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LEADERSHIP AND COMMUNITY BUILDING IN PROTESTANT WOMEN’S ORGANIZATIONS
- Indiana University Press
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851 l Women’s Societies LEADERSHIP AND COMMUNITY BUILDING IN PROTESTANT WOMEN’S ORGANIZATIONS Rosemary Skinner Keller SINCE THE FOUNDING of the American colonies, in- fluential separatist women’s organizations have characterized the participation of Jewish and Christian women, and women of Anglo, African, and Hispanic American descent, in sacred and secular areas of life. When not welcomed—indeed, prohibited from serving—to serve on the governing boards of established associations and institutions, women simply formed their own separatist societies to advance their religious commitments to women, churches, and social and political movements. Prior to the Civil War, women’s associations were limited to the local scene. Bible study groups, missionary societies, and prayer circles met in churches and homes. “Daughters of Liberty” organizations made supplies, medicine, and clothing for troops during the War for Independence. By the early nineteenth century, benevolence societies provided relief and employment to women in distress and started orphanages and schools to care for destitute children. Locally based activist associations worked for social justice causes such as moral reform, temperance, abolition of slavery, and women’s rights. After the Civil War, national organizations were formed to address the social, political, and religious concerns of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Women provided financial and personnel resources to found hospitals, schools, orphanages, and homes for the elderly; they sent men and women into international missions to spread faith in Christ and to bring material aid to persons in underdeveloped countries; they sought laws and began unions to protect women and children from abusive working conditions. Women’s history could not be written without placing at the center the significant contribution of women’s separatist associations to churches and social reform. However, when one studies women’s voluntary associations through a different lens, the inner life of these organizations, another story unfolds. Separatist societies have been effective because women at the national and local levels developed an alternative style of leadership, counter to the traditional male hierarchical model. Out of a vision of building bonds of sisterhood, community within communities, leaders of separatist societies brought thousands of women together as committed participants at the grassroots level. They provided ordinary women with larger purposes for their lives beyond the confines of their homes, networks of support for their daily needs, and education in leadership. All 852 l MULTIDENOMINATIONAL MOVEMENTS—WOMEN’S SOCIETIES these fruits were crucial to the vision and power of the founders and national leaders of voluntary organizations . This essay examines the “story within the stories,” the convergence of styles of leadership and creation of community within women’s communities in the American Protestant tradition. To build community within organizations , it is necessary to develop attitudes and structures of shared authority, teamwork, support, and cooperation that value the participation of all members. Creation of this environment necessitates leadership styles counter to traditional male hierarchical patterns that stress individual competitiveness and highly centralized authority. Through their leadership, feminists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries profess a commitment to this alternative vision of community building. There are historical precedents for leadership and community building growing out of this feminist vision. Focusing the lens of this essay, it concentrates on this experience of three representative women’s communities that flourished during the Social Gospel period from the 1870s through the early twentieth century: the deaconess movement, women’s societies of Christian service and missionary outreach, and social settlement houses. These case studies provide practical examples of the relationship between leadership and community building that reveal a side of the story of women’s organizations not usually told. Community within communities resulted from the creation of a corporate sense of members’ vocations and the living out of that commitment in leadership styles, relations with each other, and daily activities. While addressing the needs of churches and social service and justice agencies, women found individual vocations, mentored each other in leadership, and developed bonds of sisterhood that previously had been inconceivable. A Public Family and Its Mother Leadership and community building converged in the Chicago Training School for City, Home and Foreign Missions, founded in 1885. One of the earliest and strongest deaconess institutions established within the Protestant tradition and the Methodist Episcopal Church, the school was begun after the Civil War through the partnership of Lucy Rider Meyer, who served as principal, and her husband Josiah Shelly Meyer, its longtime administrator. The Training School included a deaconess home, a residence for the young single women...