Moving Beyond the Line: Presence, Absence, and the Quiet Religious Authority of Hannah Adams
Video Arts & Humanities 2025 Graduate ExhibitionPresentation by Chelsea Parker
Exhibition Number 528
Abstract
This presentation examines how Hannah Adams built a career on inoffensiveness, using absence as the method through which she gained popular acceptance and respect. Unlike other women religious writers, whose work was marked by an intense personal presence, Adams avoided controversy through an explicit absence of her authorial self. She did not make broad theological claims, emphasize her personal religious experience, or assert a public voice. Instead, she presented herself as a woman who was bad at being a woman, physically frail, socially awkward, and unsuited for traditional domestic roles. She preemptively excluded herself from feminine expectations, making her nonconformity appear inevitable rather than transgressive. At the same time, Adams maintained plausible deniability by claiming reluctance and necessity. She emphasized the mental and emotional strain of reading religious controversy, the nervous complaints that plagued her, and the lack of systematic education that left her susceptible to error. She characterized her career as a last resort, her literary efforts as a personal project that others had urged her to publish, and her intellectual work as a product of curiosity rather than ambition. By neither speaking as a woman nor speaking for other women, Adams sidestepped accusations of claiming authority while still constructing a literary reputation. Her absence was not a rejection of the strategies used by other women writers but another variation. It was an alternate means of making room for herself in a landscape where women who made their authority too public did not maintain it for long.
Importance
This presentation contributes to the study of women in early and 19th century America by examining how Hannah Adams, the first American woman to support herself as an author, navigated religious and intellectual spaces by erasing her presence from her work. Adams has been understudied, at least partially because she does not fit easily into the stories we have told about American women’s experiences. Her career challenges traditional narratives about women’s authorship and religious authority, demonstrating that absence could be as effective as presence in negotiating gendered constraints. By analyzing Adams alongside contemporaries like Sarah Osborn and Judith Sargent Murray, this research highlights the diverse rhetorical strategies women used to expand intellectual opportunities without openly challenging social norms.