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“College Has Been the Means of My Conversion”: The Empowering Role of Evangelicalism at Southern Women’s Colleges, 1800-65

The history of evangelicalism and women in the antebellum South is often presented as a narrative of oppression. Scott Stephan accurately describes existing scholarship on religion and southern women when he writes that, “the traditional starting point for most studies on evangelical women in the antebellum South [has constituted] what religion did to women.” Rejecting the notion that evangelicalism played only a restricting role in southern women’s lives, Stephan challenges scholars to examine not only “what religion did to women,” but also “what religion did for women.” While scholars may agree theoretically with this approach, Stephan’s challenge has nonetheless gone unheeded in many aspects of historians’ actual work. This is certainly the case with scholarship on southern women’s higher education. Preoccupied with demonstrating that southern women’s education was engendered in such a way as to shape young women into submissive southern ladies, scholarship on southern women’s education simply assumes that evangelicalism, being one of the means to shape young women into ladies, played a fundamentally oppressive role in southern women’s lives. This interpretation may be substantiated by an 3