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864 l MULTIDENOMINATIONAL MOVEMENTS—WOMEN’S SOCIETIES of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (1977), establish the significance of women’s separatist societies in American history and church history. Important primary sources related to Lucy Rider Meyer and the deaconess movement are Lucy Rider Meyer, Deaconesses (1892); Isabella Horton , High Adventure: Life of Lucy Rider Meyer (1928) and The Burden of the City (1904), and Reverend Christian Golder, History of the Deaconess Movement in the Christian Church (1903); also the Deaconess Advocate and the Message and Deaconess Advocate, journals of the Chicago Training School, in which Meyer’s writings were published. A good modern study is Mary Agnes Dougherty, My Calling to Fulfill: Deaconesses in the United Methodist Tradition (1997). Recent annotated articles on Rider are included in Women in New Worlds: Historical Perspectives on the Wesleyan Tradition, edited by Rosemary Keller , Louise Queen, and Hilah Thomas (vol. 1, 1981; vol. 2, 1982). The authors include Virginia Brereton, Mary Agnes Dougherty, Catherine Prelinger, and Keller. Women’s missionary journals of the late nineteenth century referred to in this essay include The Heathen Woman’s Friend (Methodist Episcopal Church), the Lutheran Missionary Journal, and The Woman’s Evangel (United Brethren Church). Also see Rosemary Skinner Keller, “Lay Women in the Protestant Tradition ,” in Women and Religion in America, vol. 1, The Nineteenth Century, ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller (1982). For Jennie Fowler Willing, see Joanne Brown, “Shared Fire: The Flame Ignited by Jennie Fowler Willing ,” in Spirituality and Social Responsibility: Vocational Vision of Women in the United Methodist Tradition, ed. Rosemary Skinner Keller (1993). For Nannie Helen Burroughs, see Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (1993). Jane Addams’s Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910) is the definitive primary source document, of Addams’s many writings, for this essay. Three of the recent related studies quoted here are Jean Bethke Elshtain, Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy (2002); Eleanor Stebner, The Women of Hull House: A Study in Spirituality, Vocation, and Friendship (1997); and Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture, 1830–1900 (1995). Biographical essays of Addams, Starr, Kelley, Lathrop, and Hamilton, as well as Meyer, Willing, and Burroughs, are found in Edward T. James, ed., Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, 3 vols. (1971), and Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd, eds., The Modern Period, vol. 4 (1980). “LIFTING AS WE CLIMB”: NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF COLORED WOMEN (NACW)/ NATIONAL COUNCIL OF NEGRO WOMEN (NCNW) Marcia Y. Riggs WHY DID AFRICAN American women organize a national club movement at the end of the nineteenth century ? There are two aspects that establish parameters for answering this question. First, the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth century was a time of such racial brutality, disenfranchisement, and legalized segregation that it has been described as the “nadir” of U.S. race relations. In fact, the plight of African Americans by the last decade of the nineteenth century has been summed up in this way: “The 1890s sounded several loud warnings of the collapse of black prospects in America. The three shrillest were Booker T. Washington ’s abnegation of black equality in his Atlanta Exposition speech of 1895; the U.S. Supreme Court’s blessing on Jim Crow in its Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896; and the total eclipse by 1898 of the Populist movement with the resurgence of the solid Democratic South” (Henri, 1). In response to these circumstances, African Americans increased their self-help and racial uplift efforts within independent black churches and through social reform movements. The race-class ideologies that undergirded these responses ranged from accommodationist and integrationist to protest and nationalist; the theologies were evangelical and Social Gospel. Second, there was a significant growth of women’s organizations between 1890 and 1920 as social reform work led by women in separate groups such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Unions achieved success . The growth of these women’s organizations is a significant indicator of women’s efforts to expand the meaning of the reigning nineteenth-century gender ideology , “the cult of domesticity.” The cult of domesticity assumed that women were to be wives and mothers whose attributes were domesticity, submissiveness, piety, and purity. With social activism outside the home, women embraced a concept of “virtuous womanhood” wedded to an “ideology of educated motherhood” as they...

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