About Women preachers

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The Battlefield: Conservative Christian culture in America and biblical interpretations that limited women, particularly in the 18th and 19thcenturies.

The Opponents: Men and women who had accepted the idea that women as speakers (or as published authors) indicated that they were “promiscuous,” “manly,” and “immodest” versus women determined to speak and to publish for political reasons and for the purpose of preaching, exhorting, and joyfully speaking for God. 

Guiding questions for chapter one:

1. How does a woman’s ethos, as it is determined by her and co-created by an audience of listeners or readers, limit or empower her in the 18th and 19thcenturies in America?

2. How did Christian women, such as Quakers and participants in the revivals of the two Great Awakenings, move authority away from college-educated men and into the hands of the common people, including women?

3. How did women preachers, who presented themselves as pure and called by God in a time where public speakers were denigrated with epithets like “promiscuous,” undermine the prejudices the public (both men and women) held against women speaking in public? 

4. How is the work of women preachers ironic? Given that many did not claim equality with men and used alternate names to sidestep the issue (Mothers in Israel, exhorters, prophetesses, etc.), did they help advance women’s right to speak publicly even though they clearly did not intend to do so? And what about the women preachers who are far outside of mainstream Christianity? Should we recognize the work of women whose work misled other Christians because they held great influence over some? 

5. Why did so many women argue for a woman’s right to speak by basing it on a long list of biblical figures? Why did so many argue for a woman’s right to preach when they themselves were not preachers nor did they intend to be? What is the significance of the debate over a woman’s right to speak in terms of Christian exegesis done by amateurs and not by educated theologians? 

First Wave Feminists included women preachers and Christian leaders who forged a path for the right to speak in public, although their contributions were ironic since these women claimed to be speaking for God and did not claim to fight for women’s equality. Yet they still eroded the patriarchal constructs that were in place to silence women. Without the right to speak publicly, feminists’ other social, educational, and political reform initiatives could not have been achieved. While most of the prominent leaders in social movements, such as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, were Christians, it is in the role of women preachers that we see how women undermined the cultural prejudices that tried to silence them and undermine their authority and ethos in a more pervasive and influential way because their numbers were greater, and they validated their work through spiritual, not human or social or even educational, credentials.