St. Mark's and the Social Gospel: Methodist Women and Civil Rights in New Orleans, 1895–1965

Introduction

Introduction The story of St. Mark’s Community Center and the St. Mark’s congregation is a story about women. It is a story about white, southern women, about Methodist women, women who were products of their own time and place but who also challenged the prevailing culture in both subtle and dramatic ways, and who brought about substantial change in New Orleans. St. Mark’s and the Social Gospel is not a traditional biography, because not one of these women—not those who worked in 1895 nor those who worked in 1965, nor any of their sisters in between—was regarded as biography material. No one collected their papers and archived them. By the turn of the twentyfirst century, finding enough information about any one of them to fill a book proved impossible. Yet that circumstance is precisely the story of women’s most powerful work, work that is performed collaboratively, using the hours and talents and nickels and dimes of many women joined together. The white southern Methodist women in this study established and ran a settlement house. Settlement houses were not, as the name might imply, focused on providing housing for the needy. Rather, they were facilities that allowed well-educated women to live in low-income neighborhoods, learning from their neighbors as they got to know them about what their true needs were. Settlements were designed on the one hand to provide an oasis of calm and beauty for people whose daily lives in dirty factories and crowded tenements tended toward chaos, but they were also designed to give the settlement workers a deep, experiential understanding of how they could best help the neighborhood. Hull House, established in Chicago by Nobel Peace Prize recipient Jane Addams, is the best known of all settlement houses in this country, but other nonsectarian settlements came to be identified with famous workers like Lillian Wald and Florence Kelley, and even Eleanor McMain, who ran Kingsley House, the nonsectarian settlement in New Orleans. Traditional history has neglected the women who are the focus of St. Mark’s and the Social Gospel, for several reasons. Those reasons include the dismissal Introduction 2 of religious settlements by social historians and nonsectarian settlement workers of the time (for being too religious) and by the church at large (for not being religious enough); the fact that Methodist deaconesses, like Methodist preachers , were moved around from location to location by the larger church, which prevented any one woman’s story from becoming indistinguishable from that of St. Mark’s (and vice-versa); and the fact that the laywomen of Methodism did their work collaboratively, as an organization, an approach that is only beginning to garner some of the historical attention it deserves. Furthermore, as discussed in the following pages, the history of the deaconess movement within Methodism overall has received very little consideration by historians, and despite the importance of their ministries in southern cities, even less research has been done on Methodist deaconesses in the South. The fascinating history of their groundbreaking work has been lost, along with the names of the individual women who accomplished it. Since the second wave of feminism began, many have debated the topic of what feminist leadership styles should look like. Early in this movement, many women in the workforce absorbed the message that to achieve success in what was “still a man’s world,” they should make themselves appear, in work style Fig. 1. A postcard of St. Mark’s produced by C. B. Mason sometime between 1923 and 1926. Introduction 3 if not in dress, as much like men as possible. Feminist theology, on the other hand, began to question relatively early whether men’s experience and perspective is indeed “the human situation” for women.1 Over time, the concept of “woman-church” emerged, with reflection on what a nonhierarchical church might look like. Today, feminist theologians tend to focus on the interconnectedness of lives and souls. They tend to value community over individuality, not as a way of demeaning a woman’s self, but as a way of acknowledging that hierarchical structures have not been good for the church, and most especially for women or any other marginalized group. In part from necessity and in part from theological conviction, the Methodist women of New Orleans from 1895 onward worked as collaborators to achievedramaticresultsintheircity.Thisbookfocusesinpartonwomenwhose careers as professional church workers brought them to the city...