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Rapid Review

THE REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION
1 (2001): 194-198
© 2001 National Communication Association

Religious Women Rhetors

Karlyn Kohrs Campbell

Rebecca Larson.  Daughters of Light: Quaker Women Preaching and Prophesying in the Colonies and Abroad, 1700-1775. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. x + 399. Appendices and Index. $27.95 (paper).

Catherine A. Brekus. Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. x + 466. Index and bibliography. $49.95 (cloth); $17.95 (paper).

These books are important additions to the history of women’s speaking. Larson’s is a detailed study of Quaker women preachers in Great Britain and the American Colonies in the eighteenth century. Brekus uses fragmentary evidence to trace the careers of evangelical women preachers in this country in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The story of Quaker women’s preaching is better known; the history of evangelical women preachers has been erased from many church records, so Brekus’s book is an important historical recovery. What both establish is that religious communities provided the first venues in which women were able to find voice.

According to Larson, “an estimated thirteen hundred to fifteen hundred women ministers were active in the transatlantic Quaker community during the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century” (63). Evangelical women preachers affiliated with small, dissenting sects emerged out of the revivals of the First (ca. 1740) and Second (ca. 1845) Great Awakening.

Although they have largely disappeared from history books, evangelical preachers were among the first women to speak publicly in the American colonies; they preached to “promiscuous” audiences of men and women and were speaking publicly as early as the 1740s. Harriet Livermore, for example, preached in the Hall of the U.S. House of Representatives four times (1827, 1832, 1838, and 1841), always to large crowds (Brekus 18), a feat partly attributable to her family’s political connections. “To study their lives,” Brekus writes, “is to understand both the possibilities and the limitations of biblical feminism” (7).

Concurrently, at a time when women in other religious denominations were silenced, Quaker women ministers were active; many crossed the Atlantic as part of their ministry. Their history is an important corrective to histories written from the perspective of the New England Puritans.

Quaker beliefs made such roles for women possible. They “viewed social identities, gender attributes, and human appetites as superficial layers covering the ‘Seed,’ or ‘Light,’ of God’s voice within each person. Since Quakers believed that inspired words came from the same source, the indwelling Spirit of God, it was irrelevant who preached at the meeting” (18). The inclusion of women in the ministry and in church business meetings encouraged female literacy and travel. Moreover, the “Quaker method of decision making provided an unusual opening for female participation, since the Society of Friends did not arrive at decisions through the will of the majority (nor, theoretically, on the basis of political or economic power). Rather, those who most convincingly appeared to be speaking ‘in the power of the lord’ wielded the most influence” (194).

By the eighteenth century, the ministerial role had become customary for women. A spiritually “gifted” woman in the Society of Friends could pursue her ministerial “calling” without renouncing marriage or motherhood, although transatlantic travelers tended to defer both. Even married women with small children might receive warrants to travel if their “leading” was deemed authentic. “Service to God first (which in Quaker belief might demand public speaking, as well as travel), then husband and children, was the correct hierarchy for a woman; altering the traditional domestic ideal” (164).

Quaker women’s ministry faced less resistance through time; in the British Isles the Enlightenment increased religious skepticism and toleration of dissent. In the American colonies, Quakers had political and economic power. In addition, the First Great Awakening made audiences more tolerant of itinerant ministers and more responsive to preaching based on spiritual “witness” and less formal worship.

Clergy were most resistant to Quaker women’s activism. Quaker women’s preaching raised the issue of what qualified a person for the ministry and challenged university training and ordination as essential requirements. The women’s claim that Gospel ministry should not be remunerated threatened the established clergy. Quaker women ministers also benefited from stereotypes: “Female preaching could be appreciated within the traditional framework of women as mediums, as prophetesses, and as mystics” (287). As Larson notes, “Disputes over women’s abilities and their role in public life continued throughout the eighteenth century. Widespread prejudice still existed against women as preachers” (289); nonetheless, “Never before had so many women spoken in public before audiences composed of both sexes” (289).

Larson ends with a brief biography of Elizabeth Webb (1663-1727) whose life epitomizes the importance of Quakerism for women’s history. Like other white colonial women, Webb was a “feme couvert,” unable to own property, execute contracts, or convey property without her husband’s consent, wholly subsumed within her husband’s legal and political identity (297). Her public ministry transformed her life. She traveled widely and established a broad social network of men and women whom she met on her travels. Literacy enabled her to correspond with far-flung acquaintances. Preaching led to authorship. She had recognized spiritual authority, and she publicly represented her local community in a proposal to the Concord Monthly Men’s Meeting, although her husband held such political offices as assemblyman, county assessor, and justice of the peace. Larson concludes:

Eighteenth-century Quaker women’s conviction of their direct connection to God empowered them; not only allowing them to surmount the physical barriers of mountains and oceans, expanding the geographical boundaries of their world, but enabling them to overcome the conceptual barriers of traditional gender roles and perceived limitations of women’s capacities, expanding their life possibilities. (303-304)

By contrast, colonial conditions facilitated the emergence of evangelical women preachers. As churches were disestablished and became one more kind of voluntary association competing for members, they no longer seemed to be public institutions that should be governed by men alone. “Because churches bridged the public and the private, the ‘masculine’ world of government and the ‘feminine’ world of the family, many evangelicals claimed that women as well as men had the right to organize home missions societies, [and] several dissenting groups claimed that women also could vote on church business and serve as preachers,” Brekus writes (14). In other words, there was a vast middle ground between the public and the private that was shared by men and women, variously labeled “civil society,” “the social,” or the “informal public,” which included antislavery and temperance societies, home missions, and a variety of organizations that mediated between the family and the state. “If churches were simply an extension of the informal public of neighborhood gatherings and social visits, then there was no reason to fear that female exhorters might go out of their place” (51). In turn, the revivals of the First Great Awakening broke down restrictions on the religious speech of women and lay men. Women were allowed to pray aloud, to be informal evangelists or “exhorters”; conversion became a public event, so women were permitted to testify in public.

The differing circumstances of women preachers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are related to changing conceptions of gender. In the eighteenth century, most Americans accepted a one-sex model: there was only one sex, the male sex, and women were simply incomplete men. Accordingly, women could preach only if they transcended the limitations of their sex; conversion was self-abnegation; evangelical women sought to obliterate their sex in union with the divine, illustrated by the career of Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers.

In a pattern that would recur in U.S. history, evangelical women lost their public voice when struggling, marginal sects matured into prosperous denominations with the trappings of respectability, including a well-educated clergy. The revivals of the Great Awakening had temporarily subverted the restrictions on women’s religious speech, but by the mid-1750s in the North and the 1770s in the South, few evangelical women were allowed to speak (67).

In the nineteenth century, however, conceptions of gender changed. “Americans began to argue that women were not similar to men, but distinctively different in physiology, psychology, and intellect. Instead of one sex, there were two sexes with fundamentally different natures” (14). Accordingly, in the nineteenth century, evangelicals affirmed that women had a right to preach as women, as “Mothers in Israel” and “Sisters in Christ” who had been divinely inspired to preach the gospel (15).

A backlash against female preaching occurred during the 1830s and 1840s, however. Any woman who became a preacher, no matter how pious, was believed “lost to modesty and prudence” (272). Black women faced even greater hostility than white women. The most vocal and influential critics were mainline clergy. “To the eyes of mainline ministers, female preaching resembled a contagious disease: it spread from denomination to denomination instead of staying confined to a few countercultural sects” (277).

Brekus summarizes the limitations of biblical feminism: Evangelical women rarely protested their political and economic subordination; they demanded only the right to preach; most were single when their careers began; if married, they deferred to husbands; they accepted their position as the subordinate sex; with only a few exceptions, they did not demand the same rights and privileges as male ministers (224). Most evangelical female preachers resented being confused with platform-speaking “radicals” and seem to have believed that the feminist reformers of the 1830s and 1840s hurt them more than they helped them. As Brekus recognizes, the battle over female preaching was a battle over women’s proper place in nineteenth century America (283).

Of special note is that, in addition to being excluded from the pulpit, female preachers also were excluded from the pages of church records and clerical memoirs. A few, such as African American Jarena Lee, wrote memoirs designed to affirm the legitimacy of their calling. Brekus concludes, however: “As biblical feminists, female preachers stood outside of the two communities who might have tried to preserve their memory. Too radical to be accepted by evangelicals and too conservative to be accepted by women’s rights activists, they were caught between two worlds. Remembered by neither, they disappeared into the silence of the past” (339).

For all who are interested in the dynamics affecting the rhetorical history of women, these books are must reading.

Karlyn Kohrs Campbell is professor of Speech-Communication at the University of Minnesota.