need to be brought to the readers’ attention to serve as examples. Adams’ work is a very refined kind of pornography, serving as a stimulus to the imagination. It appears to have sold well.

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Excerpt above from Jane Rendall, “The Grand Causes Which Combine to Carry Mankind Forward - Wollstonecraft, History and Revolution” in Wollstonecraft on Adams, in Mary Wollstonecraft and the critics, 1788-2001, ed. Harriet Divine Jump.

(Article originally published in Women’s Writing 4, 2, 1997; 155-72)

See remainder of article at Google Books.

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The following excerpt is from the chapter ‘Maria W. Stewart—An African
American Woman Speaks’ in Lift Ev’ry Voice 1830-1860, 3rd in the series Making Freedom, African Americans in U.S. History.

See at Heinemann

[108] Starting in 1831, Maria W. Stewart became a controversial writer and lecturer who raised the issues of black rights and self-determination later taken up by Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, the Grimke sisters, and the many influential champions of human rights throughout the nineteenth century. Maria W. Stewart read widely. She studied history, enjoyed poetry, and read the major newspapers of her day to stay informed about national and international events. She declared her major influences to be the Bible, the work of radical black abolitionist David Walker (1785–1830), author of Walker’s Appeal . . . to the Coloured Citizens of the World 1829, and studies of women’s lives such as the 1790 volume, Woman, Sketches of the History, Genius, Disposition, Accomplishments. . . of the Fair Sex in all Parts of the World . . . by the British historian John Adams (1750–1814).

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The following is from A Greater Awakening - Women’s Intellect as a Factor in Early Abolishionist Movements, 1824-1834 by Jennifer Rycenga, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 2005, vol 21, issue 2, p31.

Writings such as Dymond’s that could have offered women both intellectual succor and substance were rare in two ways - they were rarely written and rarely accessible. The very real limitations placed on women’s education that Dymond pointed out created and reinforced further limitations. For any woman, to break through these limitations to a place of self-knowledge, self-development, and self-expression required that combination of emotion and reason discussed earlier. The dulling conformity of school textbooks and compendiums posed yet another obstacle.

One of the more prolific compilers of such schoolbooks in this era was an Englishman named John Adams, a pedant who flourished from 1785 to 1810. His many books, such as The Flowers of Ancient History (1788), A View of Universal History (1795, in three volumes), and Elegant Anecdotes and Bon Mots (1790), were used in select academies (roughly equivalent to a high school level), and most went through multiple editions. Adams was a writer whose knowledge was broad rather than deep, and whose likely effect on his readers was more exhaustive than enlightening. His Sketches of the History, Genius, Disposition, Accomplishments, Employments, Customs, Virtues, and Vices of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World, first published in England in 1790, was published in Boston in 1807. Adams’s rhetoric is laced with condescension. He never hesitates before passing judgment on entire religions, civilizations, and cultures, including giving a racist appraisal of Africa most noteworthy for its reversal claiming that Africans were “robbing and murdering all other inhabitants of the globe” while they wallowed in “their idleness, ignorance, superstition, [and] treachery.”

This work of Adams’s, through some obscure path, wound up in the hands and mind of the abolitionist and feminist orator Maria Stewart. Born a free black woman in Connecticut in 1803, Stewart lived as a servant, thirsting for [48] education but never attaining the circumstance to quench her desire. In the aftermath of Nat Turners rebellion, she offered her writings to William Lloyd Garrison, who published them first as a pamphlet, later printing her speeches directly in the Liberator. These public speeches generated a great deal of controversy, even within Boston’s black community An unwanted prophet in her own land, Stewart retired her jeremiadic voice from public speaking in 1833. Her farewell speech, from September of that year, utilized Adams’s text to justify women’s right to speak in public on religious and political matters.

It is only by profoundly conscious acts of intelligence that Maria Stewart was able to get beyond Adams’s patronizing tone and use him as the highly potent (albeit highly edited) source that she does. It is unclear at what point in her oft-interrupted and self-guided education Stewart discovered Adams’s text, but she surely used it with aplomb. She begins by retelling her internal conversion, her willingness to surrender herself to God’s will. She recounts her prophetic calling in Boston and her sense that God has commanded her to speak. She then commences a remarkable summary of women’s involvement in religion; even today it could serve as a reasonable starting point for a syllabus on women and religion. She compares herself to Deborah, Esther, Mary Magdalene, and women who “ministered unto Christ”. In the midst of this, she sweeps aside any sexist objections from Pauline texts by trumping Paul with Jesus, then asserting that if Paul knew how much black women were suffering, “I presume he would make no objections to our pleading in public for our rights”. Her bold woman-handling of Paul outstrips much feminist theologizing, then and now, and is another example of women’s questioning the literal truth (and internal consistency) of scripture.

To convince her hearers that women were called to sacred vocations in the [49] past, she turns to Adams’s text. She quotes him exactly and then follows with shorter paragraphs of her own commentary. Adams’s text is transformed in Stewart’s voice. His compendium of prominent women in ancient cultures becomes strong evidence to Stewart that women are meant to do spiritual work. She quotes from Adams that, “in the most barharous nations, all things that have the appearance of being supernatural, the mysteries of religion, the secrets of physic, and the rites of magic, were in the possession of women”. Rather than seeing the presence of women religious leaders in pagan cultures as an ancient practice, contemptible and condemned, Stewart refigures these women as rich spiritual instruments merely awaiting the virtuoso touch of the Deity: “[B]e no longer astonished then, my brethren and friends, that God at this eventful period should raise up your own females to strive”. Her theological audacity escalates when she declares that those who want women silenced now are offending against God’s plan: “No longer ridicule their efforts, it will be counted for sin”

The next two pairs of paragraphs likewise alternate Adams’s voice with Stewart’s. First Adams outlines the late medieval period. What to him is merely an impressive list of accomplishments by medieval European women mystics and thinkers becomes for Stewart an empowering intellectual legacy. These accomplishments demonstrate to Stewart what is possible for women who combine education with Christian piety and political activity. She rhetorically demands to know, “Why cannot a religious spirit animate us now? Why cannot we become divines and scholars?” Even so, Stewart knows better than to call formal education a necessity, given that formal schooling was an institution from which she was doubly excluded as a black woman (even triply excluded, as a working-class servant as well). She reminds her hearers that God does not require a degree to make use of a person.”

Rhetorically, Stewart’s glosses on Adams’s information demonstrate once again the unity of rationality and emotion by marginalized intellectual activists such as the early women abolitionists examined here. Stewart vividly underlines the points she draws out from Adams’s nonchalance. He speaks of women prophets “obtain[ing] much credit at Rome”, whereas she magnifies her points with imperatives - “No longer ridicule their [i.e., Stewart’s] efforts” - and emphatics -”to stop the strong current of prejudice that flows so profusely against us”. As with her mentor, David Walker, Stewart’s urgency enables her reason, and her social location triggers the need to detect larger patterns [50] that underlie those “strong current[s] of prejudice.” Whatever the intent and attitude of Adams, to have read those words from the pen of Maria Stewart was to see the legacy of women intellectuals, striving for public honors and responsibilities, embodied in a black woman.

Tags: abolition of slavery, feminism, John Adams, Maria Stewart, virtue, Wollstonecraft