Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845

Abstract

Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845. By Catherine A. Brekus. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Pp. x, 466. Illustrations, tables. Cloth, $49.95; paper, $17.95.) More than one hundred evangelical women, white and black, tramped the roads of America preaching the Gospel during the century following the Great Awakening. Most were poor by the standards of the advancing market economy. Even those who defied and left their families to bear spiritual witness remained dependent on male clergy for occasional access to pulpits. Less educated than the men who led their own sects, the women professed reliance on divine inspiration, sometimes with humility but at other times in a brash and contentious mood. They drew crowds-curiosity-seekers and penitents-and reportedly moved listeners to tears and conversion. As quickly as they appeared, they typically disappeared from the historical record. Some married and gave up preaching, some were overcome by life's problems. Almost no one, including many of the women themselves, thought it important to keep a record of their work. Catherine A. Brekus constructs an intriguing portrait of early American women preachers from bits of evidence: ministers' memoirs, denominational trials, advertisements of preaching engagements, drawings, and photographs. The great contribution of her study is how well it reveals the conflicted mind-set of evangelicals not only about women but about progress. Female preachers were not found among sedate Protestants; they inhabited the religious margins as Separates, Baptists, or Shakers in the eighteenth century, and as Methodists, African Methodists, or Millerites in the nineteenth century. Unusually attached to the Bible, these populist evangelicals, male and female, were wary of the acquisitive spirit and social freedoms of modernity. Probably none of them conceded that women had rights. It is ironic that their religious conservativism drove them to radical measures. Eagerly harnessing new media such as mass-- circulated publications and photography, they denounced established society's complacency and sought restoration of biblical standards. By conventional measures, the same women preachers who disdained women's rights advocates such as Fanny Wright were dangerously immodest. They were, in Brekus's words, `biblical' rather than secular feminists (6). Awkwardly, they risked their good name even in evangelical circles by obeying God's call. It is often said that the value of women's history is the new light it casts on history overall. Strangers and Pilgrims succeeds well on these terms. Women preachers-poised between self-abnegation and self assertion, pious submission and social resistance, traditionalism and innovation-are an apt symbol of radical evangelicalism during this long period of religious awakening. The sweeping quality of Strangers and Pilgrims, so helpful m staking out a new field of inquiry, also contributes to the study's imprecision on issues of thesis and context. …