Time & Perspective Quote by Eliza Farnham

Farnham’s sentence is a scalpel aimed at a familiar American contradiction: a Church that treats the body as both disgrace and weapon. The phrasing does double work. “Our own theological Church” sounds almost dutiful, even patriotic, before the pivot into indictment. And that “as we know” is doing social pressure: she’s not offering a hot take, she’s naming a public secret, the kind of hypocrisy everyone is trained to tolerate.

Her intent is reformist, but the method is rhetorical exposure. Notice the extremity of “scorned and vilified” paired with the humiliating conclusion that it becomes “almost a reproach and a shame to have one.” That “almost” is a strategic understatement; the lived reality she’s pointing to is a moral culture where embodiment is treated as contamination. Then she tightens the trap: despite demeaning the body, the same institution “credited it with power” to damn the soul. The subtext is that the Church’s theology needs the body to be dangerous, because danger justifies surveillance, discipline, and a hierarchy of purity.

Context matters: Farnham wrote in a 19th-century reform landscape where women’s rights, “moral treatment,” prison reform, and early sex and health debates collided with Protestant respectability. Her target isn’t faith so much as a gendered moral economy in which women, in particular, are made responsible for managing bodily “temptation” while being taught to despise their own physicality. The quote works because it reveals how shame and fear can be twinned into a control system: if the body is low, you must police it; if it’s powerful, you must surrender to those who claim to police it for you.