Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845 (review)

A “stranger and a pilgrim” is what Harriet Livermore, four-time preacher to Congress, called herself (1788–1868). Catherine Brekus uses the phrase categorically in her illuminating study of more than 100 evangelical women, white and black, who unsuccessfully “struggled to invent an enduring tradition of female religious leadership” as their efforts went through several cycles of acceptance, rejection, and forgetting (3). No longer “enthusiasts best forgotten,” Brekus’s women now appear as historical agents whose recovered voices enrich and complicate our view of such phenomena as the democratization of American religion, the growth of a market economy and its consequences, the expansion of civil society, the rise of an “informal” public, the change from a “one-sex” to a “two-sex” gender model, and the relationship between religious and political movements (338).

During the revivals of the 1740s, women felt encouraged to practice public religious speaking. But within a decade, resistance began to silence them in what emerges as a controlling pattern: when countercultural sects became more respectable, “evangelical women lost their public voice”; their achievements were claimed by others, their names disappeared from records. After a hiatus during the Revolutionary and early national eras (during which Shaker Ann Lee and the “Public Universal Friend,” Jemima Wilkinson, are outstanding exceptions), the pattern repeated itself in the nineteenth century. Such struggling denominations as the Freewill Baptists, the Christian Connection, the Methodists, and African Methodists sent women out to preach to lower-class audiences, but denominational success and upward mobility changed congregational structure and membership (by 1844, the Methodists were the country’s largest denomination). During the 1830s and 1840s, the growing visibility of female political reformers coincided with another backlash against female preaching within evangelical congregations: the battle over preaching became a “battle over women’s proper place” (283). The resurgence in female preaching associated with the Millerites ended with that movement’s collapse in 1845.

Brekus’s “strangers and pilgrims” were “biblical” rather than secular feminists. Most of them were as poor and uneducated as their audience; few supported political change. Revolutionary in defense of women’s preaching but orthodox in theology and often reactionary in their longing for an imagined past of stable communities, most defined themselves as helpmates, not leaders. Religious individualists, they condemned economic individualism; idealizing the home, they left it to preach. They criticized the market revolution but used its tools to spread their message. Unacquainted with traditions of biblical criticism that highlighted women’s authority and unaware of their own predecessors, they kept “reinvent[ing] their identities.” If eighteenth-century pioneers felt they had to overcome their “female nature” to preach, their nineteenth-century sisters grounded their right to preach in “women’s natural virtue and morality” (15). Brekus finds them “exceptional” yet “more representative . . . than free-thinking radicals such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton” (7).

Differentiating her subjects by region, class, race, education, denomination, and other contexts, Brekus lays out her material without silencing its paradoxes and contradictions. While her own interpretations are informed and persuasive, she has opened a trail that invites further exploration.