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THE SANCTIFIED CHURCH(ES)
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430 l PROTESTANTISM—EVANGELICAL PROTESTANTISM She published three editions of her autobiography: The Life, Work and Experiences of Maria Beulah Woodworth (1894), Signs and Wonders (1916), and Acts of the Holy Ghost, or the Life, Work and Experience of Mrs. M. B. Woodworth-Etter, Evangelist (1922). When she settled down to pastor a local church in Indianapolis, she passed the mantle to Aimee Semple McPherson (1890– 1944), who visited her in 1918. Social Reforms Holiness also empowered many women to engage in a variety of social reforms. Phoebe Palmer worked at the Five Points Mission, an outreach to the poor of New York City. She gave Antoinette Brown Blackwell (1825– 1921) her initial tour of the facility and the neighborhood . In 1853 Brown became the first woman in the United States to be formally ordained as a minister. Mattie Perry worked with the poor in the mill villages of Spartanburg, South Carolina. Joanna Moore (1832–?) traveled extensively in the Mississippi Delta, trying to encourage and uplift recently freed slaves. Many Holiness women were temperance advocates. Frances Willard became president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Hannah Whitall Smith was the WCTU’s superintendent of evangelism before she moved to England, where she continued her involvement with the WCTU. It was she who introduced Willard to British WCTU president Lady Isabel Somerset . Both Willard and Smith worked diligently for woman’s suffrage as well. Holiness women were active in education. Elizabeth Baker and her sisters in Rochester, New York, founded not only the Elim healing home but also the Elim Bible training school. Mattie Perry founded Elhanan, an orphanage and school for needy children, in Marion, North Carolina. Women of the Holiness movements opened homes with a variety of ministries in addition to healing. Many welcomed missionaries and other Christian workers who needed rest and refreshing. In 1866 in Belton, Texas, Mrs. Martha McWhirter had an experience in which she spoke in tongues and heard God speaking back to her, telling her to establish the “Woman’s Commonwealth,” a celibate community for women who wished to leave their abusive husbands. White Holiness missionary Joanna Moore opened a home for elderly black women in New Orleans. Holiness women also reached out to the homeless and destitute. The women at Elim offered a dormitory for homeless and derelict men and served them free meals. Emma M. Whittemore established a home for former prostitutes, and Martha A. Lee (“Mother Lee”) (b. 1842) reached out to shelter young women who became pregnant out of wedlock (in the late nineteenth century many were cast out of their families and drifted into prostitution to support themselves and their child). The Twentieth Century With the advent of Pentecostalism in 1906, many Holiness groups, especially in the South, became Pentecostal . Some Holiness denominations such as the Church of the Nazarene and the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana ) continued to ordain women, but as these denominations reached out for wider cultural acceptance in the first half of the century, they often neglected and even discouraged women’s ministry. With the advent of biblical feminism in the 1960s, however, they began to recover their historical memory of these early women leaders, and this gave rise to a new generation of ordained women. Susie Stanley has pulled many of them together in gatherings of an organization known as Wesleyan /Holiness Women Clergy. Other Holiness denominations such as the Christian and Missionary Alliance, under the influence of fundamentalism , have flatly rejected women’s ordination despite having had significant numbers of women pastors and evangelists in the early 1900s. SOURCES: Helpful sources include Rosemary Gooden’s lengthy introduction to Faith Cures and Answers to Prayer Healing by Faith (2002); Nancy A. Hardesty, Women Called to Witness: Evangelical Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (1984, 1999) Faith Cure: Divine Healing in the Holiness and Pentecostal Movements, (2003); Rebecca Laird, Ordained Women in the Church of the Nazarene: The First Generation (1993); Jean Miller Schmidt, Grace Sufficient: A History of Women in American Methodism, 1760–1939 (1999); and Susie Cunningham Stanley, Holy Boldness: Women Preachers’ Autobiographies and the Sancti fied Self (2002) and Feminist Pillar of Fire: The Life of Alma White (1993). Additional sources: Abel Stevens, The Women of Methodism (1866); Charles Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835); Stephen Olin Garrison, Forty Witnesses (1888); and Carrie Judd, Prayer of Faith (1880). THE SANCTIFIED CHURCH(ES) Cheryl Townsend Gilkes WITHIN AFRICAN AMERICAN...