This biography follows three generations of ministers' mothers, daughters, and wives as their family—one of America's foremost Unitarian dynasties—spreads out across the continent and their liberal denomination evolves. The oldest Eliot women remember its quickening in the early 1800s, and the youngest, its formal consolidation in 1961 with the kindred Universalist Church of America. Shifting the focus from pulpits to parsonages, and from sermons to doubting pews, Tucker lifts up a long‐ignored female perspective and humanizes a famously staid and cerebral religious tradition. The narrative or ... More

This biography follows three generations of ministers' mothers, daughters, and wives as their family—one of America's foremost Unitarian dynasties—spreads out across the continent and their liberal denomination evolves. The oldest Eliot women remember its quickening in the early 1800s, and the youngest, its formal consolidation in 1961 with the kindred Universalist Church of America. Shifting the focus from pulpits to parsonages, and from sermons to doubting pews, Tucker lifts up a long‐ignored female perspective and humanizes a famously staid and cerebral religious tradition. The narrative organizes itself as a series of stories, all shaped by defining experiences that are interrelated and timeless. These range from the deaths of young children and the anguish of infertility to the suffocation of small parish life, loneliness, doubt, and financial distress. One woman survives with the help of a rare female confidant in the parish. Another is braced by the unmet friends who read magazines that publish her poems. A third escapes from an ill‐fitting role by succumbing to neurasthenia, leaving one wasting condition for another. It is left to the matriarch's granddaughters to script larger lives for themselves by bypassing marriage and churchly employment to follow their hearts into same‐sex unions and major careers in public health and preschool education. Thematically, these stories are linked by the women's continuing battles to make themselves heard through the din of clerical wisdom that contradicts their reality.