Elizabeth Peabody - Courage, Action, Faith, Achievement

These are the subjects I address in my new book, "We Believe in You: 12 Stories of Courage, Action, and Faith for Women and Girsl" and Elizabeth Peabody truly exemplifies all four.

Many of us know Elizabeth Peabody's extraordinary achivements:

• Founder of kindergartens in America

• First woman publisher in Boston

• Owner of a successful book store and lending library in Boston, where Margaret Fuller’s “Conversations” for women took place

• Leading Transcendentalist and Unitarian; editor and publisher of the Dial, the Transcendentalist newspaper

• Author

• Teacher, including at Bronson Alcott’s Temple School

• Along with her sisters Mary Peabody Mann and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, considered a leading figure in Nineteenth Century American Romanticism

But I also wanted to look at her faith, which she makes very clear in her writing supported her in moments of doubt. After all, she was blazing new trails. It made all the difference! Here's an excerpt from the book. Enjoy!

Her Faith in Action

What strikes me about Elizabeth Peabody’s faith journey, like others in this book, is her inquisitiveness and her refusal to accept any one doctrine at face value. Both of her parents had been tutors. Later, her mother taught school out of the family home and her father went on to become a some-time physician. Education, learning, and ideas were part of Elizabeth’s family culture.

As Megan Marshall points out, Elizabeth was raised at a time when traditional Calvinist orthodoxy clashed with more progressive theology. At age seven, when she heard the Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing preach in Salem, it changed her life forever. Even at that young age, Elizabeth was trying to determine her own theology. Marshall writes that Elizabeth saw religion as “a subject of enquiry and dispute … not quite a settled thing that we must believe the popular system of theology” and that “true religion should be addressed at once to the understanding, and to the heart.”

Elizabeth’s inquiring mind led her to study Hebrew to be able to read the Old Testament for herself. She investigated Swedenborgianism and the Socinians, rejecting some ideas but agreeing with others. As a result, Elizabeth’s parents insisted that she read only the Bible for one whole summer – which she did, thirty times. Soon after, as a teenager, she heard Channing preach again and thereafter was “staunchly Unitarian.”

As a young teacher in Brookline, Massachusetts, Elizabeth tried to engage her young students in theological discussions. She suggested that religion was “a matter of inquiry rather than rote learning.” But their parents would have none of it. At the same time, Elizabeth deepened her friendship with Channing and her commitment to Unitarianism by becoming his sort of secretary. Their conversations often turned up in his sermons. Now, at age twenty-one, she wrote her spiritual autobiography – acutely aware even then of her real-time spiritual journey.

Elizabeth once wrote: "to contemplate the Spirit in ourselves, and in our fellow man, is obviously the only means of understanding social duty, and quickening within ourselves a wise Humanity—In general terms,—Contemplation of Spirit is the first principle of Human Culture; the foundation of Self-education.”

As one of her biographers, Joan Goodwin, explains: “In essence Elizabeth's own educational philosophy was a practical application of the Unitarian optimism as to the inherent human goodness, especially of the young, combined with the ideas of self-culture she took from Channing. She had always taught by foregrounding her own intellectual delight and curiosity as the means of inspiring children both to enjoy learning and also to take on greater moral responsibility. "When a child has been led to enjoy his intellectual life, in any way," she wrote, "and then is made to observe whence his enjoyment has arisen, he can feel and understand the argument of duty which may be urged in favor of attention."

Elizabeth parted ways with Channing to pursue her own interests and that included Transcendentalism. “Unitarianism,” she wrote, “has a short mission in the world ... we should all survive it and find a new light.” She became friends with Bronson Alcott, putting their shared “faith in action” principles to work at his Temple School in Boston. As in Nature, they believed, children were unique buds who needed to be respected, nurtured, and enabled to grow fully into who they were meant to be.

At her bookstore in Boston, Elizabeth published the Transcendentalist newspaper the Dial, hosted Margaret Fuller’s “Conversations” for women, and encouraged intellectual and spiritual pursuit through her lending library. But it was when she encountered the teachings of Frederick Froebel on early childhood education that her spiritual self really swung into action. To repeat this quote from her:

“Kindergarten,” Elizabeth wrote, “means a garden of children, and Froebel, the inventor of it, or rather as he would prefer to express it, the discoverer of the method of Nature, meant to symbolize by the name the spirit and plan of treatment. How does the gardener treat his plants? He studies their individual natures and puts them into such circumstances of soil and atmosphere as to enable them to grow, flower, and bring forth fruit … He does not expect to succeed unless he learns all their wants, and the circumstances in which these wants will be supplied, and all their possibilities of beauty and use, and the means of giving them the opportunity to be perfected.” 

Today, we take it for granted that this is how children should be treated. But it was Elizabeth Peabody’s faith in action that really started the United States down this path. Toward the end of her life, Elizabeth’s faith in action, along with her sister Mary’s, extended to woman suffrage, Native American rights, and world peace.