12. Susannah Thompson Spurgeon and Ministers’ Wives
12
Susannah Thompson Spurgeon and Ministers’ Wives
In May 1990, a furor broke out at Wellesley College. “A seemingly harmless invitation,” according to the New York Times, “has ignited a dispute that has roiled the campus and raised questions around the country about the nature of feminism.” The invited commencement speaker was Barbara Bush, wife of President George Herbert Walker Bush. Students were “outraged” that a woman who had “dropped out of Smith College after two years to marry, and has been best known as a supportive wife and mother” would be perceived as a role model for the class of 1990.1
The following year, in 1991, the commencement speaker was Madeleine L’Engle. There were no protests.
As we rate women for their accomplishments, how do we rank Barbara and Madeleine? When I googled Barbara there were more than fifty million results (though admittedly hers is a common name). Madeleine’s unique name gave me fewer than a million results. Both rate substantial Wikipedia articles. Madeleine, like Barbara, was a wife and mother, but Madeleine’s renown as a writer and speaker clearly stood apart from her husband, Hugh Franklin, an actor.
Madeleine’s A Wrinkle in Time was the 1963 winner of the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious prize an author can receive for children’s literature. The book’s protagonist is a frizzy-haired girl named Meg who accomplishes incredible things and continues to serve even today as a role model for girls. I knew Madeleine better for her Crosswicks Journals, however, and was disappointed to read after she died in 2007 that her memoirs were perhaps almost as fictional as were her novels.
So how do we rate the role models of our lives? Must they be honest and must they stand apart from their celebrated spouses?
A wife of noble character who can find?
She is worth far more than rubies.
Her husband has full confidence in her
and lacks nothing of value.
She brings him good, not harm,
all the days of her life.
She selects wool and flax. . . .
She considers a field and buys it;
out of her earnings she plants a vineyard.
She sets about her work vigorously;
her arms are strong for her tasks.
She sees that her trading is profitable,
and her lamp does not go out at night. . . .
She opens her arms to the poor. . . .
Her husband is respected at the city gate. . . .
She makes linen garments and sells them. . . .
She is clothed with strength and dignity;
she can laugh at the days to come.
She speaks with wisdom,
and faithful instruction is on her tongue.
She watches over the affairs of her household
and does not eat the bread of idleness.
Her children arise and call her blessed;
her husband also, and he praises her.
Proverbs 31:10–13, 16–18, 23–28
In many ways the feminism of today is more nuanced than it was a quarter century ago. Perhaps Barbara’s speaking at Wellesley would not now raise ire. But I contemplate the issue in this chapter. Someone might question how women married to famous men fit into the broader context of the book. Would any of them have been noted women in their own right? Perhaps not. Nevertheless, within Protestant circles since the Reformation, beginning with Katie Luther, the minister’s wife has filled a very important role.
When I first filled that role in a small church in 1972, I realized quickly that the expectations were high. Although I was a full-time graduate student, I was eager to become involved in the ministry. I took on a Sunday school class for middle school girls, jointly coordinated the high school youth group, led a women’s Bible study, and often joined my husband in home and hospital visitation. But when I was asked to also lead an Awana club, I declined, though offering to serve as a substitute. For some my lack of full involvement was not enough. They were critical, but I held my ground.
Today in many churches the minister’s wife is almost invisible. But such was not the case in previous generations. Expectations were high, and God forbid if she had a career or was a full-time graduate student. So we invite a selection of these wives who served in the shadow of celebrity preachers to join the parade of women in this volume: Susannah Spurgeon, Sarah Edwards, Eunice Beecher, Emma Moody, Daisy Smith, and Ruth Peale.
They all struggled in fulfilling their roles. Like Barbara Bush they were secondary to famous men, often put in a position of defending their husbands. Like Madeleine, their stories were often fictionalized. And like me, the expectations were typically greater than they were willing or able to fulfill.
SUSANNAH THOMPSON SPURGEON
Powerhouse Invalid
The first time Susannah Thompson listened from her pew to the nineteen-year-old prodigy preacher, she was scornful. “So this is his so-called eloquence! It does not impress me. What a painful countrified manner! Will he ever quit making flourishes with that terrible blue silk handkerchief! And his hair—why, he looks like a barber’s assistant!”2 He was an overrated amateur devoid of class. What was his appeal? And why had he been invited to preach at London’s prestigious New Park Street Chapel? And why did she even show up to hear him?
Just shy of her twenty-second birthday, Susannah had a quick wit and a keen intellect. She was adept at assessing any man in the pulpit, including the “old-fashioned dapper” senior deacon. He was a “lawyer and wore the silk stockings and knee-breeches dear to a former generation.” As a hymn leader, he was situated in front of the pulpit: “He was a short, stout man, and his rotund body, perched on his undraped legs and clothed in a long-tailed coat gave him an unmistakable resemblance to a gigantic robin; and when he chirped out the verses of the hymn in a piping, twittering voice, I thought the likeness was complete!” Yet she “stood very much in awe” of the old deacon.3 Not so the boyish Charles Haddon Spurgeon.
Through mutual friends, Susannah soon became acquainted with Charles on a personal level. Their first public appearance together was December 19, 1853, and the following June, their courtship began. Several months later, in January 1855, he wrote to her: “I am glad you are not here just at this moment, for I feel so deeply that I could only throw my arms around you and weep.”4 They were married one year later on January 9, 1856, when she was twenty-three. On September 20, less than nine months later, Susannah give birth to twin boys.
By this time Spurgeon’s popularity had soared to such a height that New Park Street Chapel could no long hold the crowds. Surrey Gardens Music Hall was a much larger venue, and the first service there was scheduled for the evening of October 19, 1856. Some ten thousand people packed the auditorium, and before the service had hardly gotten under way, someone in the crowd apparently shouted “Fire!” and there was a stampede for the door. Eight people were trampled to death and many more seriously injured. Rather than closing the service, Charles carried on. According to one account, “vile preaching above the cries of the dead and dying, and louder than the wails of misery from the maimed and suffering, resounded from the mouth of Mr. Spurgeon.”5
The account went on to tell about “mangled corpses” that were carried away amid the “clink of money” as the “collection-boxes” were passed.6 When he realized how tragic the situation was, Charles was truly anguished. The stories in the press were not favorable, and he fell into depression. Nevertheless, crowds continued to flock to hear his preaching, and soon a new church building had been constructed.
Throughout her married life, Susannah had suffered various maladies, and by age thirty-three she was an invalid, having undergone serious surgery (though never specified in her writing). Her twins, not yet ten, spent time with their mother primarily at her bedside. She rarely got out of the house even to attend church. Invalidism among women in the Victorian era was not uncommon, nor has it been fully understood. Women, of course, were regarded the weaker sex and were more given to fainting spells than men. It is significant to note, however, that Susannah, though older than her husband, outlived him by more than a decade.
Despite her physical ailments and invalidism, Susannah initiated a book fund that she with the help of others would carry on for the remainder of her life. The initial purpose of the fund was to enhance the libraries of poor country ministers, but the recipients eventually included missionaries and almost any minister who made a request. The vast majority of books shipped out were Spurgeon’s own writings, which included frequent mailings of his sermons as well as his magazine, The Sword and the Trowel. Large amounts of money were donated to the fund, and through her highly organized effort, Susannah did more than anyone else to spread the fame of her husband. With no Facebook or Twitter, her method was the most effective social media of the day.
One of the endearing traits of her husband, at least in the minds of his many supporters, was his spontaneous and sometimes shocking remarks. On a Sunday night in 1874, he had preached a sermon on so-called little sins that could bring a person down. At the end of his preaching before he closed the service, he invited a visiting minister from America to say some words. The minister picked up where Charles left off, using the habit of smoking as an example and how he had finally conquered that sin in his own life. Instead of simply closing the service with a hymn and prayer, Charles returned to the pulpit and told the congregation that he did not regard smoking as a sin and “hoped to enjoy a good cigar before going to bed.”7 The incident was not without controversy, and soon shops stocked cigar boxes embellished with his likeness.
Newspapers were not necessarily kind to the Spurgeons. There were stories of extravagant spending, particularly when they moved from one house described as a mansion to another that was even more ostentatious. One visitor offered details:
Many a millionaire might well have envied his home. This was at Westwood, on what is known as Beulah Hill, in Sydenham, which is one of London’s fairest suburbs. Here he had a large and handsome mansion, situated in a spacious park; so that, although within a few minutes’ ride of the teeming streets of London, it was as rural and as secluded as though in the heart of a wilderness. Passing the lodge gates, the visitor found himself amid an expanse of well-kept lawns, diversified with shrubbery and groves. A small lake was near the house, and elsewhere was a fountain containing many goldfish, of which pets Mr. Spurgeon was exceedingly fond.8
Clearly Charles did not shy away from controversy and, in fact, on occasion initiated it. Such was the case in the late 1880s with the Down-Grade Controversy, the term taken from articles in his magazine claiming that the Baptist Union was downgrading orthodoxy, but the real concern seemed to be a widespread lack of enthusiasm for old-line Calvinism. The backlash was swift, with a demand that he name the individuals, if indeed they were propounding heresy. He refused, and his reputation was damaged as a result. After his death when Susannah was writing his biography, she stated that “his fight for the faith . . . cost him his life.”9
During her final years, Susannah spent time editing her husband’s personal papers and turned them into a volume she called his autobiography. She insisted that no defense of him was needed now that he had gone home to be with the Lord, where there were no more “heartless attacks” or “unjust cruel words,” where “the points of the arrows are all blunted” and “the stings of these scorpions are all plucked out.”10 If she had ever assumed that reporters would have given her husband a pass, she was seriously mistaken. He had invited publicity and had certainly not shied away from controversy. Susannah never could have imagined that generations after her husband’s death most of the criticism would have been forgotten and that his writings would be spread today through Facebook and Twitter.
EUNICE BEECHER
Humiliated Preacher’s Wife
If Susannah was upset by the newspaper accounts critical of her husband, how must Eunice Beecher have felt? Susannah and Charles were no doubt aware of the news reports spreading scandal about one of America’s most noted preachers. In fact, the very year that Charles was being mocked for his cigar smoking, Henry Ward Beecher was making headlines for the scandal of the century. Henry, son of the renowned minister Lyman Beecher and brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, had been the pastor of the large and prestigious Plymouth Church of Brooklyn for more than a quarter century.
Eunice was the daughter of Dr. Artemas Bullard of West Sutton, Massachusetts, her birth coinciding with the outbreak of the War of 1812. She became acquainted with Henry, more than a year younger than she, while he was a student at Amherst College. They became engaged soon after they met, but for various reasons he delayed the wedding for seven years, by some accounts because he had fallen for other young women in the meantime. When he finally did decide to tie the knot, he gave Eunice very little warning and then expected her to pack up and move to Lawrenceburg, Indiana, shortly thereafter. He had answered a pastoral call to a tiny church in that town without making living arrangements. So their first home was a spare bedroom in the home of a church elder.
When they did find a place of their own, it was above a barn, and Eunice was forced to take in boarders to make ends meet. Two years later Henry accepted a call from another tiny church in Indianapolis. In his eight-year tenure, the congregation grew from thirty to three hundred, and Henry thrived. But Eunice missed her New England family and was busy having babies, fighting malaria, and working as a seamstress to meet expenses. She was accused of being cranky, while the boyish Henry socialized with the townspeople and spent more money than they could afford on books. When he accepted a call to Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, New York, in 1847, she was ecstatic. It meant a much higher standard of living and servants, which she needed with her sixth child on the way.
Besides preaching, Henry was a social activist and wrote columns regularly for various newspapers. Eunice did not object to his antislavery stance, but when he began touting women’s rights she strongly disagreed. “I have no sympathy for the new woman,” she wrote. “What is the ability to speak on a public platform or the wisdom that may command a seat on a judge’s bench compared to that which can insure and preside over a true home?”11 She strongly objected to his involvement with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, whom she believed would destroy the family with their campaign for women’s suffrage.
As was true in Lawrenceburg and Indianapolis, Eunice did not become a beloved minister’s wife. She was accused of making Henry’s life a living hell and of being a jealous and suspicious wife. Perhaps for good reason. Even while in Indianapolis, she had heard rumors of his attraction to other women. Now in New York, rumors snowballed. She had realized years earlier that Henry took great pleasure in spending time with women, but not her. The two of them were on different wavelengths. Her concerns were the children and family issues. His were theological and social issues of the day. She was a conservative, holding tight to traditional values, while he was hankering for more freedom and touting a liberal agenda.
His engaging interaction with feminists of the day more than irritated Eunice, but it was his relationship with Libby Tilton that truly angered her. Libby was a Sunday school teacher who also ministered to destitute women and their families living in tenement housing. More than twenty years younger than Henry, she was the mother of two young children and the wife of Theodore, one of Henry’s close associates. Henry often stopped by their home to visit—even when Theodore was away on lecture tours. He found Libby to be a good listener and a great admirer of his writings and preaching. She confided in him, and, as Henry would later tell, she “gave an account of what she had seen of cruelty and abuse on the part of the husband that shocked me.”12
Likewise, Henry would later insist that he simply engaged in pastoral counseling. Yes, perhaps there were some hugs and maybe kisses, but it was all part of the consolation a father figure would offer to a woman young enough to be his daughter. Libby, however, told a very different story, first to her husband, who then reported it to others. Henry’s response was to accuse Theodore himself of sexual misconduct and Eunice, now in her late fifties, joined in the effort to besmirch Theodore’s name. At the same time Henry sought reconciliation, but by the spring of 1871 reporters had gotten wind of the story and turned it into tabloid fodder.
The scandal quickly began to take a toll on Eunice, who was described by one acquaintance as “white haired” and a “dozen years older” than when this woman had last seen her. “My heart has been full of pity for her,” she continued. “Her face is written over with many volumes of human suffering.” Henry turned his back on Eunice, which only added to her misery. He moved all his personal papers to his sister’s home and sent her to Havana or Florida, presumably to relax and relieve her mind of the gossip. All the while he wrote pitiful letters to her, one lamenting, “My life is almost over.”13
In the meantime, Plymouth Church set up a committee to investigate, and in 1874 Henry was exonerated, even though Theodore had testified that Henry had committed adultery with Libby. The following year Theodore brought a case against Henry in Brooklyn. Eunice, now home in New York, was in court every day. In the end the jury failed to reach a verdict. Technically Henry was off the hook, but most people, including his own parishioners, thought him guilty. Later Libby, separated from her husband, confided in a letter that she had lied when she testified in court that she had not committed adultery with Henry.
Nevertheless, Henry held on to his prestigious pastoral position at the church and was frequently in the pulpit. Publicly Eunice stood by her man, but privately she was enduring anguish. “I live in the past over and over, and every little while when talking most cheerfully,” she confided to a friend, “such a flood of fiery indignation sweeps over me that I am constantly on the watch lest I lose my self-control and show it.” Here again, her indignation seems to have been directed more at Libby than Henry. He left on lecture tours while putting their daughter-in-law in charge of the household and sending Eunice to Florida, a matter she deeply resented.14
It is very bitter to go away from you, worse now than years ago, because while under this mysterious cloud, whatever it may be, and feeling its cruelty, I am in danger of that which will be far worse than death, that my love and trust in you may grow cold or waver. . . . If your heart has not changed woefully, you would not—you could not subject me to the torture of the last four years.15
Eunice was intuitive enough to realize that her marriage to Henry was essentially in name only. Despite her insecurities she carried on as best she could. In fact, she continued her writing, which she had begun after moving to New York. At age forty-seven, more than a decade after they had settled there, she had published her first book. Then in 1875, in the midst of the scandal, her second book was released, Motherly Talks with Young Housekeepers, and three years later How to Make Homes Happy. The title was ironic considering her inability to make her own home happy.
Henry died at seventy-three; Eunice lived on for more than a decade. When she was eighty, she published an article in the Ladies’ Home Journal, which might have made a greater impact than anything either she or her husband had ever written. It appeared at a time when severe corporal punishment was widely practiced. Her examples and words of caution were words that parents needed to hear. This article was for all practical purposes her final message. She told how she had once been severe in her physical discipline, but the deaths of one child after another had a profound effect on both her and Henry: “Little Georgie’s loss was a very severe trial, and through the sorrow we were led to a milder interpretation of parental duties.” Then after the twins died she wrote that they never again “resorted to corporal punishment.”16
DAISY BILLINGS SMITH
Pushed-Aside Popular Preacher
Daisy’s husband, Oswald J. Smith, was an internationally celebrated minister who founded the Peoples Church in Toronto in 1928 and served as senior pastor for thirty years; he then passed the torch on to his son Paul, who carried it for another thirty-five years. According to Wikipedia, Oswald accomplished great things in his ninety-six years. “Over the course of eighty years he preached more than 12,000 sermons in 80 countries, wrote thirty-five books (with translations into 128 languages), as well as 1,200 poems, of which 100 have been set to music.” The article also cites his strong enthusiasm for overseas missions and his role as “a leading force in Fundamentalism in Canada.”
His “gracious and generous helpmate” is barely mentioned except for her “sublimating her career to his.”17 That statement in many ways uniquely sums up her life. Neither Susannah nor Eunice had a career to sublimate. Daisy did, and she suffered on that account. From her youth growing up in a poor family in Ontario, she longed to be a missionary. Before graduating from high school, she began working in a factory to save money to pay for expenses at Nyack Missionary College in New York, where she enrolled in 1908. There she worked in the laundry for room and board.
She was single-minded in her commitment to ministry. When she received a letter from a young man who confessed he was “falling in love” with her, she responded that her “only goal [was] to study God’s Word, to be better equipped to preach it somewhere to those who have never heard.” In his original letter her suitor had complimented her on her “marvelous deep speaking voice,” adding that she was “going to make a great preacher.”18
On graduating, she and Ada, her roommate, set out for West Virginia to begin ministry in Roaring Fork, a small coal town. When they arrived late at night, they were shown to a dilapidated shack furnished with bedbug-ridden sagging cots. Waking up with bites and rashes, they heard a knock at the door. A destitute woman informed them that her baby had died in the night. Daisy returned with the woman to a pitiful hovel where a very young girl was sitting on a bench holding the dead infant. The mother took the tiny body and handed it over to Daisy and left with the girl. No books or school courses had trained Daisy for this. She washed the body, found some clothes, a blanket, and a box, and waited for the woman to return. When she did, they dug a grave and lowered the box into it. Daisy prayed, read Scripture, and offered words of consolation.
In the two years that followed, the two missionaries reopened a church and began services, Ada playing the old pump organ and Daisy preaching. When they left, due to the terminal illness of Ada’s mother, one of their coal-miner converts agreed to carry on with the ministry. Roaring Fork, however, had offered Daisy an opportunity to fulfill the young man’s prediction that she was going to make a great preacher. Preaching invitations poured in, and soon she was asked to join Pastor J. D. Morrow on the staff of Dale Presbyterian Church. Her work there primarily involved outreach to the poor, but preaching was what she enjoyed the most.
With added growth, Morrow invited Oswald to join the staff. Daisy was assigned more work off-site, while Oswald took over her preaching and congregational duties. Many people were unhappy with the change, not the least of whom was Daisy. She resented his intrusion but realized that she had been outmanned. Oswald assumed it was his place to do the preaching, but he recognized Daisy’s remarkable gifts. Having just gone through a broken engagement, what he later described as the greatest sorrow of his life, he began wooing Daisy. She was in her midtwenties, approaching “old-maid” status. She knew what she was doing. She traded preaching for a wifely supporting role.
The headlines said it all: “Assistant Pastor of Dale Presbyterian Church Weds Its Popular Deaconess.” Soon after the wedding, Morrow took an extended leave of absence. Oswald, true to his nature, immediately set about changing things. Without consulting the church board, he hung in front of the church a large banner with red lettering: GET RIGHT WITH GOD. He changed the style of music without informing the music director. The focus was now entirely on “soul saving.” The church was in turmoil. Daisy, once so popular, was almost undone. Members of the congregation who had loved to hear her preach now avoided her. She felt alone and even abandoned by her husband, who spent late-night hours with those eager to be involved in his special prayer groups.
When Morrow returned, he was distressed by the situation, accusing Oswald of putting the church in debt. Oswald resigned, thus ending three stormy years of ministry. With no other opportunities, Oswald decided to move to British Columbia to do mission work among lumberjacks. Here the pregnant Daisy was often alone for days on end with their baby. With that ministry faltering, he uprooted the family again and returned to Toronto, where he left Daisy and their two sickly babies with her financially strapped family while he tried his hand at an itinerant ministry.
Eventually Oswald did find a measure of success but not enough to support Daisy in even modest circumstances. He was convinced that God was calling him to an international ministry. In 1924, he sailed to Europe, leaving Daisy behind in Toronto with three little ones. During the long absences, she became depressed and filled with self-doubt. “Why, O, why is God taking you away from me,” she wrote. “I only wish I were worthy of you. . . . I fall so short of my own ideal for myself as wife and mother, and often wish, really and truly, that I were taken away so that before you are old you might have a more ideal woman.”19
In 1927, Oswald accepted a ministerial call to Los Angeles, but before they arrived by auto, he had a change of heart. He called back home to cancel the furniture movers, only to learn that it was too late, so he agreed to stay at this new church for a year. Having kept his word to the very day, he then moved the family back to Toronto, where he found himself once again persona non grata in his previous church circles. Thus at forty he established his own church—the People’s Church. He was a dynamic evangelistic speaker, and soon the seats were full. “For some time I did not take much interest in the work,” he later wrote. “Very often I left others in charge and travelled.” Daisy stayed home. The once-strong young woman who had preached so confidently in Roaring Forks and Dale Presbyterian was beaten down. “I try to be brave,” she lamented to her husband, “but I feel so defeated by it all.”20
When the children reached their teens, Oswald expected Daisy to leave them home and join him. She responded to him in a terse letter: “You never wanted me with you before, and I’m not going now. The children still need me.”21 In the years that followed when the children were on their own, she sometimes did accompany her husband, all the while his fame increasing while she supported him behind the scenes.
RUTH PEALE
The Power behind Positive Thinking
Had she not been married to Norman Vincent Peale, one of the foremost ministers of the twentieth century, Ruth would be one more pastor’s wife remembered only by close family and friends. Her life spanned the twentieth century, 1906–2008, and deserves telling from beginning to end. But her significance, at least for the purposes of this volume, lies in her authorship of a fascinating book, The Adventure of Being a Wife. Unlike Eunice Beecher, she was not hesitant to speak of marital problems. Nor was she tempted to turn her husband into a saint as Susannah Spurgeon had sought to do.
For fifty-two years Norman served as senior pastor of the Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan. From that base he built his empire, which included organizations that to some seemed more secular than sacred, among them the Horatio Alger Association and the American Foundation of Religion and Psychiatry. He came of age as a minister when radio and TV were seemingly begging for sermons, particularly those that offered audiences a positive slant on life. But the work for which he is remembered most was his best-selling book, The Power of Positive Thinking. For that and for other contributions he had made, President Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
One might imagine that being married to the authority on positive thinking, Ruth would have been blessed with a serene and optimistic husband. Nothing could be further from the truth. She wrote honestly of two people enduring each other’s flaws in marriage: “For example, I have to put up with his volatility and unpredictability where plans and appointments are concerned. He, on the other hand, has to live with my lack of flexibility and tendency to become bogged down in details.”22
These problems continued throughout their marriage. The problem of Norman’s mother continued for decades as well. His mother had strongly objected to their marriage, and she insisted that she and Norman’s father accompany them on their honeymoon to a cabin in the Adirondack Mountains. When they traveled abroad, she accompanied them. Norman had no backbone to prevent her joining them. He was indecisive and weak willed.
But a far greater issue throughout their marriage was Norman’s serious bouts of depression, sometimes long periods of black despair. “When he gets depressed,” Ruth wrote, “he sees only the negative side of everything. Sometimes I think he writes about positive thinking because he understands so much about negative thinking.” Indeed, it was Ruth who kept his head above water when he was drowning in despair. “I considered it part of my job as a wife to understand all this, to evaluate it unemotionally, and then do something about it.”23
Doing something about it sometimes entailed a severe scolding. When Norman was in the depth of self-pity on one occasion, he quoted her saying to him: “You are not only my husband. You are also my pastor, and in the latter department I’m frank to say I am becoming increasingly disappointed in you. I hear you from the pulpit talking about faith and trust in God’s wondrous power. But now I hear in you no faith or trust at all. You just whine your defeat.”24
In her willingness to be open and honest about marital difficulties, Ruth was ahead of her time. She placed no value on feigned spirituality or pretense of any kind, particularly about any such ideal as perfection in marriage. If a marriage was devoid of differences and if there were no disagreements and disputes, she suspected it was not alive and growing. Her outspoken reflections are as refreshing as they are telling:
Countless times, talking with a married couple I’ve just met, I’ve heard them say to me, “Oh, yes, we’ve been married fifteen years (or twenty, or thirty) and we’ve never had a cross word between us.” I always smile and nod happily, but what I’m really thinking is, “How dull! How boring! What a drag a marriage like that would be.”25
CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS
Ministers’ wives, like politicians’ wives, are expected to follow the counsel of Tammy Wynette’s hit song, “Stand by Your Man.” How often we see the politician at the microphone (his wife discreetly standing at his side), apologizing for infidelities or other sorts of wrongdoing. Even though women are in far greater numbers entering politics and ministry, we always picture a wife supporting her husband more than the reverse. It is true today, as it has been historically.
Susannah was a natural at playing second fiddle to her husband, though her initial assessment of him gave no hint of her being a wallflower, much less a preacher’s wife. But she found her place and had a critical role in making his sermons and writings known far beyond those who were part of his congregation. And when he was publicly criticized, she was his strongest defender. She blamed his opponents for his early death and posthumously edited his autobiography, not surprisingly a very sympathetic account that helped to establish his future prominence in evangelicalism.
Eunice also defended her husband, but she was publicly standing by her man while desperately trying to cope with the pain her flamboyant, unfaithful husband had inflicted on her. Susannah had married the up-and-coming preacher of her own church, while Eunice and Daisy Smith found out the hard way how difficult it was to follow their husbands from place to place and raise little ones without a steady income. Daisy’s story is perhaps far more common than we realize. She was forced to set aside her dreams and her remarkable gifts for the sake of her husband’s ministry. Her private anguished letters are critical to understanding the larger picture of Christian ministry and the toll it can take on individuals and families.
Ruth was amazingly honest about her bipolar minister husband, and she was open about their problems and personal differences, hoping that others would realize that marriage—whether to a preacher or a politician or anyone else—is hard work, particularly when a mother-in-law is overbearing and a husband is seriously depressed.
QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT
Do you think the ministry of Charles Spurgeon might have been enhanced had he been married to a woman who was not only a supporter but also a constructive critic? Do you know of situations when a wife would have done well to strongly encourage her husband to make important changes in his work or relationships?
Can you put into words how Eunice must have felt when she heard the news that Libby had accused Henry of having an inappropriate relationship with her? How should a woman respond in such instances? Do you personally know of similar situations?
Does a husband’s ministry or career take priority over that of a wife? Is there something Daisy might have done to hold on to her ministry and curtail her husband’s rash decisions to uproot the family? Does her frustration ring true with women today?
Can you relate to Ruth Peale’s problems with her overbearing mother-in-law? Are mother-in-law troubles overplayed? Do you know women with serious mother-in-law issues? What kinds of solutions are advisable?
If you could pick one of these ministers’ wives to speak at a women’s retreat, who would be your first choice? Which one would you most enjoy having an intimate one-on-one afternoon with?