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Nowhere was this model of self-sacrificing perfection applied more often than to women in death or invalidism--both of which occurred mysteriously and frequently in that time of limited and primitive medical practice. Dealing with death and illness was a common ordeal and was still carried out in the home and community among family members and citizens of all ages, including children, rather than in institutions such as hospitals and funeral homes, removed from everyday life. A firm, literal belief in resurrection, reunion with lost loved ones, and relief from suffering clearly empowered women to bear pain and to welcome release from its tyranny, but the repetitious tales of death-bed cheer also indicated a need of the survivors to bolster their own faith and to perpetuate the ideal of redemption through suffering.
A favorite story was that of Fannie Crosby, the blind composer of hymns who thanked the physician who prescribed the treatment that ruined her sight because
it was not a blunder on God's part,but a plan that enabled her to concentrate and write the songs that could never have been written
if [she] had been hindered by the distraction of seeing.
BS , January 22, 1914, p. 11.
Incidents of women crying out in their pain,Lord Jesus, thou art all and I am nothing,while reassuring loved ones with
Don't cry, I shall soon be at rest,were commonly related in obituaries.
BS , February 8, 1900, p. 16; BS, August 13, 1903, p. 16.
This spirit of resignation and faith was not just developed over a lifetime, but was somehow bound up in female nature because girls displayed it. Little Lockie, who worked for the orphans' homeall her bright young days till death came...on her death bed desired that her medicine bottles be cleaned, sold, and the proceeds sent to the orphans.
BS , December 1, 1892, p. 1.
Another beautiful little girl who inspired everyone's love was taken from her parents by death becauseshe was too pure for this world,her pastor reported.
BS , November 17, 1892, p. 8.
The analogy between women's suffering and that of Jesus is inescapable, if not explicit, in the above stories and in the following eulogy of Elizabeth B. Paxton of Cleburne, Texas, who died in 1894:
For years before she died she suffered from an incurable and exceedingly painful disease. And I have the word from those who were with her most, that from first to last, she never spoke a word that was even remotely akin to complaint or murmur. Ah, she had sure-enough religion! It was her business to suffer, and to wait for release from pain. If her life was beautiful her death was more lovely still. Without a doubt, without a fear, she reached out her hand to God and He drew her to Himself.
BS , May 24, 1894, p. 2.
Baptists appear to have expanded the common romantic literary genre to give a feminine balance to their patriarchal religious system. They would adamantly deny such a charge, but they used women in general and mothers in particular to complete the androgyny of the godhead in the way that Roman Catholics used Mary, the mother of Jesus. This practice of Roman Catholics is one with which Baptists disagree as much as they do the existence of papal authority for the ostensible reason that both are extra-biblical. All across the South, the sentiments of obituaries and sketches like these were transmitted first into hymns and eventually into country songs in which Mother (as womankind or a female principle) suffers, intercedes, and waits in heaven.
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