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Gale Kenny, Rodney Hessinger. Smitten: Sex, Gender, and the Contest for Souls in the Second Great Awakening., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 504–505, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae638
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Extract
During the Second Great Awakening, prophets, priests, and evangelists wooed their followers with divine revelations that often came with new conceptions of family, gender, and sexuality. These religious innovators also met with critics who denounced these men as false prophets intent on deceiving their “smitten” (mostly) female victims. In Smitten: Sex, Gender, and the Contest for Souls in the Second Great Awakening, Rodney Hessinger provides a gendered analysis of these debates over the authenticity and effects of religious enthusiasm. He demonstrates that the religious and gender dynamics of the Second Great Awakening were inextricable as the competition to win believers fueled debates about sexuality, consent, marriage, motherhood, and the power of male religious authorities. Religious groups further developed alternative sexual practices and gender norms to distinguish themselves and “strengthen the commitment of believers” while condemnations of such phenomena contributed to a coalescing white and middle-class Protestant establishment (7). Ultimately, Hessinger concludes that such efforts to stifle the sexual and gender experimentation that flourished as a part of religious innovation were also responsible for ending the Second Great Awakening. By the 1850s, both enthusiasm and sexual experimentations “had been tamed and contained” (13).
