The Robes of Womanhood: Dress and Authenticity among African American Methodist Women in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Scholars of American religion are increasingly attentive to material culture as a rich source for the analysis of religious identity and practice that is especially revealing of the relationships among doctrine, bodily comportment, social structures, and innovation. In line with this focus, this article analyses the ways nineteenth-century African American Methodist women turned to dress as a tool to communicate religious and political messages. Though other nineteenth-century Protestants also made use of the communicative powers of dress, African American women did so with a keen awareness of the ways race trumped clothing in the semiotic system of nineteenth-century America. Especially for women entering into public fora as preachers and public speakers, dress could act as a passport to legitimacy in an often hostile setting, but it was not always enough to establish oneself as a Christian lady. Considering the related traditions of plain dress and respectability within the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, this essay finds that AME women cultivated respectability and plainness within discourses of authenticity that tried—with some ambivalence—to use dress as a marker of the true soul beneath the fabric. Based primarily on the autobiographical and journalistic writings of women such as Jarena Lee, Amanda Berry Smith, Hallie Q. Brown, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, as well as accounts from AME publications such as the Christian Recorder and the Church Review, and other church documents, the essay also draws on the work of historians of African American women and historians of dress and material culture. For nineteenth-century AME women, discourses of authenticity could be both a burden and a resource, but either way they were discourses that were often remarkably critical, both of selfmotivation and of cultural markers of class, race, and gender in a world that made a fetish of whiteness.

Dressed for Death: Gender, Respectability, and Resistance at the Gallows

“…Thus, a Black woman who chose white for her execution attire readied herself for death like she would for her wedding, while simultaneously laying claims on a respectable and virtuous self. Here the context of the execution matters greatly, since Black women in other institutional settings made other sartorial choices, ranging from plain and respectable (Klassen 2004) to brightly colored (Lamm 2018) clothes, to subvert and “challenge white racist stereotypes regarding black femininity and beauty” (Rabinovitch‐Fox 2019:239).…”

“Moral Fibre: Women’s Fashion and the Free Cotton Movement, 1830-1860”

“…Even as free women, the prevalence of sexual violence against black women made conservative dress a matter of safety. 18 For Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley, a former slave who eventually became Mary Lincoln's dressmaker, beauty was associated with danger. "I was regarded as fair-looking for one of my race, and for four years a white man -I spare the world his name -had his base designs upon me.…”

Hijab and the Abrahamic Traditions: A Comparative Analysis of the Muslim Veil

“…For Christian African-American women, modesty norms have been used as a mechanism for portraying respectability. Klassen's research on African-American Methodist women in the nineteenth century highlights many of these themes, including the influence of the 'plain attire' of Quakers, Amish and Mennonites that helped counter stereotypes of African-American women as highly sexualized (Klassen 2004). 'In the African-Methodist community, AME Books of Discipline and conference proceedings reiterated throughout the century a basic commitment to modesty in dress' (Klassen 2004: 48).…”

“…'In the African-Methodist community, AME Books of Discipline and conference proceedings reiterated throughout the century a basic commitment to modesty in dress' (Klassen 2004: 48). Ultimately, Klassen's research highlights how African-American Methodist women not only reinforced modest dress, but were left with a 'burden of respectability', in terms of how they dress symbolized honor, virtue, and piety (Klassen 2004). Klassen claims that 'Religiously rooted codes and critiques of dress offered a path of legitimacy for women to claim public voices and to assert themselves as virtuous women in a culture that was deeply suspicious of the possibility that public women could also be virtuous' (Klassen 2004: 72).…”