Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845, and: Daughters of Thunder: Black Women Preachers and Their Sermons, 1850-1979 (review)

Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845 by Catherine A. Brekus. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998, 466 pp., $49.95 hardcover, $17.95 paper.

Daughters of Thunder: Black Women Preachers and Their Sermons, 1850-1979 by Bettye Collier-Thomas. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1998, 345 pp., $25.00 hardcover.

Just when you thought it was safe to make generalizations about women preachers in the United States because every possible source had been uncovered, these two books challenge conventional wisdom about preaching women based on new archival sources. Conventional wisdom has it that women preachers were proto-feminists, preaching women's liberation along with the Christian gospel and seeking ministerial ordination to achieve ecclesiastical authority. On the contrary, Brekus and Collier-Thomas demonstrate that these women's goals were communicating the gospel and that challenging prevailing gender ideology was an incidental, if inevitable, byproduct of a woman's call to preach. Moreover, many preaching women did not seek ordination because they felt the Bible did not condone it, but followed their call through evangelizing, testifying, and exhorting with or without male clerical approval. Taken together, these two books broaden and shade our understandings of women's roles as religious leaders in the United States.

In Strangers and Pilgrims Catherine Brekus analyzes evangelical women preachers of the First and Second Great Awakenings, two periods of widespread revival in the late-colonial and early-national periods. Focusing on Freewill Baptists, Methodists, and the Christian Connection, she conducted exhaustive research in primary sources, particularly church records and private journals. She also includes chapters on the Shakers, Millerites, and Society of the Public Universal Friend, sectarian movements led by women. Brekus argues that in the eighteenth century, women preachers denounced their femininity and denied their sex, basing their right to preach on having transcended the constraints of gender. By contrast, in the nineteenth century, they stressed that distinctive female traits such as virtue and superior morality qualified them to speak the word of the Lord. However, whatever their justification to preach, Brekus asserts preaching women across nearly a century proclaimed the same message: salvation and new birth in Jesus the Christ and resistance to growing individualism and materialism of U.S. culture, especially among evangelicals as they became more mainstream. She concludes that women preachers have been neglected by both later evangelicals and feminists, too radical for the former, too orthodox for the latter.

Brekus makes her points effectively, if not always succinctly. Her main argument that women preachers were "strangers and pilgrims"--outsiders in U.S. culture, repeatedly reinventing their identities, unable to sustain a lasting tradition, forgotten by their descendants --is familiar to historians of virtually all women's movements. More significant is her concept of "informal public," a middle ground between private and public spaces and a useful construct for historians of women's organizations. In contrast to historians who have struggled with the dichotomy of public/private lives, Brekus claims that churches bridged home and the world, creating opportunities for women's leadership. Her detailed socioeconomic analysis is exceptional, both of early national society and the women themselves. However, compared to her class analysis, her inclusion of African American women preachers seems token. Although she discusses them, she offers little analysis of the ways in which their ministry was complicated by race as well as gender. The value of the book rests in Brekus's recovery of a forgotten tradition, albeit a disconnected and fragmentary one, that thickens our knowledge of evangelical religious movements.

Although Bettye Collier-Thomas's Daughters of Thunder is more an anthology than sustained analysis, it is nonetheless ground-breaking. Like Brekus, Collier-Thomas recovers a forgotten tradition of women's preaching in African American religious life. Unlike Brekus, however, Collier-Thomas's sources are...