The Scots-Irish Presbyterian Heritage of Woman’s Rights Advocate Elizabeth Birch Wilson

This article situates Elizabeth Wilson’s A scriptural view of woman’s rights and duties in all the important relations of life (1849) within her Scots-Irish Presbyterian heritage. By drawing upon snatches of unpublished archival evidence – a marriage notice, a gravestone, census data and an Irish family genealogy – it becomes possible to identify Wilson as the daughter of the Ulster Presbyterian minister Thomas Ledlie Birch and consequently to document specific ways in which Presbyterian hermeneutics and polity shaped America’s most comprehensive nineteenth-century biblical defence of woman’s rights written by a woman.