Ann Bolton and Early Evangelical Women

Abstract

Abstract This chapter explores the agency and religious activism of early evangelical women through the life-writings of one British Methodist woman, Ann Bolton. Considerable scholarly attention has been given to those rare opportunities when eighteenth-century religious women surmounted gendered barriers to use their voices in the pulpit and print, as well as their more usual influence in the domestic world of home and family. Aalders argues that critical attention to women’s life-writings reveals a far broader range of women’s religious activities—activities that often took place at the intersection of public and private worlds and included both teaching and evangelism. While traditional interpretations of the Bible, together with social mores that favored women’s silence and humility, presented tensions for early evangelical women who wished to take an active role in ministry, they were able to overcome such hinderances by claims to a divine calling. Ann Bolton’s substantial archive—which includes a diary kept for almost thirty years and hundreds of letters—complicates and enriches our understanding of the scope of eighteenth-century women’s religious worlds.