WOMEN IN CHURCHES

WOMEN IN CHURCHES. Religion was integral to the history of European settlement of North America, and in large measure the experiences and work of women shaped the history of church life in the United States. Within the first generation of the Puritan experiment in New England, three important forms of women's religious experience were apparent. First, women would play critical roles as pious participants in the religious institutions that were being built in the new society. Second, women's roles would link family with faith. And third, women were not always content to live according to existing expectations.

Supporting the Churches

The critical role of women in American churches persisted even as they were often restricted to public listening and private prayer. Female Puritans, no less than their husbands, were responsible for living a virtuous life, testifying to their personal faith before being granted admission to church membership. By the end of the seventeenth century, women were already outnumbering men in the churches, a reality that has never abated. During the Awakenings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women enthusiastically embraced the new democratic "religion of the heart" that was preached on the frontiers and in the cities. After the revival preachers moved on to the next location, community women often preceded their husbands and children into church membership.

In the early nineteenth century, Protestant women were instrumental in forming and supporting mission and moral reform societies. They collected money, established the networks of correspondence, and, by late in the century, had helped to make overseas missions one of America's largest corporate enterprises. Meanwhile, Catholic sisters were the vanguard of the educational and medical institutions that were formed to support Catholic life in the United States. Jewish sisterhoods quickly took their place as the organizational backbone of synagogue life. Even in late-twentieth-century society, many women's religious organizations remained among the most vital centers of church life, and women's voluntary labor sustained both local congregations and religious service agencies. With few other opportunities for leadership within the church, women consistently transformed their religious groups into powerful arenas of religious, social, and political action.

Church and Family

The spheres in which women were expected to expend their energy included religion and family, and the two were often linked. Early Puritan women maintained fierce loyalty to their churches, in part to make sure their children could be baptized and obtain salvation. Victorian homes may have been "ruled" by fathers, but it was mothers whose work created the everyday world in which children were nurtured in the faith. In turn, it was argued, it was motherly nurturing that would produce the morally responsible citizens on which a democracy depends. And when children and husbands were threatened by economic woes and moral ills, it was women who mobilized to defend the sanctity of their homes, even if it meant marching in protest or singing hymns at the door of the

local saloon. Women's "natural piety" and church connections could be formidable. Frances Willard was among the most visible nineteenth century leaders who linked the temperance crusade against alcohol to the interests of women and families, extending her vision to issues ranging from prison reform to prostitution and poverty, and arguing that women should be granted the right to vote so they could use their moral virtue for the betterment of society.

Change and Innovation

As these examples illustrate, religious women did not always stay quietly within prescribed limits. In the very first decade of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Anne Hutchinson dared to assert her own right to interpret scripture and teach, as guided by the Holy Spirit and not by her pastor. She was tried and banished for her heresy in 1637. Mary Dyer was a Quaker and was therefore deemed troublesome to the Puritan colony. She, too, was banished. But, refusing to stay away from Boston, she twice returned and was ultimately arrested. In 1660, Dyer was hanged for sedition. A generation later, in 1692, a wave of witchcraft accusations swept Salem, Massachusetts, over-whelmingly catching women in its wake. In these early days, women who failed to conform embodied the fears and marked the boundaries of a fledgling society.

By the nineteenth century, some women had grown critical of religious traditions that condemned or limited them. Some suffragists, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, developed strong critiques of the churches. Other women simply left existing groups to join or found new faiths. Mother Ann Lee established the Shakers; Mary Baker Eddy founded Christian Science; and Ellen White's vision resulted in Seventh-Day Adventism. Other women used magical means to offer healing and divination to their communities (a role by no means new or uniquely American). A variety of utopian groups, from the Oneida community to the Latter Day Saints, experimented with new forms of marriage and imagined new forms of salvation, at least some of which offered women new opportunities. As the frontier moved west, religious experimentation continued to be a prominent feature of American society.

Within existing churches, women's roles gradually expanded as well. A few women emerged as preachers and evangelists, and, by the middle of the nineteenth century, pioneering Protestant women were petitioning their denominations to ordain them. In 1853, Congregationalist Antoinette Brown became the first woman to be ordained to the pastoral office. In 1819, eight years after she first asked, Jarena Lee received permission to preach from African Methodist Episcopal Church founder Richard Allen, but neither she nor other traveling women evangelists, such as Amanda Berry Smith, yet had official ordination. Lack of official standing did not stop the remarkable Phoebe Palmer, who taught with such power that a "holiness movement" was born out of the Tuesday meetings she held in her home. And, in the early twentieth

century, an emerging Pentecostal movement recognized the spiritual gifts of women. Over the course of the twentieth century, doors to full participation and leadership gradually opened in many but not all Protestant denominations.

In the last third of the twentieth century, the diversity of American women's religious experience became strikingly visible. Some women spent great creative energy in adapting religious language, images, and rituals to acknowledge the experiences of women. Other religious women took up issues such as abortion and pornography, extending the historic link between family and faith to encompass new concerns. Women of color developed womanist theologies; Native American women gave new voice and visibility to traditions European settlers had nearly eliminated. Immigrant women from all over the world played significant roles in helping their religious communities establish themselves, while still other women added goddess and wiccan spiritualities to more traditional church teachings. No single story can account for women's religious experience in American history, and in this most recent chapter, that fact is especially clear.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Braude, Ann. "Women's History Is American Religious History." In Retelling U.S. Religious History. Edited by Thomas A. Tweed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Chaves, Mark. Ordaining Women: Culture and Conflict in Religious Organizations. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Gilkes, Cheryl Townsend. If It Wasn't for the Women … : Black Women's Experience and Womanist Culture in Church and Community. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2001.

Keller, Rosemary Skinner, and Rosemary Radford Ruether, eds. In Our Own Voices: Four Centuries of American Women's Religious Writing. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1995.

Lindley, Susan Hill. "You Have Stept out of Your Place": A History of Women and Religion in America. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996.

Nancy T.Ammerman

See alsoAdventist Churches ; Church of Christ, Scientist ; Oneida Colony ; Quakers .

Women and Religion

Sources

Female Piety. The role of women in religious life expanded tremendously during the nineteenth century and helped elevate the position of women in public life in general. In colonial times women made up the majority of most churches, often constituting as much as two-thirds of a given congregation. But church leaders were traditionally men, who were believed to hold the only authority to speak on religious matters. After the American Revolution, however, this situation began to change. The state churches were disestablished, and ministers and their churches lost their official public roles. As religion became more personal and voluntary, it also became more clearly connected with home life, and by extension, with women. Women were thought to be pious and moral by nature, while men, who dealt with the secular world, were inclined toward brutish behavior and vice. It was the proper role of women, therefore, to instruct their husbands and children in spiritual matters. This duty became all the more important as the nation expanded. Families migrated to unpopulated areas where there were often no churches for dozens or even hundreds of miles. Mothers, it was believed, had the innate and vitally important ability to ensure that a moral and virtuous society was maintained.

New Roles. While the changes wrought by disestablishment elevated female spiritual authority in the public eye, they did little to alter the traditional notion that a woman’s place was in the home. Rather, that notion was reinforced by the pervasive idea that a virtuous republic could be maintained only if there were good, selfsacrificing wives and mothers at home to give moral strength to their families. But the revivals of the 1820s and 1830s began to expand women’s roles into the world beyond the home. The novel experience of offering public testimony of their faith at a revival offered many women a form of emancipation from their cloistered domestic lives. Revival preachers encouraged all of their converts, male and female, to share their experiences with the larger community, and many heeded their call, going door-to-door or holding prayer meetings in their homes. In doing so, women ceased to be simply objects of the revivals and became active evangelists themselves.

Public Life. Formal ordination for women was rare in the nineteenth century, but there were other ways to become active in the evangelical drive to convert the world. Many women became missionaries, both at home and abroad, often remaining unmarried in order to devote themselves fully to their godly professions. Others traveled on revival circuits, preaching and exhorting on an informal basis before large audiences. Nancy Towle, a Free Will Baptist, began preaching and holding revivals as early as 1815 and was once invited to preach before the United States Congress. At first many people of both sexes were startled or even offended by the idea of women speaking in public. Some attended religious gatherings simply to gape at the spectacle where women were lecturing or preaching. Once there, however, many were moved by the power of the speakers and began to abandon some of their prejudices. By midcentury female religious authority had become sufficiently accepted to allow several women to lead new religious movements and denominations. Most notably, Ellen Harmon White became the prophetess and leader of Seventh Day Adventism and Mary Baker Eddy founded Christian Science.

Reform. Participation in religious life also helped women move into broader spheres of activity outside the home that offered many a much-needed sense of intellectual fulfillment. Encouraged by revivalists such as Finney, many women became leading activists in the social reform movements of their day. Separate female benevolent societies were formed by some women, while others came to stand on equal footing with men in established societies. Again they met resistance, this time from people who felt it indecent for women and men to mingle behind the closed doors of committee meetings, but they held their ground. With stature gained from participation in the religious realm, women began to give public lectures against intemperance, gambling, prostitution, and other sins. Sarah and Angelina Weld Grimke, Lydia Maria Child, Lucretia Mott, and others emerged as prominent voices in the antislavery crusade. Empowered by these roles, many of the same women in turn became leading figures in the struggle for woman’s rights.

ROCHESTER RAPPINGS

In March 1848 two young sisters named Kate and Margaret Fox began hearing mysterious rapping noises in their house near Rochester, New York, Interpreting the sounds as communications from the dead, the girls set up a code system by which the spirits could respond to their questions. Friends and neighbors flocked to the Fox house to ask their own questions and speak to deceased loved ones. The following year an older sister became the girls’ publicity manager; P. T. Barnum made them part of his show; and they were soon national celebrities. As their fame spread, so did the national enthusiasm for Spiritualism, the belief in communication between living humans and disembodied spirits, generally through a medium. At seances across the country objects moved by themselves; instruments played in locked cabinets; and men and women revealed apparently unknowable information while in trance states, convincing thousands of the reality of the spirit world. Some enthusiasts, mindful of accusations of fraud against many mediums, were content to view spiritualist séances as simple entertainment. For others, however, séances were deeply religious experiences, offering “scientific” proof of the existence of the human soul after death. Spiritualist mediums and writers tended to reject the claims of the clergy to any special religious authority and to stress the ability of every individual to follow his or her conscience. Many rejected the idea of hell as unjust and argued that all people would eventually be saved. The movement had widespread appeal to people of all social and educational levels, and served as both an extension of and an alternative to mainstream religious beliefs.

Source: R. Laurence Moore, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

Sources

Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977);

Janet W. James, ed., Women in American Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980);

Rosemary E. Ruether and Rosemary S. Keller, Women and Religion in America: A Documentary History, volume 1 (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981).