9. Elizabeth “Betsy” Fry and Women of the Social Gospel
9
Elizabeth “Betsy” Fry and Women of the Social Gospel
July 1990. I was on holiday, having just finished teaching two three-week intensive courses at Moffat Bible College in Kijabe, Kenya. My son and I, along with our good friends Bud and Joan, were on an overnight train to the lovely coastal tourist town of Mombasa to spend a long weekend in delightful thatched-roof cottages on the Indian Ocean. We dined at seaside buffets and bartered for carvings and masks. We sunbathed on the white sand and snorkeled among the reefs.
I look back at those brief, warm, sunny days with fond memories, though always qualified with a sense of shame. There is a picture that is firmly lodged deep in my memory. After our night on the train en route to Mombasa, we enjoyed an elegant breakfast in the dining car. Then we leisurely strolled along the railed open walkway of the train, taking in the morning sun. We passed fields of women hoeing corn and villages of tiny thatched houses, a few lazy dogs lounging in the dirt yards. Young boys calling out with arms outstretched ran near the tracks hoping for tourist coins.
And then as the train clanged along the tracks, we passed another thatched settlement. Here four small girls scantily dressed stood in a row close enough for me to see their pigtails and dark round eyes. I’ll never forget them. We waved. They looked back with a vacant stare. At that moment I felt ashamed of myself. I perceived sadness more than anger on their faces, each one of them. Were they aware that we rich tourists were on our way to a seaside resort in their own country that they could never afford to visit? Were they resentful of my wealth? And who was I that I dared to wave my rich white-gloved hand at them—these impoverished little girls? By world standards, I truly am rich.
Today controversy swirls when Pope Francis speaks of the injustice of massive income inequality—a serious problem in America itself. But when we contemplate worldwide poverty, the situation is much worse, particularly where there is no safety net for those in desperate circumstances.
With the picture of those little Kenyan girls in mind, my husband and I decided to get serious about poverty and to significantly increase our giving to a charity that subsidizes school fees for such children. It’s one small way that I can respond to the sense of shame that still haunts me. Yes, shame. Misplaced, some would say. Go to a therapist and be done with it. But maybe that visual panorama—a passenger train, a dining car with white tablecloths, formal waiters, a rich American lady waving at sad-faced little girls—is not forgotten for a reason. Hopefully our funding subsidizes schooling for just such girls.
In the West today it is often assumed that government services support the poor. Sure there is dire poverty in Africa and Asia but not in the developed world. No one would have ever made that false assumption, however, in the nineteenth century. Cities such as New York and London were cesspools of poverty. If you were to climb the rickety steps of a multistory tenement, you would find a dark narrow hallway with one-room, rat-infested family dwellings, sometimes ten or a dozen crammed together with no indoor plumbing. Fathers often hooked on cheap gin, mothers working fourteen-hour days in the mills, children picking up rags or picking pockets. Then, a raging winter fire leaving behind no more than a pile of ashes.
Fortunately there were some rich ladies (and many others) who took up the cause of the poor. Elizabeth Fry was a tireless worker for women and children imprisoned in London. Phoebe Palmer founded the Five Points Mission in New York City. Catherine Booth cofounded the Salvation Army; Evangeline, her daughter, also served the needy as did Carry Nation, Frances Willard, and Florence Nightingale. As a group they illustrate the diversity among hundreds of women who served in similar capacities.
Prison Reformer
Unlike her predecessor Margaret Fell, who risked wealth and social status to convert to the low-class cult of Quakers, Elizabeth “Betsy” Gurney Fry was born into Quaker wealth more than a century and a half later. Members of this once-despised movement had quickly moved into the merchant class and beyond. Betsy’s father, John Gurney, was a partner in the Gurney Bank; her mother, Catherine Barclay, grew up in the family of the Barclay banking giants. Two wealthy fashionable Quaker families. How times had changed. And it is no surprise that Elizabeth married banker Joseph Fry.
For Margaret Fell and Elizabeth Fry, prison was a common denominator. Margaret was a religious outlaw repeatedly sentenced to languish in foul dungeons, while Elizabeth freely entered these stinking hellholes to serve the inmates and fight for reform. Although Quakers over the generations had made incredible progress, the prisons had not. What an awful shame on the English people. This was an age of lavish wealth. But those on the lower rungs of society suffered as much as they had during the English civil wars—during the days of Margaret Fell Fox.
Life even among the wealthy—then as now—did not escape tragedy. When Elizabeth was only twelve years old, her mother died, a great sorrow that suddenly turned her into a mother of younger siblings. Responsibility, to be sure, but certainly not without riches. There were household servants and liberal allowances for all the fancy clothes and accessories Betsy and her sisters could want. And how fun it was to either skip Sunday meeting altogether or to strut with their finery in front of plain-dressed Quakers.
It was during one such meeting that the eighteen-year-old Elizabeth, clad in a colorful dress and “wearing purple boots with scarlet laces,” heard a message by a visiting preacher from America. His words pricked her heart. Her life would never be the same. But not so fast. How could she give up all that was rightfully hers? Back home from the meeting she was of two minds. How awful it would be to turn into a “plain” Quaker. She loved her clothes and her visits to London, the opera and theater.
In the months that followed she struggled. She shunned the idea of being different from her father and siblings, and she knew that plain dress would embarrass them. But her own conscience and the sense of God’s calling proved strong. She determined to devote her life to serving those whom Jesus identified as the least of these: the sick, the poor, and prisoners. And she would begin immediately. Her first outreach effort took her no further than the laundry room of the family estate. She invited poor children to listen to Bible stories at her Sunday school—more than that, she taught them to read and write. Her sisters lightheartedly called the ragtag assembly Betsy’s imps.
Elizabeth would never renounce her call to minister to the less fortunate, but that sense of duty would be interrupted by her marriage and the eleven children she bore. Then during the Christmas season of 1816, only months after her tenth child was born, she began the prison work for which she is remembered today. Some years earlier she had visited Newgate Prison and observed the appalling conditions. Now she was determined to do something about the situation. Her first order of business, at the recommendation of the women prisoners themselves, was to set up a school for children who were incarcerated with their mothers. Her next order of business was to form the Newgate Association and corral other women to join her in the work and, perhaps equally important, to testify before a committee in the House of Commons.
In the years that followed she instituted sewing, cooking, and literacy classes at the prison and launched other societies to serve the needy outside prisons. As hectic as her schedule was, she would later establish a nursing school that predated the work of Florence Nightingale by several years. Through this training program she supplied nurses for Nightingale’s work of mercy in the bloody Crimean War.
During these years of service, Elizabeth held forth as the matron of her large household. Her husband’s family, wealthy merchants who imported coffee, tea, and spice, had moved into banking. As affluent as they were, they held tight to their Quaker speech of thee and thou and their plain dress. Elizabeth, in their eyes, was not plain enough. Her husband agreed, suggesting that her personality was too high-class—too much of the courtier. Try as she might, it was not easy to entirely abandon the sense of style that had previously been so much a part of her life.
Besides criticism from husband and in-laws, Elizabeth struggled with the exhaustion of childbirth and constant household demands. Her diary expressed what she could not say outwardly. She was becoming “a careworn and oppressed mother.” Later she lamented: “I fear that my life is slipping away to little purpose.”1 Yet she soldiered on, working among the most downtrodden of society. In her spare time she wrote a book on the necessity of better treatment of female prisoners, published in 1827.
Then in 1828, the unthinkable occurred. Her husband’s bank went under and with it, not only the assets of her immediate family but also the investments of many others, particularly people they knew well among the Quakers. He was removed from membership—“disowned”—by the Quaker meetinghouse, and she was accused of using investors’ money for her charities. From available records, it appears as though Fry was guilty of mismanagement, if not fraud. That Elizabeth had raided the family coffers for her work was widely known. That investors’ money was comingled with family funds is entirely possible.
For Elizabeth the shame of the scandal was only part of the awful anguish. The family was forced to leave Plashet House, a grand mansion facing a large fishpond on a beautifully landscaped estate with manicured lawns. Who knew? That she had slept on the floor in prisons with coarse women inmates, it turns out, was only a small portion of her story. She had lived a life of luxury with costly furniture and rugs and artwork and tableware. Now her possessions were being hauled away by creditors. Memories were all that was left to fill the empty rooms with high ceilings—rooms that were soon to be furnished and filled by others. A cloud of darkness and depression descended upon her. In her diary, she wrote that it was like living through a funeral.
But Elizabeth had lost far more than her good reputation and material possessions. With no money, how could she carry on with her charitable work? Many impoverished people depended on her for bare sustenance and for sustaining the village schools. Now everything was lost. In subsequent years she only slowly came to terms with her new life. Indeed, by 1835, she viewed herself in the prime of life. Her Friday Newgate readings were once again popular prison events, drawing large crowds, and she was seeing real changes among the prisoners.
As is often true, there was competition from others—“reformers” sought to counter Elizabeth’s work with strong bureaucratic oversight that left no place for the “meddlesome” women’s societies. But before she died in 1845, she had been heralded as a true British treasure. She was widely recognized for her selfless service to prison inmates and the underprivileged in all realms of society. Among her admirers were Queen Victoria, who supported her ministry, and the king of Prussia, Frederick William IV, who, while on state business in 1842, visited Newgate Prison for one of her Friday readings.
PHOEBE PALMER
Preacher, Writer, Mission Founder, and Theologian
How could anyone justify a woman’s public preaching in light of the nineteenth-century consensus that a woman must keep silent in church? True, Margaret Fell had answered objections in Women’s Speaking Justified. But that short booklet was published nearly two centuries earlier and by a long-forgotten Quaker. The time was ripe. In 1859, Phoebe Palmer published a hefty four-hundred-page volume, capturing the answer to that question in the title, Promise of the Father. Her thesis was her strongly held conviction that God’s promise to pour out his Spirit on both sons and daughters was no less than biblical truth. These were the very words of the prophet Joel repeated again at Pentecost. That ministers and men in general had sought to prevent women’s speaking and prophesying was to her a great travesty. She did not mince words in making her case:
We believe that hundreds of conscientious, sensitive Christian women have actually suffered more under the slowly crucifying process to which they have been subjected by men who bear the Christian name than many a martyr has endured in passing through the flames.2
Such religious feminism had long been practiced—and in some cases preached—by women, from Hildegard to Katherine Zell and Margaret Fell. But Phoebe’s most immediate influence came from Methodists such as Susanna Wesley, Mary Fletcher, and others. Her long and laborious defense of such ministry, however, began deep in the Old Testament. We should not be surprised that she references in her twenty-one chapters Deborah, Huldah, Philip’s daughters, even Isaiah’s wife. But that she cites the second-century Dialogue between Justin Martyr and Trypho the Jew indicates the scope of her research.
Phoebe was born in New York City into a family of devout Methodists. In fact, her father had been converted through the preaching of John Wesley himself. She could not remember a time of not having strong religious faith, but the Wesleyan doctrine and practice of entire sanctification eluded her, and she feared at times for her own salvation. God for her was a fearsome deity who demanded absolute surrender.
When her first child died, she was convinced that God took him because she was too devoted to the little one. She sensed God speaking: “Thou must resign thy child.” After the death of her second child, she wrote:
I will not attempt to describe the pressure of the last crushing trial. Surely I needed it, or it would not have been given. . . . The Lord had declared himself a jealous God; He will have no other Gods before Him. After my loved ones were snatched away, I saw that I had concentrated my time and attentions far too exclusively, to the neglect of the religious activities demanded.3
Her fourth child, Eliza, died in a house fire: “Never have I passed through a trial so severe.” But now Phoebe knew for certain that God meant business: “The time I would have devoted to her, shall be spent in work for Jesus.” With this additional time she testified that she was transformed into “a monument of what the grace of God can effect on a once rebellious child of Adam,” asserting, “O! this, I am sure, is a holy ambition, and authorized by Scripture.”4
It was on a summer night in 1837, the year Queen Victoria ascended the English throne, that Phoebe, at her home in New York, having been influenced by her sister, Sarah, realized her “holy ambition,” her “day of days”: “My heart was emptied of self, and cleansed of all idols, from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit. . . . I saw that the High and Holy One would have me enter into covenant with Him, the duration of which would be lasting an eternity, absolute, and unconditional.”5
Though she was married to Walter, the Lord now asked her, “betroth thee unto Me forever,” which would mean giving up her husband, “one with which every fibre of [her] being seemed interwoven.” How could God require such a thing: “Did Abraham know why he was called to give up Isaac at the time he gave him up?”6 But as God had stayed the hand of Abraham, he stayed his hand and gave Phoebe more children by her husband.
To understand Phoebe is to understand her seriousness about life. There appears to be no fun or humor or playfulness. She quickly moved beyond indescribable losses to her solemn call to holiness. Charles Edward White, her biographer, suggests that her severity in looks and dress and overall manner as well as her lack of emotion capture the essence of her character. It is no exaggeration to imagine her a spoilsport, a wet blanket, a killjoy, a party pooper, an overall straight-laced sourpuss. Twice she wrote (unanswered) letters to Queen Victoria reprimanding her for her Sunday activities such as yacht excursions—activity that could risk her very eternal destiny. Other women of this era, including Hannah Whitall Smith and Mary Slessor, revealed a much lighter side, as we shall see.
With her assurance of entire sanctification, Phoebe joined her sister, Sarah Lankford, in leading the celebrated Tuesday Meetings (“for the promotion of Holiness”). In 1840, after her sister had left the area, she became the teacher of this gathering, which soon filled her large home to standing room only, both men and women. With a move to a larger home, she was able to accommodate as many as three hundred, including ministers, even bishops, from various denominational backgrounds.
These meetings as well as her publication, The Guide to Holiness, paved the way for Phoebe’s revival ministry. She left behind her surviving children with Walter and a maid, though he later joined her part-time. “Never have we witnessed such triumphs of the cross as during the past summer and fall,” she reported in 1857. “Not less than two thousand have been gathered into the fold. . . . Hundreds of believers have been sanctified wholly, and hundreds have received baptism of the Holy Ghost, beyond any former experienced.”7 Her travels took her into Canada and on to the British Isles, where she (as well as Walter) preached sometimes four or five times a day. Meticulous records were kept, with an estimated twenty-five thousand decisions.
The tallied decisions were not for salvation only. Her plea was for sanctification as well. How, one might ask, could a person make an on-the-spot decision for entire sanctification? It is that issue that separates Phoebe from those who came before her. Whereas John Wesley had viewed sanctification as a process, she preached her “Altar Theology” whereby entire sanctification was bestowed instantaneously: “How soon may I expect to arrive at this state of perfection?” she asked her audience. “Just so soon as you come believingly, and make the required sacrifice, it will be done unto you according to your faith. . . . When the Savior said, ‘It is finished!’ then this full salvation was wrought out for you. All that remains is for you to come complying with the conditions, and claim it.”8
The experience required three short steps: placing one’s sacrifice or all on the altar, faith in God’s promise of entire sanctification, and publicly testifying to the experience. The third step was the kicker. Who would be so bold—so arrogant, perhaps—to claim to be entirely sanctified? Her answer was that no evidence or particular holiness was necessary for verification. If someone were to question the testimony because of an apparent lack of holiness in the individual’s life, all she need do is point the person to God and his promise. Case closed.
In addition to her Tuesday Meetings and her revival campaigns, Phoebe was involved in a wide variety of humanitarian endeavors, including temperance activities. Her best known outreach was her Five Points Mission in one of New York City’s worst slums, a district the visiting Charles Dickens declared to be as filthy and decayed as anything in London—a no-man’s-land filled with crime and debauchery of every description. Here Phoebe set up her mission, offering housing, health care, and schooling for the poorest of the poor.
After her death in 1874, Phoebe’s widowed sister, Sarah, returned to lead the Tuesday Meetings as well as edit The Guide to Holiness. Two years later she married Walter Palmer, Phoebe’s widower.
CATHERINE BOOTH
Mother of the Salvation Army
Criticism of Phoebe Palmer challenged Catherine Booth to investigate for herself the topic of women in public ministry. Phoebe, with her husband at her side, had been invited by supporters to minister in England and had received a warm welcome. But many respectable Brits were shocked by such impropriety—the audacity of an American woman presuming to preach from the pulpit, and to a mixed audience no less.
For Catherine, now married and approaching thirty, the subject of women’s equality was not new. Indeed, she had raised the issue some seven years earlier before she agreed to marry William Booth. While they were courting, he had commented in a letter to her that while he had high regard for her he suspected that she had “a fibre more in her heart and a cell less in her brain”9 than he. Such a statement, he should have realized, was neither a good pickup line nor one that would advance their courtship. Her response was unequivocal. She would never marry a man who did not regard her as his full equal. William backed down.
Catherine Mumford Booth is most remembered as the cofounder of the Salvation Army. Without her enormous influence, it is difficult to imagine where that organization would be today. She was born in Derbyshire, England, in 1829, eight years before Queen Victoria began her more than sixty-year reign. A precocious child, often sickly, she spent her childhood reading. Encouraged by her parents, she read the Bible many times over before she reached her teens. Her father was a lay Methodist minister and carriage builder who would later become an alcoholic and lose his faith.
Phoebe’s preaching spurred Catherine not only to search the Scriptures but also to wonder if she might preach herself. She had been active in the temperance movement, but the thought of public speaking terrified her. By her own testimony she had from childhood been “one of the most timid and bashful disciples the Lord Jesus ever saved.”10 But then one Sunday after her husband had finished his sermon, she stood with no forethought and added her own short message. William was so taken by surprise that when she was finished, he had no further word except to announce that she would speak that evening. And thus her preaching career was launched.
It soon became evident that they had two entirely different preaching styles and audiences. William reached out to the down-and-out in East London, while Catherine preached to large crowds in London’s well-heeled West End. She defended her ministry with appropriate Scripture texts, convinced that it was the devil who kept women from the pulpit: “The Spirit [at Pentecost] was given alike to the female as to the male disciple. . . . What a remarkable device of the devil that he has so long succeeded in hiding this characteristic of the latter-day glory!”11
Like Margaret Fell some two centuries earlier, she published a booklet justifying women’s public ministry. She minced no words in Female Ministry: Or, Woman’s Right to Preach the Gospel: “Judging from the blessed results which have almost invariably followed the ministrations of women in the cause of Christ, we fear it will be found, in the great day of account, that a mistaken and unjustifiable application of the passage, ‘Let you women keep silence in the Churches,’ has resulted in more loss to the Church, evil to the world, and dishonour to God, than any of the errors we have already referred to.”12
Catherine’s West End preaching supported the growing family, while William continued his ministry to the poor. Then in 1873, more than a decade after she had published Female Ministry, she began preaching in Portsmouth, which proved most successful in terms of numbers, sometimes drawing as many as three thousand people packed in a large music hall. She was a dynamic speaker. Her son Bramwell likened her to an attorney: “She reminded me again and again of counsel pleading with judge and jury for the life of the prisoner. The fixed attention of the court, the mastery of facts, the absolute self-forgetfulness of the advocate, the ebb and flow of feeling, the hush during the vital passages—all were there.”13
Catherine’s concern for the poor was no less than that of her husband, who focused particularly on men addicted to alcohol. Her passion was aimed at the terrible plight of prostitutes, many of them mothers who sold their bodies to feed their little ones—women whose husbands threw their wages away on cheap gin. Out of their joint efforts, the Salvation Army was born. From these early converts came their pool of volunteers, including transformed prostitutes. From the beginning women played an important role in the ministry. They worked in teams and were billed as the “Hallelujah Lassies.”
For Catherine, the most difficult aspect of her all-consuming ministry was the consequent loss of family togetherness. At the time of her daughter’s wedding, she wrote:
Mothers will understand . . . a side of life to which my child is yet a stranger. Having experienced the weight of public work for twenty-six years, also the weight of a large family continually hanging on my heart, having striven very hard to fulfill the obligation on both sides, and having realized what a very hard struggle it has been, the mother’s heart in me has shrunk in some measure from offering her up to the same kind of warfare.14
Her struggle in denying herself the joys of family life for the sake of the poor can be understood only in light of Jesus’s words to forsake all for the gospel. Others before and after her had made such sacrifices. But to read her excruciating death is far more difficult. She died in 1890, after having undergone unsuccessful surgery for breast cancer. Refusing morphine on religious grounds, her agony was only relieved by death.
During the preceding months, however, she dictated hundreds of letters encouraging others, while suffering unspeakable pain herself, as William’s diary entries attest:
A large part of the breast has fallen off, and [Salvation Army Captain] Carr has cut it away and left the gaping wound which is simply one mass of cancer.
She exclaimed again and again as she started with the stabbing pains, which like lightning flashes started in her poor bosom, “Oh, these fiery scorpions! These fiery scorpions!”
Two nurses are required, seeing she is so very helpless, and the breast has to be repeatedly dressed to keep the fiery flame that burns night and day anything like down. . . .
My darling had a night of agony. When I went into her room at two a.m. she had not closed her eyes. The breast was in an awful condition. They were endeavouring to staunch a fresh haemorrhage. Everything was saturated with the blood.15
CARRY NATION
Hatchet-Wielding Temperance Reformer
She was a wild and crazy hatchet-wielding saloon smasher. That is how we remember her. Google her image, and you see her familiar pose. She thrived on publicity and was always poised for headlines. If she were alive today, every avenue of social media would be exploited to promote her causes. Yet as was true in her own day, she still remains difficult to pigeonhole. Was she the leader of some sort of right-wing, homegrown militia? Was she a radical in the tradition of John Brown? Or was she a do-gooder somewhere in the middle?
Almost anything that has been written about this woman has been exaggerated or falsified or simply misunderstood. She was not a manly Amazon who stood over six feet tall. She was by no means the first saloon smasher. She had friends and supporters in high places while she languished in small-town jails. She was a Protestant fundamentalist who had broad ecumenical leanings and was often seen going to Catholic mass. She was both a conservative prohibitionist and a liberal civil rights activist; she demanded women’s rights and was deeply concerned for the poor, both black and white.
Carry was not widely regarded as a crazy fanatic in her day—at least not in Kansas and other western states. She considered herself first and foremost a Christian preacher. She was well-versed in the Bible and was photographed with it wherever she went—never with a hatchet alone but often with just the Bible. Although she was a shameless self-promoter, hawking her souvenir hatchets, her generosity was legendary, and she refused to lodge or dine in anything but cheap establishments.
Not until God called, she insisted, did she become a smasher. She awakened on the morning of June 5, 1899, to a “murmuring musical” voice saying, “Go to Kiowa,” and “I’ll stand by you.” It was very clear that God was telling her to “smash” a saloon as others had done before her. “I threw as hard, and as fast as I could,” she later recalled, “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.”16
Carry’s first husband was an alcoholic who left her behind to raise her baby. Most of her life, until that fateful summer day in 1899, was consumed with domestic and business activities, often on the move following the whims of her second husband, David Nation. Indeed, after settling in and establishing a successful boardinghouse in Texas, he insisted they move to Kansas and leave behind all her hard work.
There she joined in protests against alcohol and marched with other women as early as 1894. But before 1899 she was known primarily for her Sunday school teaching and her work as a doctor of osteopathy. True, she had no respect for the moral-suasion concept of the WCTU (Woman’s Christian Temperance Union), but she had not yet made a name for herself as a saloon smasher.
She used the Bible to justify her radical turnabout, sometimes comparing herself to the biblical Deborah. On other occasions she took her cue from Moses, who smashed the stone commandments, and from Jesus, who drove the money changers out of the temple. When her husband said somewhat in jest that she might be more effective wielding a hatchet, she took him up on it and found her own unique symbol. The hatchet quickly caught on and others joined her, including some well-known sophisticated women.
Carry’s new activism and strong personality were not conducive to marriage, certainly not to a man who expected a woman to cater to his every need. His 1901 divorce petition stated that she was “guilty of extreme cruelty” by her neglect of him while she had been caring for “the poor and down-trodden.”17 Now, with her marriage over, she was entirely free to travel and speak. But as a divorced woman, her domestic life was put to the test and was found wanting. Her married daughter with young children was mentally unstable. Was that the fault of Carry—and, many asked, was Carry herself unstable?
Carry, however, never let controversy stop her, and slander seemed not to harm her cause. She would carry on to the very end, always emphasizing good works over smashing saloons. She died in 1911, at age sixty-five.
CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS
For a historian, the decision on how to present individuals and events and who and what to include is always a struggle. History makes no sense if everything is presented in chronological order as it happens, thus topical grouping is a necessity. The same goes for a biographical history as this book purports to be. I am always pleased, therefore, when I discover that someone else has grouped individuals or events in similar ways. Such was true when I came upon this quote by Catherine Booth:
Will any one venture to assert that such women as Mrs. Elizabeth Fry, Mrs. Fletcher of Madely, and Mrs. [Hannah Whitall] Smith have been deceived with respect to their call to deliver the gospel messages to their fellow-creatures? If not, then God does call and qualify women to preach, and His word, rightly understood, cannot forbid what His Spirit enjoins. . . . Nor are the instances of the spirit of prophecy bestowed on women confined to by-gone generations: the revival of this age, as well as of every other, has been marked by this endowment, and the labours of such pious and talented ladies as Mrs. Palmer.18
If we take into account Catherine herself, three of the women included in this chapter are cited by her; Hannah Smith and Mary Fletcher have found their way into other chapters. The quote is taken from Catherine’s book, Female Ministry: Or, Woman’s Right to Preach the Gospel, first published in 1859. Catherine’s primary concern here was preaching as opposed to across-the-board equality. Her feminism, like that of Lottie Moon and countless other Christian women, was self-sacrificing more than self-serving.
Indeed, very few Christian women prior to the late twentieth century imagined themselves contending for equal rights per se. They regarded God’s call as far more significant than gender equality, though it is true that Catherine herself had more feminist inclinations, particularly in marriage, than did most of her contemporaries. Even women’s suffrage (opposed by many Christian women) was stressed not as a right but rather as a responsibility for the purpose of voting for temperance.
This was true of Carry as well. To view her primarily as a strong-armed, hatchet-wielding performer fails to understand the profound connection between poverty, prison, and alcohol during this era. Her prohibitionist stance was prompted by her deep concern for the poor, particularly women and children.
QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT
Have you or anyone you have known ever gone bankrupt or struggled with poverty after enjoying relative wealth, as Elizabeth did? Have you ever fallen prey to someone else’s reckless financial decisions, worse yet, a fellow Christian you trusted? Should a wife bear the shame of her husband’s decisions that have hurt others?
How should we assess Phoebe Palmer and her belief that God was taking her little ones as punishment for her unbelief? From this are we to infer that God chastised her as a “rebellious child of Adam” for her devotion to her little girl? “There is something monstrous,” one author writes, “in such holiness.”19 Do you agree?
If Christian ministry were defined more in terms of service and evangelism (as the Booths defined it) rather than authority and headship, do you think the debates over women in ministry and ordination would be less contentious? Do you know any women who have been denied ministry opportunities due to gender?
If you had been involved in the temperance movement of a century ago, would you have shunned Carry Nation or joined with her? Do you know any eccentric women like her involved in ministry today?
If you had the opportunity to interview just one of these women—Elizabeth, Phoebe, Catherine, or Carry—which one would you choose? Which one would you most eagerly welcome into your Bible study, book club, or potluck group?