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Chapter 1: Soul Winners and Sanctified Sisters: Nineteenth-Century African American Preaching Women
- The University of Tennessee Press
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Chapter 1 Soul Winners and Sanctified Sisters: NineteenthCentury African American Preaching Women Despite institutional sanctions against their licensing or ordination, African American women were active in the nineteenth century as preachers, exhorters , evangelists, and missionaries. From Rebecca Cox Jackson’s Shaker mission among African Americans in Philadelphia to the itinerant preaching of women such as Jarena Lee and Sojourner Truth and the revivalist and evangelical work of Amanda Smith and Annie Brown, African American women defied open hostility and attempts to limit if not prevent their work. Often taking their messages to whoever would receive them, they addressed men and women, whites and blacks, at camp meetings, in churches, in streets and alleyways, and in private homes. Indeed, these women should be understood as participating in the center of nascent American “liberationist movements like abolitionism and feminism” that, as Jean Humez documents, “were deeply rooted in the successive layers of religious enthusiasm that spread out over the northeastern United States in the first four decades of the century” (“Introduction” 2). Much historical scholarship on evangelical religion in nineteenthcentury America has documented its importance in “open[ing] up a whole new world for northern women discontented with their roles,” offering them “a new field in which they could become active, assertive, and relatively free agents responsible for nothing short of the redemption of the world” (Grammer 6).1 As Elizabeth Grammer notes, religion was regarded at the time as belonging to “a world somehow between the public sphere of men and politics and the private, domestic sphere, which was considered by many Americans the proper one for women” (6). For African Americans, however, religion was central to the public sphere and the church was the locus of black politics. This difference may, in part, account for not only the fierce contest over women’s right to preach but also a historical record that has actively marginalized women and their role. Even though Methodism was, as Catherine Brekus characterizes it, open to “the poor, the unlearned, the slave, or the 2 Soul Winners and Sanctified Sisters female [who] felt qualified to preach the gospel” (145), this was not the case in reforming African Methodism. Studies of nineteenth-century African American preaching women tend to characterize their position as marginalized, given that institutional positions were denied them for much of the century. Certainly, many of these women labored outside religious institutional structure, yet to take this as indicative of their position among those they worked to convert and to minister to, both the churched and the unchurched, is to underestimate and misunderstand their position and influence. Rather, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s understanding of the black church as “a discursive, critical arena—a public sphere in which values and issues were aired, debated, and disseminated through the larger black community” (7), should be extended to religious gatherings in general. In what we might then call these “small publics” we can better recognize the important ways in which black preaching women contributed to, even as they challenged, the church as public sphere. As Gary Fine and Brooke Harrington argue, small or “tiny” publics “permit individuals to collaborate flexibly for common interests without the infrastructure and resources that organizations entail” (349). That flexibility meant that preaching women arguably reached more potential converts outside the church’s formal structure than they would have had they been licensed by a denomination or given a pastorate. Invited to preach in churches by sympathetic ministers, both black and white, of varying denominations, and sought after to participate in interdenominational camp meetings or to address large gatherings in urban areas, African American women often worked at the center of nineteenth-century religious life rather than at its margins. Both the Second Great Awakening and the Holiness revival movement defined nineteenth-century American religious life, converting thousands of people organized denominations did not reach and reclaiming “backsliders” who had strayed from the church. Erica Armstrong Dunbar has recently documented that the “North, in particular, saw a tremendous rise in the number of African Americans who belonged to a Methodist denomination, in particular the African Methodist Episcopal Church” during the Second Great Awakening because “emotional conversion” was more attractive to people who “had been uncomfortable with other denominations that relied heavily on literacy” (99). These movements provided numerous opportunities for African American women to preach, exhort, and evangelize. Where opportunities were not readily available, these women made their own, traveling to reach their audiences, even into the dangerous southern slave states. It should...