The evangelistic consciousness that seized early American religious life from the time of the first Great Awakening in the 1740s provided an opening for women of all denominations, including Baptist Eunice Smith of Ashfield, Massachusetts, to express their faith publicly, allowing them to find a public identity and a community through speaking and writing. Drawing sanction mainly from the letters of Paul in the New Testament, the early Protestant religious establishment in America had cautioned women to remain silent and submissive to male directives in the conduct of their spiritual lives and to stay in the private sphere of the home, tending to the moral direction of their children and the physical sustenance of their husbands so that the men could actively confront rigors of spiritual life in the wilderness. Thus, in seventeenth-century New England, women such as Anne Bradstreet and Margaret Tyndal Winthrop produced writings more concerned...