7 - Religious Selfhood 1870–1950

Summary

Religious/civic activism among women marked direct entry into and participation in the public sphere. This chapter discusses religious activism with regard to the three nineteenth-century women poets: Penina Moise, Rebekah Hyneman, and Emma Lazarus. While some of Moise's poems reflect contemporary women's culture, her main body of writing is emphatically public. Most Moise hymns in any case address public rituals and are intended as common prayers. As with Moise, the few comments on Hyneman's work focus interpretation through the women's culture that Jewish women shared with other nineteenth-century women. Emma Lazarus is among the first writers self-consciously to regard America as fundamentally ethnic. For Lazarus, as for Moise and Hyneman, it is affiliations that launch and give force to poetic voice, voice that is addressed to others in a community in which religious selfhood becomes conjoined or redefined through further gendered, ethnic, and national identities.