I. Introduction
In The Democratization of American Christianity, Nathan Hatch has traced the groundswell of growth in the American population from two and a half million in 1775 to twenty million in 1845. Christianity grew as well, with the ranks of Christian ministers in America increasing from 1800 to 40,000 during the same period.Footnote 1 This increase in membership and ministers necessitated building more churches. Between 1815 and 1848, according to Daniel Walker Howe, “Americans were erecting church buildings at a rate of a thousand a year.”Footnote 2 The Bible too had its heyday during this era. Its ascendancy is evident in the founding of the American Bible Society in 1816, by which time there existed 108 local Bible societies – six times the number of states in the union. The American Bible Society even announced in 1829 ambitious plans to “put a Bible in every American home.”Footnote 3 The proliferation of Bibles emerged in tandem with a prodigious religious publishing industry. A surge in the accessibility of Bibles, commentaries, concordances, and atlases characterized the early nineteenth century.Footnote 4
These aspects of American life during the decades following the Revolution helped to ignite a nascent movement, the Christian Connection, which claimed “no creed but the Bible.”Footnote 5 One of its founders, Elias Smith, contributed to the burgeoning production of Christian literature, since he “recognized the power of the printed word, and in sermons, discourses, books, and his newspaper the Herald of Gospel Liberty (HGL) used the press to spread his vision of America.”Footnote 6 Smith and other adherents of the Christian Connection, explains Hatch, “cranked out an avalanche of pamphlets and newspaper copy, which, in its form and content, conspired against social distinction.”Footnote 7 Hatch deftly draws the pieces together when he identifies how, “between 1790 and 1815 this loose network of religious radicals demanded, in light of the American and French revolutions, a new dispensation set free from the trammels of history, a new kind of institutional church premised on the self-evident principles of republicanism, and a new form of Biblical authority calling for the inalienable right of common people to interpret the New Testament for themselves.”Footnote 8
This coalescence of population growth, a high appraisal of the Bible, a proliferation of Christian literature and buildings, and a keen valuation of the rights of common people to interpret the Bible set the stage for the emergence of women who conceived of themselves as exhorters, evangelists, and preachers, as scholars such as Catherine Brekus have amply documented.Footnote 9 Our analysis will demonstrate as well that they were interpreters of the Bible. Three of these women, all associated with the Christian Connection at the time they wrote defenses of a woman’s right to preach, provide the focus of our study.Footnote 10 Deborah Peirce, about whom little is known, except that she lived in Paris, just south of Utica in Oneida County, New York, published in 1820 the treatise A Scriptural Vindication of Female Preaching, Prophesying, or Exhortation. Footnote 11 Four years later, Harriet Livermore, while she circulated as an itinerant visitor and exhorter for the Christian Connection, published Scriptural Evidence in Favour of Female Testimony in Meetings for Christian Worship. Footnote 12 Then, in 1841, Rebecca Miller, who preached for the Christian Connection in Ohio and Virginia, published two brief articles in the Christian Connection magazine, Christian Palladium, titled “Duty of Females” and “Christian Improvement.”Footnote 13
This study offers an analysis of the interpretation of the Bible in three of America’s earliest extant defenses of a woman’s right to preach.Footnote 14 Such a study, surprisingly perhaps, does not exist. Mark Noll’s magisterial America’s Book offers overarching hermeneutical strategies in nineteenth-century women’s biblical interpretation. As such, Noll cannot dwell at length on specific texts such as Paul’s mandate for women to be silent in 1 Corinthians 14:34–35. Catherine Brekus’s pioneering Strangers and Pilgrims offers analysis inter alia; its focus is principally historical rather than hermeneutical, covering the lives of over one hundred women from 1740 to 1845. The focus of Christiana de Groot and Marion Ann Taylor’s edited volume, Recovering Nineteenth-Century Women Interpreters of the Bible, is British women; it features two American women, Sarah (Ewing) Hall, who paraphrased the Old Testament, and novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe.Footnote 15 Our study complements these works by demonstrating, on a granular level, that early American women within the Christian Connection presented themselves as biblical interpreters; they understood themselves to be heirs of the Bible’s female laborers and believed themselves capable of unraveling the Pauline juggernaut of 1 Corinthians 14:34–35, in which Paul commands women to be silent in church and to learn at home from their husbands.
If the focal point of this study is the biblical interpretation of Peirce, Livermore, and Miller, its circumference is wider. We will contrast these defenses with commentaries from the British Isles, including those of Presbyterian minister Matthew Henry (1662–1714), Congregational minister Philip Doddridge (1702–1751), Church of England minister Thomas Scott (1747–1821), and Methodist minister Adam Clarke (1762–1832), as well as American Presbyterian minister, Albert Barnes (1798–1870).Footnote 16
Commentators at the time were so influential that “the names of the best-known bible scholars appeared prominently on the title pages of their various works and became the common way of referring to them: ‘Brown’s Bible’, ‘Scott’s Bible’, and ‘Clarke’s Bible’.”Footnote 17 Woman’s rights activist Elizabeth Wilson, whose A Scriptural View of Woman’s Rights and Duties, in All the Important Relations of Life appeared in 1849, claimed that “our popular commentators are the standards of public opinion on woman’s position in the human family.”Footnote 18 They present, she asserted, “not antiquated views of woman’s standing; but the views now entertained, on woman’s position in the human family, and the views given from the rostrum, and forum; from the pulpit, and from the press, with few exceptions.”Footnote 19 Viewing Peirce’s, Livermore’s, and Miller’s interpretations against the backdrop of prominent commentaries, even without positing literary dependence, allows us to isolate the distinctiveness of women’s contributions to the history of biblical interpretation.
We will also set these defenses alongside relevant passages in Sarah Grimké’s Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, which appeared seriatim in 1837 in the New England Spectator and William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator and were published as a book a year later.Footnote 20 Grimké’s was a paradigmatic work. Mark Noll claims that “observers at the time recognized that the most comprehensive defense of female activity in public life came from Sarah Grimké.”Footnote 21 Claudia Setzer extols it as “the first sustained analysis of women’s rights stemming from biblical and theological argument to be written by an American.”Footnote 22 A brief comparison of Grimké’s interpretation of 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 with that of Christian Connection women, we propose, will prove illuminating.Footnote 23
Finally, we will set these defenses in the context of other writings by women that incorporate the Bible – from lecture to catechism, from letter to memoir – published in America between 1790 and 1841. The analysis in this section will contrast the seriousness with which Peirce, Livermore, and Miller saw themselves as biblical interpreters with other authors, for whom the Bible functions, by comparison, in an ancillary way. The three Christian Connection women we analyze did something different, namely, they took a stance as biblical interpreters, who could dissolve the juggernaut of texts such as 1 Corinthians 14:34–35.
II. Paul’s Mandate for Women to Be Silent
Peirce, Livermore, and Miller began their treatises with a typical litany of women in the Bible – women such as Miriam, Deborah, Huldah, and Anna.Footnote 24 They found women prophets, female laborers with Paul, preachers, teachers, heroines, and exhorters throughout scripture. Yet, they acknowledged, too, that, no matter how many such women were named in the Bible, two passages stood in their way: 1 Corinthians 14:34–35, in which Paul counsels women to be silent in church and to ask husbands questions at home, and 1 Timothy 2:11–12, in which Paul tells Timothy that he does not allow a woman to teach or usurp a man’s authority.Footnote 25
Deborah Peirce, for example, having briefly explained women’s prophesying (1 Corinthians 11:4–5), introduced an interlocutor, who countered by alluding to 1 Corinthians 14:34–35: “But, says one, all this avails you nothing, since Paul hath declared it is a shame for a woman to speak in the church.”Footnote 26 Livermore noted, “The strength of opposers to female preaching lies in a charge Paul gives respecting the women at Corinth, and his directions to Timothy.”Footnote 27 Miller, like Peirce, addressed a specific interlocutor, who traced the issue to Paul’s letters: “But, say the objector, there is a total prohibition of their public officiation in the new dispensation, made by the apostle Paul.”Footnote 28 These rejoinders underline that 1 Corinthians 14:34–35, to which each interpreter would turn, is the scriptural juggernaut blocking the way to a woman’s right to preach:
Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.Footnote 29
Peirce, Livermore, and Miller would overcome the obstacle presented by this Pauline passage by filtering 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 through the sieve of Christian Connection practice, in which meetings were divided into worship and governance.
A. Two Meetings in the Christian Connection and First Corinthians 14:34-35
Three years before Peirce’s Scriptural Vindication was published, Christian Connection leader Joseph Burgin had penned a letter to the Christian Herald, in which he limited Paul’s mandate in 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 to meetings devoted to church governance: “But where is it that Paul considers it to be a shame for a woman to speak, teach, and usurp authority over the man? I answer, ‘In the church.’ – not in meetings of public worship; and in no other way can Paul’s declarations be reconciled. And there is no evidence that the apostles ever considered that women had any more to do with the regulations and government of the church that [sic] they had in the civil affairs of the state.”Footnote 30
The distinction Burgin drew between “meetings of public worship” and meetings concerned with “the regulations and government of the church” reflected Christian Connection practice during the early nineteenth century. Beginning in 1808, general meetings were called several times a year to gather Christians in a vicinity together. During these meetings, worship was central; “almost nothing of a business nature was attempted.”Footnote 31 Women were permitted to speak publicly in those gathered assemblies. On one Monday evening of a general meeting held in Charleston, New York, in September 1820, three females, including Sarah Hedges, occupied the pulpit: “After singing, sister Hedges prayed, and then, after relating her exercises of mind about her duty, and proving from the scriptures that it is right for women to preach, she spoke from Heb. ii,3, to the great admiration, satisfaction, and surprise of all that were present. The time was improved, principally by female speakers, until 12 at night.”Footnote 32 When worship rather than governance took place, women in the Christian Connection could speak until all hours of the night.
In contrast, when business took place, men governed the meeting. Livermore, in her autobiography, reflected upon her participation in the organization of a Christian Connection church in Kensington, Pennsylvania. She explained how “a Church meeting for business was appointed on Monday evening. The brethren who were united in the object, submitted to the Elder present, to propose some method of adjustment of affairs, in order that the Church might walk according to the gospel rule.”Footnote 33
Even when women were instrumental in securing enough converts to establish a church, they were not permitted to participate in governance. A general meeting was called in Johnsonsburgh, New York, in 1826, when “some thirty or forty persons, mostly heads of families, wished to be organized into a church; and it was thought best to appoint a general meeting.”Footnote 34 These persons had been converted under the preaching of Abigail Roberts, but it was necessary to call two male Christian Connection Elders, Thompson and Clough, from other parts of the state to oversee the business of setting up the church. Roberts was not permitted to speak in the forging of governance for the new church, but, following the general meeting, she resumed preaching at the church. With this acknowledgment of the Christian Connection two-meeting practice, we can now see how Peirce, Livermore, and Miller utilized it in their interpretation of 1 Corinthians 14:34–35.
When Deborah Peirce confronted the reality that Paul’s mandate in 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 might be universal, she faced an intractable problem, which she solved by limiting women’s silence to business meetings: “It is evident that Paul meant no more by his expressions than this, where a body of men are met to regulate the affairs of the church; to form, alter or enlarge discipline; to ordain bishops, elders, deacons or preachers; and expel members and such things, let a woman keep silent; and if she would know any thing about those things, let her ask some one that knows, and be in subjection, for a right is given the man by God, to rule and go forward.”Footnote 35 What Burgin, and Peirce after him, did was to exploit a Christian Connection distinction between worship and church business to surmount the obstacle of 1 Corinthians 14:34–35.
Livermore adopted a similar interpretative approach. After quoting 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 in full earlier in her treatise, she had asked, “How can any rational, candid, meditative Christian, direct this language of the Apostle, to female disciples at large, in meetings for the worship of God?” Now she asked, “Where?” Where must women be silent? “In the churches. In church meetings for business certainly.”Footnote 36 With this assertion, Livermore joined the ranks of Burgin and Peirce by importing the distinction between worship and business to limit the scope of Paul’s injunction.Footnote 37
Rebecca Miller followed suit. After characterizing the church not as a wooden structure – this would be “antiscriptural” – but as “a congregation of spiritual believers in Christ,” she explained: “Now the government of this body, under the great Head, devolves on men, and not on women. The voice of the church is that of the males, and not of the females. It is evident that Paul considered that women had no more to do with the arrangement of church business than they have in general with civil legislation.”Footnote 38
It is important to note that Peirce, Livermore, and Miller claimed to interpret the Bible on its own terms – without creed, without excessive reliance upon commentaries, without ecclesial influence. This approach aligned with the foundational belief of the Christian Connection that there exists no creed but the Bible. Yet, their effort to remove the obstacle to women’s speaking in public presented by 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 did not arise from an incontrovertible biblical foundation. They drew, rather, from Christian Connection practice. The apostle Paul does not suggest that 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 applies exclusively to meetings of church governance. On the contrary, this biblical text has to do with the appropriate and orderly exercise of prophecy in the context of worship – not business. Paul’s injunction to silence in 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 cannot, on exegetical grounds, be limited to church governance, as Peirce, Livermore, and Miller claimed. Nonetheless, exegesis was the handmaid of ecclesial practice, which provided Peirce, Livermore, and Miller with the requisite heuristic lens to interpret a difficult Pauline text.
B. First Corinthians 14:34–35 in the Commentaries
The distinction between meetings for worship and meetings for business proved useful for Peirce, Livermore, and Miller as they attempted to remove the obstacle to women’s preaching in 1 Corinthians 14:34–35. The uniqueness of this interpretative approach can be grasped by setting it in the context of the commentaries of their day. Livermore, and probably Miller, consulted commentaries. In her autobiography, Livermore confided, “The Scriptures I read more diligently than ever, with, and without Commentaries. From the latter, I believe I have never reaped such essential benefit as I have heard some persons express … But I continued for some years to study annotations on the bible, such as Henry, Scott, and Doddridge; and if they have done but little good, I am sensible they have not injured me at all.”Footnote 39 Miller’s reference to a “Dr. Clark” is probably to Adam Clarke.Footnote 40
Commentators tended to explain 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 by distinguishing between inspired and uninspired women, that is, between women prophets in 1 Corinthians 11:4–5 and uninspired women in 1 Corinthians 14:34–35. Matthew Henry, in commenting upon 1 Corinthians 14, acknowledged that women with spiritual gifts in the early church “might be under this impulse in the assembly,” so he concluded, with respect to 1 Corinthians 14:34–35, “For these reasons, some think these general prohibitions are only to be understood in common cases; but that upon extraordinary occasions, when women were under a divine afflatus, and known to be so, they might have liberty of speech.”Footnote 41 In short, women could speak but only on those occasions when they were “under a divine afflatus.”
Thomas Scott, like Henry, conjectured that “several women” referred to in 1 Corinthians 11 “had been endued with the Spirit of prophecy, which enabled them, by immediate inspiration, to offer prayers for the congregation, or to give instruction.”Footnote 42 In contrast, the women of 1 Corinthians 14, whom Paul told to be silent, were “not under any immediate or extraordinary impulse of the Holy Spirit.”Footnote 43 Of these women, Scott wrote, “it seems most natural to suppose, that some of the Corinthian women were used to speak publicly, when not under any immediate or extraordinary impulse of the Holy Spirit; and perhaps they interrupted the other speakers by inquiries or objections, according to the disputatious spirit that prevailed.”Footnote 44
Adam Clarke offered a similar resolution to the tension between 1 Corinthians 11:4–5 and 14:34–35 when he acknowledged that a woman could receive “any particular influence from God, to enable her to teach.” When under this influence, “she was to obey it, and the apostle lays down directions in chap. xi for regulating her personal appearance when thus employed.” On the mandate to silence in 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, he commented, “All that the apostle opposes here, is their questioning, finding fault, disputing, &c., in the Christian Church, as the Jewish men were permitted to do in their synagogues.”Footnote 45 In other words, Paul upholds the Jewish custom, telling women to pose their questions to husbands at home, “because it was perfectly indecorous for women to be contending with men, in public assemblies, on points of doctrine, cases of conscience, &c.”Footnote 46 Yet, Paul acknowledges, too, that inspired women, such as those Paul addresses in 1 Corinthians 11:4–5, “might prophesy, i. e. teach.”Footnote 47
Livermore evinced an awareness of this position when, in her autobiography – not her Scriptural Evidence – she contrasted “unbecoming” Corinthian women, who opposed and contradicted men, with her own experience of speaking in a business meeting of Elders, in which it became “evident that those brethren and fathers gained an evidence that the Holy Ghost was my teacher, for the same afternoon I received a certificate of their approbation to visit the Christian churches.”Footnote 48 Like Henry, Scott, and Clarke, she viewed the women whom Paul addresses in 1 Corinthians 14, not as all Corinthian women, but only those in “common cases” (Henry), that is, only disruptive women. What differs from the commentaries in Livermore’s interpretation of 1 Corinthians 14 is the limitation of that disruption to business meetings only.
In the end, Peirce, Livermore, and Miller did not solve the problem of 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 by adopting the distinction between inspired and uninspired women espoused by commentators Henry, Scott, and Clarke.Footnote 49 In striking unison, they solved the problem of 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 by distinguishing instead between the types of meeting that characterized the Christian Connection: meetings for worship, in which women could speak, and meetings for business, in which women could not.
To appreciate the strength of their solution, it should be set against not only prior British commentaries but also the commentary of Albert Barnes, minister of First Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia, president of the Pennsylvania Bible Society, and author of Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians. Barnes proved to be more restrictive than his predecessors in his interpretation of 1 Corinthians 14:34–35, which contains a “rule” he regarded as “positive, explicit, and universal. There is no ambiguity in the expressions; and there can be no difference of opinion, one would suppose, in regard to their meaning.”Footnote 50 Barnes rejected the suggestion, held by British commentators, that women “who claimed to be inspired” could preach.Footnote 51 On the contrary, Paul’s mandate does “not refer merely to acts of public preaching, but to all acts of speaking or even asking questions, when the church is assembled for public worship.”Footnote 52 He concluded, “No rule in the New Testament is more positive than this; and however plausible may be the reasons which may be urged for disregarding it, and for suffering women to take part in conducting public worship, yet the authority of the apostle Paul is positive, and his meaning cannot be mistaken.”Footnote 53
The two-meeting solution, which limited women’s preaching to worship meetings, may seem a tepid alternative to the commentators. However, set against Barnes’s Notes, the force of this solution becomes more noticeable. It contrasts sharply with the views championed by Barnes, who deemed that Paul excludes all women in all places and at all times, including in “public worship,” from speaking of any sort.
C. First Corinthians 14:34–35 in Sarah Grimké’s Letters on the Equality of the Sexes
A brief analysis of Sarah Grimké’s Letters on the Equality of the Sexes will also underscore the distinctiveness of Peirce, Livermore, and Miller’s interpretation of 1 Corinthians 14:34–35. Grimké chose another interpretation, rather than the two-meeting solution, to crack the conundrum of 1 Corinthians 14:34–35.
When she turned to Paul’s mandate for women to be silent in 1 Corinthians 14:34–35, Grimké observed that Paul was preoccupied with tempering abuses. Paul commands men to be silent when they fall into “certain abuses,” like speaking without an interpreter (1 Corinthians 14:28) or speaking while another person talks (14:31–33). “He then proceeds to notice the disorderly conduct of the women, who were guilty of other improprieties,” which arose from the freedom Corinthian women exercised now that they were free from the restraints of Judaism. “The apostle disapproved of this, because it disturbed the solemnity of the meeting: he therefore admonishes the women to keep silence in the churches.”Footnote 54
Grimké examined, as well, the command for women to learn at home from husbands. She determined that learners, not teachers, were the recipients of this command. “Now a person endowed with a gift in the ministry,” she concluded, “does not ask questions in the public exercise of that gift, for the purpose of gaining information: she is instructing others.”Footnote 55 Women who needed to learn were told to be silent in church and ask questions at home. This command did not apply to women who taught others. Grimké, then, solved the problem of 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 by distinguishing teachers, who could speak, from learners, for whom Paul mandated silence, particularly if they “disturbed the solemnity of the meeting.”Footnote 56 In contrast, Peirce, Livermore, and Miller championed a different interpretation, based upon a Christian Connection distinction between worship and business meetings.
Finally, Grimké rejected a distinction the commentators had drawn between the inspired female prophets of 1 Corinthians 11:4–5 and the allegedly uninspired ones addressed in 1 Corinthians 14:34–35. This distinction had allowed commentators to argue that extraordinary women, in exceptional circumstances, might prophesy, but that, as a general rule, women should not. Grimké would not concede this distinction. Not even Pentecost offers precedent for an extraordinary endowment: “There is not the least intimation that this was a spasmodic influence which was soon to cease. The men and women are classed together; and if the power to preach the gospel was a supernatural and short-lived impulse in women, then it was equally so in men.”Footnote 57 Grimké’s defense did not rise or fall on a distinction between uninspired and inspired women, as in the commentaries, or between worship and business meetings, as in the writings of Christian Connection women. Women with the ability to teach, contended Grimké, have the right to do so on any occasion in any place.
III. Female Laborers
While nearly all of the 975 Christian Connection leaders included in E. W. Humphreys’s Memoirs of Deceased Christian Ministers are men, there are still more than twenty designated as “female laborers.” For example, Anne Baton was “a female laborer in the church, in Tuscarawas County, O[hio].”Footnote 58 The Christian Connection Herald of Gospel Liberty and Christian Palladium contain indications that “female laborer” was the accepted designation for women who preached in the Christian Connection. Rebecca Miller, for instance, is identified as a “Female Laborer” in the 1838 Minutes of the Ohio Central Christian Conference, published in the Christian Palladium. Footnote 59 Miller later wrote about herself, “my humble station as a female laborer in Christ.”Footnote 60 Her obituary also classified her as a “female laborer.”Footnote 61 In general, Christian Connection publications and statements by women themselves indicate that female laborer was the preferred, perhaps the exclusive, designation for women who preached in the Christian Connection.
Acknowledging female laborers in the Christian Connection is not to deny their existence in other churches. Catherine Brekus, in a chapter titled “Female Laborers in the Harvest,” opens with the story of Sally Parsons, who “had begun speaking in [Freewill Baptist] churches throughout New Hampshire and Maine by 1796.”Footnote 62 I. D. Stewart, in The History of the Freewill Baptists, spanning 1780–1830, mentioned Clarissa Danforth, Martha Spaulding, and Susan Humes in a section titled “Woman’s Labors.” Stewart wrote, “The early history of the Freewill Baptists would be wanting in truthfulness, did it pass unnoticed those few women who labored in the cause … It has, from the first, been proclaimed as woman’s right and duty to act and speak for her Saviour; and this she has been encouraged to do in promiscuous meetings, as well as in those of her own sex exclusively.”Footnote 63
Only once did Stewart, in contrast to many more references in Christian Connection literature, refer to the phrase female laborer. He recalled that Mary Savage of Woolwich “is the first name on the records as a female laborer in the gospel.” According to Stewart, “the melting power of her exhortations was often irresistible, and so great was the effect with which she sometimes spoke at the Quarterly or Yearly Meeting, that a note of the fact was entered upon the book of records.”Footnote 64 Nowhere else in his history did Stewart use the term, so its precise meaning proves elusive. Pamela Durso suggests that it was an informal term. Writing about Mary Savage, Durso surmises, “These Baptist ‘she-preachers,’ while apparently quite effective, served only informally. None held official church positions or titles, and none were ordained.”Footnote 65
More frequently, the term female laborer appears as a designation for Baptist missionaries. An 1854 article, “Female Missionaries,” published in the Freewill Baptist publication The Morning Star, outlines the “qualifications requisite in the female laborer,” who has torn “herself away from all the endearing delights of home and friends in a Christian land, placing on the altar of missions a pure, confiding heart.”Footnote 66 In an obituary for Miranda Vinton Harris, appointed in 1841 by the American Baptist Board of Foreign Missions as an assistant to the Karen Mission (Burma), the term female laborer is used by her husband: “As a female laborer among the Karens, in my judgment, none have surpassed her.”Footnote 67 It appears, based upon extant writings, that female laborer was not a typical designation for Baptist women other than missionaries. In contrast, within the Christian Connection, the term occurs with relative frequency to identify women preachers.
A. The Scope of Female Labor within the Christian Connection
It is difficult to distinguish the precise nature of female labor because of an ambiguity concerning a particular manifestation of that labor, namely, preaching. Peirce and Livermore conceded the distinction between how men and women preached in their day – for example, exposition versus exhortation – but they did so to denigrate how men preached. How women preached, they contended, was both more biblical and more effective. Miller, for her part, saw no reason why women should not preach exactly as men did.
The first to write, Peirce drew a distinction between the preaching of men and women. Of one sort of preaching, she found no trace in the Bible: “to take a particular text from the bible; name the book, chapter, and verse, and divide into particular heads and explain them by course.”Footnote 68 Women preached differently, she argued, and she demonstrated this with a litany of women of both biblical testaments who had preached, concluding with the women who proclaimed Jesus’s resurrection (Matthew 28:9–10).Footnote 69 She then quoted an interlocutor: “But, say you, this is not preaching.” To this she replied, “I think it is the foundation of all true preaching, to declare a risen Saviour.” Peirce continued with further examples of the sort of preaching that was not expository in nature. John the Baptist preached in the wilderness, saying simply, “Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” and Jesus repeated the same words when he preached. Philip, who began at the same scripture that the Ethiopian eunuch was reading, preached Jesus to him. These examples led Peirce to query:
Then if you declare there are blessings in Christ for all mankind [like Abraham], if they will receive him, it is not preaching?
Then, if we [like Philip with the eunuch] prove by the scripture that Jesus is a complete Saviour, who suffered to satisfy justice, and redeem lost sinners; is it not preaching?Footnote 70
Armed with biblical examples, the putatively flawed rebuttals of interlocutors, and rhetorical questions, Peirce readily concluded, “if we tell sinners they must repent and keep God’s commandments we preach.”Footnote 71 She had contended earlier in her treatise that “the females may prophesy or preach Christ to the people and exhort sinners to repent and believe the gospel.”Footnote 72 This sort of preaching, whatever it be designated – for instance, prophesying or preaching – female laborers not only could do; they must do.
For her part, Livermore spent the final pages of her defense proposing a catalogue of sorts for when and where women should speak. Along the vein of the commentators, she advised that “praying, exhorting, and singing in meetings” can be performed by anyone from both sexes “upon whom the Holy Ghost descends while waiting upon God, with his quickening and commanding influences.”Footnote 73 Praying for the sick is the prerogative of women. Exhorting and praying at burials occasionally belong to the province of women. Praying at the family altar also belongs to the “daughters of Zion,” in proportion to their faithfulness and devotion.Footnote 74 Then, of course, there were the gospel errands to which female laborers attended, some of which male ministers did as well: “Journeying to visit churches, appoint meetings, and in them (no matter how public) if the providence of God permit, and his divine spirit assist, to extol the stem of Jesse’s rod, I really in my very heart do believe, belongs to the daughters of Zion, as well as to the ministers of the gospel; and woe to them who refuse or neglect going when God calls.”Footnote 75
Of what did exhorting or extolling the stem of Jesse’s rod consist? Not, apparently, preaching from the pulpit, which is not “so profitable as exhortation in a female testimony.” Livermore warned that women who preach like men but “in a female hand” may open the “door to self-importance and self-applause” and must, therefore, “constantly guard every avenue to their hearts, lest spiritual pride should exert its destructive power, and prove their overthrow.”Footnote 76 Along with the potential for spiritual pride was the prejudice women would face: “I am not myself very much in favour of females taking the pulpit in this day of reigning prejudice against female preaching; let those small inclosures, general esteemed so sacred, be occupied by men only, is my judgment; but I will not insist on this point either way – let every one be fully persuaded in her own mind!”Footnote 77 Livermore conceded that women could preach, though, she cautioned, it would make them vulnerable to spiritual pride and human prejudice against women. Livermore expressed this caution while she circulated among Christian Connection churches. When this was not enough, when she ceased heeding her own caution, Livermore walked away from the Christian Connection altogether into a world that, just a few years later, would find her speaking in the US Congress.Footnote 78 That hour, however, was not yet.
Miller seems to have deviated from Peirce and Livermore by not sharing similar reservations about the right of female laborers to preach in the way men did. She identified laboring with preaching without explanation when, in response to an interlocutor, she wrote, “Here, also, he [Paul] speaks in the same terms of woman, as he does of other laborers, and fellow laborers, whose names are in the book of life. Perhaps it is thought by this time, that Paul was not so averse to woman’s preaching as was anticipated.”Footnote 79
What precisely Miller meant by preaching is difficult to ascertain, though an assortment of phrases suggests that she believed women capable of the sort of scriptural exposition that Peirce and Livermore had left to the province of men. Paul’s coworker, Priscilla, was “engaged in expounding the word of God.”Footnote 80 In a subsequent discussion of 1 Corinthians 14:3 and other scattered texts, she identified prophesying as “exhorting, edifying, or instructing, comforting, testifying of Jesus, or all of them.” But Miller proceeded further: “Now until it can be proved that there were no females in the Corinthian church, these passages must stand as indubitable testimony in favor of females publicly teaching the word.”Footnote 81 Prophesying, for Miller, was not limited to exhortation, edifying, comforting, and testifying, all of which coincide with the so-called female form of preaching in Christian Connection practice. Miller instead identified prophesying with “females publicly teaching the word,” which is what Priscilla did when she was “engaged in expounding the word of God.”
In her most detailed definition of preaching, Miller seems to have disparaged the form of preaching exercised by male Elders when she defined preaching more universally as “nothing more than discoursing publicly on religious subjects. We have no evidence that it was a general practice among the first preachers of the gospel to preface their discouses [sic] with a text. They simply addressed the people, proclaiming gospel truths.”Footnote 82 Miller seems, then, to have argued on two fronts. On the one hand, female laborers had the right to teach and expound the word as much as male Elders. On the other hand, the form of preaching that identified a biblical text and expounded upon it – what Christian Connection Elders did – is not biblical, certainly not as biblically based as the form of preaching practiced by women, who could expound the word of God and “discourse publicly on religious subjects” in a less formal or official capacity.
Miller’s approach to preaching reflects the amorphous state of female labor in the Christian Connection.Footnote 83 According to her son and biographer, Elder Philetus Roberts, Abigail Roberts “took charge of the meetings on the Sabbath, and delivered regular discourses” in 1816, in a church in Greenfield, New York, that had no pastor and was “only occasionally visited by a preacher.” Elder Roberts later would visit that church, where he “preached and baptized.”Footnote 84 Had Abigail Roberts preached, or had she just “delivered regular discourses” along the lines suggested by Miller’s definition of preaching as “discoursing publicly on religious subjects”? This form of preaching was what Miller herself did. According to the description in her obituary, she was able “to convey her ideas on the various subjects which occupied her attention in the pulpit” because “she was a close and critical reasoner, and entered fearlessly into the examination of the false doctrines of the day.”Footnote 85 Miller, and perhaps Abigail Roberts before her, was able to enter the pulpit to discourse publicly.
A decade later, Abigail Roberts supplied the Christian Connection church at Johnsonsburgh, New York, which she had been instrumental in founding, with “occasional preaching.”Footnote 86 Her son listed the texts from which she preached (e.g., Hebrews 11:25–26; Numbers 24:7; 1 Peter 1:5; 4:17–18; Matthew 13:47–48; Song of Solomon 2:3–4), as well as some main points she drew from them.Footnote 87 He, then, in the next sentence, associated these “discourses” with the verb preach. Footnote 88 The boundary between preaching, exhorting, and expositing seems to have been too permeable to permit a determination of the precise content of women’s preaching within the Christian Connection in the early nineteenth century.
B. Biblical Support for Female Laborers
While they may not have offered a precise definition of female labor, Peirce, Livermore, and Miller nonetheless traced female labor to Philippians 4:2–3, in which Paul refers to Euodia and Syntyche: “And I intreat thee also, true yokefellow, help those women which laboured with me in the gospel, with Clement also, and with other my fellowlabourers, whose names are in the book of life” (4:3). Peirce, Livermore, and Miller referred as well to other New Testament women as laborers: Phoebe (Phebe in Romans 16:1 AKJV); Mary, “who bestowed much labour on us” (16:6); Urbane, “our helper in Christ” (16:9); Tryphena and Tryphosa, “who labour in the Lord” (16:12); and Persis, “which laboured much in the Lord” (16:12).Footnote 89
Of what did such labor consist? If the interlocutors Peirce, Livermore, and Miller cite are any indication, opponents of women’s preaching interpreted female labor as menial labor in support of the work of male ministers. Peirce, Livermore, and Miller in unison disputed such an interpretation of female labor. To those who said, “this was their labor, to make, mend and wash the preachers’ clothes,” Peirce replied that these women labored, not for the gospel, but “in the gospel.” She continued, “If laboring with the hands for the preacher, is laboring in the gospel, the vilest of men and women often do that; but Paul maketh a clear distinction between hand labor and laboring in the gospel.”Footnote 90 Livermore addressed the same objection that “this labor was making clothes and the like.” She posed the question, “Ah! Does Paul say they laboured for me? No, they laboured with me in the Gospel.”Footnote 91 Miller, too, took on the objection that women labored for “temporal things,” that they “labored in support of the gospel.” On the contrary, argued Miller, Euodia and Syntyche were not asked to help the church; rather, the church was asked to help them – female laborers, to whom Paul referred in terms similar to men. Miller concluded, “What a contrast between Paul, and objectors of modern times!!”Footnote 92
This refusal to understand female labor as menial labor is not a disavowal of laboring with one’s hands. Though she preached itinerantly for two decades, founded four Christian Connection churches, and preached at a single church for a year when no male minister was available, Abigail Roberts “took a little respite from her religious labors” to weave “twenty-four yards of woolen cloth between early morn and nine o’clock in the evening of the same day.” She proved so skillful with her hands that “the ladies thought she excelled in making and doing up caps, which was the main employment of her hands.”Footnote 93
Despite the necessity of menial and manual tasks, female labor was principally labor in the gospel, which is quintessentially represented by the work of Phoebe, whom Paul mentions in Romans 16:1–2, though Paul refers to her not as a laborer but as a “servant.” Peirce discovered evidence in Phebe (Phoebe) that women could “declare her thoughts concerning God, his holy word, the way of life and salvation through Christ.”Footnote 94 Paul, noted Peirce, designated Phoebe a servant – precisely the same designation with which he identified himself.Footnote 95 If Paul, the servant, preached, then Phoebe must have, as well.
Livermore included Phoebe at the head of a list of women who undertook “Gospel errands.”Footnote 96 Phoebe, contended Livermore, carried Paul’s letter to Rome, though not simply as a letter carrier, but because she was a “deaconess in the Cenchrean church and eminent for godliness.”Footnote 97 This commitment to female labor in the gospel serves to explain Livermore’s impassioned response to various interlocutors: “I wish every objector to female labourers in the vineyard of the Lord, would make diligent search for the true motive, the ground of their dislike, and see what foundation it stands on, and whether it is their order they are tenacious about, or God’s order, whether a selfish principle lurks at the bottom, or a godly jealousy or the honor of Christ’s Church in its purity!!! This I ardently desire!!!”Footnote 98
While Miller gave no indication that she had read either Peirce’s or Livermore’s defenses, she agreed with them at pivotal points. Miller’s identification of Phoebe as a servant follows Peirce, yet she added parenthetically, and without explanation, “(minister,) of all.”Footnote 99 She concurred, too, with Livermore, when she wrote of Phoebe in Romans 16:1, “here he writes a letter of commendation for her, to the church at Rome, for she was then on a long journey thither, to preach the gospel, and Paul sent his epistle to the Roman church by her.”Footnote 100
Livermore went further still when, with respect to Euodia and Syntyche, whom Paul mentions in Philippians 4:2–3, she contended, on the basis of Augustin Calmet’s dictionary, that the infant church in Philippi “was disciplined and governed by two women.”Footnote 101 With this interpretation, Livermore set the responsibilities of female laborers squarely within the purview of male Elders, who alone presided over church business in the Christian Connection. This interpretation disrupts the tidy distinction drawn in the Christian Connection between worship and business. Women could speak in worship meetings but not in meetings for governance of the church. Yet, Livermore breached this barrier and discovered in Philippians 4:2–3 the basis for women, not only to preach, but to govern as well.
C. Female Laborers in the Commentaries
We should note at the outset of this discussion that Sarah Grimké, who was not associated with the Christian Connection, referred neither to female laborers nor to Philippians 4:2–3. While we may not be able to compare their writings with Sarah Grimké’s, however, it can be said that women in the Christian Connection differed sharply from the commentators. Matthew Henry excluded the women who labored in Philippians 4:2–3 from “public ministry, for the apostle expressly forbids that, I Timothy ii. 12. I suffer not a Woman to teach.” Instead, women assisted ministers “by entertaining the ministers, visiting the sick, instructing the ignorant, convincing the erroneous. Thus women may be helpful to ministers in the work of the gospel.”Footnote 102 But women may not preach. Philip Doddridge followed a similar trajectory when he stated that the women Paul mentions in Philippians 4:2–3 “lent their assistance for the service of the gospel, whatever their assistance were; whether by their prayers, or their familiar addresses to their friends, or their kind offices to the bodies of those in distress, or that uniform example by which the several virtues of Christianity were recommended.”Footnote 103
Commentators’ interpretations of the women who labored alongside Paul in Romans 16:1–12 are consistent with their perspectives on women’s labor in Philippians 4:2–3. Henry noted that Phoebe (Romans 16:1–2) was a servant, though “not to preach the word, that was forbidden to women; but in acts of charity and hospitality.”Footnote 104 He even consigned Priscilla and Aquila, who are referred to in Acts 18:26, to whom Paul refers in Romans 16:3, to helping roles in his commentary on Romans 16:1: “Those are helpers to faithful ministers, that lay out themselves in their families, and among their neighbours, to do good to souls.”Footnote 105 Doddridge did not comment specifically on the laborers of Romans 16 but offered a general exhortation: “Let not that sex therefore think that it is cut off from the service of Christ, because the ministry is appropriated to men… . The most valuable ministers have often been assisted by them, in the success of their work, while their pious care, under the restraint of the strictest modesty and decorum, has happily and effectually influenced children, servants, and young friends.”Footnote 106 Alone among the commentators, Clarke acknowledged, vis-à-vis Romans 16:12, “that Christian women, as well as men, laboured in the ministry of the word. In those times of simplicity all persons, whether men or women, who had received the knowledge of the truth, believed it to be their duty to propagate it to the uttermost of their power.” He added, “Many have spent much useless labour in endeavouring to prove that these women did not preach.”Footnote 107
There is nonetheless a certain ambivalence inherent in Clarke’s introductory description of Tryphena and Tryphosa as “assistants to the apostle in his work.”Footnote 108 They were not coworkers. Still more salient, Clarke distinguished between ministry in antiquity and his own day. In “those times of simplicity all persons, whether men or women,” preached. Yet, he deemed ministry more complex in his day, so he concluded his commentary on Romans 16:12 by writing, “there is, however, much more than this [preaching] implied in the Christian ministry; of which men only, and men called of God, are capable.”Footnote 109
Clarke’s interpretation of Philippians 4:2–3 proved even more constrictive. He began by citing the usual interpretation that Euodia and Syntyche “were two pious women, as it is generally supposed, who were deaconesses in the church at Philippi.” Yet, Clarke demurred: “But it is more likely that Euodias was a woman, and Syntyche a man, and probably the husband of Euodias; and that it is Syntyche which the apostle calls true yoke-fellow in the next verse.”Footnote 110 This interpretation is based upon the slender evidence that Syntyche (Clarke supposed) is referred to as σύζυγε. However, the vocative is probably addressed to the recipient of the letter, who is asked to help them – with “them” referred to by a feminine plural personal pronoun, αὐταῖς, and a feminine plural relative pronoun, αἵτινες. The antecedents of these plural feminine pronouns must be Euodia and Syntyche. Nevertheless, Clarke reinforced this point later: “Some think the women here were Euodias and Syntyche, but I rather incline to the opinion that Συντυχη, was a male, and Euodias his wife.”Footnote 111
Clarke took a similarly restrictive position by referring to ancient “Grecian and Asiatic countries,” in which “women were kept much secluded.” Consequently, he argued, the apostles required the presence of “some experienced Christian women with them, who could have access to families, and preach Jesus to the female part of them.” As such, like Tryphena and Tryphosa, Euodia and other women “were assistants to others also who had assisted him.”Footnote 112
If Clarke cracked open the door to women’s preaching in his interpretation of Romans 16:12, he shut it precipitously in his interpretation of Philippians 4:2–3. Despite Greek syntax to the contrary, Clarke denied that two women at Philippi had labored with Paul in the gospel; Euodia, rather, assisted her husband, Syntyche. Even Clarke, therefore, can be counted among the commentators who limited the scope of women’s labor in Paul’s letters.
The near unanimity of influential commentators contrasts with the interpretations of Peirce, Livermore, and Miller, who forcefully argued that labor in Paul’s letters referred to work “in the gospel,” including preaching, rather than “in support of the gospel.” If commentators largely presented women’s labor as so-called women’s work, assistance in the private sphere, mending and making clothes, what Miller called “temporal things,” or helping ministers by visiting the sick and teaching women and children, Peirce, Livermore, and Miller refused to restrict the labor of women to those spheres.
IV. Other Early American Women’s Writings and the Bible
Three documents published by American women before 1820, the year in which Peirce published her defense, address the matter of the Bible and women, but none defends a woman’s right to preach or engages the Bible in depth. The gist of Judith Sargent Murray’s essay, “On the Equality of the Sexes,” published in 1790, is evident in the opening gambit of the essay’s second section: “the sacred oracles … are wholly metaphorical.”Footnote 113 Hannah Mather Crocker, in 1818, devoted several pages to a discussion of Genesis 1–3 and mentioned four biblical women – Mary, Ruth, Deborah, and Hannah – but then transitioned to address two other categories of interpretation cited in the title: reason and common sense.Footnote 114 Sarah (Ewing) Hall’s Conversations on the Bible, first published in 1818, is principally a paraphrase of the Old Testament in a catechetical framework, featuring a “Mother” who responds to her children’s questions concerning stories about the Hebrew people.Footnote 115 These publications, each in its own way, differ substantially from the use of the Bible that characterizes the writings of Christian Connection women.
Several women preachers before 1841, when Miller’s articles appeared in the Christian Palladium, published memoirs rife with biblical phrases, typologies, and themes. These memoirs trace the author’s life, call to preach, and subsequent preaching ministry – an arc that is apparent in the title of Jarena Lee’s memoir, The Life and Religious Experience of Mrs. Jarena Lee, A Coloured Lady, Giving an Account of her Call to Preach the Gospel. Footnote 116 Authors of memoirs, such as Lee, who published her first, shorter edition in 1836, rooted their experience in the Bible. As Elizabeth Elkin Grammer puts it, “they use their autobiographies – with remarkably similar scriptural language – to describe the rewards of experiential Christianity. In fact, though these women rarely cite the Bible, they use it extensively in their writings as an avenue toward self-definition.”Footnote 117
Authors of these memoirs did not, however, enter serious debates about the interpretation of challenging biblical texts. Typically, rather, they discovered a resonance between their experience as preachers and a litany of biblical women: Deborah, Hulda(h), Esther, Miriam, Anna, Philip’s daughters, and, notably, Mary Magdalene, who first proclaimed Jesus’s resurrection. Itinerant preacher Nancy Towle, for instance, in her memoir, published in 1833, responded to critics who objected to women preachers because Jesus chose men, not women, to be disciples. Towle enlisted the figure of Mary Magdalene, who received the command from Jesus to tell his disciples about his resurrection, to counter these objections: “We regret that they have not penetration sufficient to know, that ‘A woman was commissioned with the most important, Gospel message, ever borne by mortals – even to the whole of that number’.”Footnote 118
Three years later, Jarena Lee, an itinerant African Methodist Episcopal preacher, took a similar tack. “Did not Mary first preach the risen Saviour,” queried Lee, “and is not the doctrine of the resurrection the very climax of Christianity – hangs not all our hope on this, as argued by St. Paul? Then did not Mary, a woman, preach the gospel? for [sic] she preached the resurrection of the crucified Son of God.” Lee continued, “But some will say, that Mary did not expound the Scripture, therefore, she did not preach, in the proper sense of the term. To this I reply, it may be that the term preach, in those primitive times, did not mean exactly what it is now made to mean; perhaps it was a great deal more simple then, than it is now: – if it were not, the unlearned fishermen could not have preached the gospel at all, as they had no learning.”Footnote 119 Lee claimed that preaching comes by way of inspiration from God, which is how Mary, as well as the “unlearned fishermen,” could preach.Footnote 120 Neither Towle nor Lee explicitly referred to those Pauline texts that Christian Connection women interpreted in depth. Towle, for her part, was apparently aware of them; she cited Adam Clarke’s commentary, in which he declared that women prophetesses in apostolic times preached.Footnote 121
Fanny Newell, a Methodist exhorter, included a curious reference to Paul in her autobiography, published in 1824, the year in which Livermore’s Scriptural Evidence appeared. Newell wrote somewhat cryptically, “Paul tells us of a rule, which a woman ‘praying or prophesying’ is to observe.” This is evidently a reference to 1 Corinthians 11:4–5, in which Paul instructs women to pray or prophesy with heads covered. Newell appended to this brief statement a citation of Romans 14:22: “Under these considerations I can say, ‘happy is the man, who condemneth not himself in the thing that he alloweth; for unto his own Master he standeth or falleth.’”Footnote 122 Newell’s contention apparently is that Christians should act, not in obedience to a rule but as they believe Jesus would have them act. Though she was aware of 1 Corinthians 11:4–5, she made no comparable reference to the more restrictive Pauline passage, 1 Corinthians 14:34–35.
Finally, in her 1839 memoir, itinerant preacher Elleanor Knight described her experience – and her encouragement for other women to preach – with a pastiche of biblical allusions. The claim that she does not “usurp authority over the brethren” comprises an allusion to 1 Timothy 2:12, which reads, “But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.” Her rejoinder, that “God has given me authority to labor with them, to advance the cause of Christ,” may comprise an allusion to Philippians 4:3, which refers to Euodia and Syntyche, “those women which laboured with me in the gospel,” and perhaps Mary, “who bestowed much labour on us” (Romans 16:6), or Tryphena and Tryphosa, “who labour in the Lord” (Romans 16:12). Knight referred as well to Priscilla, “the wife of a Jew,” who “was prepared to assist her husband to instruct an eloquent Jew” (Acts 18:24–28).Footnote 123 After comparing the bondage of wives to slaves, she returned to her theme of emboldening women to preach. With an allusion to 1 Thessalonians 5:19, “Quench not the Spirit,” she urged women not to quench “that tender, loving spirit” out of fear of a husband. Finally, she implored women called to preach, “Be obedient as wives – be obedient as daughters, but in things of religion serve the Lord – render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and render unto God the things that are his” (Mark 12:17; Matthew 22:21; Luke 20:25).Footnote 124
The quantity of these allusions represents the quintessential expression of the use of the Bible in nineteenth-century women preachers’ memoirs. For instance, Knight absorbed the Bible; she knew at least one of the texts that was used to restrict women’s preaching – her allusion to 1 Timothy 2:12 makes that clear. Yet, Knight did not, like the Christian Connection women, argue against interpretations of this or any other text that restricted women’s ability to preach.
In genres other than memoirs, two other women acknowledged the difficulties women preachers confronted while interpreting Pauline literature. Lecturer and activist Maria Stewart, in her “Farewell Address to Her Friends in the City of Boston,” published in 1833, granted in general terms that Paul may have condemned women for speaking in public, but she countered that Jesus, “our great High Priest and Advocate,” did not condemn women, not even the Samaritan woman, “for a more notorious offence.”Footnote 125 Sarah Righter Major, the first woman preacher of the Church of the Brethren, weighted what the Bible says about women – Anna, Elizabeth, Mary, and the women among the 120 who waited in the upper room in Acts 1 – against Paul’s statements that forbid women to speak. She concluded by throwing up her hands: “If the rest of the testimony proves the contrary, then Paul in these two letters is not understood.”Footnote 126
Like Stewart and Major, Peirce, Livermore, and Miller recognized the obstacle to women’s preaching 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 posed. Yet, Stewart and Major did not resolve the matter by interpreting the text itself. Stewart referred not to Paul’s letters but to Jesus’s forgiveness of women. Major simply conceded an inability to understand the text.
Christian Connection women also distinguished themselves from memoir authors Elleanor Knight, Jarena Lee, Fanny Newell, and Nancy Towle, who fused their experience with biblical language. In contrast, what follows demonstrates that, while they recounted their experience, Peirce, Livermore, and Miller separated it from their biblical defense of a woman’s right to preach.
The preponderance of Deborah Peirce’s A Scriptural Vindication of Female Preaching, Prophesying, or Exhortation is precisely what the title claims to be: a biblical defense of what women do throughout the Bible combined with interpretation of problematic Pauline passages. It begins, however, with her experience; the first six pages provide an autobiographical account of the circuitous route through which she came to the point of feeling “such love to God and his cause, and such a desire for the salvation of sinners, I thought if all the world was present, I should not be afraid to tell of the loving kindness of the Lord.”Footnote 127 At this climactic point in her defense, Peirce left experience behind to focus exclusively on demonstrating, on biblical grounds, the right of women to preach. She signaled the transition by writing, “But, says one, bring me an example from scripture, that ever a woman was sent by God to declare his wonderful works in public.” The next line is, “I answer,” which she did for the ensuing fifteen and final pages.Footnote 128
Livermore and Miller separated experience from biblical interpretation by writing about them in different publications. Two years after the publication of Scriptural Evidence, which contains a detailed engagement with the entire Bible, Livermore published A Narration of Religious Experience, in which she, like Knight, Lee, Newell, and Towle, traced the arc of her early life, her conversion, her protracted decision to be baptized, and the details of her call to public ministry.Footnote 129 Rebecca Miller distinguished experience from interpretation in a comparable, albeit briefer, way. In 1839, she published in the Christian Palladium a letter addressed to her former conference in Ohio, in which she recounted her experience of how they helped her “in the ascendency over my diffidence in public speaking and the obstacles that presented themselves in my way.”Footnote 130 Then, in 1841, she published two more articles in the Christian Palladium devoted wholly to the biblical basis of a woman’s right to preach.Footnote 131 We are able to discern, then, in the writings of Peirce, Livermore, and Miller, a sequestering of experience from biblical interpretation that distinguishes their publications from the memoirs of Elleanor Knight, Jarena Lee, Fanny Newell, and Nancy Towle.
V. Conclusion
The use of the Bible in the writings of Deborah Peirce, Harriet Livermore, and Rebecca Miller conforms to the findings of previous scholarship focused upon antebellum Christian women. Like others of their era, Peirce, Livermore, and Miller accepted the inspiration of the Bible. They adhered to the analogy of scripture; that is, they allowed one inspired text to interpret another. They did not appeal explicitly to tradition or a magisterium but chose to rest authority in the Bible alone, even if their interpretations belie the influence of ecclesiastical practice or other assumptions, named and unnamed. As Mark Noll emphasizes throughout his chapter on antebellum women’s hermeneutics, “for their place in national history, it is important to underscore that the great majority of antebellum women Bible interpreters fully shared the era’s central Protestant convictions as well as the conventional ways of understanding the Bible.”Footnote 132
If this is true, what contribution does this unique strand of biblical interpretation generated by Christian Connection women make? An appreciable contribution – if we compare it with the continuum of hermeneutical strategies that were available in early nineteenth-century America.
Peirce, Livermore, and Miller offered an alternative to the influential commentaries of their day. They diverged from the commentaries in their ability to discover in Philippians 4:2–3 female laborers who worked alongside Paul rather than, as commentators suggested, as “assistants to the apostle in his work,”Footnote 133 who proved “helpful to Ministers in the Work of the Gospel”Footnote 134 when they lent “their assistance for the service of the gospel.”Footnote 135 They also resolved the matter of Paul’s mandate to silence in 1 Corinthians 14:34–35, not by positing a vague and ultimately unverifiable distinction between inspired (1 Corinthians 11:4–5) and uninspired (1 Corinthians 14:34–35) women but by superimposing concrete Christian Connection practice onto the biblical text: women could pray, prophesy, and preach in worship meetings.
Their biblical interpretation can be differentiated, too, from Sarah Grimké’s. As discussed above, her interpretation of 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 restricted Paul’s mandate not to women in business meetings but to learners rather than the learned. Equally significant, Grimké contended that “whatever is morally right for a man to do is morally right for a woman to do,” including preaching “the unsearchable riches of Christ,” which is the duty of man – and “also of woman.”Footnote 136 Grimké grounded this principle in Genesis 1:26–27:
In all this sublime description of the creation of man, (which is a generic term including man and woman), there is not one particle of difference intimated as existing between them. They were both made in the image of God; dominion was given to both over every other creature, but not over each other. Created in perfect equality, they were expected to exercise the vicegerence intrusted to them by their Maker, in harmony and love.Footnote 137
Peirce, Livermore, and Miller held no such universal conviction. They claimed no parity with men in the household, no equivalence with men in the administration of the church, no equality with men in the sphere of politics. Yet, they had the wherewithal to espouse the distinction in Christian Connection practice between worship and business meetings to carve out a sphere in which women had the right to preach.
The writings of Christian Connection women also differ from the memoirs of other women preachers with respect to the use of biblical material. In memoirs, women preachers wrote their life story, as Grammer suggests, “over the bible.” Allusions to biblical passages, short biblical phrases, and biblical themes of sin and deliverance, persecution and salvation, permeate their memoirs. In contrast, Christian Connection women did not so much ingest the Bible, like the authors of memoirs, as interpret it. They stood with – and against – the commentators by offering a clear hermeneutical strategy in their effort to demonstrate on biblical grounds a woman’s right to preach, which they accomplished by discerning in Pauline literature Christian Connection polity and practice. They did commit to writing their experience of faith, including their call to preach, but they did so apart from their interpretation of the Bible, either as a preface (Peirce), in a separate publication (Livermore), or in a separate article in the Christian Palladium (Miller).
Without the writings of these women, it might be possible to draw an artificial bifurcation between interpretation and experience, that is, between the commentaries and the Letters of Sarah Grimké, on the one hand, whose primary purpose is to interpret the Bible without explicit reference to personal experience, and, on the other, the memoirs of women called to preach, for whom the ascendant attribute of their call was a lived experience of God that no text or interpretation could invalidate. The writings of Peirce, Livermore, and Miller elide such a dichotomy.
We see, then, in these early American defenses of a woman’s right to preach, something unique that can be mapped onto our understanding of antebellum Christianity. Peirce, Livermore, and Miller countered dominant single-volume commentaries written by men. They paved a way in print for women, within the constraints of American and church culture, to preach in certain settings. And they complemented the experience that was characteristic of the memoirs written by women called to preach with a rigorous effort to confront the juggernaut of 1 Corinthians 14:34–35. In these ways, they mitigated restrictions placed upon women that Christianity in nearly all corners of antebellum America espoused.
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