Prophetic Sisterhood

The Eliot women could simply have gazed at the record of male achievement and known that their family name would find an exalted place in history. The roster went all the way back to Boston before the American Revolution, when Andrew Eliot served as the minister of the New North Church. ...Yet it was not in the women’s nature to risk their own immortality by slipping into the future as stowaways, hidden and isolated in men’s men reputations. Unwilling to vanish, they kept aan account of what they achieved and endured. Not everything got into the cargo, and no one pretended it did. “Some things,” they shrugged, were “best said, not written,” and not everything that was written survived. The women’s own letters debated the question of what to commit to the scissors or flames, and to judge from the fragments and gaps, this was no idle talk. What they saw fit to save was inclusive, however, and resonates centuries later as their loyalties and intregity integrity thread through the records. They pull together the generations, the East and the West, Christians and Humanists, sanctuaries and parsonages. They honor the same-sex partnerships along with conventional marriages; the empty cradles and pews as well as the crowded nurseries and churches; the pastorates of daughters and wives no less than traditional ministries; and the whispered doubts that muted the thundering certitudes.