"Can a Woman Preach?": Rethinking Gender in Evangelical History (Episode 9)

When we tell the story of evangelicalism, we usually reach for famous pastors, theologians, and institutions. But what happens when we turn our attention to the women who taught, organized, wrote, fundraised, evangelized, and sustained evangelical life across generations? In this episode, hosts John Fea, Dan Hummel, and Maggie Capra are joined in the studio by historian Andrea Turpin for a wide-ranging conversation about women as co-creators of evangelicalism at every level.

Beginning with the story of Welsh evangelist Jesse Penn-Lewis—who built a transatlantic preaching career through evangelical institutions even as those institutions remained led by men—the conversation explores how women shaped evangelical spirituality, education, missions, and ministry, often precisely because formal leadership roles were closed to them. Along the way the group examines the relationship between evangelicalism and feminism, the history of women’s education, the rise of women’s missionary organizations, and how historians are rethinking who belongs in the story of American evangelicalism. It’s a conversation about power, influence, faith, and why some of the most consequential figures in evangelical history have so often remained in the background.

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Andrea Turpin is a professor of history at Baylor University, specializing in women’s history, the history of education, and American religion. She is the author of a study of gender and the founding of American higher education, and is currently at work on a project on women in the fundamentalist–modernist controversy, focused on the era’s women’s missionary organizations. 

IN THIS EPISODE

• Jesse Penn-Lewis and the paradox of a woman building a preaching career through male-led institutions—and why her central concerns were the Holy Spirit and spiritual warfare, not chiefly “women’s issues.”
• “Progressive” as a historical category: why 19th-century evangelicals often pushed furthest on women’s education—and what “progressive compared to the wider culture” does and doesn’t mean.
• Evangelical pragmatism and women’s education: Mary Lyon and Mount Holyoke, and the coeducational (and biracial) founding of Oberlin under Charles Finney.
• The waves of feminism, from the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments through second- and third-wave feminism—and the surprisingly loose correlation between religious affiliation and support for suffrage.
• Teaching as women’s sanctioned space: Sunday school, Henrietta Mears, the “deputy husband” and Republican motherhood, and the long argument over 1 Timothy 2:12.
• Egalitarian vs. complementarian: how two categories hardened in the early 1990s, and Turpin’s case for a lost middle—“complementarity without hierarchy.”
• Women’s missionary organizations and church polity: how women held evangelism and social service together as the fundamentalist–modernist split tore them apart—and why polity determined whether anyone listened.
• Recovering hidden labor: Biddy Chambers and the making of My Utmost for His Highest, and a call for women in evangelicalism to donate their papers to the archives.

PEOPLE, PLACES, and TERMS

• Jesse Penn-Lewis — Welsh evangelist; author of The Magna Carta of Woman and War on the Saints.
• Mary Lyon (Mount Holyoke) and Charles Finney / Oberlin College.
• Phoebe Palmer, Hannah Whitall Smith, Henrietta Mears, Helen Barrett Montgomery, Biddy Chambers.
• Beverly LaHaye, Phyllis Schlafly, Elisabeth Elliot; the Equal Rights Amendment.
• Evangelical feminists: Nancy Hardesty, Letha Dawson Scanzoni, Sharon Gallagher.
• Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and the “deputy husband”; Anne Hutchinson; the Grimké sisters and Christabel Pankhurst.

Key terms: evangelical pragmatism, postmillennialism, separate spheres, egalitarian and complementarian, “women’s work for women.”

BOOKS MENTIONED

• Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750 (Knopf, 1982).
• Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (Liveright, 2020).
• Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth (Brazos Press, 2021).
• Margaret Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present (Yale University Press, 1993).
• Donald W. Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage (Harper & Row, 1976).
• David R. Swartz, Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
• Brantley W. Gasaway, Progressive Evangelicals and the Pursuit of Social Justice (University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

Hosts:

JOHN FEA - Visiting Fellow in History, Lumen Center; Distinguished Professor of History, Messiah University

MAGGIE CAPRA - Visiting Instructor in American History, Beloit College

DAN HUMMEL - Director of the Lumen Center; Honorary Research Fellow, University of Wisconsin-Madison

This podcast is brought to you by the Lumen Center and STUDIO, both initiatives of the SL Brown Foundation. 

Find out more about our work:

• slbf.org/lumen-center
• slbf.org/studio

Produced by Daniel Johnson and Dave Conour

Edited by Dave Conour 

Transcript

Cold Open: Jesse Penn-Lewis and the Magna Carta of Woman

Maggie Capra 0:11

In 1919, the longtime evangelical preacher, teacher, and writer Jesse Pen Lewis published The Magna Carta of Woman, a book that argued for allowing women to teach wherever a man could. In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul wrote, I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man. She must be quiet. 1 Timothy 2.12. Pen Lewis did not so much argue against Paul as urge that in context, this and other biblically informed norms about women not being allowed to teach did not mean a blanket injunction against it. Rather, Pen Lewis declared that limiting the office of a teacher to men denies one half of the church the right to speak in the assembly and subjects itself to man-made ordinances. The Holy Spirit, she argued, has never been poured forth in any company, in any part of the world, in any nation without the handmaids prophesying. The latter phrase was a reference to a passage in the Old Testament book of Amos, quoted in the New Testament in Acts 2. While ultimately preaching to tens of thousands in a public ministry spanning 1892 to her death in 1927, Pen Lewis frequently confronted skeptics on this point. Though she authored the Magna Carta of Women, Pen Lewis understood the role of women as part of a larger issue she saw as more central, the work of the Holy Spirit and the challenge of spiritual warfare. Born in 1861 in Neath, South Wales, Jessie Jones experienced chronic illness throughout her childhood. Intelligent and outspoken, she chafed against Victorian expectations for women. At 19, she married William Penn Lewis, a distant relative of Pennsylvania's founder. Her spiritual journey led her into temperance work and founding a YWCA branch in Richmond, London, where she recruited women for missionary service. She eventually connected with Evan H. Hopkins, a key organizer of the Keswick Convention, and soon became recognized across Europe for her teachings on personal holiness, emphasizing crucifixion and self-annihilation. She combined these with a devotion to Scripture, a premillennial eschatology, and a commitment to what one historian described as her mystical theology of encounter with God. Here was a woman building a transatlantic preaching career through evangelical institutions, even as those institutions remained firmly led by men. In the fall of 1900, as a rising name in evangelical circles, Penn Lewis made her first trip to North America, initially planning a quiet three-month visit with her husband. The trip quickly turned into a speaking tour. Trusting in Providence, Penn Lewis accepted speaking requests as words spread of her visit. Once news of her availability was made known among evangelical and premillennial circles, she could not accommodate all of the speaking requests. The two biggest opportunities came from Moody Bible Institute in Chicago and the Christian and Missionary Alliance headquarters in Nyack, New York. In under two months, she delivered over 30 addresses on classic Hesick themes. The scale of American society astonished the Welsh Pen Lewis. Yet she was also overwhelmed by the positive reception she received. At Moody Bible Institute, the place was packed, every inch of space being filled, and the people standing along aisles and around doors until there seemed hardly breathing room. The president of the school himself, Reuben Torrey, introduced her as one of the most gifted speakers the world had known. She was a woman commanding the most prominent evangelical platforms in the country, and they were asking for more. The Halcyon days proved fleeting, however. The very evangelical network Penn Lewis had tapped into soon became fragmented along multiple lines. Penn Lewis became a leading advocate in one such line. By 1910, she was increasingly fixated on reports of new manifestations of spiritual power around the globe and the chaos they sowed in the field of Christian service. These manifestations, which in some cases, such as the New Pentecostal movement, empowered women to teach and prophesy alongside men, struck Penn Lewis as not just dangerous, but demonic. She initially grew preoccupied with spiritual warfare and demon possession while observing the 1904 to 1905 Welsh Revival with its blend of Calvinistic, Wesleyan, Methodist, and Haweness influences. As crowds swelled, they began displaying behaviors reminiscent of American camp meetings. One Pen Lewis biographer described the confusion of South Wales that included disorderly meetings, dancing and barking, radical prophecies and healings. These excesses, as Pen Lewis came to call them, cooled her enthusiasm for the revival. The young charismatic leader of the Welsh Revival, Evan Roberts, suffered physical and emotional collapse, eventually recovering in Pen Lewis's home, where she convinced him the revival had taken a wrong turn. Together, they concluded that evil spirits had co-opted its promising beginning and that the manifestations revealed newly potent satanic activity. This would turn into a full-fledged attack, not just on the Welsh radicals, but on Pentecostalism more broadly. Her mature thinking cohered in her book, War on the Saints, published in 1912, which emphasized that Satan's preferred end times tactic was deception through counterfeit spiritual power. In Pen Lewis's view, the deeper a Christian entered God's presence and the higher a Christian ascended in holiness, the graver the risk of satanic infiltration. The spiritual Christian, she wrote, will find himself amid the most intense workings of the deceptions of the enemy. There was no Wesleyan hope of entire sanctification, and yet no Calvinist comfort in gradual perseverance. Despite her combative turn, Pen Lewis remained within the evangelical movement. Indeed, her rejection of more radical spirituality likely made her more palatable as a woman teacher in establishment evangelical spaces. In 1912, the editor of The Fundamentals, Louis Mayer, invited Penn Lewis to contribute a chapter in Volume 10 on Satan and his kingdom. The wide distribution of the fundamentals, some 250,000 ministers received all 12 volumes free between 1910 and 1915, secured Penn Lewis's influence among a broad evangelical readership. As much as Jesse Penn Lewis's legacy was marked by spiritual warfare, she was a woman in a largely male-dominated profession. Even as women were co-creators of evangelicalism at every level, her theology merged her view of the Holy Spirit with her concern for gender equality. If the spirit fills whom it wills, gender cannot be the gatekeeping criterion. It was the same logic that had carried her from a YWCA circuit to Moody Bible Institute, from the Welsh Hills to the Fundamentals.

Dave Conour 7:24

Welcome

Welcome & Episode Introduction

Dave Conour 7:25

to American Evangelicals, a history podcast. When we tell the story of evangelicalism, we often focus on famous pastors, theologians, institutions, and movements. But what happens when we shift our attention to the women who taught, organized, wrote, fundraised, evangelized, and sustained evangelical life across generations? In this episode, John, Dan, and Maggie are joined by historian Andrea Turpin for a wide-ranging conversation about women as co-creators of evangelicalism. Beginning with the story of Welsh evangelist Jesse Penn Lewis, they explore how women shaped evangelical spirituality, education, missions, and ministry, even when formal leadership roles were often close to them. Along the way, they discussed the relationship between evangelicalism and feminism, the history of women's education, the rise of women's missionary organizations, and the way historians are rethinking who gets included in the story of American evangelicalism. It's a conversation about power, influence, faith, and why some of the most important figures in evangelical history have too often remained in the background. Let's join the conversation with historians Maggie Capra, Dan Hummel, and John Fia, and special guest, historian Andrea Turpin.

Why This Story? Women as Co-Creators

John Fea 8:48

So, Maggie, tell us a little bit more about this story. Why did you choose it? How is it going to help our conversation going forward?

Maggie Capra 8:54

Yeah, so I think one of the great things about Jesse Pen Lewis's story is that it highlights that women who are involved in evangelicalism were not obsessed about women in evangelicalism, that in fact, whether a woman could preach wasn't their sole object or their even their main purpose. And Jesse Pen Lewis, I think, illustrates that really well. And it's something that Dan, who wrote the story, it's part of his upcoming book on uh evangelical spirituality, highlights this, right? That she had other concerns and other things that she was talking about, but that of course, because of her presence as a woman, uh, it was going to enter into her ministry, this question of where is a woman's proper place in evangelicalism. And I think negotiating that is such a central component of the story of women and evangelicalism. I'm also really excited that we get to talk about Jesse Penn Lewis's story and other women in evangelical story with Andrea Turpin, who is visiting our podcast today and who is a specialist on women's history, uh, and will I think help us kind of uh explore this question of how women were co-creators in evangelicalism at every level, as Dan said. So, Andrea, thank you so much for joining us today. Delighted to be here.

John Fea 10:02

And Andrea is with us. She's physically here in this. Yeah, this is really fun.

Andrea Turpin 10:06

That's a giant mic and everything. Yeah. Yeah.

John Fea 10:08

For those of you who don't know, Andrea is a professor at Baylor uh university. She's wrote a great book on the history of education in the 19th century and and now working on a which we might hear a little bit more about, working on a project on women and fundamentalism. So this is I'm excited about this.

Maggie Capra 10:23

Yeah.

Centering Women in Evangelical Spirituality

Dan Hummel 10:24

Definitely.

Maggie Capra 10:24

So, Dan, tell us a little bit about how this project on evangelical spirituality centers women in a way that your first two projects really don't. Am I interpreting that correctly? Okay.

Dan Hummel 10:36

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, so writing on particularly dispensationalism, it's just a very male-dominated uh conversation for the most part. When you're looking at the level of theological production, systematic theology, often the story's taking place, at least the sort of intellectual history is taking place in seminaries, Bible institutes, places where it was just heavily male-dominated, really until today in dispensationalist spaces. Doing a project on spirituality, um, and by that I'm really interested in more uh wide-ranging conversations about ideas of sanctification, ideas of holiness, ideas about the Holy Spirit and how the Holy Spirit acts in people's lives. That's just a story that is not just one that takes place in seminaries or among, you could say, revivalists who have tended to be male as well through American history, but really takes place in interesting other religious spaces. So you can think of someone like Phoebe Palmer, who's really important to the Holiness Movement in the 1830s and 40s. And it's actually in her New York parlor that she starts hosting sort of holiness gatherings. And I really am, I'm an intellectual historian, so I'm interested in like sort of where the ideas develop. And it's just a history of these particular conversations that has a lot of women involved. So Hannah Weidel Smith is someone that we've already talked about on the podcast. We have another episode in this series where we talk about Mary Kay Ash, she of Mary Kay Cosmetics fame. And these aren't just sort of people that are just like interesting examples. They're actually significant to the development of thinking on a popular level for evangelicals on these issues of sanctification and holiness. So it's a history that lends itself because it, I think, has a more popular bent to it. And by popular, I mean that it's not merely an academic conversation about these sort of theological issues. It really does take place in trade presses and periodicals and on the radio and so forth, largely outside of often formal church settings, which is one reason why women have sort of more room to maneuver there. So in some ways, I didn't like plan it and say, like, I want to have a story that sort of has a lot of more mixed gender people in it, you know, men and women. Um it was much more about a certain set of questions I had that just doing the history made me realize that. I think one thing it's made me do, this is something I came into this project with, is wondering, like, what are you can talk a lot about the sanctification theology in the 19th century, and it can feel quite abstract or detached from what we commonly care about in politics and religious movements and money and all these types of things. But um, one of the things that sort of comes up, particularly when you start paying attention to gender, is just like, oh, there's social implications to how you talk about who the Holy Spirit empowers and why, that are very evident when you're reading the sources, that there's there's real world implications about who gets to teach, who gets to run an organization, or who doesn't get to run an organization. And I think that's one of the things that I've just become more attuned to as I've done this research is understanding if I don't see the social implications immediately, many of the historical actors did and were very invested in those. And so it's something where I'm almost like following the trail of their arguments and how these arguments about what it means to be transformed or formed into Christ-like, you know, sort of a definition of sanctification, how those actually have implications way beyond the inner life and into the social life as

Were Evangelicals "Progressive" on Gender?

Dan Hummel 14:03

well.

Maggie Capra 14:03

And in those conversations that we've had previously, I know we talked a little bit about like how progressive was the you know evangelicalism for women. And I remember, John, you made a comment about that.

John Fea 14:13

It's in the trailer. If you go back and look at the trailer, the one clip that our great producers chose was me saying that in the 19th century, evangelicals were fairly progressive compared to the rest of the culture on the role of women and and gender issues and so forth and and their agency. So we have Andrea here who's the expert. So was I right when I said that? I said it in an episode, but it also made it into the clip, right? Was I right?

Andrea Turpin 14:40

Uh yes. Uh so the specific area that I have looked at in depth has to do with higher education.

Evangelical Pragmatism: Mount Holyoke & Oberlin

Andrea Turpin 14:48

And so I'll give this as an example that spins out like why evangelicals were more progressive on average than the general population on this issue. So the first permanent higher educational institution for women and the first truly coeducational college were both founded by people that I label evangelical pragmatists. And so what that means is that they were converted in the revivals of the second great awakening and they were on fire for spreading this message. And they wanted to get as many other people on board with it, right? This was the era of optimism. I don't know if y'all have talked about post-millennialism on this podcast. Okay, so we'll just throw that word out there. All right. But optimism that God is doing a new thing in the American nation, optimism that through the church, a large proportion of the world will be converted, that there will be a golden age established on earth, and then Christ will come back. And so this optimistic moment is you got to get as many people on board for this as possible. There's also anxiety about, ooh, if we don't get a lot of virtue in the United States, it might collapse. We've never tried a democracy on this scale. Also, maybe the Catholics will get ahead of us on this in the West, and that would be terrible. Right. So there's there's all these things going on. But evangelical pragmatists who really want to spread the gospel message, and they also think, you know, once you get converted, you're you're supposed to also start being an activist who actively changes the world both by converting other people and by engaging in social reform. They're doing both. And so these educators, that's sort of their chosen social reform as well as their chosen mode of evangelism, say, okay, so women in most of these Protestant evangelical traditions still can't be preachers. There are some exceptions. They definitely can't be pastors. So what can they do to help? They want to help, they're converted, so they can teach. It's increasingly becoming a mode that women can engage in outside the home. And this whole idea that you can't have religion in public school, like public schools are a new idea at the time. Uh, you can definitely have religion there if you're feeling it. Most schools are still private. And so women, particularly single women who aren't yet married, see this as an opportunity, like their opportunity to evangelize children. Like they can't be a pastor, but they can do it for children. And they want to get trained to do that as well as possible. And some of the more progressive ones are like, you know, maybe women are going to do other things too. And we should just give them the best education they can. So they have as much training, as much mental framework for God to use them in whatever way in the bringing of the kingdom of God. And so because they have this real pragmatic, hey, we need all hands on deck to spread the gospel. We need women doing whatever they're going to be allowed to do. And so we can let them and be pastors. They are the ones who push forward women's education because they're willing to ignore certain gender norms that they're like, you know, that's not really scriptural or really required. The really important thing is evangelism. And we should train people to do that well. And so the evangelical pragmatists are like, all right, we're going to set up a school that trains people to do that well. So Mary Lyon is the founder of Mount Holyoke. That's that first permanent women's higher educational institution. It's going to become a college. It's not quite college yet in her lifetime. It was founded in 1837. She dies in 1849. It keeps her vision for like 50 years. One in five missionaries sent out by the United States in the Protestant missions movement were as a graduate of Mount Holyoke. So, like, that's how powerful this vision of hers is. Like, we're going to give them a good education and see what they can do for God. It's a liberal arts education. She's trying to get as close as she can to men's colleges. And she'll go and she fundraises for this institution by herself. And people are like, hey, that's not cool. That is improper for a woman to do. And she quotes Nehemiah and she says, I am doing a great work and I cannot come down. The thing that Nehemiah said when he received pushback for rebuilding the walls of Israel. So she's willing to overlook gender norms for this greater purpose of evangelism and getting as many people involved as possible. Same thing happens at Oberlin and it's even more radical. Oberlin, the founders of Oberlin College in Ohio, they have an actually co-educational institution and it's also biracial. At the same time, people were paranoid about black and white people marrying and having children. And that kind of radicalism came from the idea that, you know what, we want to get people without as much money educated, we want to get women educated. We want to get white people educated. We want to get black people educated. And the cheapest way to do that is to stick them all in one institution because we don't got a ton of money to go around here. So they violate all those norms to give as much education as possible to as many people as possible to spread the gospel as well as possible.

John Fea 19:26

And Oberlin being uh formed out of the second great awakening, right? Charles Finney. Charles Finney was became the president of Oberlin. That's correct. Of Oberlin. So just a quick follow-up to that. So let's just say we're let's just say we're talking to a 2025 grad of female grad of Oberlin or Mount Holyoke.

Andrea Turpin 19:46

Yeah, they have no idea.

John Fea 19:49

I definitely believe that. Yeah. But

Progressive Compared to What? A Question of Method

John Fea 19:51

let's but this is more of a question about historical method, right?

Andrea Turpin 19:54

Okay.

John Fea 19:54

You know, we are we are American Evangelicals, a history podcaster. So what would you say to like someone, you know, who says, oh, progressive? They were in the schools, they couldn't run for office, they couldn't vote, they couldn't, you know, politically, you know, engage in the public in public life, they weren't allowed to be pastors. Like how so how would you how is that progressive? I'm imagining like an Oberlin or or about Holyoke grad today might might say that. And again, I'm asking you to answer that as a historian. Yeah.

Andrea Turpin 20:25

Um I mean, as a historian, progressive is an adjective meaning directionality, right? It's progressive from what and to where. And so it is as against the wider culture at the time, I'm labeling them in this particular way at this time for their willingness to push against norms that they believed were overly constricting. It's also worth noting that in the 19th century, particularly in the first half of the 19th century, if you if you just a surface reading of the Bible and evangelical Christians were biblicist and wanted to take this as their text, it's actually more progressive potentially than the surrounding culture, not less. It only becomes the surface reading, only becomes less progressive, honestly, kind of in the wake of second wave feminism. So for a long time, uh, even just a surface plane, like common sense reading of the Bible would push you, or at least would push some interpreters in the direction of being more progressive in the culture, not less.

John Fea 21:28

That's a great answer. Yeah, I think I think it's you know, I I've I think we've actually talked about this, Andrea. You know, I've I've taught uh Laura Thatcher Ulrich's good wives for for years. I love that. It's just it's it's here are the possibilities for women. And at that time they were they were you know able to have a certain amount of agency that you know today, of course, we would look back at and say, you know, they lived in this patriarchal culture and so forth. But but I think the historian kind of thinks about these things differently. I mean, not right or wrong. You know, I think a second wave feminist would be very disappointed with that world. But yeah, great.

The Waves of Feminism Explained

Dan Hummel 22:05

So you mentioned second wave feminism. Can you orient us to the waves of feminism and how you think about that in terms of relation to evangelical history?

Andrea Turpin 22:15

What a small question.

Dan Hummel 22:16

Right.

Maggie Capra 22:17

Okay. So just what are the waves of feminism as historians label them? Again, we made this up, right? First wave feminism gets stereotyped as being about women's right to vote. It is not. The very first part of first wave feminism, so if typically dated to the Declaration of Sentiments in 1848, the Seneca Falls Convention, they have a whole list of demands patterned on the Declaration of Independence. It's really fun to go back and read it. They're copying Thomas Jefferson's language with slight tweaks and then talking about men are King George and women are the American colonists. And their list of demands is extensive. It includes women's right to vote, but it also includes women's right to be pastors. It includes there's a lot of Quakers, and they were already doing this, who are part of this movement. It includes women's right to higher education, to working in all the professions, to custody to their children and a divorce, all sorts of things. This movement ends up narrowing to focus on suffrage in the 1890s forward dominantly until the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, and we can talk more about that. Then what is known as second wave feminism is part of the general rights revolution of the 50s and particularly 60s and 70s, following on the civil rights movement, which is one stream into it, following in on President Kennedy getting in trouble for not appointing any women to his cabinet, like his Republican predecessors had, uh, and like FDR had. There's a couple of different streams here, but that ends up with expanding out the list of desire for change to a broader arena of issues again. There's liberal feminists, which actually is the less liberal one, as opposed to radical feminist impulses that are about strict legal equality. And there's a radical feminist side that's about changing the culture. Third wave feminism, as it is typically talked about, is credited to Rebecca Walker, the daughter of Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, who makes the point that has now become a truism, because it is true, right? That women are have multiple identities, right? So they are black and female, or in the case of Rebecca Walker, black, Jewish, and female, right? Um, and that all of these multiple identities create different kinds of scenarios. And that justice for women also means justice for a lot of different oppressed groups.

Religion and the Suffrage Movement

Maggie Capra 24:35

Now, the church maps onto this in like really interesting ways. I did a study once on this for class because I was curious, okay, well, how does religion map on to suffrage? And I'm still working on this project a little bit on the side. There is not a lot of super clear patterns about how religion maps on to the women's suffrage movement. So, like the second part of first wave feminism. There are suffragists who are free thinkers, Elizabeth Katie Stanton, um, Carrie Chapman Catt. There are suffragists who are like traditional Methodists, right? Um, Francis Willard, who is the president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, traditional Methodist. You've got a lot of Quakers. Alice Paul's a Quaker. You've got a Catholic, Lucy Burns. So there's there's no through line for the people who chose to become no obvious through line for the people who chose to become suffragists and not. I'm actually doing some research. I'm not sure about the exact numbers right now about conservative Protestant support for women's suffrage. But William Jennings Bryan was pro-woman suffrage, like the arch fundamentalist in the Scopes trial. John Roach Stratton, this is a fun one. Fundamentalist, he was pro-woman suffrage.

Speaker 2 25:40

So there's he really didn't want them to have dogs instead of babies.

Speaker 1 25:44

That's true, but he thought they could have and should have jobs. Right. Um, because they need to to take care of themselves monetarily.

Speaker 3 25:51

So Andrew, what about the what about the idea and like the second great awakening produced, you know, you hear this uh did the second great awakening produce like anyone in first wave feminism, you know, that would have connected women's rights, not just voting, but anything, to the kind of egalitarian move, you know, similar to like did the first great the second great awakening create kind of a progressive evangelical in the same way that's the most important thing.

Speaker 1 26:19

Well, it means it depends on what you mean by that, right? So you think about the Grimke sisters, yeah, yeah. Right. So the Grimke sisters were abolitionists and feminists. And when you're reading Sarah Grimke's letters in defense of women's participation in the abolitionist movement, she's making very biblicist arguments. They're basically evangelical style arguments. She moves through a number of different denominations, but it's very much coming from that impulse. So she would be another person in that category, yes.

Speaker 3 26:47

Okay. Yeah, because there's always this collection of like social reforms that certain kinds of evangelicals in the present bring up, right? You know, evangelicals are on the front lines of anti-slavery, they're on the front lines of temperance, uh, prison reform, women's suffrage, right? And that sometimes gets thrown in. Women's women's suffrage.

Speaker 1 27:06

Okay, so like no, right? But also, yes. And so famously on the British side, right? You have female fundamentalist Christabel Pankhurst. Yes, yes. Christopher Pankhurst on the British side, right? Fundamentalist suffragist. And suffered a little bit before she embraced fundamentalism in fairness, but she kept it. Like she kept them together. So these impulses could absolutely go together, but they also didn't absolutely definitively go together. And plenty of people, male and female, opposed women's suffrage on biblical grounds, just like plenty supported it on biblical grounds, just like slavery. So I think that's the fair way to look at it.

Speaker 3 27:43

So what I'm hearing you saying is I think that all the big names that make it into like the US survey textbooks probably were not or evangelical, or as we, you know, however you define that term, and and even or evangelical kind of adjacent. They were Quakers, they were, they were Catholics, they were.

Speaker 1 28:01

Well, I mean, Francis Willard makes it into textbooks, but the Women's Christian Temperance Union was the single largest suffrage organization.

Speaker 7 28:12

It's an interesting maybe lack of correlation between religious affiliation and supporting or not supporting women's suffrage.

Second-Wave Feminism and the Evangelical Response

Speaker 7 28:20

When we get to second wave feminism, is there a clearer sense for you that evangelicals sort of I mean, my I I think the the wide reading is they reject second wave feminism, but w how would you nuance that?

Speaker 1 28:32

So I put together Peggy Benzroth's book, Fundamentalism and Gender, with Michael Hamilton's article on women and fundamentalism to come up with this theory, which is that fundamentalism had more roles for women than mainline Protestantism because they were building a new thing from the ground. So I think this is a lot of what you're looking at in evangelical spirituality. There's a lot of let's create new books, new institutions, new radio programs. And there's a lot of space for women there. There are fewer spaces for women in formal mainline structures, and men like to take a lot of them. That said, increasingly women can get to the very top of the mainline structure. And fundamentalist women cannot get to the very top for the most part of the fundamentalist structure because of the perceived prohibition against women pastors. So when second-wave feminism comes, there's a different style of response in the more conservative and moderate or liberal Protestant denominations that has to do with exactly what have women been doing up to that point. So there is more okayness with okay, everything can be open to women, like liberal uh legal equality, second wave feminism within more mainline denominations, because there haven't been a lot of women in positions of power, but they've been at the top. Whereas in fundamentalism, they haven't been at the top, and there's a reaction that this is unbiblical. So even though they've had more space to be participants, there is more of a pushback against second wave feminism specifically. And Maggie, you said this earlier today in a conversation that we were having. I think there is something also about perceived effect on the family as a bastion of passing on the faith that's understood in a particular way by more conservative Protestants.

Teaching as Women's Sanctioned Space

Speaker 2 30:13

I'm curious about the role that teaching plays in this. Like that kind of fits with your earlier project with Oberlin and Mount Holyoke and missions and the opportunities for women. And I think in those fundamentalist structures, that's where we see women really flourish, is Sunday school teachers, right? Um, I'm thinking of the Arlen McLeazo book on how bears. Yeah, like I mean, it I mean, basically the arguments of this book is that she is the founder of modern evangelicalism because she created a network through her students that were the men who built it after World War II. And she was a teacher, like a Sunday school teacher, and a lot of other things.

Speaker 3 30:53

The way you frame that, Maggie, it sounds like the old like Republican motherhood argument, right? You know, these that women influence through her children. Yeah, in that's where the influence comes from raising good. Yeah, that's interesting. Right.

Speaker 2 31:05

Yeah, yeah. And that's lower R Republican. Right, lower R, right? Yes, for our audience. Sorry to interrupt. No, I mean, exactly, right? That there is something to that that women have embraced, I think, in evangelical culture, this like, okay, I might not be able to be the preacher, but I might even be able to be in a pulpit if I'm just a teacher. Correct. And so I'm wondering if you'd have more comment on that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 31:28

So backing it up to teaching in general, uh, there are two reasons this became a more heavily female profession, which I think is I'm gonna relay this to the church in a minute. Um, so I asked my students, okay, raise your hand if most of your elementary school teachers were female, and it's like every hand up. Um, this happened for two reasons. One, women had to make money somehow in the economy of the new nation. And teaching was seen as a sort of appropriately feminine thing to do because women taught their children. It's like an extension of that. If you're gonna start a public school system, which you're gonna start because it's important to have educated voters, et cetera, et cetera. Republican motherhood, the idea that, oh, you also need to educate the girls because they're gonna grow up and be the mothers who train the sons to be educated voting citizens. The other reason, no joke, public schools are founded by tax dollars, and you don't have to pay women the same as men until 1963. It's just cheaper to have female teachers. And then select against the profession because they can make more money elsewhere, but it's the only thing that many women can do. So they do it because it's considered appropriately feminine, and also you don't have to pay them a lot. So it's has a long tradition of being accepted for women to do this, which you get into lots of debates within Protestant churches about what does it mean I do not permit a woman to teach or hold authority over a man, but she has to be silent from 1 Timothy chapter two. This gets interpreted right through the lens of like, I don't know, what are we already okay with in America, you know? And so I think that you get these spaces for women to teach within the church, particularly kids, not a problem. Everybody's down with that, unless you're really, really fringe. But I mean Henry de Mir's, that's a little bit progressive. She's teaching adult men, but everyone's okay with it because she's not the pastor. She's under the authority of somebody else. And so it gets interpreted through this lens that this is a thing that women do. We're good with it.

Speaker 7 33:11

For Mears in particular, I think it's important for these distinctions that she's teaching Sunday school and not a sermon in the not in not in the main gathered, I agree.

Speaker 1 33:21

Right. That distinction is.

Speaker 7 33:22

So that's another there's these, you know, Sunday school wasn't always around, right? That's some that's a that's an innovation of the 19th century. That's so there that's another version of like creating new spaces where the norms that hold to like the main show or whatever uh of the Sunday service don't hold in the the adjacent uh spaces like

Anne Hutchinson and the Limits of Teaching

Speaker 7 33:41

a Sunday school.

Speaker 3 33:42

This is me with my early American stuff, right? Change over time, right? Years I taught Ann Hutchinson's uh trial. And you know, she technically was under the authority of John Cott.

Speaker 5 33:53

Yeah, right.

Speaker 3 33:54

Yep. So so you know, she still got kicked out of the colony. Now they're that's a complicated story, right? But uh but she was teaching part of it, was that she was teaching men, which Henrietta Mears now is but nobody was it wasn't that she was teaching men, right?

Speaker 1 34:08

It was that she was teaching men to critique their pastors. And and right like unorthodox doctrine according to what's I think if she'd been chill, like if they'd like been okay with her doctrine and she hasn't didn't critique the ministers for not being saved, I think she could have kept doing it.

Clarifying "Progressive": Holding the Most Progressive Space

Speaker 3 34:24

Maybe I'd I'd agree with that.

Speaker 1 34:26

I wanted to circle back to something to be as precise as possible because when we were talking about suffrage and talking about slavery, it is certainly true that there are evangelicals who supported this and also evangelical Christians who opposed it. And so when I said that evangelicals were more progressive on gender than the general populace in the 19th century, what I meant specifically with education is that they, in point of fact, held the most progressive space. It doesn't mean that the majority of them were there or right, but there was something intrinsic to their belief system that led them to push out to the furthest, that led a portion of them to push out to the furthest space. And I'm arguing that that is that evangelical pragmatism and spreading missions and spreading the kingdom of God. It doesn't mean that like every last one of them was or that they're more progressive as a camp on either anti-slavery necessarily or on women's rights. Yet they do push out to those edges because of something intrinsic to their belief.

Speaker 3 35:28

I guess I was comparing it to sort of like, you know, if you looked at the the entire culture, right? The people who are going into these quote unquote progressive spaces in education, there's a good chance it might be an evangelical as opposed to a like today, where you know, you would you would think certainly progressive space. That would surprise you, yes. I guess that's what I was getting at.

Speaker 7 35:51

I don't know if we want to return to talking a bit more about second and third wave feminism. Oh, yeah. And just sort of completing some of that. I mean, giving us sort of a narrative that that's

The 1970s, the ERA, and Concerned Women for America

Speaker 7 36:00

a through line. So, you know, I think often when we talk about the 1970s, we talk about one of the things that is leading to the formation of the Christian right and sort of the the political wing of evangelicalism is this concern about feminism. And then you have like Beverly LaHaye and Concern Women for America as this pretty popular group. A lot of women join it. And there's also the Equal Rights Amendment in that, um, in that decade. Help us understand sort of like how should we think about that in relation to is that sort of do you take that as this is the evangelical response to to feminism, or is that do you make distinctions between the Beverly LaHaye faction and other responses that evangelicals have? Um I mean there's the same decade.

Speaker 1 36:43

There are evangelical feminists, right? There's an evangelical left and an evangelical right. And numbers-wise, the evangelical right wins. Okay, like empirically, I don't want to make this to out to be different than it is, but the tradition itself had capaciousness that both interpretations were possible. And so you do have evangelical feminists who say, Yeah, no, we should not have patriarchy or hierarchy, and women should be pastors, but they are going to believe you have to have salvation and to have faith in Christ to be saved. Um the more frequent position is the position that pushes back against some aspects of feminism, uh, of second wave feminism. It is true that there were not a lot of evangelical women say associated with now that you've got a picture of the religious women involved with the National Organization for Women by Betty Fridane. And, you know, there's a nun, right? There are black episcopal priests, there's there's Betty Fridane is Jewish, right? That's so there are there's a variety of uh religious people. It is you're not rocking the evangelical Christians by and large.

Speaker 4 37:54

Right.

Speaker 1 37:54

What the concern there is, and it's interesting, right? You you mentioned Barberly LaHaye, of course, the the most famous opposing woman against the Equal Rights Amendment is Phyllis Schlafley, who's Catholic, but very good at coalition building, particularly with evangelical women. And there is this, I'd be curious on your take on this too, Dan. It seems to me that there is a little bit of a long shadow of the fundamentalist modernist controversy and the question of oh, we don't like where the culture is going or the mainline church is going, and we're going to withdraw and do our own thing in the last bastion of being able to do your own thing is the family. And so if there are legal changes in the nation that feel like a threat to the family, and I think this is the point you were making earlier, Maggie, be it abortion or disallowing prayer in public school where you send your children, or this fear that the Equal Rights Amendment will make it no longer economically viable for women to stay home and train their children, if that's what you believe is necessary to do to pass on the faith that feels like a threat and that will send many of those women into opposing some of these changes because they feel like it's an attack on the space that they use to transmit the faith. Though it should be noted, it's not like these people aren't working 40 hours a week. The leaders like Beverly LaHaye, Phyllis Schlafley, they're women who work outside the home, right? Leading this movement. Is another good idea.

Speaker 2 39:13

So it's what who? Elizabeth Elliott. She would often like write about like her opposition to evangelical feminism and Christianity today. She was a popular writer there. And she was a full-time writer. Like her husband would joke that he was, I think, Mr. Elizabeth Elliott, right? Like, even though she took his last name because she was complementarian. So like there's always this kind of tension with these really strong evangelical women leaders who want to present a complementarian viewpoint, and yet they also are very talented working women.

Evangelical Feminists and a Usable Past

Speaker 3 39:47

Who were some of the flip side evangelicals who embraced sort of a version of second-wave feminism? And then kind of a follow-up to that, to what extent have they provided kind of, whether in the 70s or whatever, have they provided like a usable past for kind of up, you know, what we're seeing today with evangelicals, you know, who are egalitarian, or you know, someone like Kristen Dumay or Beth Barr, your colleague at Baylor, or someone else who is pushing uh challenging patriarchy in some ways, right? Is there any, is there any are they drawing from, I don't know the literature as well, are they drawing from some of these early evangelical feminists who who are evangelicals who rode the wave, if you will, of second feminism rather than you know trying to mix in my metaphors here, but built a wall to stop it, you know?

Speaker 1 40:36

Yeah. I mean, that's this is a good question. Um, so a couple of historians have written extensively about this. David Schwartz is one. Um Progressive Evangelicals and Social Justice, Brantley Gassaway is another.

Speaker 7 40:49

And I would say I think of Don Dayton's book from the 70s, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage.

Speaker 1 40:54

Yeah.

Speaker 7 40:55

Which is I mean, he's a professional historian. It's a more it's a little more pop version. It's a shorter book and stuff. But he, I think, is making that argument too, that there's this there's another way to think about evangelical history where the role of women is much more elevated. Um so that's 1976 that he writes that.

Speaker 1 41:10

Aaron Powell There were certainly women who were part of this whose whose names are known to scholars of the movement like Sharon Gallagher. Yes. But in my observation, they're not as Nancy Hardesty, another one. Right, right.

Speaker 3 41:22

Nancy Hardesty's the one I wrote.

Speaker 1 41:24

Because she was writing a history of of um Leah Skansoni.

Speaker 3 41:27

And there was one who recently passed away. I can't remember her name.

Speaker 1 41:30

Uh Laza Skenzoni, or was Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 41:33

Uh say that again.

Speaker 1 41:34

Skenzoni?

Speaker 3 41:35

Yeah, Skinzoni. So if she was an evangelic, if she identified it.

Speaker 2 41:38

I think she changed over time. Yeah, because she wrote in Eternity, she wrote in Christianity today, like early, right? As evangelical feminism was the launch point, and then she became too radical for those publications. Yeah.

Speaker 1 41:50

What I was gonna say is those names are not as well known outside the field. Uh, people have heard of Phyllis Schlafley, people have heard of Beverly LaHaye.

Speaker 5 41:57

Yeah.

Speaker 1 41:57

So when you think of a usable past, I mean, this is this is a feminist truism. The women are constantly having to reinvent feminism because that they lack this through line of what their foremothers did. This is one of the reasons for women's history. They're like, let's keep teaching the through line. But yes, uh, they are not as well known, I'd say publicly and generally.

Speaker 3 42:16

But are people like Du Bay or Barr, are they do they see a through line in their own work? Like, do they see a through line from these from like Skinsoni and Absolutely? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 42:27

Absolutely. Kristen is part of a denomination that's been influenced by the presence of women and wrestling through these things. Beth has done a lot of recovery work for the role of women in the church throughout church history. And she's pointing out like this phenomenon that we forget, but this was a thing. Yeah, that's all I was just curious about that.

Speaker 3 42:48

Yeah, how they were appropriating this earlier phase of evangelical feminism.

Egalitarian vs. Complementarian: Two Hardened Camps

Speaker 7 43:00

John mentioned the term egalitarian that you know by the 80s really takes on it's one of the two camps in the in the broader evangelical world. You're an egalitarian or you're a complementarian. We haven't used those words yet. I think in part because they weren't.

Speaker 1 43:15

They think it's in 1994, right? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 7 43:17

It's like late 80s or early 90s, is when those become sort of distinct camps. And and one thing I think about with that is we often take the camps that we have today, what in all types of issues, and then we just project them back. Like it must have been that you either had to declare you were an egalitarian or a complementarian all the way back, as far as we can think. Like Ann Hutchinson had to pick them down on that issue. Well, this is the usable past thing, right? So if you are I mean, that's a good way to create a usable past is to just categorize a bunch of people that held it. But as I I read the the record, like it it was actually much more Oh yeah. Uh there were much many more positions. Um we have a couple. John, you went to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School during this era. I know from hearing you and others say like the the faculty there was sort of divided over this or there were people who had a what we call now an egalitarian position where women could serve in all roles and then others who were complimentarian.

Speaker 3 44:10

I sat in classes with Wayne Grudham. Oh wow one of the great champions of complementarianism. It wasn't a the course wasn't about that but yeah he would bring it in a lot. And then and then you know people like Scott McKnight um there was a guy there who was really one of the big early champions of evangel that he's not really well known but of of uh Walter Liefeld, a New Testament scholar. And there would be you know it was there were fruitful debates and conversations about it.

Speaker 7 44:38

So how do you think the introduction of those categories to me it seems like they've really dominated how evangelicals talk about women uh in a lot of both in church world and society. Yeah. And and how how has that shaped the conversation in the last two decades?

Speaker 1 44:54

Oh wow yeah I have strong opinions about this speaking more from a contemporary than historical perspective you end up collapsing and I think you were saying this you collapsing a variety of options that were present in the past in different ways. I am of the opinion that one of the problems with having like you have to be one of these two things as articulated by the select group of people is that generally speaking well I'll tell the story. In 2007 or something I wrote Christians for Biblical equality which was created in contradistinction from the um Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, which came from the project that Wayne Grudham and John Piper did in 1994, which is why I was postulating this as the founding date for this word. At Danvers, Massachusetts, which was the location of the Salem witch trials fun fact. Because it was a conference at Gordon Conwell and any rate so I wrote Christians for Biblical equality was like, please send me stuff by an egalitarian on like the meaning or the theological meaning of gender difference. And you rate there was nothing that they were aware of. And I was like you're kidding me right this is a category like a complementarity that was non-hierarchical but that actually had some kind of theological meaning was not a category people were writing about at least within evangelicalism. Not going to say it's it's present in Catholicism, for example, like you just have to catch a brighter, a broader net it's not like the Christian world isn't doing it. But the American evangelical Christian world was not really doing it because they were having these other fights. And so if that was an important question to someone like hey what does it mean to be a man or what does it mean to be a woman? It's not important to everybody, but it's important to enough people like there was one thing on offer. And so then they they tie their identity to this thing and it's like well now we can't have female pastors because like what does it mean to be a man? You're like it did you really go to this edge really fast when you've only got these two categories. This is my opinion of some of the problems of the current debate and that doesn't have this additional space about how about complementarity

Complementarity Without Hierarchy?

Speaker 1 46:42

without hierarchy is that a thing we could do this thing. I think there's space in the Christ and the scriptures for this. And that was present more in the past and not always in like great ways. I'm not saying the past was like this golden era of this separate spheres had a lot of problems, but they did have theology about like okay here are some of the things that strengths of men and women and you can preach as women right Catherine Breckis recovers this in the lower church tradition female preachers in the 1800s saying like listen you need to hear my perspective as a preacher because I'm a woman and I have something special to add. And people would accept that because they believed okay women are different and they do have something special to add. And so that was a category of thought that existed and we can there are problems with that as well as strengths, but it was a sort of more expansive space in that respect.

Speaker 3 47:32

What do you mean I I think you just defined it but what do you mean by complementarianism without hierarchy? So you just okay so sure.

Speaker 1 47:42

The word complementarianism as currently used in um evangelical theology refers to hierarchy. They will tell you or I believe some of the people who were writing that book from 1994 about biblical womanhood, right? This is the catchphrase biblical manhood and womanhood will say well we were actually doing this like contra extreme patriarchy, right? Contra like jerky men are in charge of everything. Right. Like no no women's role is important, but it was still defined as inherently hierarchical. Right. So men are the head of the household women are submissive men are the pastors women are the laity. It's not that women don't have something special to add, but they are intrinsically less so. You could however it's a perfectly acceptable mental space to say okay women and men are different and so they should be present in all careers together because they are creating different perspectives and you need them both. And that's why God made two sets of people. But that just was not a position that was frequently articulated in contemporary American evangelicalism because it divided along these two lines. You get more of that in in I think higher church thought.

Speaker 2 48:47

All right so there's a quote by Anne Browdy

"American Religious History Is Women's History"

Speaker 2 48:50

that all I'm gonna mess this up. American religious history is women's history there we go. Thank you for that so Americans religious history is women's history. Yeah so if we keep that in mind and just thinking that statistically speaking more women do go to church than men and that's true of evangelicalism as it is in in other spaces where do we as historians want our field to go the field of history to better reflect this idea that women are co-creators of evangelicalism as Dan put it.

Speaker 1 49:18

I got thoughts about this. Great and it has to do with power for change roughly speaking right there are two philosophies of power for change it's people with more power from the top as it were alter things. This is like religious history of pastors and theologians and seminaries uh leaders of congregations and then there is quote power from below this would be like labor union history right large groups of people who have less power can have power collectively lived religion lived religion whether that's power for change or whether it's just like these are people's experiences and they're on the ground. But like where does change or action and Catherine breakfast makes the point that honestly to conserve a thing or to keep a thing going in another generation is itself an action and that oftentimes that was the responsibility of women in teaching and so we shouldn't say it's only action if it's change or only power if it's change. It can be power to conserve or to pass on, which I think is an important point. This means you have to look at certain places for what's going on to have an entire picture of the church. And I also think that this means that you need to theorize silence. So you have to ask if there are no women there, what are the implications of that?

Women's Missionary Organizations & Church Polity

Speaker 1 50:25

So what I'm actually working on in my current book project which is women in the fundamentalist modernist controversy is the phenomenon of women's missions organizations. So every major Protestant denomination in the after the Civil War through about the 1920s had a large women's missions auxiliary. They took different forms some of them were more independent some of them were more subordinate but like if you were in women's ministry this is what you did. You didn't drink tea and have a shallow Bible study, right? You raised money for missionaries, single women missionaries going out to women who were in places where a male missionary could not reach you chose your own people to support you raised your own money you did all sorts of things on your own this was your deal which also meant that they ended up with an independent culture slightly different from the culture of the men at the church. This was a more gender segregated era in church activities, though more segregated than today in all churches, I'm actually not sure that that's true in fairness, I'll take that back. But it was a segregated era in church activities in many respects. And so the women who are raising money for women to go be missionaries, particularly focus at the time for churches with China and India and high class women in these cultures and the idea was if you convert the high class women you change the culture because they raise their kids and those kids will have power and this kind of a thing. They were secluded right there in Zananas. So you were also encountering women in cultures that had some pretty obvious feminist issues from the perspective of American women even American women who would not own, would not be pro-suffrage say the issue is Chinese women had footbinding right in the upper class so that they it was a sign that they didn't have to work but it was a mutilation and they're like that's not cool. Parts of India practice sati or widow burning the widow is useless once the husband is dead and so she should take herself out of the the problem for everybody else. They're like this is not good. So even when they're focused very much on evangelism, they also end up focused on social service because they're focused on women because they're women focused on women. So they retain this sort of combo of evangelism and social service longer while the men start fighting about the fundamentalist modernist controversy and tearing it apart. And again, fundamentalist modernism does not have to be about social service versus evangelism, but it ends up like that and the modernists drop evangelism so they won't be associated with those people over there. The fundamentalists drop social service so they won't be associated with those people over there. I think this is one of the tragedies of the split women hold it together longer. Now the question is did anyone listen to them? And this is a question of church polity. So I've been looking at like what happens with the Baptists, what happens with the Presbyterians, what happens in the South, what happens in the north, how about uh with black denominations whether they were listened to and what level of effect they had in mediating these debates depended in large part on the polity of the church. And so I never thought I was going to become a scholar of polity because that's like I don't know very boring or something. No, it's very interesting because it has to do with who gets a voice. And this circles back to something you said at the very beginning Maggie that I made a a note of you said you liked the story because it indicated that women weren't just talking about whether women could preach. And this is true. In the YWCA, the Young Women's Christian association the power of the Young Men's Christian association which we all know about because of the Village People's song it's catchier than YWCA. And so but the YWCA, right, it's a women-owned pan-Protestant organization woman-run pan-Protestant organization. And they had a fundamentalist modernist controversy. They were like going at these issues because they could talk about that because they didn't have to talk about whether women could talk because women ran the whole thing. In many denominations, I was surprised to discover that they were not talking about this when I thought they would be talking about it because instead they were talking about whether they could talk. So the Presbyterians the Northern Presbyterians for example had no lay representation in the General Assembly, which meant no female representation, which meant how are you supposed to hear these women's opinion anyway when you're making any kind of choices for the denomination. You're not but the Baptists, the Northern Baptists had one of the first female presidents of a major denomination because they had lay representation at their national convention. So Helen Barrett Montgomery one of probably the most prominent women in the women's missions movement was head of the National Baptist convention like one of the big years they were hashing out the fundamentalist modernist controversy and she had some influence because of their polity. Well that'll be a fun book to read I think so too. I hope to finish it soon. So does my editor.

Speaker 7 54:44

You said that you're you know one of the driving questions is the women missionaries held together the evangelism and the social together longer but it makes it makes it sound like it still sort of didn't last or is it just a question of it was five years more of that type of evangelicalism?

Speaker 1 55:02

No, I mean this is a bit of a generational issue here, but at the sort of blow up time in the 1920s this was still held together.

Speaker 5 55:10

Yeah.

Speaker 1 55:10

But when I say they held it together longer, I actually mean that in many denominations attempted to because reasons dismantle these separate women's organizations. Now they did shift and some of them in a more modernist direction to what was known as world friendship that's less evangelistic as a as a mission's philosophy as opposed to women's work for women which is a more evangelistic and social service sort of previous these I'm using Dana Roberts categories here. But a lot of the denominations started to try to dismantle them sometimes in the name of like why should we have a separate women's group? Let's be progressive. Let's have men and women together only let's not be so progressive that women could have 50% or more representation on these committees. Let's keep them to one third. And then we're like I'm sorry but we used to run our own thing. Right.

Speaker 2 55:52

So then they start having to fight about that and they have less ability to talk about sort of their distinct perspective John I'm curious about your perspective on this just because you've been in the field for quite a while and you've kind of seen some ebbs and flows when it comes to scholarship on women in evangelicalism. Where would you like to see the field go in kind of explorations of the role of women?

Speaker 3 56:17

I've been trying to incorporate women's history into my in women's Christian religious history into my courses my entire career we talked about my Colonial America class with Ulrich which is a very old book. I teach it still I taught it last semester 82 I think or something it was published. Yep I think some of the best scholarship in the history of American evangelicalism is coming from people writing about women and and other people sort of on the margins from the dominant way in which the story of evangelicalism has been told. You know, I think people like Andrea and others are uh really giving us a much more complex and nuanced, you know, I

Recovering Hidden Labor: Biddy Chambers

Speaker 3 57:00

was telling someone today uh group today, you know, the we historians we make the smooth places rough I maybe I've even said that in this podcast at one point.

Speaker 1 57:08

But you know to sort of complicate the narrative a little bit and I think there's probably so much more work to be done on women in evangelicalism or is am I am I Oh I mean yeah this is this example does not come from women in evangelicalism but it it explains my continual amazement that there is so much more work to be done. The very first book on enslaved women's religion like full book length treatment came out in 2021. And I was like you're kidding me it's souls of women folk. And every time I teach this and starting I think in 2022 when I first taught this I was like okay look guys this is incredible. This just came out think about how much more there is to do and you know you say it's not an evangelical but you probably find some evangelical her angle is not evangelical but like yeah I bet you find some Christian yes that's you do you do she's actually trying to push back against the Christian paradigm within American slavery slave religion enslaved religion but yeah yeah no I think we I think you know I think all three of us wanted to have an episode totally devoted to this field because it is such a vibrant field within evangelical studies.

Speaker 3 58:14

So yeah absolutely yeah and I've learned a lot as someone who doesn't study women or gender for that matter I've learned a lot.

Speaker 2 58:22

And I think it's something that historians really do have something to offer contemporary evangelicals because we do have a tendency in the 21st century to view things through a very certain lens. If a woman does X, that means she takes the egalitarian position or etc. And so to look back and say actually there is a lot of complexity here and there are ways that women have done incredible things and have shaped the movement and done all sorts of things without actually challenging much of what people might be afraid of. And maybe they did push on some of it in a way that is good to think about. And so I think kind of putting down some of those categories that create real difficulty in having conversations around these themes that's something history can do for evacuation

Teaching Historical Thinking Through Women's History

Speaker 2 59:08

the other thing is women's history has created some of the best opportunities to talk about historical thinking for me.

Speaker 3 59:16

Right because let's go back to Ann Hutchinson or or let's go back to uh you know 18th century or 17th 18th century women in New England Laurel Thatcher Ulrich or something students even my evangelical students I've taught my entire life they want to turn these you know what yeah first feminist or you know next thing you know they're like Betty for Dan has been superimposed into the 17th century. So you get to like at least explore what's possible. So what is it actually possible for women to do and then once you have the possibilities then you can see women at least this way I read Ulrich right you can see women really breaking down traditional barriers but within a framework. So you gotta say in the past is a foreign country they do things differently there, right? You know, kind of thing. But women's history has been so helpful in to me in trying to get them to think like historians that's not a judgment one way or the other but it's it's the discipline right so the two two time periods in history that really I I I find similarly useful for teaching historical thinking in class is one, it's Urich's deputy husband category.

Speaker 1 1:00:23

Yes. So that's I think that's what you're talking about. So the belief that prior to say the the 19th century like I don't know if the husband is sick or he's out of town the wife can conduct his business for him no problem. She's considered like deputized by him.

Speaker 3 1:00:36

And then my students will say why why does he have to be out of town but then I'll say no she doesn't necessarily love that.

Speaker 1 1:00:43

This is the catch. This is the historical moment. She's like dude more work. And so they don't think like we think necessarily they don't think yeah I'm liberated they're like oh I have to do with stuff it's not my job. And then if you go forward to I love using this one prompting my students for the sort of you might call the stay-at-home mom movement of the 1950s, right? It's like, do they like this? Here's the thing yes by and large according to polls although they all say they don't want their daughters to do it, which is very interesting. But why? Well because it's the 1950s if you think like a historian you don't think back from the present you think forwards from the past what just happened the 1930s and the World War II. So what did they just live through 10 years of depression followed by five years of war. And now they have enough money finally to kick out their in-laws and like live on one's salary and like maybe some some women genuinely really liked working in factories and they were upset to be kicked out other women were like I'd rather raise my kids right like factory wife don't love it. And so it's it's all about where you're coming from in the past going forwards not looking back from today.

Speaker 3 1:01:50

And what I love about teaching women's history you know when I do it I just have I just teach I just I don't write about it but a pedagogically is the story it defeats this kind of linear progressive view of history where things are just getting better and better and better for women until finally we have the feminist movement. And so if you read someone like Ulrich, you know she's kind of saying well the Puritans actually women had more I don't know agency power in like the 17th century than they did in the 19th you know she's looking back from like separate spheres it's interesting whether that's a good there's tradeoffs, right?

Speaker 1 1:02:25

There are pros and cons of the move to separate spheres.

Speaker 3 1:02:27

But yeah yeah yeah and I think that's what she's yeah so they're they're just fun fun pedagogical kind of ways to think about these things.

Speaker 7 1:02:34

I'll add one more thing I find I I hope is sort of where people spend some time. It's more on the research than the teaching but uh another person I spent some time looking at recently is Biddy Chambers the wife of Oswald Chambers who is famed as the author of My Utmost for is highest which is one of the most popular devotionals. And you've you learned so that that book comes out in 1928 which is many years after Oswald died. And you wouldn't know this based on the book if you just picked it up but she edited the whole thing. And not only that she took down so the the devotional are Oswald Chambers's sort of teachings. He never wrote those down she wrote them down and she spent years editing them and organizing them in the way that you get the book today. And it wasn't really for many many decades until anyone really acknowledged this that she didn't want to be acknowledged and that's another that that's a very common thing as well. But it ultimately sort of came out and it it actually creates an interesting question because often if you're if you assume Oswald is the author and he organized it this way well you're you're thinking about his context in largely the 1910s and World War I'm interpreting anything you would want from good most it was actually can composed about ten years later in the middle of the fundamental modernist controversy. Now they're British they're a little different but they were involved Biddy was involved in that dispute and so it takes on a whole new meaning if you're contextualizing it in the 1920s. And there's also this deeper question there was a there was a a journalist who wrote about this named Macy Halford and she sort of acknowledges at one point I'll I'll read the quote where she says there was no getting to Oswald but through her and if she altered anything at any stage along the way that he said there would be no way of knowing what it was because he spoke and she took down notes. That's just a fascinating sort of research question that only comes to light if you actually include Biddy in the story makes it much more complicated and much more rich as a story. So I'm and there's a lot of stories like this I mean it it takes often a lot of research to sort of get under the the surface level story but um I think there's a lot more of those stories out there that I hope people like Macy Halford this journalist um and others can uncover so that we can have just a much more nuanced and rich understanding of how these evangelical cultural productions and stuff actually come to be.

Speaker 2 1:04:57

I love that I think these are all really excellent points and hopefully you know we will have researchers that will take the time to dig through the archives and also just as a little bit of a push out there for women who are involved in evangelicalism, donate your papers to the archives. That's also a component of this is that it's harder to find sources because women are a little bit less likely to see their importance and therefore document things and donate them. So that pushed

Closing Thoughts & Sign-Off

Speaker 2 1:05:25

aside.

Speaker 3 1:05:25

And women read women's history.

Speaker 2 1:05:27

Yeah with that note uh thank you so much Andrea for joining us today we really appreciate your expertise and your wisdom on this um I think it's made for a really rich discussion.

Speaker 1:05:35

My pleasure thank you for having me thanks for listening to American Evangelicals a history podcast if you haven't already be sure to subscribe so you don't miss what's next. And if this episode sparked your curiosity consider sharing it with someone who wants a deeper more nuanced understanding of evangelical history. Until next time thanks for listening