Eve and Her Daughters in England’s Long Eighteenth Century. Review Essay by Laura Stevens

Abstract

ould there have been an archetype more powerful for the women of early modern England and its colonies than Eve? She was everywhere in discussions of what the first epistle of Peter termed "the weaker vessel" (1 Pet. 3:7), while debates over women's moral and intellectual capacities tended to be waged through discussions of her merits, her flaws, her relationship with Adam, and of course her particular culpability in bringing about humanity's expulsion from Eden. The notorious Querelle des Femmes, or quarrel over women, enlisted classical and English historical figures in a combat of example versus counterexample of female virtues and failings, but nothing surpassed the moral authority of biblical figures, the foremost of whom was Eve. The spiritual diary of Martha Gerrish, a New England Congregationalist memorialized in a funeral sermon of 1740, aptly summarizes the powerful combination of recrimination and consolation that surrounded this figure, especially when she was regarded as a synecdoche for all women: "There is no Affliction, which humbles me so much as the Consideration of the Woman's being first in the Transgression.. .. But eternal Praises be to our merciful God, who. .. came down a few Minutes after the Fall of Man, and raised him up with a Promise of Salvation, in the Seed of the Woman." 1 Whether she was primarily or jointly responsible for the Fall, Eve simultaneously signified, for women like Gerrish as well as for countless men, humanity's damnation and redemption, its disobedience but also its eventual salvation. Her position was especially prominent in discussions of marriage. In the conclusion to A Wedding-Ring Fit for the Finger, a wedding sermon reprinted several times after its first appearance in 1658, William Secker proclaimed, "Every wife should 1.