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Appendix A: Sources for Research on MECS Women’s Work
- The University of Tennessee Press
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Appendix A Sources for Research on MECS Women’s Work This is the first study of its kind of which I am aware. I hope it has revealed how much can be learned about the larger work of Methodism’s white southern women with regard to the Social Gospel and to race relations through a very long-range, in-depth study of their work at one facility. A truly comprehensive study from a scholarly viewpoint has not been written for other missions run by women of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, but this is not surprising, given the daunting nature of the task. While researching St. Mark’s, I discovered that most seemingly obvious methods for obtaining documentation were not productive. Furthermore, I strongly suspect that this would be the case at all, or nearly all, of the women’s missions. I hope this summary of the methods through which I accumulated enough data to tell the St. Mark’s story may benefit other researchers who choose the important undertaking of constructing narratives about churchwomen’s work. The footnotes throughout this volume point to many helpful secondary sources. A good literature review relevant to almost any study of Methodist women’s institutions exists in Gender and the Social Gospel, edited by Wendy J. Deichmann Edwards and Carolyn De Swarte Gifford.1 Research specifically on the work of Methodist deaconesses is scant. In the second half of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Meredith Lee and Barbara Campbell published brief works.2 Another major contribution was Mary Agnes Dougherty’s expansion of her doctoral dissertation into My Calling to Fulfill: Deaconesses in the United Methodist Tradition; it is, as its title suggests, an overview that does not follow the specific work of women in any particular location. Scholars Carolyn De Swarte Gifford, Susan Hill Lindley, Rosemary Skinner Keller, Barbara Campbell , Laceye Warner, and more recently Alice Knotts have published some results of their research, but all have focused mainly on women in the MEC and the northern training schools.3 Sources for Research on MECS Women’s Work 246 Although the quality of local recordkeeping no doubt varies, most religious settlement houses are likely to present similar problems for researchers, because even when deaconesses fully appreciated the need to preserve records for historians, they lacked sufficient personnel for the task. They almost invariably chose to devote limited resources to immediate assistance for their neighbors rather than to documentation of their own efforts for posterity. Records at the national level also proved largely nonexistent. Although this may be due in part to understaffing, it also reflects the lack of importance the church at large has attached to “women’s work.” In secular society, the practice of writing women out of history has been so well documented that it need not be revisited here. Because of their prolonged resistance to the ordination of females, churches have been even more prone than the rest of society to ignore the contributions of women. For at least thirty years, since the United Methodist Church created GCAH—the General Commission on Archives and History—personnel in other church agencies have been able to believe that if they packed up material and sent it to GCAH, they had dealt with the issue of historic preservation. As any historian knows, creating an archive is not a miracle cure that automatically makes documentation usable and available; however, it is understandable that other agencies would want to avoid duplicating work that GCAH “should” be doing. GCAH is located on the campus of Drew University in New Jersey and has archival space there. Thus, “we sent it to Drew” is often Methodist-speak for, “I think maybe someone sometime put some stuff in a box and sent it—or at least meant to send it—somewhere else.” My own quest to recover the stories of the women of Methodism’s Social GospelmovementinNewOrleansbeganasaresearchpaperforaNewSouthhistory class taught by Clarence Mohr, then of the Tulane faculty. Sarah Kreutziger, a member of the School of Social Work’s faculty who wrote her dissertation about how Methodist deaconesses contributed to the professionalization of the field of social work, suggested the settlement house named St. Mark’s as a topic. The paper grew over the years into a doctoral dissertation at Tulane and still later into this book. The first step toward the construction of that first paper was to ascertain what material was available at St. Mark’s itself. Various types of records were stored in the offices of the...