Gender and the construction of models of Christian activity: a case study.

Johnson, Dale A.

In my review of previous presidential addresses, I found it interesting to discover that only one had built upon one of the most significant cultural and scholarly developments of the past generation and perhaps the past century, that is, women's and, later, gender studies and their relevance for our respective fields. That was Jane Dempsey Douglass's address twenty years ago as the first woman president of this Society on "what Calvin learned at the school of women," an event that will surely be recognized in the program session tomorrow on "Women in the American Society of Church History."

At my institution in the 1970s the process was called, in the language of the day, "consciousness-raising." It started with the use of language and went from there to other complex matters. Our school's document on inclusive language appeared in 1979 only after long discussion and some serious debate. One of my own instances of consciousness-raising in that period was coming upon an early-twentieth-century book on English Primitive Methodism entitled Men on Fire, and Consecrated Women Also. Obviously, the author found language constraining as he tried to encompass in his title the breadth of Christian activity in his denomination. Those of you who took part in similar discussions in that decade will have stories of your own or your community's engagements in the consciousness-raising process. It has had such a widespread effect on thought and practice that the experiences ought not be lost.

The literature and the resources now available in the fields of women's and gender studies in many areas of religious history is simply remarkable when compared to those days when questions such as "where are the women in this subject matter?" appeared on student course evaluations. But developments in the area in which I mostly work, modern European Christianity, have been considerably less than those marked, for example, in late antiquity, medieval or early modern studies, or American religious history. The concentration of research in this area into smaller chronological periods, regional or national geographies, and individual religious traditions has certainly limited the appearance of more synthetic assessments or evaluations of broader impacts.

Further, the European nineteenth century has not been thought to be especially interesting with respect to questions of religion and gender, at least when compared with other eras. In Britain, one word may represent that perspective: Victorian. But there are broader connotations as well. The word is taken to represent the full flowering of ideology, of genderized virtue, of the consolidation of the middle class with its revised gender expectations, of women being regarded as more moral and more religious than men. Few people talked about political, social, or economic equality for women. The feminism that developed in the second half of the century was not nurtured or supported within the church. All this has no doubt discouraged the investigation of the larger topic for the nineteenth century. Similar points could be made about other European countries and cultures. In much of the scholarship of the last two decades, the reigning framework has moved from "separate spheres" to "the feminization of religion," yet the new label is hardly more enticing, applying helpfully to issues relating to demographics and recreational access but less well to the challenges and opportunities the century's great change put before religious people. Both tend to be used to end discussion rather than to set up a problem to be investigated, and neither helps to point to the struggles or the gains or to those who tried in one way or another to press the boundaries, to contest authority, or even to respond to perceptions of need in new ways.

Eventually, wherever we work, the "so what?" question emerges as a challenge to place a topic in some larger perspective. A reviewer of my early effort to collect documents on the subject of women and religion in England from 1700 to 1925 commented, "What the book does do, however, is to illustrate how slight, at least as regards modern religious history, is the addition to our knowledge which Women's Studies makes." (1) Some twenty years later, there is still only limited attention to the question of what difference a consideration of the question of gender has made for modern European religious history. Here, then, is a modest effort toward that end, focusing on the construction of models of Christian activity in the English nineteenth century, a question that, despite its apparent innocuousness, was considerably debated over much of the century. (2) I will take most of my illustrations from persons, activities, and movements that have not been so well covered in the research of social or religious historians. (3)

I. BENCHMARKS TO NOTE

Two brief tracts provide benchmarks for this investigation. They were almost surely not widely read at the time of publication or in the decades or centuries following, although both have had new life by being republished in various forms since the 1970s. When Margaret Fell wrote "Women's Speaking Justified" from prison in 1666, she was not the first advocate of women's religious proclamation, but hers was the most vigorous and challenging argument offered in English to that point against those who opposed what she called "women's speaking in the Church." (4) With no lack of biblical resources, from the Creation story of Genesis 1 to the church represented as a woman in Revelation 12, from the models set forth by women in the Bible to the example of Jesus in relating to women, Fell had much to appeal to in contending against those whose norms were the perceived sanctions of 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2. As she argued that those texts had only local rather than universal significance, she found her primary authority in an eschatological vision, the Spirit poured out upon all flesh and the contest between the True Church and the False Church, both communities being composed of men and women. In challenging established understandings of gender roles within the religious community, she contended not for all women, but for those who were part of the True Church, an eschatological not an institutional reality. Important to her argument were that the biblical precedents provided direct authority, not mediated institutionally, and that the work of the Holy Spirit gave the only ground needed for claiming a vocation. Although she did not appeal to Galatians 3:28, she did find much biblical support for her contention that "God hath put no such difference between the male and female as men would make." (5)

Florence Nightingale's "Cassandra," written in 1852 before she found a vocation in the Crimea, became a tiny part of the very large Suggestions for Thought to the Searchers for Truth among the Artizans of England that was only privately printed in 1860. It was not only an outcry against social indifference to the situation of women but a challenge to the culture to make use of the gifts of women. "Is the difference between man and woman this," she asked, "that woman has confessedly nothing to do?" Her proposal: "Jesus Christ raised women above the condition of mere slaves, mere ministers to the passions of the man, raised them by this sympathy, to be ministers of God. He gave them moral activity. But the Age, the World, Humanity, must give them the means to exercise this moral activity, must give them intellectual cultivation, spheres of action." (6) Note both the appeal to Jesus as the authority for women's moral activity and the absence of an appeal to the church for the means to exercise that moral activity. Recall, too, that this was well before women had access to the university, even longer before the receipt of academic degrees--largely because people could not imagine what one would do with this education. Nightingale posed what was, in effect, one of the great questions of the age. Whether others were similarly dubious regarding possibilities within institutional religion, Nightingale was right in her sense of things: increased spheres of action would take place not so much outside of the institution but at least without the planning and support of it. She lamented that the church provided no means for her to exercise her vocation, and soon thereafter she found her own means to do that. This, too, is part of the import of the question for modern religious history.

Between Margaret Fell and Florence Nightingale came a number of women writers, most significantly Mary Wollstonecraft, whose A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) not only claimed the revolutionary language of rights for the discussion of the social relations of the sexes, but also contended, against a considerable body of eighteenth-century advice literature, that the issue was not women's nature but the absence of meaningful education. (7) For all of the resistance over much of the next century to the use of "rights talk" in general as well as in its application to women, Wollstonecraft established the ground for a new stage in the national conversation that connected education to activity and thus the wider participation of women in the society. Despite objections to much of what was viewed as Wollstonecraft's radical agenda, Hannah More and other Anglican Evangelicals around the same time engaged in their own critique of the state of education for women. (8)

II. BOUNDARIES TO NEGOTIATE

In 1843 the Quarterly Review, one of the leading English journals, referred to Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna as "a muslin divine." The comment came in connection with a consideration of writers, especially women, who hide their names from public view. If not a compliment, it was a recognition of the voice and the vehicle for it. In a response in her own journal, Tonna declared, "Women have souls, and any attempt to corrupt the saving knowledge whereby alone a sinner may attain to eternal life becomes an attack upon individual faith to be individually repelled and answered. On this ground we respectively crave of our brethren, Reverend and literary, freedom of speech, at least among ourselves." (9) The following year an edition of her collected works was published in the United States, with an introduction by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Tonna died in 1846 at the age of 55.

She had been known in the publishing world as "Charlotte Elizabeth." The daughter of an Anglican clergyman in Norwich, she grew up to become a strong "Church and King" Tory, partly in reaction to the threats posed by the French Revolution and the Irish rebellions. She also became a vigorous anti-Catholic, one of the common traits of fervent Anglican Evangelicals, believing that the Church of England was "the most insurmountable barrier" to popery and Socinianism. (10) She married a military officer and followed him first to Nova Scotia and then to Ireland. They separated in 1824. She began a literary career somewhat accidentally as a tract writer, where she left off her married name in order to protect her earnings.

In 1829 the Catholic Emancipation Bill aroused her opposition, and later, in her Personal Recollections, she posed what eventually became the question of the day, later echoed by Florence Nightingale: "'But suppose a woman feels herself called on to take a personal interest in public affairs, what can she do, without stepping out of her proper sphere, and intruding into the province of the superior sex?' I am going to tell you what a woman may do," she went on; "for of us it may surely be said, 'Where there is a will, there's a way.' When we set our hearts upon any thing, we are tolerably enterprising and persevering too, in its attainment." (11)

Charlotte Elizabeth was clearly more than tolerably enterprising and persevering. She was invited to become the editor of a new journal, The Christian Lady's Magazine, its first issue appearing in January 1834. In her 1972 study, Women in Print: Writing Women and Women's Magazines from the Restoration to the Accession of Victoria, Alison Adburgham counted 235 of these periodicals. In that total are 132 that began in the eighteenth century and 96 in just the first four decades of the nineteenth. Many of these periodicals contained religious themes and topics, of course, but The Christian Lady's Magazine was the first to use a religious adjective with the gender referent.

To get some sense of the context in which Charlotte Elizabeth launched the journal, consider Adburgham's conclusion, that at the end of her period "women's magazines became ever more obsessively domestic" and "the atmosphere for women had begun to get claustrophobic," halting the progress women had made in the eighteenth century and reacting against the permissiveness of the Regency period. (12) While The Christian Lady's Magazine was intended for a middle-class audience, it did not, however, focus on advice or domestic matters. (13)

One aspect of the social context involved tying the question of women's roles to the understanding of the place of religion in the larger culture. Women often bore the brunt of the exhortation to Christians to separate from the world. In one sense the focus developed because it could, that is, the increasing number of persons in the middle class for whom it might be said that leisure was a legitimate possibility. Whereas it could be difficult to argue the same for men who had to contend for livelihood in the world, Christian women could be admonished to be not conformed to the world's fashions, led by its opinions, or governed by its laws. (14)

Charlotte Elizabeth's Christian Lady's Magazine did not so much challenge boundaries as negotiate them. Her introduction to the first issue noted the boundary assigned to women, yet that first issue opened a recurring section called "Politics." It began with a feigned conversation between the editor and "her uncle":

 "Politics!" exclaimed my uncle, who very unexpectedly popped
 his head over my shoulder, just as I had traced, in well rounded
 capitals, the imposing word which tops this page; "what in the world
 have you to do with politics?"

 This plain question, propounded in a tone of mirthful surprise,
 somewhat discomposed me; casting an air, almost of the ludicrous,
 over the conscious self-importance with which I had been invested
 but a moment before. However, I mustered courage, and confidently
 replied, "A great deal, uncle: I have undertaken to conduct the
 political department in the new Lady's Magazine." (15)

In the interchange that follows, she wonders what is so wrong for a woman to "collect the heads of a few important public events," and he observes that "it is the fashion of the age for women to leave their assigned sphere" to become "political agitators, political economists, and what not." She replies that her object is quite different. In succeeding issues the uncle comes to see the benefit to public morality when such topics are taken up, so long as the readership "adorn your stations without overstepping their boundary." (16) By the fourth issue the uncle is encouraging "the unfeminine study of political economy," especially as it would be "for the sake of your poor neighbours." In the next issue he defends the magazine against the critique of several women who believe the continuing topic of politics is unsuitable for a lady's magazine; he uses the factory question as his main example to make the point that religion should be carried into every question of the day. In the first issue of 1835, the question is laid to rest with the following declaration: "Some few friends have suggested the discontinuance of the pieces headed 'Politics,' but so decided is the majority of those who urge their continuance, that we shall make no alteration in that part of the work." (17) Over the course of the first two years, such topics as the Corn Laws, taxation, the national debt, child labor and the appropriate legislative response, machinery and the attendant implications for labor, and the Irish question were treated in the section on Politics and a new one on Political Economy.

That was not all. Charlotte Elizabeth printed essays of her own and of other authors on the abolition of slavery, the question of whether women should be involved in missionary activity, issues in education, and the like. In 1844 she proposed to boycott ready-made linens until she could determine that a fair price was being paid for needlework. She ran a series on great women in the Hebrew Bible and another on major theological doctrines. She encouraged debate on such questions of the day as female inferiority, the appropriateness of mixing religion and politics, simplicity of dress, and a topic called "the abuse of superfluities" (that is, how to deal with wealth) by running opposing points of view in successive issues of the journal.

Like the vast bulk of Evangelicals, she was not a supporter of Mary Wollstonecraft or of the language of "the rights of woman." One might recall that in the first half of the nineteenth century, if the hypothetical "rights of woman" were under attack or being revised in relation to Wollstonecraft's claims in response to Thomas Paine, the so-called "rights of man" were not doing too well, either. Still, because of her concern for the poor and distressed in society, Charlotte Elizabeth took another Wollstonecraft title and wrote a two-volume work on "the wrongs of woman," calling attention to the working conditions of milliners and dressmakers, domestic servants, and those toiling in the manufacture of pins and lace. (18) She understood "the rights of woman" in spiritual rather than in social or political terms; but in her works of social criticism and in activities among the poor Irish laborers in London, she spoke of a much larger agenda not only for Parliament and the nation but also for those Christian women who might through her writings become similarly concerned. The 1830s and 1840s were decades in which "women's mission" literature became prominent in England. Much of it focused inward, but Charlotte Elizabeth's engagement with that topic encouraged a different vision. (19)

Four years after her husband died in 1837, she married again and is thus known in the literature as Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna. After she died, The Christian Lady's Magazine continued for three years, but eventually stopped publication due to a drop in subscriptions. Her ultra-Protestant religious position, high Tory social perspective, and growing millennialist take on current issues did not endear her to later generations, and her work has only been studied in recent years, chiefly by literary scholars. (20) It was her sense that things were terribly askew, that the nation and certain groups of people in society were in great trouble, more than any particular issue, that drove her interest in producing a journal that was not frivolous and elicited such refrains as "What can Christian ladies do?" regarding the temperance question, and "Can nothing be done?" regarding the rehabilitation of prostitutes. (21) References to societies working on behalf of one cause or another appeared increasingly, with invitations to the readership for support and involvement: infant education, women's shelters, missions both home and abroad. (22)

Neither Tonna nor the journal established the voluntary societies dedicated to literally dozens of issues to which women were both permitted to belong and able to lead, but the journal appeared at a crucial time, when the very question of the extent of women's public activities was being debated in the culture. The Oxford Movement leader Edward Pusey, no friend of Evangelicals or of the public activities of women, expressed concern in 1838 that the proliferation of voluntary societies meant that the Church of England was losing its initiative in addressing contemporary issues. "Societies are our Episcopacy," he asserted, "and newspapers our rules of faith. This state of things cannot last without the dissolution of the Church." (23) It was, of course, not as bad as that. But something different had occurred: people perceived needs in the larger society that the Church seemed unable to address, and proposals emerged about what might be done and who might be engaged in those tasks. Women were the chief untapped resource, and need gradually trumped gender exclusion. (24)

III. OPPORTUNITIES TO IDENTIFY

Just over twenty years after Charlotte Elizabeth's journal had ceased publication, Woman's Work in the Great Harvest Field appeared. It ran from 1873 to 1894. The title itself indicated how great a change had occurred in the cultural and religious consciousness in barely two decades. The journal minced no words about the task, apologized for nothing, and saw the world as its sphere of work without ignoring the family. Its cover page offered "Papers illustrating the ministry of woman in its different aspects, and intended to draw into closer association and sympathy the quiet workers in the family and social circle, and those more actively engaged in home and foreign fields of mission labour--in schools, hospitals, workhouses, cottages, city rooms, etc." (25) This was an arm of the deaconess program established by the Reverend William Pennefather, first at his parish in Barnet in 1860 and then moved with him to St. Jude's, Mildmay Park, London in 1864. If he has been remembered more than his wife, it was Catherine Pennefather (1818-93), president of the Association of Female Workers from its founding in 1862 until her death, who was the major force behind the journal and the many activities recorded there. In its first issue she put the questions, who are the women to be employed? and what is to be their occupation? Her brief response: "ministry seems to be written across the whole page of woman's work." (26)

The journal is worth noting not so much for its arguments or articles as for the range of activities, causes, and societies promoted through its pages. It left deaconess work to other venues. The underlying theme, as Catherine Pennefather noted, was on complementarity ("woman's true work is what none but a woman can do," she declared), this in a time when complementarity was beginning to come under attack in the wider culture. Still, the attention to poverty and education, the recognition of the need for women in a large number of mission-related activities, and the encouragement to become involved in meaningful work certainly contributed to the stretching of imaginations regarding acceptable Christian activity for women. The journal helped to change the question into a statement of fact. As one person wrote, "Times, however, have changed; ... Has not God opened doors of usefulness all around us? Varied kinds of work need varied minds and powers; none can now say there is nothing that they can do." (27)

The organizations named and discussed in the journal included the Ladies' Female Emigrant Society, the Mildmay Colportage Association (for the selling of books), the Indian Female Normal School and Instruction Society, the Association for Promoting Education among the Slavonic Christians of Bosnia and the Herzegovina, the Children's Medical Missionary Society, and the Anglo-Oriental Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade. A multitude of concerns were identified to readers for their attention, financial support, and more direct involvement. The journal served, then, almost as a bulletin board for need and opportunity, an umbrella for a great variety of causes. In the first few years essays by Quaker women also appeared, urging women's involvement in issues related to local school boards and making the case for women's preaching.

After Constance Maynard (1849-1935) founded Westfield College, London, in 1882 as a Christian college for young women, she and others used the journal to advertise and advance the purposes of the institution. Criticized on the one hand by some Evangelicals who feared that further education would lead to doubt and on the other hand by some supporters of women's education who feared that a self-conscious religious identity would limit intellectual freedom, Maynard not only defended the intellectual preparation of women for a variety of useful work, but took up larger topics as foundations for her engagement in higher education. She used the categories of 2 Timothy 2 as models for the Christian life--soldier, wrestler, husbandman, workman, and servant--without any sense that they needed to be refigured for women, only suggesting that her readers "can say to one another under any apparent discouragement, any present restriction laid upon us, 'It doth not yet appear what we shall be.'" And she put the question of the Christian's contact with the world once more, noting that women rather than men had borne the chief burden of the claim that retreat was the appropriate response. Such a proposal was not good for the agent or for the work. "And it is but a timid position after all," she declared. "Where is the 'good fight of faith'?" (28) Her colleague at Westfield, Frances Gray, wrote, concerning the duty of women with regard,to politics, "Religion and politics are not two different spheres of life. (29) That such claims came from Evangelical women ought to say something about the import of this endeavor for modern religious history.

Ambitions, to be sure, contended with frustrations. Maynard established a Divinity course at Westfield in 1901 and gave two courses of lectures herself. Four years later it had to be dropped because of insufficient numbers of students, and Maynard complained that she could not get Evangelicals to listen to her, despite that being her primary ambition. "Quakers and Independents will listen," she said, "but not the Evangelical Church." (30)

IV. STRUGGLES TO PREACH

Women's preaching in the English nineteenth century is scattered and patchy, in part because it was so frequently contested. Issues of authority and perceived biblical sanctions (a combination of "headship" and the question of the appropriateness of speaking to mixed audiences) sometimes limited even the consideration of it. The encouragement of John Wesley from the 1760s was important in the emergence of occasional women preachers within the Methodist movement. But for one notable exception in the 1780s, they were not placed on the itinerant roster, as much for the risks of travel as for the challenge to gender roles. With the development of institutional forms after Wesley's death, the 1803 Methodist Conference declared that women should not be permitted to preach. Its stated reasons, that there was an adequate supply of preachers and that women should normally address an audience of women only, would almost surely have been rejected by Wesley before his death.

Women who had been preaching within the framework of Wesley's support, namely, that the authority to preach depended foremost on a sense of an extraordinary call, did not give up easily. Despite repeated efforts to control it through publications and Conference discipline, resistance occurred from the first. Zechariah Taft was only one of many who kept dissent from the denomination's leadership alive through letters, essays, and published works over several decades. (31) More immediately important for the activity was the modest network of relationships and correspondence that encouraged women in their work. Taft's wife, Mary Barritt Taft (1772-1851), experienced conversion in her late teens, joined the Methodist movement, and soon participated in exhorting and in leading class meetings. She first used the word "preached" in her memoirs in connection with a 1794 meeting in a Yorkshire town hall. After her marriage, and despite occasional denominational objection, she functioned often as a kind of co-itinerant with her husband. She once wrote to Mary Bosanquet Fletcher, "I laboured a littel [sic] for the Lord while my name was Barritt and dare not give it up now for my own Souls sake and have some reason to believe my labours have not been in vain in the Lord though I am very unworthy of Such a Master and still more to be imployd [sic] in Such a Worke." (32)

Mary Tooth (1777-1843) was Mary Fletcher's companion and nurse in the last several years of Fletcher's life. She served as class leader and preacher for some thirty years around Madeley, in the new industrial areas of Shropshire, where Fletcher's husband had been vicar. Her sermon notes concentrate on issues involved in salvation: the power of sin and the need for repentance and conversion, building a sure foundation on Christ, and living a life of holiness. When she did not preach, she might tell a story or read an account of an individual to illustrate how one might have been an adversary to God's truth but later became a model of righteousness, how one could be both poor and very pious, or how one had endured disaster or personal crisis in order to come to the realization of their need for grace. In one two-year period (1816-18), she recorded conducting more than thirty-five meetings in some fifteen different locations, not unlike the activity of class leaders and lay preachers who had been engaged from almost the beginning of the movement. As such, it went under the radar of the discouragement of women preachers. Still, it reflected a resistance as well as a determination to carry the message and advance the cause, with or without denominational recognition or support.

Mary Tooth was also a key participant in that informal network of Methodist women preachers. Sarah Mallet, later Boyce (1768-ca. 1845), had begun with Wesley's support. One recent biographical note states that she gave up her preaching "perhaps after her marriage or because of the 1803 Conference's prohibition of female preaching." Yet her correspondence with Mary Tooth tells a different story. Boyce often travelled with another preacher, Martha Gregson, and her letters record both successes and trials. In one 1830 letter, she wrote about recent experiences in Norwich: "During the summer I travelled over part of the four circuits where I have been used to preach at times for more than forty years. Here I found seales [sic] to my ministry that stood stedfast in the faith. This greatly encuraged [sic] me to labour on though I was in great weakness and pain and greatly tempted to return home." A decade later she reported resistance: "Satan has always tried to hinder me in my Lord's work but could not. Now he has set others to work to do it that ought to have helped me. They own they cannot hinder me from public speaking because Mr. Wesley took me in as a preacher, but I am denied the pulpit. I may exhort in the meetings but take no text. I ask them if God had ordered them to chuse [sic] his instruments and their work, and how, and where it was to be done.... Neither earth nor hell shall shut my mouth till the Lord shut it by death." (33)

Many other examples could be cited from the Primitive and the Bible Christian Methodist traditions, which split from the Wesleyans and opened the preaching ministry to women. But by the third generation, there were no more women on the itinerancy of these Methodist movements. When education and respectability became more important as credentials for preaching, the denominations' interest declined sharply. A symposium on "The Position of Woman in the Church" in the Primitive Methodist journal in 1885 basically dismissed its beginnings, when placing women on the itinerancy was one of its marks of distinction. The best that one participant could do was to note that while Galatians 3:28 did not put the case for complete equality, "the tendency of the age is unquestionably in the direction of equality." (34)

The work of independent women preachers in Leeds in the 1820s and 1830s and more broadly as part of urban revivals of the 1860s, both popular religious expressions within quite different class situations, also did not continue into a next generation, save for the opportunities for women provided by the Salvation Army as a result of the leadership of Catherine Mumford Booth. (35) Yet the flurry of examples of women preachers in the 1860s and the arguments used to support them, as Olive Anderson notes, had an additional broader impact, such that "both the functions of women and received ideas about what those functions should be were altered and enlarged." (36) One place where the activity did continue with some denominational involvement, and that in multiple locations and settings, was in overseas work. As only one of many examples, an English Presbyterian missionary to China from 1879 to 1906, Catherine Ricketts, made numerous references in her diary to her preaching in various situations, from prayer meetings for women to larger worship services with both genders present. Far from ecclesiastical authority, they seemed not to wonder if they should have permission to do the work, and they carved out their own models of Christian activity as need and opportunity warranted. (37)

V. WORK TO DO

It did not take long for persons in the nineteenth century to realize that there neither could nor would be mission work, near or far, without women. In part it was a matter of demand in relation to supply. From this came the oft-used Victorian expression, "woman's work for woman," but its varieties are striking. Wesleyan Methodism contained several such initiatives, often created within the denominational umbrella but without its direct support. I can point to three of them here.

An appeal from a missionary wife in India in 1858 led to the formation of a women's missionary society, its aim being "to gather into one centre the isolated effort of Christian ladies, or small associations of ladies, in the various towns and villages of our land." It would raise funds to send and support female agents for teaching, leading Bible classes, distributing tracts, and other work. One of the first agents sent to Belize died within a year of yellow fever. As the society reflected on whether she should have been sent, it concluded that "it was in obedience to a clear call and a plain signal that she went forth." (38) By the end of the third year, there were twenty-two local associations, and eleven agents had been sent to six different countries. In 1876 Caroline Wiseman became one of five secretaries of the society, and for more than thirty-five years she was its most energetic traveler and vigorous spokesperson. At century's end, its number of local associations had greatly expanded, and its annual budget of over 15,000 [pounds sterling] supported schools, teachers, Biblewomen, Zenana workers, and medical missionaries. Organization, visibility, independence, widespread participation, opportunities for leadership and for service, as well as clear marks of success all contributed to making this society an indispensable part of the church's mission program. (39)

From an idea begun in the universities, of establishing settlement houses to work among the poor in London, emerged a similar idea in the 1880s for women within the activities supported by the Methodist minister Hugh Price Hughes. Katherine Price Hughes, his wife, took charge of what came to be called the Sisters of the People, and she later remarked that in comparison with the opportunities available to women in the Catholic and Anglican churches, as well as those in the Salvation Army, "we felt that in Methodism there were many women equally devoted and capable, who would render untold service to their Church, and to suffering and outcast humanity, if some opportunity were afforded them of definitely organised work, to which they could devote their lives." (40) Eventually considered an important arm of the Methodist Forward Movement, it might be seen as a kind of urban Peace Corps for Methodist women, before government imagined social welfare as its purview. In a paper before the Ladies' National Association in 1891, Price Hughes gave credit to the women of the Society of Friends for showing that Christianity imposed moral responsibility for public life upon women. A larger idea of salvation abolishes, she declared, "any essential distinction between private and public life.... The terms of Christianity are alike for both sexes." (41)

The Methodist Times for 1888 carried a story about what was called the Methodist Training-Home for Female Evangelists in Halifax. It had been started by a local manufacturer, a Mr. Clegg, who, after observing the work of the Salvation Army, decided that persons who would not listen to a minister or layman might be attracted to the preaching of women. He found a Miss Cook in a nearby town, built a room to seat five hundred, and put her in charge of both the services and the training program that soon followed. Clegg reported that he believed with John Wesley that Methodism was an extraordinary dispensation of God's providence and that women's speaking qualified as an exception to general practice. In an interview reported in the newspaper, Miss Cook avoided the question of whether her evangelists preached, but did take on the question of whether she had been troubled by the writings of Paul on the subject of women preachers. She replied, "Yes, at times. Mrs. Booth, however, has greatly helped me to understand the question by what she has written. I do not understand St. Paul to prohibit our kind of work. If I did, I would discontinue it, for we wish to obey the Bible. I understand him to refer to customs which existed in his day, but which are not known amongst us." (42) In so doing, Cook stood in a long line of English interpreters, going back at least to Margaret Fell and continuing through Catherine Booth, working to enlarge and enrich the models of Christian activity open to women.

Each of these instances was developed on the initiative of just a few individuals, with a focus on a targeted need and a sense of the availability of enough women to address it. Behind such ventures, however, was a set of larger questions, not least of which was whether there should be gender distinctions in Christian activity. If this question was not fully resolved by the end of the century, examples had been set forth to enable succeeding generations to take it up again. And that, too, is part of the import for modern religious history.

VI. EXPECTATIONS TO CHALLENGE

It might initially seem counterintuitive to discover that in that century of "the feminization of religion," both the numbers and the percentage of Quaker women preachers declined dramatically, from almost two-thirds of the entire number of Quaker ministers early in the nineteenth century to two-fifths early in the twentieth. The modest-sized British Society of Friends itself also declined by about one-third between 1800 and 1860, about two-thirds since 1680. A substantial reassessment of the causes of decline began in earnest with an essay contest in 1858, with the prize going to John Stephenson Rowntree. His list of reasons for decline included inadequate distribution of recorded ministers across the meetings, failure to proselytize, the persistence of silent meetings, and frequent disownments for a variety of offenses. He called the denomination "seclusive" because of its strategy of separation from the world, that isolation manifested in such particulars as language and dress. (43)

Quaker women preachers in the first half of the nineteenth century were among the most prominent voices advocating separation from the world. Sarah Lynes Grubb (1773-1842) regularly called her audiences to be a separate people and to free the corruptions of the world, proclaiming that "God will have a people of pure and plain language, and a ministry among them of his own choosing, and of his own guiding, and of his own blessed keeping." (44) She and many others modeled this kind of religious life, itinerating for weeks or months at a time, encouraging, consoling, praying with, and preaching to small groups of co-religionists. (45) Their frequent memoirs, collected letters, and biographies extended their influence even more broadly across the denomination into the next generation. It might not quite have been "separate spheres," but women ministers best represented the pattern of Quaker distance from the world. (46)

During the period of reassesment, many in the Society of Friends came to believe with Rowntree that the ideal itself had contributed to numerical decline and that some of the particulars supporting it needed to be reviewed. Language reflecting a distinction between "the wilderness of the world" and the "straight and narrow path to heaven" no longer worked. And women had been caught up in this because religion had been caught up in it. In the course of the debate that followed, both women and men argued for the retention of simple dress for women. Even though God looks at the heart, one man declared, God looks also for fruit, "for evidence that we have been redeemed from the world." Concerning fashionable dress, asked one woman, "Does not its inconsistency with the doctrines we teach stagger the faith of the weak, and lead to the questioning of our 'godly sincerity'?" (47) At the same time, others contended that despite considerable social progress, there was much where woman's work was especially needed. Despite the recognition by the Society of the equality of man and woman, Louisa Stewart asserted, many were held back "by the restraints of a false appreciation of woman." More directly, she added, "The making to ourselves a world of our own to any extent, is only an attempt to subvert the very object of our lives here." (48)

The reassessments came at the time of the emergence of increased opportunities for higher education for women and the introduction of the suffrage question into the national debate. Elizabeth Sturge wrote a letter to The Friend in 1873 expressing regret that despite the denomination's attention to a variety of philanthropies, "the cause of Woman's Suffrage receives no recognition there." Her larger claim represented a dramatic shift in the understanding of religious activity and the role of women in that activity: "The aim of every Women's Suffrage Association is to obtain for women in general a participation in the business interests of the world. Our Society conceded the principle long ago; it ought to stand first and foremost in helping to place women in their right position as 'helpmeets' in ruling, as well as in all other vocations of life." (49)

Some commentators have expressed surprise at the Quaker hesitancy to take up the cause of women's suffrage or to support with enthusiasm the new opportunities for higher education. But one might observe that these hesitations were directly congruent with having put the burden of separation from the world more heavily on women than on men, an ideal that had been borne more directly by an earlier generation of women ministers. It was, after all, in the 1860s that the decline in the numbers of women recorded as ministers began to be noticed. The demise of distinctive language and simple dress that occurred during this period was only a small sign of a much more significant transformation. It, too, related to models of Christian activity for women. When Ellen Robinson (1840-1912) complained in 1892 of the denomination's slowness in taking up the cause of higher education for women, she had something even more transformational in mind:

 The exclusion of women from all offices in the church, from the
 liberal professions, and from all share in the government of the
 country, have also been reasons why it has been thought a waste of
 time and money to cultivate the mental faculties with which God has
 endowed them. Women have thus been placed at an enormous
 disadvantage, and then the very disadvantages from which they
 have suffered have been made an argument against their fitness to
 receive a full share in the educational endowments of the
 country. (50)

A number of Quaker women were, of course, recorded as ministers in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Their careers, however, were considerably different from those who were role models in the first half. Ellen Robinson of Liverpool made her most distinctive contribution working for international peace. Other women became nurses, educators, Poor Law Guardians, and essayists who interpreted the Quaker message to a wider world. Their memoirs spoke more of the work and less of the ministry, where service in the world replaced distance from it. Decline in numbers, then, was not so much a sign of denominational resistance to women's ministries as a form of resistance by women to the expectations of these ministries and, more particularly, to having to represent the ideal of religion as separate from the world. As that more recent generation embodied a different ideal, they became models for a new understanding that broke the gendered exclusiveness regarding religious vocation in the modern world.

VII. LEGACIES TO ACKNOWLEDGE

The 1902-3 report of the Wesley Deaconess Order offered a declaration and a challenge to the Wesleyan Methodist Conference: "The Employment of Women in the Work of the Methodist Church is no longer an open question. They will be employed: successful experiment both demands and justifies their employment. The only question is, will the Church employ them, under the most favourable conditions, and with the best possible guarantees against failure in character and in efficiency?" (51) The Order had been in existence for barely a dozen years, so in making such a challenge it dared to speak for what had been more than a century filled with opportunities and restrictions, participation and limitation. The same dynamic would go on for much of the twentieth century. Still, the statement could be made for virtually all of the British Protestant bodies, and that is precisely the import for modern religious history and some instance of the contribution, such as it is, of the nineteenth century (52)

The contest over the question of the ordination of women to the ministry of English churches was largely a twentieth-century issue, stimulated in part by the political suffrage debate that, in turn, raised the question of representation in denominational governance. The Church of England's consideration of the question has attracted more attention than other institutional discussions, in part, I suspect, because it has gone on so long, debated in fits and starts over most of the last century. The question still goes on, ten years after the first ordinations, now in terms of the provision for "flying bishops" for parishes opposed to women clergy and the current prohibition against women bishops.

Two books of essays coming out of the Church of England debate are especially illuminating for the insights they offer into the effort to expand the models of Christian activity and thereby potentially to reform and revitalize the church. One, Crossing the Boundary: What will Women Priests Mean? was written in the moment between the Church's vote in 1992 and the first ordinations in 1994. Several of its contributors had been ordained deacon in the late 1980s and had been in a variety of ministry activity. The second, Voices of this Calling: Experiences of the First Generation of Women Priests, was published in 2002, a decade after the crucial vote. Amid expressions of anger, frustration, discouragement, apprehension, and resistance that are present in both collections, the language of vocation predominates. Many of the authors reflect on a long journey into ministry, the explorations of other careers, and the ongoing experience of a call to the priesthood. As the anticipations in the first book are followed by reflections on fulfillment in the second, hopes and visions for ministry and for the church emerge out of both. (53)

Perhaps we need the twentieth century's consideration of the ordination of women to appreciate better what some of these nineteenth-century developments offer for later reflection. The resistance offered to expressions of vocation is a start, for one can hardly imagine how much more there might have been without the resistance. The powerful relationship between religion and gender essentialisms, the ways in which that relationship made a foundation for both obstacles and opportunities, and the impact this has had for the understanding of the location and the relocation of religion in the larger society is surely a significant part of modern religious history. Contrary to some who have tended to see evangelicalism as part of the problem, it was not all bad news. The interrelationship of demand and supply enabled advocates of enlarged models of Christian activity for women to use the appeal of Galatians 3:28 and the theological category of image of God as grounds for the yet broader claim to open all offices within the respective institutions to women, when previous interpretations had been much more limited.

My examples are, of course, only a small set of what might be offered. They do not include the Victorian reformers like Elizabeth Fry and Josephine Butler, whose activities resulted in important social or political change. They do not include the significant increase in the numbers of religious orders for women or the numbers of women attracted to spiritualism, whose activities on either end of a religious spectrum did not so much present challenges to religious or cultural understandings of gender roles, but whose independence did. And they do not include multiple countries and religious traditions. There is much to do on a micro level, perhaps even more on the macro level, in order to enrich our understanding of the importance of this topic for modern religious history.

Although one can hardly claim a direct connection, the expansion of models of Christian activity for women in the nineteenth century established a foundation from which the next set of questions could be engaged in the twentieth. If nothing is excluded from the ministry of women, why do some things remain excluded? Of course, many did not believe that nothing was excluded. In the twentieth century, however, the arguments against such activity and participation had to be marshaled especially because not everybody any longer believed they were self-evident.

(1.) Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36 (1985): 162.

(2.) For the early modern period in England, see Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England 1500-1720 (London: Routledge, 1993). No comparable survey exists for the later period. Two recent studies take up the subject of gender and women from the angle of social history. Robert B. Shoemaker's Gender in English Society 1650-1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres? (London: Longman, 1998) devotes part of one chapter to religion. Kathryn Gleadle's British Women in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001) organizes her subject in relation to class, treating the topics of work, politics, and families in each section of the book. Lilian Lewis Shiman is especially successful in integrating attention to religious themes into a larger topic in Women and Leadership in Nineteenth-Century England (New York: St. Martin's, 1992). For a consideration of the contribution of evangelicals to the construction of a separate-spheres ideology, see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Two broad-gauged essays should also be noted. Rosemary O'Day uses the resources of the Charles Booth Archive Collection to explore, among other things, "the space which women created for themselves to occupy outside the domestic sphere," in "Women in Victorian Religion," in Retrieved Riches: Social Investigation in Britain, 1840-1914, eds. David Englander and Rosemary O'Day (Aldershot, U.K.: Scolar, 1995), 339-63, citation on page 357. Jocelyn Murray's "Gender Attitudes and the Contribution of Women to Evangelism and Ministry in the Nineteenth Century," in Evangelical Zeal and Public Faith: Evangelicals and Society in Britain 1780-1980, ed. John Wolffe (London: SPCK, 1995), 97-116, concludes that although the "Christian ideal" for women held them back from leadership roles, by the end of the period "the women themselves had begun to find their own way," 113.

(3.) Recent collections of essays offer some suggestions of the range of scholarship that is being explored. See Anne Hogan and Andrew Bradstock, eds., Women of Faith in Victorian Culture: Reassessing the Angel in the House (Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 1998), and Sue Morgan, ed., Women, Religion and Feminism in Britain, 1750-1900 (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). A few essays in Linda Woodhead, ed., Reinventing Christianity: Nineteenth-Century Contexts (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2001) also deal with gender issues.

(4.) Christine Trevett, ed., "Womens Speaking Justified" and Other Seventeenth-century Quaker Writings about Women (London: Quaker Home Service, 1989), 4. Margaret Fell married George Fox in 1669 and eventually became the most prominent "mother in Israel" in the Society of Friends. For a careful analysis of the document, see Margaret Olofson Thickstun, "Writing the Spirit: Margaret Fell's Feminist Critique of Pauline Theology," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 63:2 (1995): 269-79.

(5.) Ibid., 5. Phyllis Mack's Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) explores the complexity of gendered discourse and understandings of the self in this period.

(6.) "Cassandra." An Essay by Florence Nightingale (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist, 1979), 32 and 50.

(7.) Wollstonecraft remarked extensively on the relationship between education and activity, as in the following: "Women have seldom sufficient serious employment to silence their feelings; a round of little cares, or vain pursuits frittering away all strength of mind and organs, they become naturally only objects of sense. In short, the whole tenour of female education (the education of society) tends to render the best disposed romantic and inconstant; and the remainder vain and mean." A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792; London: J. M. Dent, 1995), chapter 4.

(8.) As an example, in 1798 Priscilla Wakefield, even within a vigorously class-conscious framework, wrote, "It cannot be expected that young females will of choice apply themselves to serious studies, or be willing to become industrious members of the community, whilst they are impressed from infancy with a notion, that they are born only to create admiration, and that they are excluded from the necessity of any regular occupation, beyond that of domestic superintendance, or what conduces to the acquisition of elegant accomplishments." Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex, with Suggestions for its Improvement (London: J. Johnson, 1798), 70-71.

(9.) The Christian Lady's Magazine 19 (June 1843), ii. The same issue of the Quarterly Review that contained the "muslin divine" reference offers a glimpse into the social context surrounding women of an Evangelical persuasion. A review by Elizabeth Eastlake of a series of novels by Mrs. Sherwood stated the common gender stereotypes with respect to woman's nature rather well: "feelings of women in the cause of religion are easily excited"; they concur with "whatever system assumes the greatest amount of present devotional activity"; they should be guarded by Christian men "from that contagious fervour to which they are by nature liable"; "knowing that whatever charm a woman's heart may find in the apparent self-devotion contained in the doctrines we have described, the union of sound manliness and sound religion in the other sex has in the same heart, by the blessing of Providence, a higher charm still." "Evangelical Novels," Quarterly Review 72 (May 1843): 52-53.

(10.) Personal Recollections, in The Works of Charlotte Elizabeth, 5th ed., 2 vols. (New York: M. W. Dodd, 1847), 1:15.

(11.) Ibid., 1:94.

(12.) Alison Adburgham, Women in Print: Writing Women and Women's Magazines from the Restoration to the Accession of Victoria (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1972), 271.

(13.) It is easy to be condescending about such journals. In a survey of women's periodicals in mid-Victorian Britain, E. M. Palmegiano writes regardIng the decade of the 1840s, "edited by such notoriously pious women as Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna and Mary Milner, these publications propagandized a life most often described as typically Victorian where mothers managed their households and children sensibly and wives manifested their personalities as little as possible." "Women and British Periodicals 1832-1867: A Bibliography," Victorian Periodicals Newsletter 9:1 (March 1976): 4. Such a description does not begin to recognize the subtle ways in which The Christian Lady's Magazine offered mixed messages and tested the boundaries perceived for the Evangelical female.

(14.) A good example of such an argument can be found in The Christian Lady's Magazine 7 (January 1837), 72.

(15.) The Christian Lady's Magazine 1 (January 1834), 73.

(16.) Ibid., 1 (February 1834), 160.

(17.) Ibid., 1 (April 1834), 350; 3 (January 1835), i.

(18.) Charlotte Elizabeth, The Wrongs of Woman, 2 vols. (London: W. H. Dalton, 1843-44).

(19.) The exercise of vocation by women in religious writing became prominent in the seventeenth century, and thus as an example of a model of Christian activity for women antedates the period under consideration here. By the early nineteenth century, at least from the time of Hannah More, sales of women's religious writings became a force to be reckoned with. While scholars have explored the contents and arguments of these writings, little attention has been given to the position that a number of women had in serving as publicists to the larger society on behalf of particular movements, ideals, and religious views. Charlotte Yonge (1823-1901) was such a person for High Church Anglicanism, publishing some 160 books over fifty years and editing The Monthly Packet, a journal directed toward young women, for thirty years. Isabel (Mrs. G. S.) Reaney (1847-1929) did the same for the temperance movement, writing nearly 60 books in a forty-year period mainly intended for adolescents and often given as prizes in Sunday Schools and other religious contexts. Within the Nonconformist evangelical world, Marianne Farningham, a pen name of Mary Ann Hearn (1834-1909), had a wide readership for some fifty years through her short writings in The Christian World and other religious magazines, collections of essays in book form, and an autobiography.

(20.) Christine L. Krueger devotes a chapter to her in her fine study, The Reader's Repentance: Women Preachers, Women Writers, and Nineteenth-Century Social Discourse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). See also two articles by Monica Correa Fryckstedt, "Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna: A Forgotten Evangelical Writer," Studia Neophilologica 52 (1980): 79-102, and "Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna and The Christian Lady's Magazine," Victorian Periodicals Review 14:2 (summer 1981): 43-51.

(21.) The Christian Lady's Magazine 5 (February 1836), 133; 6 (October 1836), 323-26. The preface to volume 6 declared, "Christian females must not expect to be always at ease in Zion: they have many and solemn duties to perform. And if this humble periodical, established solely for their use, may in any measure become subservient to the great end of rousing and encouraging them, it will be a matter of present and eternal thanksgiving." Ibid., 6 (July-December 1836), iii.

(22.) In 1838 Charlotte Elizabeth lamented that the frequent mention of causes needing support had led to the situation where "we are now assailed on all sides by societies ... which, if we admitted them, would really so occupy our pages, and weary the minds of our readers, that we must alter our title into that of the Monthly Mendicant, or at least the Monthly Advertiser." Ibid., 9 (January-June 1838), ii.

(23.) [Edward B. Pusey], "The Royal and Parliamentary Ecclesiastical Commissions," British Critic 23:46 (1838): 525.

(24.) Voluntary societies with religious motives or tasks had begun in the late seventeenth century, but the establishment of women's auxiliaries or independent women's societies for such purposes was an outgrowth of the evangelical movement and the emergence of Bible and missions societies at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. F. K. Prochaska reports that "by 1819 there were 350 female associations in the Bible Society with about 10,000 women 'regularly employed'; they were bringing in tens of thousands of pounds each year." Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), 27.

(25.) Woman's Work in the Great Harvest Field 3 (1874), cover page. Since it covered a broad range of topics and issues, Woman's Work can be distinguished from such single-issue journals as India's Women, dealing with foreign missions (begun 1881), or Pioneer, focusing on moral reform (begun 1887). Woman's Work did not deal with the suffrage question or the campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts that ran from the late 1860s to the mid 1880s, and thus it is not included in David Doughan and Denise Sanchez, eds., Feminist Periodicals 1855-1984: An Annotated Critical Bibliography of British, Irish, Commonwealth and International Titles (Washington Square: New York University Press, 1987).

(26.) Ibid., 1 (1872):35.

(27.) "Daughters at Home," ibid., 15 (1886):126.

(28.) "Some Aspects of the Christian Life," ibid., 15 (1886):39-44; "A Christian's Contact with the World," ibid., 19 (1890):65-70, 97-100.

(29.) "What is the Duty of Women with regard to Politics," ibid., 18 (1889):133.

(30.) C. B. Firth, Constance Louisa Maynard, Mistress of Westfield College: A Family Portrait (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1949), 288.

(31.) Zechariah Taft, Biographical Sketches of the Lives and Public Ministries of Various Holy Women, 2 vols. (Leeds, 1825, 1828; facsimile reprint, Peterborough: Methodist Publishing House, 1992).

(32.) MAM PLP 104.5, no. 2 (n.d.), Methodist Archives and Research Center, Manchester, U.K., An account of her early ministry was published as Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Mary Taft, Part I (York, 1827; London: J. Stevens, 1827); an epigraph on the title page cites Galatians 3:28 along with two other biblical passages. To show her intent to follow the Methodist regulations regarding women preachers, she notes in the preface that she made it a rule "never to go to any place to labour, without a previous invitation from the travelling preacher, as well as the friends of the circuit I visited." Yet she acknowledges an occasional exception, "when I have been so sensible of its being my duty, and the will of God, for me to go, that I durst not at the peril of my soul neglect going," viii-ix. For an important insight into the meanings of biological motherhood for Methodist women, see Phyllis Mack, "Giving Birth to the Truth: A Letter by the Methodist Mary Taft," Scottish Journal of Religious Studies 19:1 (1998): 19-30.

Many of the letters to Mary Taft over the years testified to her contributions through preaching. In 1805 Robert Harrison wrote from the Methodists in Carlisle "to humbly desire your help (you and your husband) as the preachers of their choice for the ensuIng Conference etc. I hope your good man will not be umbraged at my putting his wife first." MAM PLP 104.1.8. Among those who acknowledged havIng been brought to conversion under her preaching were Mary Anderson (letter of 1811, regarding preaching nine years earlier--MAM PLP 104.1.3), Joseph Bakewell (letter of 1840, relating to preaching forty years earlier--MAM PLP 104.1.4), and John Stobart (letter of 1827, regarding preaching in 1793--MAM PLP 104.2.4). Stobart added, "ever since, I have found a pleasure in pious females speaking a word for God. My mind has got satisfied that those passages of Holy Writ has [sic] been misunderstood that are brought forth, to set such aside. The Almighty cannot be against what he blesses, & owns for the salvation of sinners, & comfort of saints."

(33.) For the biographical note, see John A. Vickers, ed., A Dictionary of Methodism in Britain and Ireland (Peterborough: Epworth, 2000), 221; Gareth Lloyd, The Fletcher-Tooth Papers, vol. 1 (Manchester, U.K.: John Rylands University Library, Methodist Archives and Research Centre, 1997), MAM F1-1.12/2 (13 March 1830), and MAM F1-1.12/9 (26 January 1841).

(34.) "Symposium: The Position of Woman in the Church," The Primitive Methodist Quarterly Review and Christian Ambassador, N.S. 7 (1885): 223-41,241-45, 423-35, 436-42, 676-82, 683-86; the citation is from Robert Bryant, 425. The activities of female local preachers in three Methodist denominations in the nineteenth century are traced by E. Dorothy Graham in "Women Local Preachers," in Workaday Preachers: The Story of Methodist Local Preaching, eds. Geoffrey Milburn and Margaret Batty (Peterborough: Methodist Publishing House, 1995), 165-91, 319-21.

(35.) D. Colin Dews, "Ann Carr and the Female Revivalists of Leeds," in Religion in the Lives of English Women, 1760 1930, ed. Gail Malmgreen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 68-87; Olive Anderson, "Women Preachers in Mid-Victorian Britain: Some Reflections on Feminism, Popular Religion, and Social Change," Historical Journal 12 (1969): 467-84. In Women in God's Army: Gender and Equality in the Early Salvation Army (Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2003), Andrew Mark Eason argues that "with the exception of preaching, where feminine passion was seen to complement masculine reason, this type of gender complementarity fostered a profound culture of separate spheres within the denomination," the result being that "most female officers assumed subordinate and sacrificial roles in corps (church) ministry, social work and the home," xii. Pamela J. Walker's Pulling the Devil's Kingdom Down: The Salvation Army in Victorian Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) gives more attention to the stories of individual Salvationists and offers a much more positive assessment of the roles and activities of women in the early years of the movement. Her summary judgment is that "the Hallelujah Lasses were pioneers in establishing an authoritative, public, religious voice for women," 243.

(36.) Anderson, "Women Preachers," 484. But the work of such women preachers did not represent progress for many. One contributor to the previously mentioned Primitive Methodist symposium declared, "No doubt the crass ignorance, the vulgar zeal, the unseeming boldness exhibited by some women preachers of late have pained many pious souls, and have led them to denounce the whole thing. This off-putting of womanhood is one of the calamities connected with recent evangelism. Whilst we admit the validity of women preaching, we would certainly restrict it. It is the abuse of it that has rendered it as nauseating of late, and we as a Connexion are not altogether guiltless." "Symposium: The Position of Woman in the Church," 682.

(37.) See Diary of C. M. Ricketts, 1879-1906, 3 vols. Presbyterian Church of England Archives, box 1, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, especially vol. 2. The 1886 annual meeting of the denomination's women's missionary association reported one vignette regarding Ricketts's work: "When some of the Biblewomen were taught, Miss Ricketts changed her plan somewhat; in the winter she went round the country visiting villages, and getting a crowd collected, she preached until her voice gave way, and then the Biblewomen would preach." Our Sisters in Other Lands: A Record of Mission Work among Women (Published for The Women's Missionary Association of the Presbyterian Church of England, 1883-86), 2:170-71.

(38.) Ladies" Committee for Ameliorating the Condition of Women in Heathen Countries, Female Education, &c., Occasional Paper, No. 1 (March, 1859), 5; Occasional Paper, No. 7 (November, 1860), 124.

(39.) A similar development occurred among English Presbyterians, though it began in earnest about twenty years later. A Ladies' Association in the Aid of Missions began in the mid 1840s and ran for about twenty years, focusing much of its work on the island of Corfu. From 1864 to 1878 there was no independent organization for mission work by Presbyterian women, but a women's conference in 1878 led to the establishment of The Women's Missionary Association of the Presbyterian Church of England in the following year. The third annual report noted seventy-four congregational associations, and a year later there were ninety-three, about one-third of the total number of congregations in the denomination. That number grew more slowly, but by late in the century more than two-thirds of congregations had established local associations, and financial contributions increased substantially. One agent from the central office traveled extensively among the congregations to advance the work. The association sent women missionaries chiefly to China and India. At the 1889 meeting the chair declared, "It is one of the remarkable signs of our times that women are stepping out into public life and work. It has been said by some that this is a result of the great democratic movement which is surging in upon the social life of the world. But I claim for Christianity the honour of what is best and most helpful in the movement." Our Sisters in Other Lands (1887-90), 3:129.

(40.) The Life of Hugh Price Hughes, by his Daughter (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1905), 201.

(41.) "Responsibility of Women with Regard to Public Life," Methodist Times 7 (1891): 353-54.

(42.) Methodist Times 4 (1888): 469-70.

(43.) John Stephenson Rowntree, Quakerism, Past and Present: An Inquiry into the Causes of its Decline in Great Britain and Ireland (London: Smith, Elder, 1859). I have considered the subject in greater detail in "From Pilgrimage to Discipleship: Quaker Women's Ministries in Nineteenth-Century England," Quaker History 91:2 (fall 2002): 18-32.

(44.) Sermons Preached by Members of the Society of Friends (London: Hamilton, Adams, 1832), 42 and 53.

(45.) For a study of women's friendships, often nurtured and sustained in the course of their ministries, see Sheila Wright, "'Every Good Woman Needs a Companion of Her Own Sex': Quaker Women and Spiritual Friendship, 1750-1850," in Women, Religion and Feminism in Britain, 1750-1900, ed. Sue Morgan, 89-104.

(46.) As one, no doubt extreme, example of the extension of this perspective into other evangelical traditions, Andrew Mark Eason notes that Catherine Booth's mother did not permit her to associate with neighborhood children "because of her mother's aversion to worldliness." Women in God's Army, 95.

(47.) J. M. Richardson, "An Address to Christian Women," The Friend (1870): 261; Alice Alexander, An Appeal to Christian Men on the Subject of Female Attire (Dublin: John Gough, 1872), 2.

(48.) Louisa Stewart, "A Word to our Sisterhood," Friends Quarterly Examiner 1 (1867): 579 and 583. Stewart followed this essay with a small book entitled The Missing Law; or Woman's Birthright (London: W. Tweedle, 1869), in which she declared her subject to be "the pernicious order of caste which ... I shall call the Order of Ladyhood, the first essential of whose existence is that of having 'nothing to d0!'" 6. Her proposals included the need for more sources of occupation for women and for the education of girls in the same subjects as boys, 41-42.

(49.) Elizabeth M. Sturge, "Women's Suffrage," The Friend (1873): 15.

(50.) Ellen Robinson, "The Higher Education of Women," Friends' Quarterly Examiner 26 (1892): 557.

(51.) Quoted in E. Dorothy Graham, Saved to Serve: The Story of the Wesley Deaconess Order 1890-1978 (Peterborough: Methodist Publishing House, 2002), 7.

(52.) The Pan-Anglican Congress of 1908 focused in part on "The Ministry of Women." Louise Creighton's lead paper considered such topics as marital status (chiefly the large numbers of single women in the society), the kinds of parochial work open to women, remuneration, and the relative expectations of work done by women and by men. She concluded, "Only common work on an absolutely free and equal basis will show what part of any work or what kind of work can best be done by women or best left to men." None of the contributors to the Congress raised the subject of the possibility of women clergy. "The Ministry of Women. Its Relation at the Present Time to Work Done by Men," Pan-Anglican Papers (London: SPCK, 1908), unpaginated. Just a few years later, Zoe Fairfield, a product of the Student Christian Movement, sounded a new direction when she linked the themes of the women's movement to questions facing the church: "What is the place of women in the work of the Church in general? What has it been in different eras of the life of the Church? Where have we fallen back, where should we seek opportunities for fuller service? What is the true place of women in the ministry of the Church? (Nothing is being taken for granted by the younger generation.)" The Women's Movement (London: SCM, 1913), 27.

(53.) Sue Walrond-Skinner, ed., Crossing the Boundary: What will Women Priests Mean? (London: Mowbray, 1994); Christina Rees, ed., Voices of this Calling: Experiences of the First Generation of Women Priests (Norwich: Canterbury, 2002).

Dale A. Johnson is Drucilla Moore Burlington Professor of Church History at the Divinity School of Vanderbilt University. On January 10, 2004, he delivered this paper as the presidential address to the American Society of Church History.