Adrian Shirk - And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy

Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

Copyright 2017 by Adrian Shirk

First Counterpoint hardcover edition: August 2017

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Excerpt from Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Random House.

Excerpt from An American Childhood . Copyright 1988 by Annie Dillard. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Excerpt from Teaching a Stone to Talk . Copyright 1982 by Annie Dillard. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in -Publication Data

Names: Shirk, Adrian, author.

Title: And your daughters shall prophesy : stories from the byways of American women and religion / Adrian Shirk.

Description: Berkeley, CA : Counterpoint Press, 2017.

Identifiers: LCCN | eISBN 978-1-61902-966-8

Subjects: LCSH: WomenReligious lifeUnited States. | Women and religionUnited States. | Religious biographyUnited States. | United StatesReligion.

Classification: LCC BL625.7 .S55 2017 | DDC 277.30092/52dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017015896

Jacket designed by Jarrod Taylor

Book designed by Elyse J. Strongin, Neuwirth and Associates, Inc.

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For my grandmothers

And if my experience in that church did nothing else for me, it accustomed me to strange outpourings of the Spirit and gave me a tender regard for con artists and voices in the wilderness, no matter how odd or suspicious their messages might be.

Dennis Covington, Salvation on Sand Mountain

The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. That is why the first event is known to have been an expulsion, and the last is hoped to be a reconciliation and return. So memory pulls us forward, so prophecy is only brilliant memory...

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

The future is female

T-shirt for Labyris Books, NYCs first womens bookstore, 1975

CONTENTS

Mary Baker Eddy

The Moon Lodge

Flannery OConnor

Linda Goodman

Aunt Robin

The Fox Sisters

Aimee Semple McPherson

Eliza Snow

The Takeover

The Prodigal Son

Sojourner Truth

Marie Laveau

The yuwipi

A DECLARATION OF SENTIMENTS

I will start as close to the end as possible.

In February, I took a train up to Rochester from New York City to visit two friends. They howled at me from their Subaru parked outside the station and waved me into the warm car. A few minutes later we were sailing over the Frederick DouglassSusan B. Anthony Bridge, and Sofi turned to me and said, So Ive got a project for us tomorrow: Were going to Seneca Falls.

In the morning we had breakfast and then pinned our hair into nineteenth-century updos: ear braids, topknots, and tight, low buns. We tore muslin into matching white collars and fastened them together with brooches from Goodwill, tucked into dun-colored dime blankets wed turned into shawls, and then we drove the fifty-seven miles to the Wesleyan chapel.

When we arrived, it was cold, and the chapel was empty. Bright winter light fell in panels across the twelve rows of pews. The gleaming sheetrock belied the chapels authenticity: It was, to my quiet disappointment, only a simulation of the original. I ran my fingers along the far wall. Here and there an old beam or two was on display, but the rest was mirage. We split up and cased the interior for a good place to put the camera, finally setting it on a tripod just below the pulpit. Then we sat in the front row clutching our shawls and recited the Declaration of Sentiments as we imagined theyd been delivered 170 years before:

Resolved , That such laws as conflict, in any way, with the true and substantial happiness of woman, are contrary to the great precept of nature, and of no validity.

That because your laws are bullshit, because they are at war with the interests of mankind , they are without authority

(I was startled, as we began to read, by how deeply theological so many of the resolutions are, for a document primarily associated with suffrage.)

That woman is mans equal as intended by the Creator.

It is not just her right to vote, but her sacred right.

(The language, of course, is borrowed from that other declaration.)

It is a perverted application of the Scriptures and other corrupt customs that have been the yoke of her oppression, and it is time to overthrow the monopoly of the pulpit.

Man has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, telling woman what to do and where to go and when to stop, when that belongs to her conscience and her God over and over again.

At one point, a young couple wandered into the chapel and then quickly out again.

At closing time, a park ranger in full regalia came and stood beside us until wed gathered all of our things and left. But we werent finished with the action yet: Outside, we stood on the sidewalk against the brick of the chapel and continued filming and reading the Sentiments in tension with passages about fitness and facial care regimens from Real Simple . (For some reason, that afternoon, Real Simple embodied to us the ways in which America had betrayed the suffragists.) As we read, I felt that age-old double-bind described by Professor Naomi Greyser in her article Affective Geographies: Sojourner Truths Narrative, Feminism, and the Ethical Bind of Sentimentalism, that all the men who, Thomas Jefferson declared, are created equal shed their gender and their race that day they signed the Declaration of Independence. The problem... was that women and blacks could never shed their bodies to become incorporeal men. The Declaration of Sentiments was trying to make an intervention, but no black women were invited to that first convention in Seneca Falls. Across the street and over a little river, I could see a collapsed wool mill, where on that summer afternoon in 1848 some women, mothers of a thousand children, had had to work for low wages while some other women, mothers of few or none, were stating their resolutions. The river was so narrow and dribbled by so quietly that members of the two groups may even have heard the otherthe clang of her machinery, the appeal to her God.

I did not ask my friends what we were doing there in Seneca Falls, what we hoped to make or make contact with, because in some unspoken way I knew. During graduate school, when the three of us lived in Wyoming, we occasionally observed Witch Night. This included tarot readings, chakra clearings, making soup, workshopping our writing, smoking cigarettes, giving thanks to the Virgin of Guadalupe, troubleshooting cures for ovarian cysts and other reproductive woesreally anything that needed doing, ritual or otherwise, under lamplight, with other women. We never codified what should happen on these nights, but it made a sort of internal sense. Winters were long in Laramie, and there was always some burdensome masculine energy of the Mountain West that needed counteracting.