The life of Selina Campbell : a fellow soldier in the cause of restoration /

This biography of the second wife of Alexander Campbell, founder of the Disciples of Christ denomination in the 19th century, places the English-born mother of five, stepmother to five other children by Alexander's first marriage, and devout Christian "soldier" of the panhandle of western Virginia in the context of the by-now-hoary "separate spheres" and "cult of true womanhood" historiography. Selina Campbell (1802-1897) lived her life in a domestic world, but she was not bound by it. She took on many significant roles of church leadership in the rapidly growing Disciples of Christ Church, a denomination that numbered about one million members by the end of the 19th century. In particular, she helped to spearhead the foreign missions' effort in the church, one that required the construction of denominational machinery akin to those that Alexander Campbell had criticized so severely and vowed never to form in the Protestant primitivist Disciples movement. Selina "labored arduously throughout her life to promote the cause of women's activism without ever undermining the ideal of true womanhood," the author argues, in this competent biography aimed primarily at specialists, scholars, and researchers. P. Harvey University of Colorado at Colorado Springs

Most American historians can tell you that the founder of the 19th-century Disciples of Christ movement was Alexander Campbell, a strident primitivist who sought to restore the New Testament church. However, only a handful know that his wife, Selina Huntington Bakewell Campbell, was as ardent as Campbell himself and was a tireless religious activist in what is now West Virginia. Loretta Long's The Life of Selina Campbell: A Fellow Soldier in the Cause of Restoration reads a bit too much like a dissertation (her introduction is essentially a historiographical essay on Christian women in 19th-century America), but the topic is so unmined that this is excusable. ( May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved