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Boston University School of Law

Manuscript of Women, Church, and State: Religion and the Culture of Individual Rights in Nineteenth-Century America

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Individual rights

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Chapter 2 - Anticlericalism And Antistatism, Elizabeth B. Clark Jan 1999

Chapter 2 - Anticlericalism And Antistatism, Elizabeth B. Clark

Manuscript of Women, Church, and State: Religion and the Culture of Individual Rights in Nineteenth-Century America

Note: This is the first draft of the second chapter of a manuscript which through the lens of abolitionism and women's rights, traces the transformation of the ideology of individual rights over the course of the nineteenth century as it expanded to encompass, not just rights in the civil sphere, but rights of the person in private life. Part I of this paper examines nineteenth-century intellectual movements that located moral authority in the individual; Part II outlines the attack on authority within liberal Protestantism; Part III traces the extension of that critique to the state; and Part IV discusses the …


Chapter 1 - "The Sacred Rights Of The Weak": Pain, Sympathy, And The Culture Of Individual Rights In Antebellum America (Previously Published Article), Elizabeth B. Clark Sep 1995

Chapter 1 - "The Sacred Rights Of The Weak": Pain, Sympathy, And The Culture Of Individual Rights In Antebellum America (Previously Published Article), Elizabeth B. Clark

Manuscript of Women, Church, and State: Religion and the Culture of Individual Rights in Nineteenth-Century America

In 1835 an antislavery sympathizer leaving a lecture by Theodore Dwight Weld went home to dream that she was transported above the world; looking down at the United States, she saw "multitudes of sable figures, bending beneath a scorching sun -- their backs lacerated by the whip -- scourged, maimed, loaded with irons -- subject to every insult -- and exposed to every gust of unbridled passions." The dreamer, a Mrs. Sturges, drew from many discourses in describing her lengthy dream, but the fundamental trope of her visionary narrative was the story of the suffering slave, a trope that in …