Very few women and even fewer men still remember Mary Virginia Hawes Terhune, alias “Marion Harland.” She was, however, a Virginian Presbyterian woman who, as a very young woman, helped shape the lives of American women, indeed, women of the world, long before Martha Stewart of recent notoriety. She did this as a storyteller and especially with her household advice, which she shared with other women around the globe. She was a biblical “Martha” as well as a “Mary.”
Mary Virginia was born 175 years ago in Amelia County, Va., daughter of Samuel Hawes, a migrant to the South from Massachusetts, and Judith Anna Smith, daughter of well-to-do-planters. She received a first rate classical education from tutors, and at a Presbyterian girls seminary in Richmond where the Hawes family attended the Second Presbyterian Church and listened to the preaching of the noted Moses Drury Hoge. Precocious from the beginning, she began to write and publish stories for a denominational journal. At the age of twenty-four she published a novel entitled Alone under the pseudonym, “Marion Harland,” by which she became known and we shall employ here.
In Alone, her heroine starts out as an orphan, grows to maturity, marries and becomes a women’s woman, according to the storyteller. As a matter of fact, Harland did not like her book being labeled a novel. It was, in fact, a “story,” autobiographical and very religious. Her namesake, heroine Ida Ross, grows up and stands up to her own problems and those of others because of her Christian convictions. With the help of Jesus Christ she finds solutions for the trouble of other women–the most putdown daughters, sisters, wives, mothers — everyday common women some of whom are good-looking, not so good-looking, well off and not-so-well off, some who were lucky and some who even had tempers. Harland depicted Christian women as strong domestic goddesses, and religious guardians of husbands and children. Through her characters, Harland showed the women could be a strong force for good in local communities and in the larger republic.
Ida’s devout preaching by example not only influenced women, but converted recalcitrant men, thus making the entire environment in which they lived one of Christian love and respect. The rays of a woman’s halo, she claimed, could reach beyond the home into the wider world. Although Alone was mostly sweetness and light with no real villains, the author did include for didactic purposes references to a duel which took place in Richmond during the 1840s between two newspaper editors over the issue of slavery. Harland uses the death scene to condemn this sin against God’s gift of life, and also includes in her presentation of this historical drama an eleventh hour conversion experience.
Harland’s Alone made her reputation. During the rest of her life she was anything but alone. But she lived up to her namesake as a Mary. She continued her writing of stories and novels and emerged as a “New Star of the South.” She saw herself as an all- American author. And she became a true household word, like today’s “Martha”.
In 1856 she married Edward Payson Terhune, a Yankee and a Presbyterian minister. He supported his wife’s writing career, which she continued while at the same time she fulfilled her domestic duties in the manse in a very disciplined manner. In 1859 the family moved to New Jersey where she bore six children and spent the rest of her life, except for a short time in New York and Europe.
She became more useful as well as famous when she published Common Sense in the Household (1871), borrowing part of her title from her Presbyterian background and from Tom Paine, and sharing her pilgrimage as a housewife in her familiar style as an author. The volume went through numerous additions and editions, and was followed by advice in other volumes, including Eve’s Daughters: Common Sense for Maid, Wife and Mother (1881) and Marion Harland’s Complete Cookbook (1903) toward the end of her productive life.
Through her publications the Terhunes grew richer by the book and were able to live in some luxury on a twenty-four acre estate on the Jersey countryside. Her husband served two pastorates during his ministry in the Big Apple. Meanwhile, the family was able to travel to Palestine and Syria in 1893. Out of this travel experience grew another volume, Home of the Bible (1895). She continued to share her homemaking insights into home, country, and world in new magazines such as the Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping, which found place on our coffee tables and in our kitchens.
It should be noted that “Marion Harland” was no suffragette in an age when some women sought life outside the kitchen. She did believe that women needed good educations and intellectual stimulation along with good nutrition and physical exercise. Moreover, all women needed some job training to prepare them for spinsterhood, widowhood, or note, desertion. But she also assumed that women should choose marriage and family as their primary careers. She did not seem conscious of the fact that her own professional fame in the kitchen contradicted the advice she offered her contemporaries. She was no Elizabeth Cady Stanton, another Presbyterian- turned Unitarian, who composed her Women’s Bible (1898), underscoring all the women in the Good Book who had made a life for themselves outside the home. As a matter of fact, Mary Terhune Hawes alias “Marion Harland” supported the Anti- Women’s Suffrage League. She mused:
I am convicted that the majority of American women are neither willing nor ready for enrollment as active citizens of state and nation. Nor do I believe that the gift of the franchise to women is the remedy for the evils depicted by the advocates of the proposed alteration in the State (New York) Constitution.
Of course, the antis rejoiced that Marion Harland was on their side of the cause. The Martha of the kitchen and household did live to see the Nineteenth Amendment to the constitution that enfranchised women.
“Marion Harland” was a “Martha” on the household. She was, however, a “Mary,” as her name suggests, in terms of her Christian faith and life, a product of her times but one who helped to shape her times as a homemaker, mother and minister’s spouse.
When Terhune died, a newspaper editor praised the Presbyterian minister’s spouse: “There is no American city so great, no crossroads village so remote, but the name of ‘Marion Harland’ was as familiar there as if she had been a President of the United States.” That is some praise for a woman born in rural Amelia County, Va. But that is the reason we should remember this “Mary” and “Martha” on her 175th birthday.
See Marion Harland’s Autobiography (1910) and Karen Manners Smith, “Marion Harland: The Making of a Household Word” (dissertation, 1990).
JAMES H. SMYLIE is professor emeritus of church history at Union Seminary — PSCE in Richmond, Va.
