Despite my parents’ being militant atheists and my mother being ethnically Jewish, the “Christian assumption” ran through everything I was exposed to as a child, from literature (mostly British Victorian or Edwardian) to idioms (“christen” was a common synonym for “name” [as a verb], “Christian name” was a common term for “first name,” and “un-Christian” was a synonym for “uncharitable”) to the mother of all holidays, Christmas.

So I grew up amidst this “Christian assumption,” but my life as it was lived was not part of it. When I say “Christian” I am not speaking of deeply held faith, but of a culture. And it wasn’t my mother’s Jewishness that made me “not of” the culture I am referring to. What was at issue was that my mother was modern. From the time she was a teenager, her chief self-identifier had been that she was a “New Woman”. New Women did not attend houses of worship, believe in a deity, ascribe to a code of conduct that originated in the Old Testament, or use sentimental religious language to explain suffering or cushion the loss of a loved one. They did not believe in Heaven and Hell. They made sure that their children’s minds were “stayed” on the here and now, in other words, on science, progress, and, most of all, frank clinical talk about disease, death, and sex. My father, a midWesterner of Scots Irish descent, was a scientist who loathed religion as being at best superstition and at worst hypocrisy. He mentioned having been dragged as a child by relatives to a “hard shell Baptist” church where Jesus was often quoted, but “colored people” were not allowed. But what it all boiled down to for both of my parents was that to them, religion belonged to the past, and they belonged to the future.

For whatever reason, however, this did not stop my mother from immersing me in fiction where the Christian assumption ruled: Little Women, for example. The chapter in which Beth dies, many girls’ first exposure to reading while crying, takes its name “The Valley of the Shadow”, from the Twenty-Third Psalm. When Jo, the quintessential New Woman, cries to her mother that she misses her father, Marmee gives Jo a gentle sermon in which she refers to how she herself always derives comfort from God the Father. (And later in the book Jo says “If God spares Beth I will love Him and serve Him always.”)

Was Jo less of a “New Woman” because throughout the book she equated religion with goodness? There are few times now when I miss my mother, but as I write this, I wonder how she would have answered this question. Most likely, she would have said that Jo’s thoughts and feelings needed to be put in historical perspective. Her talking about God and religion were like her wearing a long dress. A New Woman in 1959 would not have worn such a dress, nor would she have talked about God or used religion as a framework for ethics and character.

For me, the dis-union between what I was encouraged to read and how I was encouraged to think and be was made more painful by the fact that most of my classmates (and their parents) seemed to have at least one foot planted in the nineteenth century. (Gertrude Himmelfarb, whose writings on Victorianism had a profound effect on me, said that the Victorian Era didn’t really end until 1962.) Not all of these families went to church, but somehow their children had absorbed a lot of religiously themed vocabulary. People who died went to Heaven. “Taking the Lord’s name in vain” was wicked. Prayer was mentioned if someone was ill. Probably most of these children had been baptized. Then of course there were the Jewish families but I was not “of” them either. They had Jewish last names (mine was Scots Irish) and the children stayed out of school (schools were open then) on Jewish holidays. Some belonged to synagogues. Many did not, but none had a Christmas tree the way my family did.

Along with a rejection of religion and its (mostly sentimental or punitive) vocabulary was a disapproval of anything “old fashioned”. This catch-all included everything from pink clothing and long loose hair for girl children (I was only allowed long hair if it was braided, and I was constantly nagged to agree to having it cut), to antique furniture (everything in the house was teak and chrome, and the color scheme favored sour greens, oranges, and turquoises).

So I escaped into stories set in bygone eras, about girls from large families, who lived in big houses, had long hair with big bows, and wore long dresses with pinafores and high topped shoes – and then opened my eyes in my ultra-modern bedroom, which I hated with its orange bedspread, metal framed butterfly chairs with removable canvas tops, and formica desk. In addition to my hating its lack of aesthetic appeal, it had no literary associations. At least in the late 1950s, there were no magical stories about apartment-dwelling only children raised as atheists and groomed to be “modern”.

[That was sixty years ago. Since that time I have been a serious student of the literature and culture of Victorian and Edwardian England, and in my 50s, I became a choir member and soloist in a progressive Lutheran church. I am not baptized, and don’t consider myself Christian, but I have somehow managed to find a home there.]