Gender and Pentecostal Revivalism

Making a Female Ministry in the Early Twentieth Century

Leah Payne

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137494696
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137494672
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations
• Index: Social Sciences

This innovative volume provides an interdisciplinary, theoretically innovative answer to an enduring question for Pentecostal/charismatic Christianities: how do women lead churches? This study fills this lacuna by examining the leadership and legacy of two architects of the Pentecostal movement - Maria Woodworth-Etter and Aimee Semple McPherson.

1

“Truly Manly”: The Ideal American Minister

This chapter explores the gendered nature of the ideal American minister in the 1890s–1920s.¹ Like all else at the turn of the twentieth century, ideals of Christian ministry were informed by regnant notions of what women and men ought to be. Chapter 1 argues that the institution of the ministry was gendered male during the 1890s–1920s according to the era’s standards of masculinity. Revivalists in particular expressed this masculinity through rhetoric and displays of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century manliness. Strategies that female revivalists employed to lead in an institution that was ideally masculine had limited success.

That the minister was gendered male in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American life is hardly a surprise. It is an office that, from its inception, has been considered male.² Female ministers throughout the formation of the Christian tradition were members of a very small, usually derided, and often persecuted group.³ But, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many advocates for female ministers saw in the era’s progressive spirit an opportunity for change.⁴ In this age of first-wave feminism,⁵ late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century feminist activists Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and their colleagues encouraged women to enter institutions of higher learning at greater rates than ever before.⁶ Once they graduated, these women entered into professional life at unprecedented rates and began careers in traditionally male vocations such as the law, medicine, and the academy.⁷ They also created new so-called female professions such as social work and public health nursing.⁸ In addition, women of the era mobilized to effect change in many aspects of American public life: health care and welfare reform, the temperance movement, and suffrage.⁹

This shift in the place and presence of women in nonecclesial professions put pressure on the country’s oldest institution to follow suit.¹⁰ Many denominations responded to progressive trends by changing their policies on female ministers. For example, between 1890 and 1930, the Methodist Episcopal Church, the African American Episcopal Zion Church, the Church of the Nazarene, the Mennonite Church, and many others opened ordination to women.¹¹ Thus, the number of denominations giving women access to ordination in the 1890s and 1920s was unprecedented.

Proponents of female ministers expressed optimism in light of their accomplishments. “In five or ten years,” said Methodist Rev. M. Madeline Southard, “all denominations will grant ecclesiastical equality to women.”¹² Southard’s prediction proved to be optimistic. In spite of the influx of women into the profession, for Protestants from fundamentalism to the mainline, the ministry, in its most ideal form, remained male.¹³

The trend toward female ministers was followed by swift and intense backlash against female ministers and their supporters. The fundamentalists, a group born (in part) out of frustration with shifting gender roles in the nineteenth century, produced some of the best-documented and most virulent responses to female ministers.¹⁴ Fundamentalists were opposed to women in church leadership of any sort,¹⁵ and they peppered their rhetoric with accusations of female theological shallowness and moral feebleness.¹⁶ “Woman,” wrote fundamentalist H. B. Taylor, “is too easily beguiled to be a leader.”¹⁷ Whereas women ministers were depicted as too weak and gullible for the ministry, fundamentalists portrayed men as the natural defenders of orthodoxy and the hope for the future of American Christianity.¹⁸

Fundamentalists provided some of the more extreme instances of retaliation, but they were not alone in their disapproval of female ministers. Evangelical and mainline Protestants alike were uncomfortable with the idea of women entering the ministry.¹⁹ Protestants in denominations with both permissive and restrictive policies regarding female ministers strongly preferred male ministers.²⁰ For example, well-known progressive ministers and theologians Walter Rauschenbush and Harry Fosdick promoted male ministers as the ideal form of the pastorate.²¹ Christian-themed novels such as Charles Monroe Sheldon’s In His Steps regularly gendered the nature of the ministry by reiterating the importance of a Christian home—wherein men were the public figures who spread the manly good news to the world, and women took care of religious education for children in the domicile.²²

Some revivalists in the 1890s–1920s had a long history of empowering women to teach, preach, testify, and prophesy publicly, but that did not exempt them from preferring men in the office of the ministry.²³ Even individuals and groups who heartily affirmed female access to the pulpit often expressed ambivalence toward women ministers.²⁴ Famed turn-of-the-century revivalist A. B. Simpson, who allowed for female pastors, encouraged male ministers to lead followers “into all the fullness of the mature manhood of Christ.”²⁵ In 1915, Billy Sunday aggressively called for more men to lead the church in its mission. “We need men,” he wrote, “men that will fight.”²⁶

Thus, even as women entered professional ministry in increasingly greater numbers, most American Protestants, and revivalists in particular, called for male ministers. Not just any male, however, would do. Americans had a specific kind of man in mind. They wanted a minister who was gendered according to 1890s and 1920s standards of manliness.

Making Manly Men

There were many qualities that made a manly late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century man. First and foremost, the manly man was gendered by what he did not possess: effeminacy.²⁷ Effeminacy, “having the qualities of a woman; womanish; soft and delicate in an unmanly degree; destitute of manly qualities,”²⁸ was the result of a man taking on womanly behaviors and sensibilities. As such, it was a condition that could only afflict men. “Effeminacy is not being female,” according to one observer, but “being less masculine.”²⁹ Therefore, femininity, while a positive quality in a woman, became the undesirable quality of effeminacy when practiced by a man.³⁰

Many worried that the “effeminacy of American youth”³¹ was at an all time high at the turn of the century, and pundits of the era placed the blame for the supposed effeminacy of their generation firmly upon their Victorian ancestors.³² The man that turn- of-the-century Americans inherited—the “archetypal buttoned-down Victorian gentleman” whose manners, reserve, and manful purity of heart and body had once been celebrated as a cornerstone of American civilization—was no longer seen as the kind of man who could lead Americans into the modern era.³³ The customs and mannerisms that had been considered manly, refined, and poised in the nineteenth century became “overcivilized,” “pussyfooted,” and “sissy,” in the 1890s–1920s.³⁴ According to early-twentieth-century Americans, the “weakling” Victorian man possessed none of the self-starting, independent powers that men needed to survive in the modern world; he was lazy, submissive, and had a fondness for luxury and leisure.³⁵ Therefore, the ideal man of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was further defined as not Victorian.

Instead of being a pussyfooted Victorian, the ideal man was modern, which meant that he welcomed the scientific advancements, technological changes, and intellectual challenges that Americans faced at the turn of the twentieth century. The post-Victorian era was a time when Americans were at the latter stage of a “hump of transition” from eighteenth-century republic to “complex industrial and urban life.”³⁶ Americans faced vast changes both in “physical landscape” and in “psychic circumstan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1   “Truly Manly”: The Ideal American Minister
• 2   “Walking Bibles”: Narrating Female Pentecostal Ministry
• 3   “Pants Don’t Make Preachers”: The Image of a Female Pentecostal Minister
• 4   “A Glorious Symbol”: Building a Female Pentecostal Worship Space
• 5   “Thunder” and “Sweetness”: Authority and Gender in Pentecostal Performance
• 6   “A Regular Jezebel”: Female Ministry, Pentecostal Ministry on Trial
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index