Chapter 7 Trans-Atlantic Reform and Revivalism: Social Workers and Lay Evangelists

Chapter 7

Trans-Atlantic Reform and Revivalism: Social Workers and Lay Evangelists

When Victor Hugo declared that “the nineteenth century is woman’s century,” he was well aware of the progress women were making in religious endeavors. Indeed, the nineteenth century brought significant advances for Western women in every area of life. Women began speaking out and organizing and assuming leadership positions as never before in history, and the church above all other institutions became a center for such activity. “It is among the distinguished glories of the commencement of the Nineteenth Century,” wrote an editor of the Assembly’s Digest of the Presbyterian Church in 1800, “that pious females are more extensively associated and more actively useful in promoting evangelical and benevolent objects than in any former period of the world.”¹

Frontier Revivalism

The Puritans in England and colonial America had elevated the woman in her position as wife and mother, but had taken a strong stand against a public ministry for women—such as that of Anne Hutchinson and the Quaker women preachers—and some had even suggested that Mistress Hopkins went insane because she thought too much about deep theological and philosophical matters. But that began to change as American religion loosened up as a result of religious revivals and sectarian movements. “Revivalistic religion,” writes, Lawrence Foster, “has always provided both men and women—but especially women—with greater outlets for self-expression and innovation than have the established churches.”² Women were viewed as having a very important place in the Great Awakening—not as revivalists, but by their attendance at religious services and their involvement in women’s prayer meetings. When he was conducting meetings in South Carolina in 1795, Francis Asbury recorded in his diary, “Our few male members do not attend preaching; and I fear there is hardly one who walks with God: the women and Africans attend our meetings, and some few strangers also.” Some years later when he was holding religious services in New England, he referred to a meeting in Marblehead where the “audience, chiefly female, nearly filled the room.”³ He was certainly not alone among itinerant evangelists who frequently preached to crowds made up mainly of women.

Without female involvement, the Great Awakenings might never have transpired. Indeed, it was widely believed in early America that women by nature were more religious than men and that they were destined by God to be the keepers of religion. When Benjamin Rush praised women for their religious faithfulness, claiming that “the female breast is the natural soil of Christianity,” he was representing a widely held view. Women were expected to maintain a spirit of domestic piety and to instill spiritual values in the home and in the community—a role they willingly accepted.

That women were more religiously inclined is born out by church membership records, which indicate that women joined at a somewhat higher rate than men during periods of revival and at a substantially higher rate during the periods between revivals. Many of the local revivals in early America were the apparent result of women’s prayer meetings.

Conscious that as church members they were within the covenant of grace and confident that God answered the prayers of His people, devout women responded to the general apathy with concerted weekly prayers for a revival. Their prayers helped precipitate revivals in that expectations of success made the prayer meeting members especially sensitive to others’ spiritual state.⁴

Although women rarely led revivals, the frontier revivals of the Second Great Awakening offered women an even greater opportunity than they had had previously to actively participate on a lay level in revivalism. “Perhaps the most common female revival effort was the prayer meeting. By the 1820s, its evangelical efforts were so accepted that a Presbyterian magazine could suggest that God showers down grace in direct proportion to women’s prayers.”⁵

For women on the frontier, religious revivals and camp meetings provided an outlet for much-needed social interaction. “Women in particular,” writes William McLoughlin, “were drawn to camp meetings, for they bore the heaviest burdens of pain, sickness, sorrow, unremitting labor, and old age.” In these meetings they “found a place outside the home where they could gather, express their fears and hopes, and join in song and prayer with other women.”⁶

Indeed, in many instances women were the most active participants in the revivals. They freely gave way to their emotions—much to the chagrin of the more sedate observers. Frances Trollope, the widely read nineteenth-century English observer of the American scene, was shocked by what she saw at a revival being conducted at a large Presbyterian church. In response to the hell-fire sermon, “frightened young girls, sobbing and trembling, made their way to the ‘anxious benches.’” Men walked the isles whipping up emotions, and the girls “became hysterical, falling on their knees and crying ‘Oh Lord!’ ‘Oh Lord Jesus!’ and ‘Help me, Jesus!’” To the English woman it was a horrifying spectacle.

It was not simply a matter of the lower orders indulging in emotion, she reminded her readers; the congregations in general were very well dressed. She concluded that these excesses were the direct result of boredom. With no card games, no billiards, and no theater, the women of Cincinnati had to find release somewhere.⁷

It was during the last years of the eighteenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth century, when the Second Great Awakening was making an indelible impact on churches and families, that female lay ministries began to flourish. Women desired to carry their religious influence beyond the realm of their families and to make a difference in society.

Lay Ministries

As important as revivals and prayer groups became for religiously inclined women, they were not enough to satisfy those who desired a more active and public ministry. Women began seeking lay ministries both inside and outside the church, but whatever the ministries entailed, they were generally closely tied to the womanly sphere. Indeed, according to Page Miller, “the evolving recognition of mothers as the primary spiritual nurturers of children and the idealization of the hearth eventually provided the rationale for women’s new public role.”⁸ The vast majority of women did not desire paid professional religious careers; they wanted to serve God, and they were fully satisfied if they could minister in a meaningful volunteer capacity.

Benevolent Societies

During the early nineteenth century, there was a tremendous increase in women’s involvement in lay ministries—a literal overflowing of volunteer service that had not before existed on such a broad scale. Ford Brown humorously describes this society craze that began in England in the early nineteenth century as part of a broad-based reform movement:

There were societies for putting down gin-mills and Sunday fairs and closing cook-shops on Sundays, for sending Bibles, homilies and Prayer Books everywhere and for keeping country girls at home. There were societies for educating infants, and adults, and juveniles, and orphans, and female orphans, and adult orphans, and nearly everybody else, according to the formularies of the Established Church or not according to them but always according to some religious formularies. There were societies for the deaf and dumb, for the insane, for the blind, for the ruptured, for the scrofulous, for the club-footed, for the penitent syphilitic and for the impenitent syphilitic; for legitimate children and illegitimate children, for chimney sweepers’ apprentices and against Tom Paine and Shelley; in aid of juvenile prostitutes and against juvenile mendicants; for distressed respectable widows, for poor pious clergymen in the country, for poor females in the maritime districts, for distressed foreigners, for small debtors, for prisoners, for female emigrees, for the deserving poor, for respectable married women and disreputable unmarried women, for sick people in hospitals and sick people out of hospitals and for simple ordinary sick strangers.⁹

The vast majority of the societies were founded or directed by women or at least were supported largely by women, and they were very often tied to religious ideals, if not directly to an organized church. Women were very active in such ministries to the sick, poor, orphans, prostitutes, and prisoners. In America the city reform movement among women began early in the nineteenth century. Home mission societies of various kinds developed alongside mission support groups. Collecting money for missionaries was too passive for many women who wanted to be where the action was.

Of the vast army of women who volunteered to serve the downtrodden in society, an amazing number were recruited from the mission homes themselves. Seth Cook Rees cited many such cases from the late nineteenth century in his book Miracles in the Slums; or, Thrilling Stories of those Rescued from the Cesspools of Iniquity, and Touching Incidents in the Lives of the Unfortunate. The following are only a few of the trophies of the missionaries to people in the slums: Orpha, who “fell prey to a professional procurer,…became a slum missionary and an ordained deaconess.” Little H—, who “had been taken to men’s rooms and forced to drink,” was later “sanctified and went to Bible School in order to prepare to become a slum missionary.” Miss M—“was put in jail for grand larceny” and later “became a missionary in the New York City slums.” Lucy “was ruined by her employer who turned out to be a bartender and was put in a Negro sporting house.” After she was rescued, “she began teaching a Sunday School class of nineteen scholars.” Dicie, who was “a drunkard, cigarette fiend, and user of morphine, cocaine, and other druges,” later “became a slum missionary.” “Little Ella,” who was “sold as a prostitute for $5.00,” later “became a Quaker and started preaching.” Christine, a pregnant teenager who “was forever hopelessly ruined,” was “called to be a slum missionary” and “went to Bible school for training.” And Bernie, who “after trying suicide…decided to have a man without marriage…was saved, sanctified” and “became assistant matron of the Home.”¹⁰

Women’s social work was certainly not focused only on women and girls. In England women were heavily involved in evangelistic and humanitarian outreach to working-class men. One of the most effective of these ministries was begun in the 1840s by Catherine Marsh. She reached out to railroad laborers, and many were converted through her efforts. She detailed her experiences in a book entitled English Hearts and English Hands, published in 1858, in which she challenged others to show more concern for the workingmen of the nation.

When…labourers either in fields or factories are within your reach, meet them with a frank and genial friendliness. Alleviate their discomforts as far as lies in your power. Provide some little innocent pleasure—a tea party for instance—from time to time, for their hard-worked existence. Above all, seek to secure to them their Sabbaths; and hold forth to them the Word of Life. Give them Bibles or Testaments…¹¹

In the 1860s, Louisa Daniell organized missions to servicemen at various military bases, providing them with recreational facilities, homecooked food, and Bible study materials.¹²

The Sunday School Movement

It was out of the reform movement that Sunday schools emerged. In the earliest years, they were often focused on the lower elements of society and were hardly distinguishable from other social and humanitarian efforts. Yet they proved to be highly controversial. Many churchmen feared that they would interfere with the professional teaching ministry of the church. These leaders were appalled at the idea of lay people—particularly women—teaching the Bible. As Martin Marty has observed, the early Sunday school movement was “often opposed by ministers not simply because it was new or was a threat to established ways of doing things but because it was often in the hands of women.”¹³

Yet without women, the movement would never have flourished. Robert Raikes, considered the founder of the Sunday-school movement, began his work in the 1780s with four women, who held weekly Bible classes for children. According to Ian Bradley, “the most active agents in the conversion of the working classes to vital religion seem to have been the females. Most of the teachers in Sunday schools and ragged schools were women.”¹⁴ There is little evidence that women heeded the voices of opposition, perhaps partly because they saw the value in their work and realized how much their ministry was appreciated by their pupils. Lord Shaftesbury, writes Bradley,

was alarmed to find a young woman in her mid-twenties in charge of a class of men in a ragged school in a particularly rough area of London, but the Superintendent told him that what worried him was not that they would molest her but “that some day a man might drop in who, not knowing the habits of this place, might lift a finger against her, for if he did so, he would never leave the room alive.”¹⁵

Hannah More, an early leader of Sunday-school work in England, also faced opposition. “She and her sisters, who fostered schools among the poor, were condemned and their teachers persecuted by curates of the church, until she appealed to the bishop, gaining no redress beyond a diplomatic letter.” According to More, “the aim of the curates was not merely to ruin the teachers employed but to strike at the principles of all my schools and to stigmatize them as seminaries of fanaticism, vice and sedition.” Altogether, she and her co-workers organized schools that accommodated some twenty thousand children.¹⁶

The early Sunday-school movement in America also was deeply influenced by women. Two women—Joanna Bethune and her mother, Isabella Graham—started a class for poor children in 1803, after Joanna had visited Scotland and surveyed the Sunday-school work there. In the years that followed there were various similar classes started by women in New York and Philadelphia. More than a decade later, after hearing enthusiastic reports of Sunday schools being organized by Robert Raikes and his followers in England, Joanna and her husband determined that it was time for the work to be organized on a broad scale in America. Initially her husband sought to interest some other Christian businessmen to become involved, but, unsuccessful at that, he encouraged his wife to take the initiative with some of her female friends.¹⁷

Although she had been actively involved in teaching Sunday schools, Joanna had not thought of herself as the organizer of a large movement, but she accepted the challenge. In a letter to a friend she told how she had talked up the Sunday-school idea and passed out literature, “in hopes the gentlemen would come forward in the business, but after waiting a number of weeks, I conversed with several of my own sex, who expressed a wish to unite with me in a Female Sunday-School Union.” She called a meeting in January 1816 at the Wall Street Church. Several hundred women from a number of denominations attended. After Bethune’s very impassioned message, “there was not a dry eye in the room, and tears flowed copiously down the cheeks of many.” Out of that meeting came The Female Union for the Promotion of Sabbath Schools.¹⁸

Classes started the following week, and by July of that year there were two hundred and fifty teachers and more than three thousand pupils. This launched Bethune into an administrative position with responsibilities rarely granted women of this period. According to Page Miller, “she supervised a large budget, established policy, oversaw the publication of the curriculum, and coordinated an enormous staff.” Yet, like most women, she depreciated her own value. In the Society’s fifth annual report, she wrote, “Of myself, I feel utterly unable to think a good thought—far less to fulfill the duties of the responsible situation you have assigned me.”¹⁹

Like the women in England, the American women involved in Sunday schools frequently faced strong opposition. Fearing that “these women will be in the pulpit next,” some pastors and church boards denied the use of their facilities for Sunday-school work.²⁰ Although the men had initially been unwilling to form a Sunday-school organization, they apparently did not want to be out-done by the women. One week after the women’s organizational meeting, the men met, with Joanna’s husband presiding. They founded the New York Sunday School Union, of which the Female Society soon became an auxiliary. Although the men were now in control, the women continued to be the backbone of the organization, with the vast majority of teaching staff being female. The following year, the American Sunday School Union was officially organized.²¹

In the decades that followed the organization of American Sunday schools, women continued to fill the ranks as teachers. Their prominence in the movement was evident at the Women’s Christian Temperance Union convention of 1889. When the Sunday-school workers were asked to stand, Frances Willard observed that out of the 466 delegates, only a few remained seated.²²

Why did the women simply hand over the reins of leadership to men? Most of them apparently had no desire to be in leadership positions and were glad the men took over. Edwin Rice, who wrote a history of the American Sunday School Union on its one-hundredth anniversary, made the following observation:

In view of the prominent service which women rendered to this movement in its teaching force and in contributing so largely to the preparation of its literature, it seems remarkable that they did not become more conspicuous in some organized capacity in the work of extending and improving Sunday schools. Possibly it may have been because woman’s day had not yet arrived. In most of the churches it was not popular for women to speak in public or to attempt to interpret the Sacred Word…Women accepted the humbler but no less important sphere of instructing the race in its formative period and giving the young some knowledge of the rudiments of religion…It would seem a distinct loss, however, that the American Sunday-School Union should miss the opportunity of fostering and encouraging an organization of women in the work in which they might have become such valuable auxiliaries.²³

The rapid growth rate of the Sunday-school movement in England and North America was not duplicated in Continental Europe. The movement faced opposition from Protestant state churches as well as from Roman Catholicism, but where it did take hold, women were generally at the forefront. Sweden is an example. There it was initiated in the 1850s by Lady Ehrenborg, who had become a Sunday school enthusiast after visiting London. Under her leadership, the movement grew “with greater rapidity…than in any other continental country.” By the early twentieth century there were nearly twenty-five thousand teachers and more than three-hundred thousand pupils.²⁴

Charles Finney and the Women’s Issue

Although the public lay ministry of women was sometimes very controversial, in other instances it was strongly encouraged. The behind-the-scenes work of women in the Sunday-school movement, humanitarian services, and in support missions was an enormous asset to the church, and it did not go unnoticed. Yet there was always an underlying fear that women would assume roles unsuited to their sex. A controversy over this issue flared up during the Second Great Awakening—particularly in reference to the revivalistic work of Charles Grandison Finney. He was perceived by many as being too eager to use the services of women. This was evident at a conference he attended in New Lebanon, New York, in 1826, at which time the issue of “the propriety of women taking any part in social meetings” arose. According to Finney, “Dr. [Lyman] Beecher brought up that objection, and argued it at length, insisting upon it, that the practice was unscriptural and inadmissible.”²⁵ Asa Nettleton, another well-known revival and church leader from the East, also strongly opposed women’s participation in mixed groups.

Why, with such active involvement of women in lay ministries, was there so much controversy over women’s involvement in revivals? One reason relates to the “promiscuous” meetings—women speaking where men were present. As a general rule, women in early America had observed the ban on their speaking in church and revival meetings. There were exceptions among sectarian groups, however, particularly in situations where male leadership was lacking, but most “respectable” churches adhered to the rule of silence for women. It is not surprising, then, that Charles G. Finney, the most popular revivalist of the early nineteenth century, created an uproar when he permitted women to pray and testify in public meetings. He was not the first revivalist to do so, however. As early as 1825 Theodore Weld had challenged women to speak and pray—a challenge that did not go unheeded. During a meeting one night “seven females, a number of them the most influential Christians in the city, confessed their sin in being restrained by their sex and prayed publickly in succession.”²⁶

Was Finney breaking new ground in his attitude toward women, or was he just trying to maintain the status quo? This is an important issue. Some evangelical feminist historians in recent years have tried to make the case that the real roots of feminism are among the nineteenth-century Evangelicals. Donald Dayton, Lucille Sider Dayton, Nancy Hardesty, and others have emphasized this. According to Donald Dayton, “it was in the American revivalism of Charles G. Finney that such tendencies [egalitarianism] began to have wide cultural impact and were transformed into the practice of full ordination for women and a form of Christian and biblical feminism.”²⁷

It should be pointed out, however, that Finney himself did not advocate the ordination of women. He was a traditionalist at heart. Like other revivalists of this period, he depended heavily on the support of women. His Memoirs attest to that fact. The women’s door-to-door visitation and prayer meetings paved the way for his revivals. Likewise, he argued that “the church that silences the women is shorn of half its power” and supported certain feminist causes, but he did not encourage women to seek leadership positions on an equal basis with men. According to Antoinette Brown, who studied under Finney at Oberlin, he “thought that exceptional women might be called on to become religious teachers.”²⁸ Indeed, Finney believed that the primary sphere for women was the home, and he advised them to avoid speaking if they encountered opposition.²⁹

Finney’s first wife, Lydia, reflected her husband’s thinking in opposing women in public ministry. According to Brown, when Mrs. Finney heard that she “intended to study theology,” she “appealed to me not to do so, at least not to become a public speaker or a minister.” Among her “stereotyped arguments” was her warning: “You will never feel yourself wise enough to go directly against the opinions of all the great men of the past.”³⁰

Finney’s second wife, Elizabeth, took a very active role in his revival ministry, but her speaking was generally limited to female audiences.³¹ But women had previously been involved in such activities. So, what Finney seems to have been doing is reacting against the conservative Calvinists in the East who were seeking to tighten up controls on women. He himself admitted as much. In his book Revivals of Religion, under a section entitled “Women’s prayer meetings,” he wrote: “Within the last few years women’s prayer meetings have been extensively opposed.” He goes on to argue that such meetings were valid, but his writing certainly does imply that a reaction had set in against women, and that he was opposing it.³²

Professional “Women’s” Ministries

As opportunities for women in lay ministries proliferated, the door slowly opened for women to become involved in professional ministry. At first the only “approved” ministries were ones that were strictly in the women’s sphere—such activities as social work and writing, but eventually more and more women ventured into the male domain of evangelism and preaching.

The Deaconess Movement

Much of the humanitarian work that was conducted by benevolent societies was carried out independently of the churches, but this began to change as some churchmen saw the need for bringing these women and their activities under the umbrella of the church itself. This came in part with the reintroduction of the the diaconate in the early nineteenth century. Theodore Fliedner, a German Lutheran pastor, and his wife, Friederike, established a hospital in 1836 at Kaisersworth. After that they founded the Institution of Protestant Deaconesses, using the Roman Catholic Sisters of Charity as their model. The Institution was complex, “replete with motherhouse, hospital, center for rehabilitating women prisoners, a training school for teachers, a girls’ high school and laboratory, kindergarten, orphans home, home for female Protestant lunatics, home for lonely and invalid women, and a preparatory school for deaconesses.” Within three decades, Kaisersworth was sponsoring more than four hundred deaconesses and served some one hundred outstations throughout the world.³³

In England, the revival of the diaconate came with the founding of the Mildmay Deaconess Home in 1860 by William Pennefather and his wife. Pennefather was the Vicar of Christ Church in Barnet. After learning of the work of Fliedners at Kaisersworth, he founded a similar work in England. Soon after it was founded, Mrs. Pennefather wrote: “I have been gratified by having numerous applications for Bible-women, matrons, and female visitors of the poor. Our infant institution has not yet been able to supply the demand, but the fact of such a demand shows the necessity for our Missionary Training Home.”³⁴

According to Maude Royden, “The Mildmay Deaconess was at first neither ordained nor ‘set apart’ nor even ‘admitted’ by a bishop, and there were some complaints at her venturing to call herself a deaconess at all.” The Deaconess Order was begun in the Church of England in 1862, but again, according to Royden, “even in this case no one seems to have known whether the deaconess was actually ordained into minor or merely ‘set apart.’ Nor has there been any very clear idea of the nature of her work, her obligations, or her vocation.”³⁵ Further impetus to the revival of the diaconate in England came with the Anglo-Catholic movement and its concern for bringing back women’s religious orders, but it was not until late in the century that deaconesses were widely accepted in English churches.³⁶

Efforts to reinstitute the diaconate in America met with less success than they had in Europe. In the 1840s William A. Passavant, a Lutheran minister, established a hospital in Pittsburgh with the help of Fliedners, who sent some of their Kaisersworthtrained deaconesses to assist. At about the same time, an Episcopal priest from New York organized a diaconate for his denomination, but as with the Lutherans, it did not interest very many women nor the church at large. “Evidently the need for such communities,” writes Janet James, “was not sufficient to overcome Protestant prejudice, for they attracted little support.”³⁷ After 1870, the interest in the diaconate increased, and in the next three decades more than one hundred homes, representing many different Protestant denominations, were established in the United States.³⁸

As a result of the dedication of Lucy Meyer, the Methodists opened a training school and deaconesses home in Chicago in 1887. It was a thriving school, largely because it trained women for many other professions besides that of deaconess. The New England Deaconess Home and Training School was founded two years later, but it remained very small. In 1906, seventeen years after its founding, its enrollment was less than thirty.³⁹

Other deaconess homes were established as well, and in some Protestant circles enthusiasm for the concept ran high. Christian Golder, a medical doctor, wrote in 1903 of the need for women to do evangelism in the ghettos. He cited the findings of George W. Gray, superintendent of Methodist City Missions in Chicago. Dr. Gray had found that in one Chicago district of more than twenty thousand people there were “two hundred and seventy-two saloons, eighty-five wine-houses, seven opium and eight gambling dens, and not less than ninety-two houses of illfame,” but only three churches. What was Golder’s solution?

More than ever before are we in need to-day of female power. We need women who will give up the luxuries of life, who will forsake society and friends, and condescend to help this class of men. The only hope and possibility of elevating and saving this class of the population in our great cities lies in the unselfish and devoted activity of such women…Here is the great and useful field for deaconesses…The time will come when tens of thousands of deaconesses, in city and country, will sacrifice their lives in Christian love services.⁴⁰

Despite such optimism the antagonism toward celibate Protestant “sisterhoods” remained. These sisterhoods smacked of Roman Catholicism, and some of the strongest sentiment against the Catholic concept of female religiosity came from the pen of evangelical women. The evangelical emphasis on female piety that was centered on the home and family was diametrically opposed to the Catholic ideal of celibacy and complete oneness with God. Such was the anti-Catholic sentiment that “many evangelical Protestants over-dramatized the threat and intentions of Rome.” An example is Maria Monk, who in her book Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal “described a nunnery’s ghastly and elaborate system of infanticide, the Catholic solution to ‘criminal intercourse’ between priests and nuns.”⁴¹

Writing and Publishing

Writing was a very significant area of women’s lay ministries. Women were often able to have a more wide-ranging and less controversial ministry through the pen than they would have been able to have in a public speaking ministry. Their writing generally centered on spiritual themes. An example is Hester Ann Rogers, who became well-known to Methodists in the early nineteenth century through her Memiors and Letters. “One preacher reported that in 1817 on his circuit alone he had sold fourteen copies of her Life and seven of her Letters.”

The story of Rogers’ struggle to attain sanctification was one aspect of the book that appealed to the readers, and her writing had an impact on the doctrine of entire sanctification in Methodist circles. She described her prayer for that “blessing”: “I thought, shall I now ask small blessings only of my God: Lord, cried I, make this the moment of my full salvation! Baptize me now with the Holy Ghost and the fire of pure love: Now ‘make me a clean heart, and renew a right spirit within me.’ Now enter thy temple, and cast out sin forever. Now cleanse the thoughts, desires and propensities of my heart, and let me perfectly love thee.”⁴²

Rogers was also deeply involved in lay evangelism, a fact that was noted in the sermon delivered at her funeral:

She…was a leader of classes and bands, and a mother in Israel to the young believers entrusted to her care. After her marriage, she became still more extensively useful. Mr. Rogers, on his entering into a Circuit, would only give a very few to her care, desiring her to complete the class out of the world: and soon, by her conversation and prayers, and attention to every soul within her reach, would the number spring up to thirty or forty; and then her almost cruel husband in this respect, for the glory of God, would transplant all the believers to other classes, and keep her thus continually working at the mine. In the city of Dublin only, Mr. Rogers himself confessed, some hundreds of those whom he received into the society were brought to Christ, or were awakened, by her gentle but incessant labors of love.⁴³

Besides writing autobiographies and devotional works, women of the nineteenth century contributed heavily to the market of religious novels and tracts. Hannah More from England, was an innovator in the latter category. She determined to do battle singlehandedly with the promoters of atheism and political radicalism who were flourishing in the years after the French Revolution, and her method was through cheap religious leaflets. “It has occurred to me,” she wrote, “to write a variety of things, somewhere between vicious papers and hymns, for it is in vain to write what people will not read…I propose printing striking conversions, Holy Lives, Happy Deaths, Providential Deliverances, Judgments on Breakers of Commandments etc.” In 1795, she began publishing three tracts a month, and by the end of the first year she had sold over two million of them.⁴⁴

One area of religious literature that was considered off limits for women in the nineteenth century was that which involved theological and doctrinal treatises. Yet women like Hester Ann Rogers managed to weave doctrinal views into their devotional works, and other women did the same in poetry and novels. Emily Dickinson is an example. “Most critics rank her with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman as the finest American poets of the country.”⁴⁵ Among her many themes, she often expressed her frustration with God, who seemed so remote. She yearned for a close communion that seemed so difficult to realize:

I know that he exists;

Somewhere, in silence,

He has hid his rare life

From our gross eyes.

“Although sentimentalists and evangelicals would have called her impious,” writes Amanda Porterfield, “Dickinson worshiped their God on her own terms. In the demands she made on God’s justice and existence and in the independence she cultivated, she hunted for God with passion and played with him with wit.”⁴⁶

Another area of writing ministry for women involved hymns. According to Erik Routley, “hardly any hymnody by women comes from the 18th century or earlier.”⁴⁷ But during the nineteenth century many women began writing hymns that are still sung in Protestant churches today. Among those whose work was widely recognized were Charlotte Elliott, Frances Havergal, and Fanny Crosby.

Charlotte Elliott, born in Clapham, England, is best known for “Just As I Am,” a hymn frequently sung at the close of revival meetings. “This hymn,” writes Kenneth Osbeck, “has touched more hearts and influenced more people for Christ than any other song ever written.” It was written in 1836, as a reflection of her conversion experience fourteen years earlier. At that time (in 1822) she was bitter about her ill health, and Dr. Caesar Malan, a renowned Swiss evangelist, visited her home and encouraged her to come to Christ just as she was—with all her struggles and doubts. Although she remained an invalid the rest of her life, she was able to minister effectively through her hymn writing. In fact, “Just As I Am” was first published in a volume entitled The Invalid’s Hymn Book, a collection of more than one hundred of her hymns.⁴⁸

Frances Ridley Havergal (1836–79) was the daughter of an Anglican priest, who was himself a recognized poet and musician. Unlike many nineteenth-century hymn writers, she was trained in music. Yet her hymn writing was characterized by a mystical dependence on God, and she purportedly “never wrote a line without first praying over it.” Indeed, “her entire life was characterized by spiritual saintliness.”⁴⁹ An admiring critic wrote: “She devoted herself from her early adult years to private evangelism. Not all of us are sure that she might have not proved a somewhat overwhelming guest…, but one can only admire—even if one keeps a safe distance—her zeal and sincerity.”⁵⁰ Three of her best-known hymns that reflect her evangelistic zeal are “I Gave My Life for Thee,” “Take My Life and Let It Be,” and “Lord, Speak to Me That I May Speak.”

The best-known female hymn writer of all time, of course, was Fanny Crosby (1820–1915), the author of more than nine thousand hymns and gospel songs. Born into a poor family from New York state, she became blind as an infant. It was this handicap that prompted her to develop her creative genius, and she began composing poetry as a youngster. By the time she was in her early thirties, she was writing popular songs including, “Rosalie, the Prairie Flower,” which earned some three thousand dollars in royalties—though Crosby received but a fraction of that.⁵¹

After teaching for a number of years at a school for the blind, she married one of her colleagues and after that devoted her time to composing hymns. Nearly all of her well-known hymns were written during the first ten years of her hymnwriting ministry—prior to 1876. They included such favorites as “Blessed Assurance,” “Rescue the Perishing,” “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Saviour,” “Safe in the Arms of Jesus,” “I Am Thine, O Lord,” “All the Way My Saviour Leads Me,” “Close to Thee,” “Praise Him! Praise Him!” and “To God Be the Glory.” Her biographer, Bernard Ruffin, writes:

In later years, with two or three possible exceptions, none of her hymns would equal in popularity those she wrote in the first decade of her career. Why was this? Had she written herself out? Most likely, yes. Fanny Crosby had said everything that she had to say, and almost everything she would produce in the future was simply a paraphrase of something that she had written earlier.⁵²

Although the vast majority of her thousands of hymns have been lost in obscurity, Crosby nevertheless has had an amazing influence on the church. What she could not have done in a public ministry, she was able to do behind the scenes. Preachers, theologians, and Bible scholars, who would not permit a woman to speak or teach in a worship service, week after week sang her hymns and profited by her ministry. And there were many other nineteenth-century women who also gave to the church some of its best-loved hymns. Although most of these women have long been forgotten, their ministry lives on. They include Elizabeth Clephane, “Beneath the Cross of Jesus”; A. Katherine Hankey, “I Love to Tell the Story”; Sarah F. Adams, “Nearer, My God, to Thee”; Emily E. S. Elliott, “Thou Didst Leave Thy Throne”; Anna Ross Cousin, “The Sands of Time Are Sinking”; Mrs. Cecil F. Alexander, “There Is a Green Hill Far Away”; Anna B. Warner, “Jesus Loves Me”; and Lina Berg, “Day by Day.”

Pulpit Ministries

The nineteenth century, more than any century before it, was one of “women preachers.” Most of these women were not ordained and did not have their own parish, but they nevertheless “preached,” attaining wide recognition. They moved across denominational barriers and sometimes even in circles of high social standing. This indeed was a new phenomenon in religious life—one that prompted strong criticism from more traditional elements in the established churches.

The reason for the strong reaction by the conservatives against women in ministry was not only women’s more pronounced visibility in lay ministries, but also their greater numbers in full-time public ministries. This reaction had set in among the Methodists the decade following John Wesley’s death. In 1802 at the Irish Conference a resolution was passed affirming “that it is contrary both to Scripture and prudence that women should preach or should exhort in public; and we direct the Superintendents to refuse a Society Ticket to any woman in the Methodist Connections who preaches, or who exhorts in any public congregation.” The Conference of 1803 eased the restrictions slightly by declaring that women might preach—but only to other women or in extreme cases when no male preachers were available.⁵³

In spite of such efforts to silence them, women continued to become involved in ministry in greater numbers than ever before. But if it was not specifically nineteenth-century evangelicalism that allowed for such ministry, how did women attain the prominent roles in religious life that were particularly evident in the midto late-nineteenth century?

Although women played a larger role in religious life in the nineteenth century than they had previously, the manner in which they attained recognition had not changed. The nineteenth-century women “preachers” were generally in movements that could be considered sectarian. In England these groups included the Quakers, Primitive Methodists, and Bible Christians; and in America, the Quakers, Freewill Baptists, Free Methodists, as well as factions connected with the holiness and deeperlife movements. They also were involved in unorthodox sectarian movements. All of these movements emphasized direct communion with God, the leading of the Spirit, and the call to ministry over and above clerical counsel, church bylaws, and ordination. As was the case with the Anabaptists and other free church movements in history, the high priority placed on spiritual gifts left the door ajar for women in ministry.

Early Nineteenth-Century Itinerant Evangelists

In rare instances women themselves conducted revivals and served as itinerant evangelists. This was true in New England among the Freewill Baptists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The first of these women preachers was Mary Savage, who went to New Durham in 1791, and from there extended her ministry into surrounding villages where there were no churches. Although her ministry in that area lasted less than a year, she apparently made a significant impact on the movement: “The melting power of her exhortations was often irresistible, and so greatly was the effect with which she sometimes spoke at the Quarterly or Yearly Meeting, that a note of the fact was entered upon the book of records.”⁵⁴

Another female Freewill Baptist preacher was Sally Parsons, who conducted itinerant work during the 1790s in New England. “For several years she traveled considerably, and was very useful in the feeble churches.” Indeed, so useful did the Yearly Meeting in New Durham, in 1797, regard her ministry that enough money was raised to purchase a horse, bridle, and saddle for her personal use. She continued her active preaching ministry for four more years until she married. Yet, as supportive as the Freewill Baptists were of her ministry, she, like other aspiring women, was not ordained and did not serve in an established church. A report from an Elders’ Conference held in 1801 not only indicates that women held a small minority of ministry positions, but also reveals that they were on the lowest rung of the ladder:

The number present was fifty-three—eight ministers, fifteen ruling elders, ten deacons, and twenty unordained preachers and exhorters, three of the latter being females. They were seated in the order above named, ministers occupying the front seats, ruling elders the second range, deacons the third, and in the rear sat the unordained speakers.⁵⁵

The most successful of the early Freewill Baptist female preachers was Clarissa Danforth, who, according to I. D. Stewart, was “the sensation preacher of this decade” (1810–20). In 1817 she spent several months in a region of Vermont “where almost every church was visited in mercy, and large accesssions were made…Crowds went to hear the woman preach, and many returned with hearts fixed to seek the Lord. In one of those meetings, the high sheriff of Danville was one of her first converts. In 1818 Clarissa began an evangelistic ministry in Rhode Island that “resulted in many revivals, and the organization of several churches.” She easily crossed over denominational lines, and “almost all houses of worship in that region were opened for her, and ministers and people in multitudes flocked to hear.” In less than a year after she arrived in Rhode Island, “the great revival commenced in Smithfield…and continued with great power for sixteen months, and extended into all parts of the State, and into all societies.” In 1821 she returned to preach in her hometown of Wethersfield, Vermont, “where not less than one hundred were converted.” Soon after that she married, and, as was the case with Parsons, her active public ministry came to an end.⁵⁶

The “Call” to Ministry

As had been true in previous centuries, the “call” was a very important factor in justifying a woman’s role in Christian ministry. Women often testified of their reservations about entering a man’s domain, but that they finally relented and obeyed the voice of God. Jerena Lee, the first widely traveled woman preacher of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, testified to such an experience:

Between four and five years after my sanctification, on a certain time, an impressive silence fell upon me, and I stood as if some one was about to speak to me, yet I had no such thought in my heart.—But to my utter surprise there seemed to sound a voice which I thought I distinctly heard, and most certainly understood, which said to me “Go preach the gospel!” I immediately replied aloud, “No one will believe me.” Again I listened, and again the same voice seemed to say—“Preach the Gospel; I will put words in your mouth…”⁵⁷

Lee initially feared that it was Satan who had spoken to her. So distraught was she that she went to the Reverend Richard Allen, “the preacher in charge of the African Society,” and told him of her call to preach the gospel. “As to women preaching, he said that our Discipline knew nothing at all about it—that it did not call for women preachers.” She initially accepted the verdict without protest, and almost a sense of relief. “This I was glad to hear, because it removed the fear of the cross—but no sooner did that feeling cross my mind, than I found that a love of souls had in a measure departed from me; that holy energy which burned within me, as a fire, began to be smothered.”⁵⁸

Another woman who related her reluctance to obey God’s call to preach was Salome Lincoln, whose “mind was first exercised on the subject of preaching, about the year 1823.” She was certain it was the leading of the Lord, “but O, my soul shrunk from the work! I thought I could never move forward; and soon lost the enjoyment of religion.” But while the Spirit of God was saying, “Go, go,” Satan cried out, “Woman, woman!” “It is no wonder,” wrote her biographer, “that at the midnight hour, while she wept and prayed till her pillow was wet with tears; she should sometimes exclaim, ‘Lord, I pray thee, have me excused!’” Despite her strong sense of calling, Lincoln did not begin preaching until 1827, and then only because there was no one else to take the service: “A large number of young persons were present, and not one among them that had ever professed religion. I sat a few moments trembling under the cross: and then fell upon my knees and commenced praying. While in prayer, the power of God was manifested—and the fear of man taken away. I then arose and began to speak.”⁵⁹

After that beginning, Lincoln began preaching three or four sermons a week, while supporting herself by working in a factory. Her ministry was confined largely to Reformed Methodist churches and nondenominational meetings. She sometimes confronted opposition, on one occasion having a school house locked so that she could not hold her service. Most of the time, however, her preaching was regarded as better than no preaching at all, and some of her admirers went so far as Elder Benton to suggest that “she possessed an uncommon mind for one of her sex.”⁶⁰

Mary Cole, who began her preaching and healing ministry in Missouri in the 1880s, was attending a camp meeting when she received her call, which was in the form of a question: “Will you consecrate yourself to go out as a life-worker for me?” Immediately, however, “the devil” prompted her to make excuses and degrade her own ability. Further discouragement came from her Methodist class leader who told her, “You are a pretty looking thing to be called to preach.” And during her early years of ministry she “met with considerable opposition to woman’s preaching.” But the compelling nature of her call sustained her even when her enemies went to great lengths to discredit her. “Falsehoods were told about me that should have shamed the devil himself. One rumor was that I was one of the famous outlaws, known as the ‘James boys,’ disguised as a woman.”⁶¹

Virtually every woman who conducted a public professional ministry during the nineteenth century testified of a special call from God, and some of these women had very prominent public ministries. Among their numbers was the great triumvirate Phoebe Palmer, Hannah Whitall Smith, and Catherine Booth—whose lives and ministries had much in common. All of them were members of husband-wife teams, with the women more prominent or equally prominent in each case. They all had several children, and they all were very much a part of the Holiness-Deeper Life movement, which emphasized sanctification as a distinct second work of grace.

Phoebe Palmer

Phoebe Palmer (1807–74), often referred to as the “Mother of the Holiness Movement,” was the most influential woman in nineteenth-century Methodism. She lived in New York City with her husband, a physician, and began her ministry in the 1830s with her Tuesday Meeting for the Promotion of Holiness, which she continued for some twenty years. These were very significant meetings. “Hundreds of Methodist preachers, including at least two bishops and three who were later to hold that office, were sanctified under Mrs. Palmer’s influence. The Guide to Holiness, printed in Boston, publicized her work and served as well to unite and inspire the clergymen great and small who shared her concern.” She was described by a well-known minister as “the Priscilla who had taught many an Apollos the way of God more perfectly.”⁶²

Phoebe Palmer, a Well-known Nineteenth-Century Holiness Teacher and Evangelist. Made from nineteenth-century prints by Deane K. Dayton for Donald W. Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).

The well-publicized success of Phoebe Palmer’s informal prayer meetings inspired other women to conduct the same type of ministry, and dozens of such meetings sprang up all over the country. “These intimate little gatherings,” according to Timothy Smith, “brought together the most earnest Christians of all evangelical sects under the leadership of women…” Indeed, Palmer had a significant influence also outside Methodist circles, particularly among Congregationalists, Episcopalians, Baptists, and Quakers.⁶³

There was a very practical side to Phoebe Palmer’s concept of Christianity, and, according to Smith, her “pioneer work in social welfare projects illustrates the part which urban evangelization played in the origins of the Christian social movement.” She played an influential role in establishing the Hedding Church, a city mission work under the auspices of the Methodist Ladies Home Missionary Society. This mission project represented the early beginnings of the later settlement houses. For more than a decade during the 1840s and 1850s she served as an officer of The New York Female Assistance Society for the Relief and Religious Instruction of the Sick Poor. She also distributed tracts in the slums of New York City and conducted prison visitation at the Tombs, and in doing so she became acutely aware of the material needs of the poor. Likewise, she founded the Five Points Mission, her “crowning achievement.” It was a mission project in New York that housed some twenty poor families and provided schooling and religious training as well. This mission project represented the early beginnings of the later settlement houses.⁶⁴

Phoebe Palmer did not confine her ministry to informal prayer gatherings and social work. Her “all-consuming desire” was not to be a great evangelist or philanthropist, but to be, in her words, a “Bible Christian.”⁶⁵ She was a student of the Bible and as such did not hesitate to challenge church doctrine if she believed it to be nonbiblical. Yet, she was influenced deeply by her denominational heritage. There was a strong “holiness” emphasis associated with her Tuesday meetings. She acknowledged her indebtedness to John Wesley’s theology of entire sanctification, and in the early years of her ministry, there was little apparent difference between her views and his. By the late 1840s, however, she was proposing a radically new concept that made the Wesleyan doctrine of entire sanctification compatible with American revivalism.

Wesley’s emphasis on the disciplined life that led to an eventual attainment of this “perfect love” was, in her mind, an unnecessary prolongation of a “blessing” that was available the moment a Christian consecrated everything to God and claimed this promise of “perfect love.” All an individual needed to do was to become a “living sacrifice on the altar of Jesus Christ.” This “altar” theology, though highly controversial, made a lasting imprint on the doctrine of sanctification among various perfectionist groups.⁶⁶

In 1858 Walter Palmer, Phoebe’s husband, purchased the Guide to Holiness and under Phoebe’s editorship, the circulation grew from thirteen thousand subscriptions to thirty thousand. Besides her editing duties, Phoebe traveled with her husband, conducting evangelistic meetings during the summer months. As the demand for their ministry increased, Walter Palmer curtailed his homeopathic medical activities and teamed up with Phoebe in full-time evangelistic ministry. Although she did not believe it was right for women to “preach,” she was able in good conscience to give “lengthy exhortations in connection with her husband’s sermons” (her meetings drawing the largest crowds).⁶⁷

Phoebe’s own position on women in ministry was traditional. She strongly defended that position in her book Promise of the Father. Even though she wrote her book after hearing the “anguished testimony of a woman who felt compelled to speak and yet was rebuked by the elders of her church,” she did not view the religious leadership of women to be the norm. Reflecting on the leadership of Deborah and Huldah in the Old Testament, she wrote that

it is in the order of God that women may occasionally be brought out of the ordinary sphere of action and occupy in either church or state positions of high responsibility; and if, in the orderings of providence, it so occur, the God of providence will enable her to meet the emergency with becoming dignity, wisdom, and womanly grace.⁶⁸

In the fall of 1857 she and her husband traveled to Canada where they attracted crowds of several thousand people. According to Timothy Smith, an afternoon prayer meeting in Hamilton, Ontario, became a ten-day revival in which four hundred people were converted and many “sanctified.” The next winter they traveled from town to town in New York, where they were welcomed not only by Methodists, but also by Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Baptists. Concerning these revival campaigns, Phoebe wrote, “Never have we witnessed such triumphs of the cross as during the past summer and fall. I think…not less than two thousand have been gathered into the fold at various meetings we have attended. Hundreds of believers have been sanctified wholly, and hundreds have received baptisms of the Holy Ghost, beyond any former experience.”⁶⁹

The holiness revival in America spread to England through the writings of Finney, Palmer, and other Americans, and in 1859 Phoebe Palmer and her husband made a four-year visit to England, “which created a minor sensation in English Methodism.” According to Timothy Smith, they “preached for weeks to packed houses at Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester, Birmingham, and dozens of other places.”⁷⁰ At the time of her death, she was credited with having brought some 25,000 people to Christ for salvation.

For all her activity and influence within the ranks of Methodism, Phoebe Palmer’s situation did not reflect the role of women in the denomination at large. She was not the norm, and her influence on the position of women in the church was nominal. Her holiness emphasis, distinguished by her own “altar” theology, further alienated her from many Methodists. She was outside the mainstream of Methodism, and she and others viewed her ministry as unique—not the norm for women. So despite her recognition and popularity, Methodist women had gained little, if any, ground on account of her example. This may have been due in part to her own insistence on a secondary role for women in ministry. Yet, while denying an equal role for women in the church, she served as a role model for other women both inside and outside the ranks of Methodism.

Catherine Booth and the Salvation Army

It was criticism of Phoebe Palmer’s preaching in England in 1859 that thrust Catherine Booth (1829–90) into a public defense of women in ministry. This came in the form of a pamphlet entitled Female Ministry; Or, Woman’s Right to Preach the Gospel. Here she not only emphasized the biblical precedent for women in ministry, but the personal leading of the Spirit: “If she have the necessary gifts, and feels herself called by the Spirit to preach, there is not a single word in the whole book of God to restrain her, but many, very many, to urge and encourage her.” She believed that the attitude toward women was based more on her contemporary culture than on biblical tradition: “Oh, that the ministers of religion would search the original records of God’s Word in order to discover whether the general notions of society are not wrong on this subject, and whether God really intended woman to bury her gifts and talents, as she now does.”⁷¹

As the wife of a Methodist minister, she had not herself preached when she wrote her defense, but the following year on Whit Sunday as her husband William finished his sermon, she stood up in front of a crowd of more than a thousand packed into Bethesda Chapel and began to speak. Catherine later recalled her inner feelings that morning: “It seemed as if a voice said to me, ‘Now if you were to go and testify, you know I would bless it to your own soul as well as to the souls of the people.’ I gasped and said in my soul…‘I cannot do it.’ and then the devil said, ‘Besides, you are not prepared to speak. You will look like a fool and have nothing to say.’” Her first words when she rose to speak were, “I want to say a word…” William was as surprised as anyone when she made her sudden announcement, but he quickly recovered, and when she had finished, he announced that she would preach that evening.⁷²

Catherine Booth, Co-founder of the Salvation Army. Made from nineteenth-century prints by Deane K. Dayton for Donald W. Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).

Catherine’s only regret was that she had waited so long. Earlier when giving temperance lectures, she wrote to her parents: “I only wish I had begun years ago. Had I been fortunate enough to have been brought up amongst the Primitives [Methodists], I believe I should have been preaching now…Indeed, I felt quite at home on the platform, far more so than I do in the kitchen!”⁷³

Although Catherine Booth was, in her own words, “one of the most timid and bashful disciples the Lord Jesus ever saved,” she was well-prepared for her public ministry.⁷⁴ She had been active in the temperance movement and was well versed in Scripture. She had been a Bible student from the time she was a child. By the time she was twelve she had read the Bible through eight times. Unlike Palmer, she was a committed feminist. She insisted before she was married that she and her husband would have an egalitarian marriage. Whether they actually did is difficult to determine, but by nineteenth-century standards, she enjoyed freedom accorded few married women, and William apparently was not threatened by the potential competition of her ministry. Soon after her pulpit debut, William became ill, and his slow recovery opened the door for her own preaching ministry. For a time he was so ill that she took over his entire circuit. Soon after that, dissatisfied with their lack of independence, the Booths broke their ties with the Methodist connection, and began working together in a revivalistic ministry. Then, in 1865, they moved to West London. “William began preaching to the poor East Enders, walking eight miles there and back each Sunday, while Catherine attracted large crowds to her meetings in London’s affluent West End.”⁷⁵

She was a dynamic and forceful speaker, as is seen in a sermon that she delivered in 1880 to the congregation at the West End. On the subject of evangelism she was dogmatic: “Oh! people say, you must be very careful, very judicious. You must not thrust religion down people’s throats.” To that opinion, she responded vehemently: “Then I say, you will never get it down. What! am I to wait till an unconverted Godless man wants to be saved before I try to save him?” She did not shy away from controversy. In fact, she viewed discord as a sign of true Christianity. “Opposition! It is a bad sign for the Christianity of this day that it provokes so little opposition. If there was no other evidence of it being wrong I should know it from that.”⁷⁶

Catherine did not limit her ministry to the West End. She was also involved in city mission work, and it was through this common interest with her husband that the Salvation Army was born. “Reclaiming” women from a life of prostitution was a significant part of the mission work. Most of these women were of the “poorer class,” but a surprisingly substantial number came from the upper class—enough for Catherine Booth to report: “At this moment one of our most pressing needs is a temporary home for the reception of the lady portion of them, until we can fit them for some useful occupation.”⁷⁷

From the very beginning, the Salvation Army welcomed the service of women. Clause 14 of the Foundation Deed submitted in 1875 specified that

nothing shall authorize the conference to take any course whereby the right of females to be employed as evangelists or class leaders shall be impeded or destroyed or which shall render females ineligible for any office or deny to them the right to speak and vote at all or any official meetings of which they may be members.⁷⁸

In 1878, only three years after clause 14 was formulated, forty-one of the total ninety-one Salvation Army officers in the field were women. Indeed, many of these “women” were mere girls—“Hallelujah lassies,” as they were termed. A London journalist reported the work of two of these girls:

I was amazed. I found two delicate girls, one hardly able to write a letter, the other not yet nineteen, ministering to a crowded congregation which they had themselves collected out of the street, and building up an aggressive church militant out of the human refuse which other churches regarded with blank despair. In the first six months…a corps or a church was formed of nearly two hundred members.

Another young girl, Eliza Shirley, was promoted to the rank of lieutenant at the age of sixteen. When her family emigrated to America, she and her mother rented a factory warehouse in Philadelphia and began an evangelistic outreach there. Handbills were posted with the message:

Blood and fire! The Salvation Army Two Hallelujah females

will speak and sing for Jesus in the old chair factory

at Sixth and Oxford Streets Oct. 5th at 11 a.m. 3m. 8m. All are invited to attend.

The first service brought out twelve people, but a few weeks later, “every bench in the factory was filled…every foot of standing room was taken.”⁷⁹

Salvation Army Poster Advertising Women Preachers. From Salvation Army Archives.

When the Booths decided to officially inaugurate the work of the Salvation Army in America, Commissioner Railton was sent with “the Splendid Seven,” a team of seven women. There was no condescending to them on account of their sex, as is illustrated in the farewell prayer offered by an Army officer: “Lord, these ladies are going to America to preach the gospel. If they are fully given up to Thee, be with them and bless them and grant them success. But if they are not faithful, drown ‘em, Lord, drown ‘em!” They did succeed, and they served as an example along with many others that prompted William Booth to say, “My best men are women.”⁸⁰

In spite of the humanitarian work that the Salvation Army conducted in the poorest urban districts, the organization met bitter opposition from virtually every sector of society. From rowdies and thugs to sophisticated high churchmen, the Army was the subject of scorn. In the streets, the ridicule frequently turned to violence, and in 1882 there were more than six hundred reported assaults on Army volunteers, more than a third of the victims being women—one dying of her wounds.⁸¹

Six of the “Splendid Seven” Who Immigrated to America in 1880. From Salvation Army Archives.

Catherine trained her own children for ministry in the Salvation Army, where they all served faithfully. The training began when they were young, and getting them “saved” was her first priority. In response to another mother’s question, “How have you managed to get your children converted so early?” she responded, “I have been beforehand with the devil. I have not allowed my children to become pre-occupied with the things of the world before I have got the seed of the Kingdom well in.”⁸²

Catherine Booth lived through the stormy decade of the 1880s, but was ill much of the time and died of cancer in 1890 at the age of sixty-one. Her last years had been devoted to preaching and to rescue-mission work, especially that involving young teenage prostitutes. But as important as her work was with the Salvation Army, her public ministry was perhaps even more significant. Of her thirty years of preaching in England, Norman Murdoch writes, “Many agree, no man of her era exceeded her in popularity or spiritual results, including her husband.”⁸³

Hannah Whitall Smith and the Deeper Life Movement

Hannah Whitall Smith (1832–1911) was raised in a Quaker home and, like Phoebe Palmer, gave a new slant to the holiness movement—a slant that reflected her Quaker background and one that gave the movement a form of passivism or Quietism. Her book, The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life, published in 1875, became a best seller almost immediately and still remains a popular devotional classic, having sold more than two million copies. Here she emphasized the passiveness of the Christian as clay in the potter’s hands: “In order for a lump of clay to be made into a beautiful vessel, it must be entirely abandoned to the potter, and must lie passive in his hands.”⁸⁴

The argument that women are more emotionally inclined than men and therefore gravitated to ecstatic religious movements is not supported by the heavy female involvement in the holiness movement. The movement, at least as it penetrated the urban middle class, was not characterized by ecstatic religion, nor were the female leaders of the movement so characterized. Hannah Smith’s testimony is particularly interesting in this regard. She had desperately sought for an ecstatic religious experience after her husband experienced great emotion and ecstasy at a camp-meeting revival. She tried desperately to achieve the same experience (and even went to the altar with a stack of handkerchiefs, thinking she would be overcome with tears), but nothing happened. For years she sought the experience. Later she wrote that she believed it was her husband’s emotional nature that allowed him to have the experience, and she conceded that she was still “a dry old stick.”⁸⁵

As the years passed, she began to question the validity of emotional experiences and actually to renounce them:

I have discovered by careful investigation that spiritualists have wonderful emotional experiences quite as often as Christians. I am convinced, too, that there are emotions common to highly exalted mental states, no matter what the cause of this exaltation, whose origin is purely physical or psychical and have nothing to do with God’s Spirit. Since such experiences can be of the body and not of the spirit at all, I fear many people are sadly deceived by them into thinking they must necessarily be from God and must be tokens of His especial favor, when the individuals concerned know nothing whatever of the reality of being filled with the Spirit.”⁸⁶

The unemotional character of her religious experience was similar to that of Sarah Lankford, who with her sister Phoebe Palmer had initiated the Tuesday Meetings. “All was calm and stillness,” she wrote. “I had none of the expected emotions. I arose from my knees fully determined to rest in God.”⁸⁷

Despite the recognition that came from her writing, Hannah Smith was at times a liability to her husband’s ministry. Certain of her theological positions were very controversial. In the 1870s after her husband had been invited to conduct meetings in England, it surfaced that Hannah held to universalism. There were loud protests, but they went ahead with the tour, and Hannah won the hearts of vast numbers of English Evangelicals and was dubbed “the angel of the churches.” “It is most remarkable,” writes Melvin Dieter, “that in spite of a longstanding commitment to a universalist view of the restitution of all things,” she was used widely in the churches.⁸⁸

In spite of the Smiths’ popularity, their public ministry was short-lived, and it was not Hannah’s heresy that created the problem. It was Robert’s. By the mid-1870s he was deeply embroiled in controversy over a scandal, and his career came to an end at an international higher-life convention in the resort city of Brighton, England. Robert and Hannah were the featured speakers and were viewed by many as the leaders of the movement. But suddenly it was announced that his meetings were canceled and that he was returning to America for health reasons. Despite the efforts of the convention leaders to suppress the details, rumors of sexual misconduct with a young woman circulated. But even more disturbing were the reports of his antinomian views. A contemporary charged that he was teaching that “those who are in Christ are no longer subject to the law of God, as the rule of their conduct; that they are lifted to a higher sphere of life, and walk in a freedom unknown to those who are strangers to the exalted experience of the new and better life.”⁸⁹

Hannah Smith appeared occasionally on public platforms following the scandal, but Robert, for most of the remaining quarter century of his life, remained in semi-seclusion. In 1895, when she was in her early sixties, she returned to England to speak as part of a promotional effort for churchwomen. The London Echo described it as an “invasion” of one hundred and seventy-five chapels by women preachers. Hannah described the event as follows:

One of the most interesting things that took place during our week of meetings was on Sunday the 16th. The newspaper extract…describes it, and also describes me as I appear to English eyes—‘active though elderly.’ It was a wonderful thing to get an entrance for women into so many places of worship in London, and the funny thing was that when our supply of women failed and we offered men, nobody would have them! No wonder.⁹⁰

Single Women on the Circuit

While Palmer, Smith, and Booth all depended on their husbands to be the real “preacher” in the family, other women made it on their own. The widow Margaret (“Maggie”) Van Cott, “was on the sawdust trail for thirty years.” Her early ministry consisted of traditional women’s work—prayer meetings, charity, and tract distribution, but her reputation as a spell-binding speaker eventually launched her into a wider ministry that included men as well as women. Yet she had serious reservations about entering a male profession. Spurned by a man in her audience and plagued by “self-doubts,” she was at first reluctant to accept actual preaching invitations. Women preachers were unheard of in Methodist circles. The invitations continued coming, however, and in 1868 she applied first for an Exhorter’s License and then for a Local Preacher’s License, and in 1869 she became the first woman in the United States to be licensed to preach by the Methodist Episcopal Church.⁹¹

In the early 1870s, Van Cott conducted a revival in Evanston, Illinois, where Frances Willard was serving at the women’s college. After preaching and singing, “she placed her kind hands on every head as she was going around that large circle” and “asked a blessing on all. The revival that followed was the most memorable ever known in Evanston, and all my girls but two…became members of the church.”⁹²

During a one-year period at the height of her career, Van Cott delivered some four hundred sermons and brought more than seventeen hundred people into the membership of the Methodist church. So influential was she that her ministry was compared to that of one of her contemporaries—evangelist Dwight L. Moody.⁹³

Amanda Smith, Nineteenth-Century Black Holiness Evangelist. Made from nineteenth-century prints by Deane K. Dayton for Donald W. Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).

Amanda Smith

Another woman to gain recognition as a preacher and revivalist in Methodist circles was the black scrub woman Amanda Smith (1837–1915). She was born a slave in Maryland and grew up experiencing hard work and intense religious emotion. “Red hot” camp meeting revivalism often provided her only leisure-time activity. She was married twice. Her first husband abandoned her, and her second husband died. After that she heard a distinct call from God to preach. In the words of Elliott Wright, “She was an unusual sight in post-Civil War America—a black woman evangelist, an ex-slave, traversing North and South preaching to all races and then spending fourteen years…evangelizing in England, India and Africa.” She too was part of the holiness movement.⁹⁴

Amanda’s ministry was deeply influenced by the modeling of her mother and grandmother, who, not unlike countless other slave women in the antebellum South, overcame the drudgery of their day-to-day toil by sharing their faith and religious experience with others—often their mistresses and their families. When “the spirit of the Lord got hold of my young mistress,” Amanda wrote, “my mother was awfully glad that the Lord had answered her and grandmother’s prayer. As I have heard my mother tell this story she has wept as though it had just been a few days ago.” So strong was the influence of these slave women that the young mistress “wanted to go to the colored people’s church.” Her family “would not have that. So they kept her from going. Then they separated my mother and her. They thought maybe mother might talk to her, and keep up the excitement…About a quarter of a mile away was the great dairy, and Miss Celie used to slip over there when she got a chance and have a good time praying with mother and grandmother.”⁹⁵

Like white women in ministry, Amanda faced opposition on account of her sex. In 1870, when the African Methodist Episcopal Church held its first general conference south of the Mason-Dixon line in Nashville, Amanda was determined to attend. Since women were not permitted to be delegates, she was looked on with suspicion: “I was eyed with critical suspection as being there to agitate the question of the ordination of women. All about, in the little groups that would be gathered talking, could be heard, ‘Who is she?’ ‘Preacher woman,’” was the answer. Amanda was not a feminist or an agitator for women’s ordination. “The thought of ordination had never once entered my mind, for I had received my ordination from Him, Who said, ‘Ye have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that you might go and bring forth fruit.’”⁹⁶

The opposition that she confronted came not only from her own people but from whites as well. When she was conducting itinerant evangelistic work in England and in India, she was trailed by Plymouth brethren who verbally attacked her ministry. After her work in England in 1878, she wrote, “The work seemed to be signally blessed of God. But the good Plymouth brethren did not see it at all, because I was a woman; not that I was a black woman, but a woman…They would try, in a nice way, to get me into an argument; but I always avoided anything of the kind; for it is like bodily exercise which profiteth little.” Later in India she was again confronted by “the good Plymouth brethren” who “were much disturbed because I was a woman…so they had nice articles in the daily papers; then they wrote me kind letters, and bombarded me with Scriptural texts against women preaching.”⁹⁷

When she was in India, she met Bishop James Thoburn, a missionary and strong advocate of women’s ministries. He later wrote of that encounter:

The penetrating power of discernment which she possessed in so large degree impressed me more and more the longer I knew her, indeed, through my association with her I learned many valuable lessons, more that has been of actual value to me as a preacher of Christian truth, than from any other person I ever met.⁹⁸

Women’s Temperance Movements

During the nineteenth century women were very active in temperance movements—movements that were closely allied with religious values. In fact, some of the greatest opportunities for women in ministry came through the temperance cause. The most well known of these movements was the Woman’s Christian Temperance Movement (WCTU), but most of the early organizations were headed by men, and women were not allowed in leadership positions. Their support was sought after, but their public presence was shunned. This attitude toward women was demonstrated again at the World’s Temperance Convention in New York City in 1853. Antoinette Brown was a duly elected delegate from her local society, but when she tried to speak, she met with strong opposition: “There was a great furor, and I stood on the platform for three hours except when someone brought me a chair, and I did not have a chance to open my mouth. So much stamping and pounding with canes that [the] air was full of dust…Regular hubbub.” Horace Greeley sarcastically reported accomplishments of the convention in the Tribune: “First Day—Crowding a woman off the platform. Second Day—Gagging her. Third Day—Voting that she shall stay gagged. Having thus disposed of the main question, we assume the incidentals will be finished this morning.”⁹⁹

The result of such treatment was the formation of women’s temperance groups, which provided many Christian women with their first opportunities to be involved in organizational activity and public speaking. Mother Stewart, in her book Memoirs of the Crusade: A Thrilling Account of the Great Uprising of the Women of Ohio in 1873, Against the Liquor Crime, recounted the stories of many women who were suddenly thrust into the limelight. “God quickly made Captains and colonels and commanders out of timid women, who had never known their powers till God called them out.”¹⁰⁰

Some of the women who acquired their public exposure through temperance activism went on into other spheres of ministry. This was true of Mary Lathrap, the wife of a Michigan physician. Her first public speaking was reciting a temperance poem, and she later became active in the state WCTU. But through the years, “the call to preach Christ’s Gospel” never left her. Her temperance speaking opened the door for preaching, and she eventually became a licensed Methodist peacher. She was a popular evangelist who had the support of Methodist bishop Simpson and other church leaders. Unlike some of her male contemporaries, she apparently was not an emotional “hell-fire and brimstone” preacher. Wrote Frances Willard, “I have often seen her hold the earnest attention of six or seven thousand people, many of them standing, for over an hour, by her clear logic, original thought, and her deep earnestness in putting forth the Truth.”¹⁰¹

Frances Willard, the Foremost Nineteenth-Century Temperance Leader. From Anna Gordon, The Beautiful Life of Frances E. Willard (Chicago: Woman’s Temperance Publishing Association, 1898). Frontispiece.

Frances Willard

One of the best-known female temperance leaders of the nineteenth century was Frances Willard (1839–98), who was active in founding and directing the WCTU, the largest nineteenth-century women’s organization. Her life and ministry illustrates how closely the temperance movement was aligned to religious activities. In spite of intense opposition, temperance work offered the only viable public ministry for many women of the nineteenth century. Frequently the religious activity associated with the WCTU involved evangelistic outreach to men. The WCTU department of evangelistic work sponsored Bible readings and gospel work in prisons and in police stations and among railroad employees, soldiers, sailors, and lumbermen. A national superintendent, a woman in each case, was in charge of each of these areas of ministry. She was aided by state and territorial assistants, who were responsible to coordinate the workers on the local level. “These,” wrote Frances Willard, “make an aggregate of several thousands of women who are regularly studying and expounding God’s Word to the multitude, to say nothing of the army in home and foreign missionary work, and who are engaged in church evangelism.” This vast army of women functioned outside the church, “not because they wish to be so,” but because the church “is afraid of her own gentle, earnest-hearted daughters.”¹⁰²

Willard herself was converted at a Methodist revival meeting when she was in her early twenties and soon after joined the Methodist church, with the commitment of “seeking to lead others to Christ.” Then five years later, under the preaching of Phoebe and Walter Palmer, she experienced “entire sanctification”—a “second blessing” that she later admitted she had lost. Her deep religious faith, however, continued to influence her ministry. Regarding her temperance work, she wrote, “[Only] as I come close to God and through Christ’s blood am made a new creature, am I ready for this work so blessed and so high.”¹⁰³ Willard’s work was not limited to the United States. Indeed, the WCTU was probably the first large women’s organization to spread world-wide on a large scale. By the 1880s, the White Ribbon Missionaries were organizing chapters in Asia, Africa, South America and elsewhere in the world.¹⁰⁴

Closely connected with her work for temperance was her support of women’s suffrage, for she believed that laws supporting prohibition would be enacted only if women had the ballot. As with her temperance work she claimed the direct leading of God: “While alone on my knees one Sabbath, in the capital of the Crusade state, as I lifted my heart to God, crying, ‘What wouldst Thou have me to do?’ There was borne in upon my mind, as I believe from loftier regions, this declaration, ‘You are to speak for woman’s ballot as a weapon for protection for her home.’”¹⁰⁵

Following her years of service with the WCTU, Willard, despite her lack of biblical education, was invited to work with evangelist Dwight L. Moody during his Boston campaign. She conducted afternoon Bible lectures and spoke at women’s meetings. There was open opposition to her work, and when Moody invited her to preach at a Sunday afternoon meeting, she expressed her concern that it would “hinder the work among these conservatives.” Her tenure with the Moody revival campaigns was short lived—due in part to differences of opinion with Moody regarding her association with the women in temperance groups who held to unorthodox religious beliefs. Yet, she was able to say: “I deem it one of the choicest seals of my calling that Dwight L. Moody should have invited me to cast in my little lot with his great one as an evangelist.”¹⁰⁶

By the 1880s, Willard was openly demanding an equal role for women in the church. She had moved far beyond the sentiments of Phoebe Palmer and other women who saw themselves as anomalies hiding behind the authority of their husbands. In her book Woman in the Pulpit, she presented a strong defense of female ministry. She also confessed to her own calling in life and encouraged other women not to be intimidated as she had been: “Let me, as a loyal daughter of the church, urge upon younger women who feel a call, as I once did, to preach the unsearchable riches of Christ.”¹⁰⁷

Years earlier in a letter to Mrs. D. L. Moody, Willard expressed her sentiments succinctly:

All my life I have been devoted to the advancement of women in education and opportunity. I firmly believe God has a work for them to do as evangelists, as bearers of Christ’s message to the ungospeled, to the prayer-meeting, to the church generally and the world at large, such as most people have not dreamed. It is therefore my dearest wish to help break down the barriers of prejudice that keep them silent. I cannot think that meetings in which “the brethren” only are called upon, are one half as effective as those where all are freely invited, and I can but believe that “women’s meetings,” as such, are a relic of an outworn regime. Never did I hold one of these meetings without a protest in my soul against it. As in the day of Pentecost, so now, let men and women in perfectly impartial fashion participate in all services conducted in His name in whom there is neither bond nor free, male nor female, but all are one.”¹⁰⁸

Carry Nation

On the extremist fringe of the temperance movement was another well-known temperance activist, Carry Nation, whose fame was based largely on her “smashing” of saloons. This type of activity was a result of what she described as a “divine call”: “One day…I opened the Bible with a prayer for light, and saw these words: ‘Arise, shine, for thy light is come and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.’” But she also claimed very specific divine guidance:

When I arrived near home…I said: “Oh, Lord, if it is Thy will for me to go to Kiowa tonight, have Price, (my horse,) pass this open gate,” which I knew he would never do unless God ordered it. I gave him the reins and when I got opposite the open gate my horse jumped forward as if some one had struck him a blow.”¹⁰⁹

Carry Nation, Holding the Hatchet She Used to “Smash” Saloons. From Carry A. Nation, The Use and Need of the Life of Carry Nation. (Topeka: Stevens, 1909).

The next morning, she was awakened to a “murmuring, musical” voice saying, “Go to Kiowa,” and “I’ll stand by you.” What was God leading her to Kiowa for? To “smash” a saloon. “I threw as hard, and as fast as I could, smashing mirrors and bottles and glasses and it was astonishing how quickly this was done. These men seemed terrified, threw up their hands and backed up in the corner. My strength was that of a giant. I felt invincible. God was certainly standing by me.”¹¹⁰

As with Willard, she viewed her work as a Christian ministry. She was a jail evangelist for the WCTU in Medicine Lodge, Kansas, and her “smashing” was very often accompanied by an evangelistic message. On many occasions, as was the case in Topeka, she and her “sisters” stated their purpose before entering the saloon. “We asked to go in to hold gospel services as was our intention before destroying this den of vice, for we wanted God to save their souls, and to give us ability and opportunity to destroy this soul damning business.”¹¹¹

Sects and Women

As in other periods of history, there was a tendency for women who desired meaningful opportunities for ministry to gravitate to sects. In these developing fringe movements they were generally accorded more respect by their male counterparts than were the women in the institutionalized church where male domination was firmly rooted. Sectarianism provided opportunities for women to actually found or lead movements, though more often they served simply as equal partners in evangelism—a smart strategy for any developing sect that needed all the willing laborers that could be recruited to propagate the new creeds or doctrinal emphases.

Were women more inclined than men to found sects or cults? Some have argued that they were, but the historical evidence does not support such a contention. Throughout the history of the Christian church the vast majority of sectarian movements have been led by men. That women held more prominent positions in sects and cults indicates only that such movements permitted them such freedom—not, as Walter Martin and others have suggested, that the prominence of women proves they are more prone to be deceived than men.¹¹²

Mother Ann Lee

Among the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sects and cults that have been founded or led by women, the Shakers, Christian Science, and Seventh-Day Adventism stand out. But even in these movements, the role of women was controversial, and when the leaders passed from the scene—particularly in Christian Science and Seventh-Day Adventism—male domination became firmly entrenched.

In the case of the Shakers, the leadership of Mother Ann Lee was virtually deified by many of her followers. According to a prominent Shaker, writing in 1780, “Some of them say, that the woman called the mother [Ann Lee], has the fullness of the God Head, bodily dwelling in her, and that she is the queen of heaven, Christ’s wife: And that all God’s elect must be born through her; yea, that Christ through her is born the second time.” But that evaluation was not universally accepted, and some Shakers challenged her leadership position on the basis of the apostle Paul’s writings regarding women. After her death, Joseph Meacham assumed leadership of the movement. It was his desire that women share an equal role in the ministry, and he even appointed Lucy Wright as a co-leader to head up the women’s work, but not without opposition from the men and reluctance on the part of many women to assume equal roles.¹¹³

Unlike certain other utopian communities that advocated some form of “free love” or polygamy, the Shakers distinguished themselves by their insistence on celibacy. This factor as much as any other incurred the wrath of outsiders. The movement was led not only by a woman, but by a woman who was denying the very basis of female worth that was so intricately tied in with being a wife and mother.

Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science

Unlike Mother Ann Lee, who was the spiritual head of socialistic communities, Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910), the founder of Christian Science, was the spiritual leader of a pseudo-Christian movement that became a wealthy and respectable middle-class church. Rebelling against her Calvinistic upbringing, Mary developed a religious ideology that served her personally and appealed to masses of nineteenth-century Americans seeking a philosophy that would ease their bodies as well as their souls. Although her movement was termed “Christian” Science, she veered sharply from the traditional orthodoxy of Christianity, and thus her life and movement are not strictly within the scope of Christendom. It is noteworthy, however, that despite her strong leadership, the movement was dominated by strong male leadership after her death.

Ellen G. White and Seventh-day Adventism

One of the most influential women in American Christianity in the nineteenth century was Ellen G. White (1827–1915). She was the prophetess of Seventh-day Adventism. According to her husband, she received literally thousands of visions, revelations, or “testimonies” throughout her long life, and it was the “inspired” writings that resulted from these visions that confirmed many of the new doctrines as well as the social and health regulations of the early Seventh-day Adventists. Although she was much criticized by people inside as well as outside the movement, she managed to maintain a powerful influence over the movement until the time of her death during World War I, and she was held in even higher esteem in the years following her death. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, with the publication of a number of articles and books questioning her honesty and originality, her place of prominence in the movement was strongly challenged, but even in the face of solid evidence that indicates she used other writings as a basis for her “testimonies” that were said to have come directly from God, the Seventh-day Adventists were unwilling to abandon her.

Ellen Harmon and her twin sister Elizabeth were born near Portland, Maine, where they grew up in the oftimes emotional atmosphere of revivals and camp meetings. Ellen herself underwent highly charged religious experiences during her youth, and at the age of seventeen she received her first “vision.” This revelation confirmed to her that the Adventist people who had believed William Miller’s prediction that the Lord would return on October 22, 1844, were on the path to heaven. Other visions that followed soon after confirmed to her the necessity of worshiping on the Sabbath and the doctrine of the “investigative judgment” that began when Christ moved from one apartment of the sanctuary in heaven to another on October 22, 1944, to begin the final phase of his atonement.¹¹⁴ Although such views had been held by some Adventists prior to her esctatic trances, her claims of supernatural confirmation bolstered their place in the movement.

By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, Ellen White had more than one hundred and thirty thousand followers. During her lifetime, Seventh-day Adventism had spread out all over the world. At the time of her death, according to Ronald Numbers,

only one other woman—Mary Baker Eddy—had contributed more to the religious life of America…Though she never thought highly of the founder of Christian Science, whom she regarded as little better than a spiritualist, she had much in common with her. Both women were born in New England in the 1820s. As children they both experienced debilitating illnesses, which curtailed their formal schooling; as young women they suffered from uncontrollable spells that left them unconscious for frighteningly long periods of time. They both sought cures in Grahamism and hydropathy…Both…claimed divine inspiration, and both succeeded in establishing distinctive churches. But despite their many similarities, the two women had basically different goals: Ellen White longed for a mansion in heaven, Mary Baker Eddy wanted hers here on earth.¹¹⁵

Roman Catholic Women

During the nineteenth century, when American Catholicism was faced with the monumental challenges of ministering to its millions of immigrant members, the number of nuns increased from fewer than forty to more than forty thousand. Sister Mary Ewens writes:

If adequate means could be found to measure the relative importance of personal influences, it might well be shown that sisters’ efforts were far more effective than those of bishops or priests in the Church’s attempts to meet these challenges…They outnumbered male church workers in the last half of the century in almost every diocese…and there were almost four times as many nuns as priests by the century’s close.¹¹⁶

Elizabeth Bayley Seton

One of the most renowned Roman Catholic women in the nineteenth century was Elizabeth Bayley Seton, who founded the American Sisters of Charity in 1808 and served as Mother Superior from 1809 until her death in 1821. She was the mother of five children, and did not convert to Roman Catholicism until after her husband died, when her children were yet small. During the early years, the new religious order made its home in a log house in Emmitsburg, Maryland. In the years that followed, orphanages and schools were established in Philadelphia and New York, and less than a decade after her death the first Catholic hospital in America was established by the Sisters of Charity.¹¹⁷

Seton rejected her Episcopalian upbringing to become a Roman Catholic, partly because of her attraction to the ritual, but it was the personality of the Virgin Mary that most influenced her in her decision. Mary became a real person to her: “I felt really I had a Mother—which you know my foolish heart so often lamented to have in early days.” She later reflected how from her earliest days she had “looked…to the clouds for my mother,” but found no one. But after finding Mary, it seemed as if I had found more than her…So I cried myself to sleep on her heart.”¹¹⁸

Male Opposition

Like their Protestant counterparts, Roman Catholic nuns struggled for a place of their own in a church dominated by men. This was particularly evident in the ministry of Mother Theodore Guerin, who emigrated from France to America in 1840 with her Sisters of Providence. Soon after settling on a farm in Indiana, she encountered the first of her many clashes with Bishop de la Hailandiere of Vincennes. Over the years he “repeatedly interfered in their internal affairs, reassigning sisters to different convents, closing and opening missions without consulting them, intercepting their mail, refusing them the sacraments, and forcing them to accept candidates they regarded as unsuitable.” The situation finally improved when Mother Guerin threatened to move her sisters to another diocese.¹¹⁹

Catholic nuns in the nineteenth century also faced strong opposition from outside their faith in the form of anti-Catholic bigotry. They were assaulted both verbally and physically. Novelists and tract-writers sought to destroy their reputation, and mobs sought to “harry them out of the land.” One of the most infamous incidents of physical persecution occurred in 1834 when an Ursuline convent in Massachusetts was destroyed by fire. “The mob looted the buildings and desecrated the chapel, even digging up the bodies of the sisters in the cemetery, before burning the convent and academy.”¹²⁰

Many of the Catholic sisterhoods in America were established by European nuns, a fact that did not improve their image among certain segments of nativistic Americans. One such order was the School Sisters of Notre Dame, headed by Mother Theresa Gerhardinger, who emigrated from Germany in 1847 to work among German immigrants in Pennsylvania. Her letters back home indicate that there was a lack of pastoral care among Roman Catholics: “How pitiful is the plight of the poor Germans. Entire families grow up and die without being baptized or instructed in their religion, especially those who live in the primeval forests.” But even with such obvious needs for more help, the sisters met with rebuff from their own church leaders. Theresa feared the bishop would not permit them to stay: “He is afraid of jealousy and disharmony on the part of the sisters he requested from Ireland. Since he himself is Irish, these sisters are his favorites and darlings. He has entrusted the hospital, the orphanage and the English-speaking schools to them.”¹²¹

Women in the Pastorate

Despite the influential positions women had as lay workers, organization heads, evangelists, sect leaders, and nuns, there were very few of them filling pulpits as pastors. Even as late as 1888, when Willard published her classic, Woman in the Pulpit, there were only an estimated twenty women in the United States serving as pastors. That figure did not include the some five hundred women evangelists or the Quaker women “preachers,” whose numbers were estimated to be around three hundred and fifty. Nor did it include the female Salvation Army officers. The denominations known to have ordained women were the Methodist, Congregational, Baptist, Universalist, and Unitarian. Ordination for women was frequently a hard-fought battle, though many women refused to become involved in the fray themselves. A friend of Frances Willard who had served for fifteen years as a Methodist pastor illustrates this attitude. When asked to justify her ministry, she responded: “I have gone forth, never allowing myself to be drawn into an argument on the subject, and never saying a word in personal defense, but I knew all the time the Lord would send somebody to take care of the defense.”¹²²

Besides the standard biblical arguments that were used against ordaining women, it was frequently said that women pastors would not be able to care adequately for their homes and families. It was this issue as much as any other on which women felt obliged to defend their calling. One woman pastor wrote, “After twenty-five years’ experience as pastor and preacher, I am convinced that there is no work outside the home circle upon which women can so consistently and properly enter as that of the Christian ministry.” Such a ministry was not without sacrifice, however, as she went on to relate, “I never take vacations, and, excepting a very few Sundays when my children were born, have really lost no time; and yet I think it is conceded by my neighbors that my children are as well cared for as theirs, at any rate.” Another woman pastor, frustrated by the grim forecasts regarding ministry and motherhood, wrote, “At the end of their profound arguments and fearful prophesying, I will still point to my five blessed boys, and meekly inquire, ‘Have they gone to ruin?’”¹²³

Antoinette Brown

Although many women preachers sought to stay out of the limelight and avoid arguments over their controversial role, Antoinette Brown, the first ordained woman preacher in America, did not fit that mold. When she was six years old, her parents were converted to “militant” Christianity through the revivalistic preaching of Charles G. Finney. She

Antoinette L. Brown, the First American Woman to Receive Full Ministerial Ordination. Made from nineteenth-century prints by Deane K. Dayton for Donald W. Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).

quickly found herself at home in that religious atmosphere and began leading congregational singing and even did some preaching. Her family all “agreed that dear little Antoinette would grow up to be a minister’s wife”; but she had different plans. She enrolled at Oberlin, only to be denied entrance into the theological department, and she continued to meet opposition at every turn throughout the course of her education. “Oberlin’s Ladies’ Board, stern watchdog of female morality, refused to let her earn money by teaching in the preparatory department.” Without a fierce determination and an iron will, she never could have survived:

I was reasoned with, pleaded with, and besought even with tears…not to combat a beneficent order tending to promote harmony…in the family and in the commonwealth. Established, ordained masculine headship everywhere was held to be indispensable to morality, and grounded in the inmost fitness of things.¹²⁴

Despite the resistance she faced, Brown completed the theological program at Oberlin in 1850, though without a degree and without ordination. (It was not until 1878, nearly three decades after she graduated that the college awarded her a degree. Later, in 1908, Oberlin awarded her an honorary D.D.) From 1850 to 1852 she was on the lecture circuit, speaking out for women’s rights and filling the pulpit occasionally in churches where her preaching was not viewed as offensive. In 1853 she was offered an attractive salary and benefit package by Horace Greeley and Charles Dana to begin a pulpit ministry in New York City, but she turned it down, believing she was unprepared for such heavy responsibilities. That same year, however, she accepted a call to a small-town Congregational church “without steeple or bell.” In response to her move, the New York Independent, a nondenominational religious circular “announced that any woman who would be ordained was an infidel and any church which would ordain her an infidel church. It neglected to print Antoinette’s reply, only commenting that Miss Brown disclaimed being an infidel.”¹²⁵

Soon after her arrival at the little Congregational church in South Butler, New York, Brown was ordained—a ceremony that made her “the first fully ordained woman in a recognized American denomination.”¹²⁶ Paradoxically, she went outside her own denomination for a minister to preach her ordination sermon—a minister in a denomination that did not ordain women. The Reverend Luther Lee, a firm supporter of women in ministry and a leading Wesleyan Methodist preacher used the occasion to defend the concept of women in the pulpit. Indeed, after offering a litany of New Testament examples of women in public ministry, he emphatically concluded, “I have now proved that there were a class of females in the Primitive Church called prophetesses, that is, there were female prophets, and those prophets were preachers or public teachers of religion.”¹²⁷

Brown’s ministry at the little Congregational church was frustrating and lasted less than a year. She was “at her own request dismissed from her connection.” There were several reasons for this: “She could not preach eternal damnation. She had refused to condemn and ostracize an unmarried girl whose baby had died, or to preach a sermon on infant damnation on that occasion. She had refused to force a dying boy into conversion, as his parents had demanded, by terrifying him with threats of hell-fire.”¹²⁸

After leaving the church, Brown went to New York where she labored as a volunteer in the tenament districts and prisons. Her heart went out to the impoverished slum-dwellers, and, through articles in Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, she rebuked the “polished, enlightened, civilized, Christianized society” for its “black shadow”—its failure to come to the aid of the oppressed. In 1856, Brown married Samuel Blackwell, a man with whom she had much in common. “They were believers in woman’s rights, abolition, temperance, but most important they were highly religious and, at the time they met, both losing their orthodoxy.”¹²⁹

For the next two decades childbearing and domestic duties kept Brown out of the public sphere, but she still found time to write books, both fiction and nonfiction, often dealing with women’s rights or religious issues. In 1878 she made it known that she was again available to accept a pastorate—this time as a Unitarian—but it was not until after her husband’s death in 1901 that she was able to return to the ministry. She founded All Souls’ Unitarian Church in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where she ministered until her death in 1921.¹³⁰

Olympia Brown

Even in the Unitarian and Universalist churches, women preachers faced opposition. Olympia Brown, whose ordination in 1864 in Weymouth, Massachusetts, was the first such ceremony for a female universalist minister, met with strong disapproval when she first began studying theology with a pulpit ministry in mind. And the resistance continued after her ordination. After performing her first marriage ceremony, the issue was raised as to whether the marriage was indeed legal, since the ceremony had been conducted by a female. Apparently the question was not in jest, for it made its way to the Massachusetts State Legislature, where it was referred to the judiciary committee. After serious deliberations, the matter was settled. The marriage was declared legal.¹³¹

Mainline Denominations

It is an important fact of history that the institutionalized churches most strongly opposed women in ministry. This is particularly evident in the Protestant churches in America. While the sectarian movements often encouraged active women’s involvement, the mainline denominations resisted it.

Methodists

The Methodists, more than any other denomination in the nineteenth century, were profoundly affected by women. The first American Methodist woman to make an impact on the movement was Barbara Heck, though her importance has frequently been overdrawn. She is often credited with being the inspiration behind American Methodism. According to Arthur Jennings, it all began when she discovered a group of men (apparently some of them Methodist immigrants) playing cards. “Her Methodist zeal flamed up at this sight and she seized the cards and threw them into the fire, also exhorting the men to repent of their sins and seek salvation. She went immediately to the home of her cousin [Philip Embury] and urged him to no longer hold his peace, but at once begin to preach the Word.”¹³² Thus began the first Methodist congregation in America. Her ministry was a behind-the-scenes organizational effort, as public preaching was considered a male domain. Some Methodist women were licensed to preach in the last half of the nineteenth century, but most women who actively “preached” among the Methodists, such as Phoebe Palmer, did so on a lay level.

In 1880, eight years prior to the publication of her book, Woman in the Pulpit, Frances Willard attended the Methodist General Conference. One of the issues on the agenda was the role of women in the church, and during the conference a motion was made to allow her to speak on the subject. The motion created an uproar, and even though it passed, Willard declined to speak in the face of such controversy. The Conference did vote to allow women to hold lay leadership positions as class leaders and Sunday-school superintendents but took a step backwards by discontinuing to license women as local preachers and denied Anna Howard Shaw’s and Anna Oliver’s requests for full ordination.¹³³

The Methodists continued to debate the issue in 1888, at which time they approved deaconesses for ministry in the local church but voted down other measures favoring women’s participation. This time Frances Willard was back “as one of the first five duly elected female local lay delegates” and as a woman who had experienced eight years of consciousness-raising. She was prepared to voice her concerns as an official delegate, but “after another lengthy and vicious debate, this time led by her rejected suitor, now bishop, Charles Fowler, the women were denied seats.” So distraught was she that she contemplated leaving the Methodist church and starting a church of her own—a threat that was never carried out. It was not until 1904 that Methodist Episcopal women gained laity rights.¹³⁴

Although Amanda Smith made speaking trips through the South, the Southern Methodist General Conference was even slower than its counterpart in the North in extending to women meaningful opportunities for ministry. “At the Southern Methodist General Conference of 1898, women were authorized to be Sunday school superintendents,” and the Woman’s Board of Home Missions was given “virtual autonomy” in its affairs. “Its independence was short-lived, however. In 1910 the Conference placed the women’s groups under control of the church’s mission board and defeated a movement to give women laity rights, declaring that such a step ran counter to ‘the view our people hold in regard to women’s place in the church and in society…’”¹³⁵

Presbyterians

It was almost unheard-of for Presbyterian women to preach, and when they did, it created an uproar. This was true of Sarah Smiley of Brooklyn, New York, in 1874. When word reached the Presbytery that “a woman has preached in one of our churches, on Sabbath, at a regular service,” it was resolved that “strict regard” should be taken to a General Assembly decision of 1837:

“Meetings of pious women by themselves, for conversation and prayer,” we entirely approve. But let not the inspired prohibition of the great Apostle, as found in his Epistles to the Corinthians and to Timothy, be violated. To teach and to exhort, or to lead in prayer in public and promiscuous assemblies is clearly forbidden to women in the holy oracles.¹³⁶

Although her sermons were described as “weighty, solemn, Scriptural, orthodox, tender, and melted some men to tears whom I have never seen so much moved before,” Smiley was forbidden to preach to Presbyterians.¹³⁷

The Presbyterians were probably the strictest major denominational group of the nineteenth century. Albert Barnes, professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, spoke for many of his fellow Presbyterians when he stated that Paul’s command for women to be silent was a “positive, explicit, and universal rule. There is no ambiguity in the expressions and there can be no difference of opinion in regard to their meaning.”¹³⁸

Most women in the Presbyterian churches went along with the restrictions on their speaking, but the situation slowly began to change as they became more involved in missions and social causes. Some began to speak out for more opportunity for ministry and for voting rights. Some even appealed for the ordination of women, but “as the nineteenth century ended, there was little doubt that Presbyterian judicatories were ‘not yet ready to settle’ the issue of women’s rights to ministerial ordination.” A few women such as Edith Peake and Louisa Woolsey ministered in Presbyterian churches as evangelists, but not without strong opposition.¹³⁹

The Lutheran Churches

Lutherans also remained closed to the idea of women in ministry throughout the nineteenth century. Women’s public activity of any kind was seen as a threat to the home and to the traditional values of the church. The Missouri Synod is an example. Its most important German organ, Der Lutheraner, urged Lutherans to vote down women’s suffrage. Likewise, in 1894 the Synod’s

official English newspaper, the Lutheran Witness, described the catastrophe female suffrage would produce. “Many women,” it predicted, “will be so busy about voting and political office that the home and children will have no attraction for them, and American mothers and children, like Christian charity, will be a rarity.”¹⁴⁰

Birth control also became an issue that was closely associated with feminism, and churchmen feared it as is seen in an article in the Lutheran Witness in 1898: “The new woman has cast the church aside, because it teaches subordination of the wife to the husband, and enjoins domestic duties from which the ‘tastes’ of the new woman revolts. The new woman hates children, and is madly exerting her ingenuity in frustrating the ends of matrimony.” An editor further denounced women who “gave speeches and essays and high moral instruction to the world instead of giving children.”¹⁴¹

Baptists

While the Freewill Baptists and other splinter groups opened their doors early to the ministry of women, the larger Baptist groups were much more restrictive in their view of women. The Southern Baptists illustrate this. The constitution of that church, which was formulated in 1845, did not specify the role for women—particularly as to whether women could be members of the convention and thus have voting rights as delegates. It was not settled until 1885, when Arkansas sent two female messengers as delegates to the national convention. After prolonged wrangling, the convention voted 202 to 112 not to seat the women. Fear of female domination was expressed by one delegate who predicted that if the vote passed, the Convention “would be flooded with them next year.” Another honestly confessed, “I love the ladies, but I dread them worse.” It was not until 1918 that the Convention permitted women to officially take part as delegates.¹⁴²

The reactionary views of Southern Baptists toward women were expressed frequently in church literature, and such views were slow in dying. An article that opposed coeducation appeared in the Biblical Recorder in 1868; it took issue with the “erroneous opinion that the mental powers of the sexes are equal.” The author maintained that women were the weaker vessel in body and in mind. Some women even joined in the effort to demean their own sex. A Mrs. James Hime of Georgia praised the 1885 Convention decision to bar women as delegates because she believed it was the duty of the men to “see that no heads inferior to their own” should be permitted to supervise “the vast network of missions.”¹⁴³

The issue of women speaking in mixed groups was even more controversial for the Southern Baptists. An article in the Biblical Recorder in 1892, expressed the sentiment of the vast majority of the members. It spoke of the troublesome fads in society, among which was “the determined effort to bring women to the front as public lecturers, or speakers before mixed assemblies, or as ordained preachers of the gospel.” Although the author conceded that “we have a few pastors and laymen South, even in the Baptist churches” who support this “unscriptural and dangerous innovation,” he called upon the stalwarts of the faith to “once for all, let it be known everywhere that our people South, as a rule, are unalterably opposed to this thing.”¹⁴⁴

Small Evangelical and Holiness Sects

The numbers of women in ministry increased each decade of the nineteenth century, not because the institutionalized church became more open to the idea of female ministry, but because of the birth and the growth of evangelical sectarian groups. Groups such as the Quakers contributed to this increase, but the greatest influence on this trend was the formation of new denominations—many of which were holiness groups that broke away from mainline Methodism. The holiness movement had begun as an effort in the Methodist church to revive Wesley’s teaching, and it remained a part of that denomination until the late nineteenth century when a number of new denominations were formed as a result of “come-outism”—those who left the Methodist church to get back to a more primitive form of Christianity or to get back to Wesley’s original teachings.

Quakers

The fierce opposition that the Quakers had faced among the Puritans of Colonial New England gradually subsided, and by the nineteenth century, Quaker meeting houses were springing up in the West largely as a result of the efforts of itinerant preachers—many of them women. One of the most prominent of these female evangelists was Eliza Gurney, who began her traveling ministry after her husband’s death in 1847. She was part of an evangelical trend in the Society of Friends that deemphasized the “inner light” and stressed Bible study and preaching, and much of her own itinerant ministry involved the organizing of Bible classes.¹⁴⁵

The most famous female Quaker preacher of the nineteenth century was Lucretia Mott. This mother of six became a Quaker minister at the age of twenty-eight in the early 1820s. It was a turbulent period for the Quakers, when some were clamoring for a return of their primitive Quietism and others were calling for an evangelical awakening. She became involved with a Hicksite wing that emphasized the “inner light” and experience over Scripture, but she was ever disenchanted with the “intolerance and sectarianism she found within that community.”¹⁴⁶

Mott was a leading abolitionist and feminist, and as such she was keenly aware of the discrimination that existed even among the Quakers. “Although recognized as the spiritual equals of men, women were not accorded equality in areas of the church governance. For example, women did not have equal power with men to disown, that is to expel, members, or to make discipline.” It was for the institutionalized church, however, that Mott had the harshest criticism. “At a time when evangelical religion was gaining increasing support from women, Mott pointed out that priestcraft was the greatest obstacle in changing the female condition.” In 1848 she was a leading spokeswoman at the Seneca Falls women’s-rights convention and was largely responsible for drafting the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments, which declared that “the speedy success of our cause depends upon the zealous and untiring efforts of both men and women, for the overthrow of the monopoly of the pulpit.”¹⁴⁷

Wesleyan Methodists

Even though the founder of the Wesleyan Methodists, Orange Scott, opposed efforts of abolitionists to broaden their struggle to include women’s rights, there were some very significant connections between early Wesleyan Methodists and the feminist movement. The Seneca Falls women’s rights convention in 1848 was held in a Wesleyan Methodist Church, and Luther Lee, an early Wesleyan Methodist leader, strongly supported women’s ministries and was willing to do so publicly in 1853 by giving the ordination address for Antoinette Brown. His speech was a strong defense of full equality for women in the church.¹⁴⁸

It was not until the General Conference in 1864 that the ordination of women actually became an issue with the Wesleyan Methodists, sparked by the ordination of a woman elder by the Illinois Conference. The delegates voted down a resolution to deny women preaching licenses, and the whole women’s issue was deemed a matter for local conferences. There was strong opposition, however, and in 1887, late in the General Conference proceedings after many delegates had left, a resolution passed denying women ordination. Four years later, the decision was reversed, and again it was left up to local conferences whether or not to allow female ordination to the ministry.¹⁴⁹

Free Methodists

Although the Free Methodist Church, which was founded in 1860, did not ordain women, it allowed women to preach and conduct evangelistic ministries. B. T. Roberts, the founder of this denomination, however, was a staunch supporter of women in ministry and sought very hard to rally support for a resolution permitting the ordination of women in 1890. Although he was unable to obtain the necessary votes, he continued the battle, and in the following year published a book justifying his position from a biblical standpoint. In his book, Ordaining Women, published in 1891, he argued the equality of women from Genesis to Paul’s Epistles, maintaining that women were fully equal to men in ministry as well as marriage. “The Gospel of Jesus Christ…knows no distinction of race, condition, or sex,” he asserted; “therefore no person evidently called of God to the Gospel ministry, and duly qualified for it, should be refused ordination on account of race, condition or sex.”¹⁵⁰

Roberts also spoke in revolutionary terms regarding women’s place in the home, presenting a model for an egalitarian marriage:

The greatest domestic happiness always exists where husband and wife live together on terms of equality. Two men, having individual interests, united only by business ties, daily associate as partners for years, without either of them being in subjection to the other. They consider each other as equals. Then, cannot a man and woman, united in conjugal love, the strongest tie that can unite two human beings having the same interests, live together in the same manner?¹⁵¹

Three years after Roberts’ publication of Ordaining Women, another Free Methodist leader, W. A. Sellow, published Why Not? Despite his defense, however, a resolution to ordain women failed again that same year in 1894. The struggle continued into the following decade and by 1907 the consensus of opinion had changed enough to permit the ordination of female deacons. It was not until 1974 that women’s ordination was placed on an equal par with men’s.¹⁵²

The Brethren Church

One of the most progressive evangelical sects regarding women in the nineteenth century was the Brethren church, which split off from the German Baptist Brethren in the early 1880s. “They moved quickly to grant women the privilege and responsibility of church leadership…By 1894 both the General Conference and most of the district conferences had passed resolutions favoring the equality of men and women in the church or the inclusion of women in the ranks of pastors and missionaries.” The first woman ordained by the movement was Mary M. Sterling, who received her credentials in 1890. After that she conducted itinerant evangelistic work, which included a tour of West Virginia and Pennsylvania in 1894, during which time “she preached 207 sermons in 187 days, receiving 27 additions to the church, 18 of whom she herself baptized.” She was well received, despite her sex, and in that same year she was asked to give the Sunday morning sermon at the General Conference meetings.¹⁵³

The Christian and Missionary Alliance

In 1887 A. B. Simpson, a Presbyterian minister who had established himself and his family in New York City, founded the Christian and Missionary Alliance (then known simply as the Christian Alliance). His “attitude toward women,” according to Leslie Andrews,

must be viewed against the backdrop of his consuming passion to evangelize a lost world before the return of the King. He did not seek to placate those whose ecclesiastical agendas were, in his opinion, secondary to the task of world evangelization. If women furthered the primary mission of the Church to reach lost souls for Christ, then he enthusiastically endorsed their ministry to achieve that objective.¹⁵⁴

Simpson was criticized for his open policy for women in ministry, but he was quick to defend his position. After a series of meetings in Atlanta, he responded to attacks by saying the matter was an issue “which God has already settled, not only in His Word, but in His providence, by the seal which He is placing in this very day, in every part of the world, upon the public work of consecrated Christian women.” He concluded by chiding the pastor who led the attack: “Dear brother, let the Lord manage the women. He can do it better than you, and you turn your batteries against the common enemy.”¹⁵⁵

Simpson’s theology also reflected his attitude toward the female sex. A chapter title in one of his books was “The Motherhood of God.” Here he rejected the common belief that God was of the male gender and confessed his appreciation for the feminine qualities of God.

The heart of Christ is not only the heart of man, but has in it all the tenderness and gentleness of women…He combined in Himself the nature both of man and woman even as the first man Adam had the woman within his own being before she was separately formed from his very body.¹⁵⁶

In reference to the Holy Spirit, Simpson wrote: “As our heavenly Mother, the Comforter assumes our nurture, training, teaching, and the whole direction of our life.”¹⁵⁷ He encouraged women to become involved in his own ministry, as is evident by the testimony of Carrie Judd Montgomery. As a young woman she conducted a faith-healing ministry in Buffalo, New York, and when she visited New York City, Simpson invited her to become involved in his large “convention” ministry, which he conducted in New York as well as in other cities around the country. On one occasion when she had cut her afternoon message short, he invited her to return that evening to speak to a much larger crowd. He later invited her to join him full-time in the ministry, but she declined, believing God wanted her to continue her own work in Buffalo.¹⁵⁸

The Church of God (Anderson, Indiana)

The Church of God (Anderson, Indiana) was founded by Daniel S. Warner and his wife in 1881. At the urging of his wife, Warner had experienced “entire sanctification,” and after that they saw a need for a new movement—a “great holiness reform.” From the very beginning, women were prominent in ministry, as was indicated in a publication in 1902, entitled Familiar Names and Faces. Some 25 percent of the movement’s leaders were female. According to John Smith, historian of the movement, “Forty years before the time of woman’s suffrage on a national level, a great company of women were preaching, singing, writing, and helping to determine the policies in this religious reform movement.”¹⁵⁹

Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee)

The issue of women in ministry arose early in the history of the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) as it did in other holiness denominations, in part because “considerably more women than men were being reached and won to the Church.” When the subject of ordination was brought before the Fourth Annual Assembly in 1909, it was determined that women could preach and hold ministerial certificates but could not be ordained, “e.g., women preachers may not perform marriages, baptize, conduct business conferences, administer the sacrament, or ‘usurp authority over the man.’” They were, however, permitted to evangelize and plant churches, “and numerous local churches came into being through the tears and labors of consecrated handmaidens of the Lord.”¹⁶⁰ Indeed, the pattern of the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) was similar to other sectarian movements in church history. Women were necessary to carry out the foundational work of church development, but once the movement was organized, men quickly took over the leadership positions.

The Belton Sanctificationists

While the holiness movement offered women greater opportunities for ministries, it did not generally espouse feminism per se. There were exceptions, however, and one of the most curious was the radical group of women who formed a community in Belton, Texas, and became known as the Belton Sanctificationists. The group started after Martha McWhirter “experienced a kind of pentecostal baptism.” Following this experience she

professed sanctification, and taught the doctrine in a way that led her to antagonize strongly the views of her successive pastors, but not to break openly with the church. Her ministry developed independently from the local church, and her convictions were most effectively set forth in a ladies’ weekly prayer-meeting which was held from house to house in the town for some years succeeding her “sanctification.” This finally merged into a meeting of her followers alone.¹⁶¹

By 1879 the women followers had separated into a self-sustaining communistic organization that operated a hotel, a farm, and cottage industries. Some of the women were widowed, and others were divorced or separated from their husbands. Initially they held to a strong view of Wesleyan perfectionism and “had regular and frequent devotional exercises,” but by the early 1890s, though they claimed to be “living the Bible,” they no longer had “formal worship of any kind.” They did, however, continue “discussion among themselves of their religious experience, which,” according to a contemporary observer, “they try to interpret so that it will serve to guide them. They frequently obtain this guidance from dreams…”¹⁶²

The Women’s Century—an Overview

As the new denominations of the Holiness-Pentecostal movement were opening doors for women at the close of the nineteenth century, little headway was being made by women in the larger Christian bodies. This was due in part to a reaction against the feminist movement. Groups such as the Belton Sanctificationists brought disrepute to women in religious leadership, but even more significant were the radical feminists whose embittered protests hurt the cause of many women who simply wanted to have a ministry in the church. A powerful example of this was the publication of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Woman’s Bible. “The inspiration of the Bible itself was being called into question,” and “no self-respecting…churchman or woman, the argument went, would want to associate himself or herself with such crass antibiblicalism.”¹⁶³ When it was suggested that her Bible was the work of the devil, she responded, “This is a grave mistake. His Satanic majesty was not invited to join the Revising Committee, which consists of women alone.”¹⁶⁴

Yet the nineteenth century had indeed been a century for women in the church. Women had made great gains in organizational work, particularly in regard to home and foreign missions and humanitarian endeavors. Equally significant was the prominent role women played in sectarian movements that flourished in the nineteenth century. But by the end of the century, women had made very little official headway in the established churches. The vast majority of institutionalized churches barred them from ordination and from equal status on the lay level as well.

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