All Things Human: Henry Codman Potter and the Social Gospel in the Episcopal Church

3. The Work and Well-Being of Women

84 3 The Work and Well-Being of Women Women were instrumental in the social and ecclesiastical reform movements of the nineteenth century. In the first decades of the century , women were active in the antislavery, peace, and temperance movements ; after emancipation they continued to work in these latter two crusades. Women also formed a major part of the workforce for the postwar “Protestant religio-social system.” Laywomen, sisters, and deaconesses staffed the day nurseries and industrial schools of the institutional churches; formed and operated domestic and foreign mission societies; founded and administered settlement houses and women’s and girls’ clubs; and staffed rescue missions, hospitals, and orphanages. As Eleanor Flexner has noted, the reform ferment of the nineteenth century “produced new forms of organization through which women could achieve greater participation in social action.”1 During the same period the movement for improving women’s legal and political status grew and became focused on woman suffrage. The relation between this movement and the Protestant churches was ambivalent. One the one hand, women such as Frances Willard and Anna Howard Shaw were deeply religious, and the churches depended upon women for much of their labor and regarded women as a preeminent force for the moral regeneration of society. On the other hand, the churches generally regarded public leadership in church and state as inappropriate for women, and some women, including religious women, recognized that prevailing clerical practice and use of the Bible and doctrine were means of discrimination against women. The Work and Well-Being of Women 85 Despite their differences, many Protestant reformers and women’s advocates united in the temperance movement, a prominent item on the agendas of both evangelicals working for a Christian America and women working to improve the conditions of their own lives and of the larger social order. These constituencies combined in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which was both a vital instrument of mission and reform work and a means for women to exert their influence in public life. Both the temperance and the women’s movements achieved significant victories with the passage of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments in 1920. Also by 1920, significant gains had been made in securing women’s roles in the churches and in improving the conditions under which women worked. While not attributable exclusively to the churches , some church people made significant contributions to these gains.2 Henry Potter was among the men who addressed the needs of women , and in doing so he adopted new and sometimes surprising positions and strategies. Like his father, he advocated increased roles for women in church work and initiated and supported measures to secure such roles. As a result both of his concern with the rights of working people and of his recognition of the realities of working women’s lives, he also advocated women’s right to work to support themselves, supported measures to improve their working conditions, and argued for expanding the roles and occupations available to women. Neither Potter’s published writings nor later treatments of his life and views, however, provide evidence of his view of woman suffrage. Like his father, Henry Potter was concerned throughout his life with temperance reform. The temperance movement directly influenced women’s well-being, both in terms of the effect of alcohol on women’s lives and of women’s participation in temperance reform work, but Potter’s approach to “the liquor problem” was significantly different from that of most women temperance workers.3 The Unemployed Agency of Christian Women In the nineteenth century the terms of public debate on women’s work and well-being were set by what has been described as the “Victorian family ideal” or the “urban-industrial cult of genteel womanhood.”4 Although elements of this ideology were present in earlier North American and European social thought, its later dominance was a product of the nineteenth-century shift from a rural agricultural economic order to an urban industrial one. Where women’s participation in both production and consumption had been prevalent in rural European and North American societies, women’s role in production became increasingly 86 All Things Human restricted as industrial capitalism took hold. As a result, the myth of women’s special nature, while having precedents in earlier Western thought and practice, became normative with the advent of industrial capitalism. As Beverly Harrison observes: “What the rising bourgeois class did...