Women in God's Army: Gender and Equality in the Early Salvation Army (review)

From its early days in the 1870s as a Christian mission in London's East End, the Salvation Army drew on unconventional measures to attract those beyond the reach of organized religion. Especially controversial was its use of female preachers on streets and platforms, a practice inaugurated by its co-founders, William and Catherine Booth. Notably at variance with the middle-class gender norms of the day, this principle of sexual equality was laid down in the Army's founding documents, elaborated by the leadership, and reiterated by historians.

Drawing on feminist theology with its 'hermeneutic of suspicion,' Andrew Mark Eason has re-examined early Salvationist rhetoric about gender equality and tested it against actual practice during the Army's first half-century in England. After a rather tendentious introduction discussing the methodology (the one instance where the reader is reminded that this work originated as a master's thesis), successive chapters examine attitudes to gender and female preaching within the culture of Victorian evangelicalism, as well as in the writings of Charles Booth and other early male leaders, most notably Booth's associate George Scott Railton. Having established that the leaders, despite their unusual openness to female preaching, were decidedly ambiguous when it came to asserting true gender equality, Eason nicely draws attention to similar tensions in Catherine Booth's own writings and behaviour. Though a strong proponent of woman's right to preach and of spiritual equality between the sexes, she did not challenge the prevailing construct of woman as self-denying, weak, and submissive to male headship. Notwithstanding its use of female preachers, the Army's patriarchal structures and conventional gender expectations of woman's role within the home led, therefore, to significant underrerpresentation of women within the higher and middle ranks, a point underscored by several helpful tables of the senior, provincial, and divisional leadership over the period 1880 to 1930.

Readers may wish that this study had examined two additional issues relevant to gender relations: Salvationist material culture in revivals, especially the statements made by the provocative costume and noisy musical instruments of female preachers, and the economic circumstances of Army couples. Unlike the Booths, most were not able to employ servants, and one suspects that the demands of raising a family in straitened circumstances may be at least as responsible as gender discrimination in moving married Army women from the streets into the home. Apart from overlooking these two concerns, this is a fine piece of research and analysis. Eason's range of interest is extensive, and he skilfully weaves into his thesis such doctrinal matters as the influence of Methodism, the impact of American revivalism, the Army's emphasis on holiness, and the move away from the sacraments. His conclusion is that the Army's egalitarian ideals were largely shaped by a pragmatic evangelicalism, and were really more attenuated by the cultural norms of the period than has generally been recognized in Salvationist historiography. Though ably argued, this insight will not come as a surprise to readers familiar with the extensive literature on religion and gender in nineteenth-century Anglo-societies. Nevertheless, as a systematic analysis of how egalitarian concepts played themselves out in a religious denomination which consciously modelled itself on authoritarian military structures, this study reveals yet one more fascinating aspect of the complex exchange between religious forms and cultural norms in the Victorian era.