The Spiritual Empowerment of Zilpha Elaw

[Margot Cullen]

Abstract:

Scholarship of nineteenth-century African American culture has focused on the liberationist aspects of ex-slave narratives, including the landmark text of Harriet Jacobs published in 1861.  However, this valuable work has overshadowed the importance of the revivalist spirituality of African American women prior to the ascendancy of abolitionism.  Their spiritual witness, such of the 1846 memoir of the itinerant preacher Zilpha Elaw, deserves more attention.  As scholar Kimberly Blockett notes, Elaw’s historic account is “an important, yet often misread, misplaced and undervalued text.”  This paper posits that elements of nineteenth-century revivalist religious culture such as liminality, individualism and sanctification influenced Elaw’s remarkable life journey.  She was part of a iconoclastic cohort of over one hundred American black and white women preachers catalyzed into action during the revivals. The radical spirituality of this era empowered the working-class, free Elaw  to challenge strictures of race, gender and class while she sustained a preaching career in the American north and south, as well as in England, from the 1820s to the 1860s.