God, Authority, and the Home: Gender, Race, and U.S. Pentecostals, 1900-1926

This article re-problematizes analyses of the relationship between conservative religious traditions and U.S. women through an examination of the Janus-faced rhetoric of feminine empowerment and male redemption that suffused U.S. Pentecostalism from 1906 to 1926. As spiritual founder and leader of Portland, Oregon's (Pentecostal) Apostolic Faith Mission, Florence Crawford (1870-1936) and her mission empowered women to demand that their husbands, fathers, and sons returned to the home to resume their kinship roles in order to fulfill the promises of patriarchy. It was a feat to be accomplished through women's glad submission to the "natural order of the home": male leadership. Yet, hers was a double-voiced discourse that critiqued and challenged male authority inside the home, in the pulpit, and in society even as it urged the return of men to familial and societal leadership roles. An examination of Crawford's rich and complex ministry elucidates the complexity of gender consciousness among conservative Protestant women during the first half of the twentieth century.