Women in Churches

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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

Dictionary of American History