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Notes to chapter 11 start on page 278 219 CANADIAN Methodist women welcomed itinerants into their homes, and used their initiative and their energies to found and support congregations . Missionary society women selected and maintained their own missionaries, and established and oversaw their own mission projects . Women in some ladies’ aids devised ways to control the use of the funds that they had raised through their own hard work. Through Sunday school work they strongly influenced the lives of Methodist youth. Women made their opinions known—sometimes quite emphatically— to their ministers, and there is no doubt that they often helped shape the views of their husbands and other male relatives when decisions were to be made concerning their church. Women’s influence must not be underrated, but nevertheless women lacked formal power in most of the official structures of their denomination. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, they were neither trustees nor ministers, and as for the few women whose names were listed as members of the official board, many felt too isolated to participate fully in the work of that body. Accustomed to an active role within their denomination, some women became aware that they did not enjoy all the privileges and responsibilities of membership, and they attempted to gain the status that they felt was rightly theirs as members of the Methodist Church. Local Representation Elizabeth Bive Higman was one of many Methodist women remembered as a “mother in Israel.” According to her 1885 obituary, “As a class-leader she had but few equals. Her warm, sympathetic, spiritual nature won the hearts of her large class of seventy-two members, over whose religious welfare she watched with more than a mother’s love.”1 All the Rights and Privileges: The Status of Women within the Church CHAPTER 11 This was the language that Methodists used frequently when they spoke of the women who led classes: their spiritual influence was beneficial to the class members whom they supervised with a maternal love. Yet, although the class meeting had as its chief purpose the spiritual oversight of its members, it also had practical functions. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, class members supported their Methodist society, not by presenting an offering during the congregation’s service of worship, but by submitting their money to their class leaders. These leaders were members of the quarterly official board, and it was at the board meetings that they made the reports on their classes and presented the returns. Thus, in 1871, in Guelph, Mrs. Day and Mrs. Maddock were among those present at a meeting of the official board held in the minister’s vestry. “The principal business before the meeting was the examination of the Classbooks for the purpose of ascertaining the number of members in good standing preparatory to making the return to Conference.”2 Women often led classes of women or girls who usually had limited financial resources. Thus the money returned by the female class leaders might be meagre.3 Nevertheless, in the large number of churches where some classes were led by women, the women who led classes were an integral part of the governing structure of their congregation. Yet the system was not without tensions. Late in the 1880s, Phoebe Haney was prevailed upon to become the leader of a class. As a result, she and another woman who was a class leader began to attend the meetings of the quarterly board. In her memoirs she wrote, “I felt rather strange when I began to attend these meetings, especially when I gave my first vote but we soon grew accustomed to it, and began to take great interest in the mechanical part of the work.…I attended every meeting of the Board, for seven years.”4 Haney’s autobiography showed her be a woman confident in her faith and her opinions. If a woman like Haney “felt rather strange” when she first voted in the quarterly meetings, there were, no doubt, many women who felt that the unaccustomed public role was a heavy burden. Thus, some women (as well as men) sometimes handed in money without attending the meetings. Women’s discomfort was shown more directly in discussion when the Hamilton Branch of the Woman’s Missionary Society met in the fall of 1898. The members’ decision was published in the WMS section of the Missionary Outlook, and there was no disguising the rebuke that the women gave to the men of the church...

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