Catherine A. Brekus. Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845. (Gender and American Culture.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1998. Pp. x, 466. Cloth $49.95, paper $17.95.
Spinning an intricate thread with which to follow the path of rediscovering the stories of evangelical female preachers who influenced the first and second Great Awakening up until the pre-Civil War revivals, Catherine Brekus in Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845 considers women of varying class and race. Recovering the significant impacts of these women on their evangelical churches in a moving towards recognized denominations, Brekus relies upon primary sources including letters, journals and memoirs along with published reports of camp meetings, religious periodicals, pamphlets and books printed by the women themselves, in parish records or the writings of a male preachers, along with a vast collection of secondary sources. As if restoring a disintegrated work of art, Brekus paints a picture of female religious leadership, which neither conforms to the silent, submissive stereotypes of eighteenth and nineteenth century women, nor the radical social activist positions of early feminists, “platform speakers,” who advocated not only women’s suffrage and reproductive rights, but also the abolition of slavery.
Though a detailed historical work, Strangers and Pilgrims is a useful resource not only for scholars, but clergy and lay people interested in discovering not only the general themes of female evangelists but also the specific struggles women like Harriet Livermore faced. Viewing the King James Bible as the literal Word of God, female evangelists struggled to fulfill their unpaid call to preaching financially by selling handiwork, tracts and books, relying on charity, or relying on the salaries of their husbands. In spite of all the controversy surrounding these women who traversed social expectations of women’s silence in public and religious spheres, most of the female evangelists tended to endorse conservative political position. It is this middle position between traditionalism and radical thinking that Brekus notes is representative of “the same values as countless numbers of anonymous women who sat in church pews every Sunday.” (7)
Drawing out a more realistic picture of women’s lives than the commonly assumed repression of women, Brekus depicts ordinary women who fervent spiritual concerns did not even broach the realm of religious power politics: these female evangelists did not clamor for rights to baptism or ordination, claiming equality with men through scriptural revelation rather than biological nature. Embracing supportive roles, this group of women who “were the first to speak publicly in America” (6) prioritized their preaching calls beneath faith in scriptural revelation. Despite their willingness to accept secondary roles in leadership, female evangelists attracted droves of converts by their condemnations of sin, which thundered as powerfully as any male preacher in spite of a lack of education. In spite of their budding leadership, Brekus notes that within a decade of the genesis of female evangelists, evangelical churches began to more rigidly distinguish the boundaries of “masculine” and “feminine” as the desire to be recognized as denominations increased.
These degenerating egalitarian and populist ideals of evangelical churches led to an emphasis on the importance of a salvation experience over and above distinctions of race, class, and gender. “In many ways,” Brekus observes, “the presence of large numbers of white and black women in the pulpit seems to offer evidence of the democratization of American Christianity.” (11) Finding the evangelical scenario after the Great Awakening to be paradoxical, Brekus discussed the contradictions in celebrating freedom, and instituting governance for those freedoms. In spite of allowing women to preach, women remained “strangers and pilgrims, outsiders in an evangelical culture that reserved its greatest public honors for men alone.” (13) Rhetorical separation of public and private spheres may have influence women’s self-perceptions, but not their actual affect on the shaping of culture. Relating the struggles of the female evangelists in the past to current issues of women’s religious leadership, Berkus provides an example of past societal failures to recognize women, challenging congregations today with the ominous threat of repeating a history of forgetting female contributions.
Hannah M. Mecaskey
Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology
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