No Silent Witness: The Eliot Parsonage Women and Their Liberal Religious World - Softcover

Shifting the center of gravity from pulpits to parsonages, and from confident sermons to whispered doubts, this family narrative humanizes the Eliot saints, demystifies their liberal religion, and lifts up the largely unsung female vocation of practical ministry. 

Spanning 150 years from the early 19th century forward, the narrative probes the women’s defining experiences: the deaths of numerous children, the anguish of infertility, persistent financial worries, and the juggling of the often competing demands that parishes make on first ladies. 

Here, too, we see the matriarch’s granddaughters scripting larger lives as they skirt traditional marriage and women’s usual roles in the church. They follow their hearts into same-sex unions and blaze new trails as they carve out careers in public health service and preschool education. 

These stories are linked by the women’s continuing battles to speak and make themselves heard over the thundering clerical wisdom that contradicts their reality. A wealth of photographs, genealogical charts, and a family roster deepen the reader’s engagement with this ambitious biography.

The author of No Silent Witness likes to say that her real education began only after she’d earned a doctorate in comparative literature and started to teach in the urban Midsouth during an era of social upheaval. As the Vietnam War and the human rights movements expanded her frames of reference, her academic focus shifted and settled in women’s studies, planting a personal interest in writing biography as a way to rectify history’s sins of omission and give our silenced stories a voice.

Committed to sharing her expertise with lifelong learning communities, she has offered her life-writing workshops at the Iowa Writing Festival, the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA, the Campbell Folk School in North Carolina, the Center for Independent Living in Memphis, and elsewhere.

No Silent Witness, Tucker’s fifth book, received the 2010 Melcher Book Award for its outstanding contribution to religious liberalism.