All Bound Up Together by Martha S. Jones

Author:Martha S. Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2007-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Churchwomen’s Many Publics

The woman question debate cut dramatically across lines of race and religiosity. Black churchwomen did not need to look far to find echoes of their own struggles among white women in both church and politics. There was the debate within the white-led Methodist Episcopal Church (North) over the licensing of female preachers and the ordination of women, which culminated in the denial of women’s right to sit as delegates in the General Conference in 1888. Most noted in this struggle by black Methodist activists was Maggie Newton Van Cott. The ame Church’s Christian Recorder followed Van Cott’s tribulations in the Methodist Church with an attention to detail that evidenced how black Methodists understood themselves to be, in part, Methodists across racial lines. The intersection of race and gender in Van Cott’s case simultaneously transcended and reified the racial divide among Methodists. The Recorder noted, for example, that African Americans had been restricted to the sanctuary’s galleries when Van Cott spoke at a New Orleans Methodist Church.62 ame activists praised Van Cott—Bishop A. W. Wayman dubbed her ‘‘the great female evangelist.’’63 Even as they were standing at the threshold of their own protracted contest over the same issue, ame activists expressed regret when the Methodist Episcopal Church (North) denied Van Cott’s eligibility for the deaconate.64 Black Baptist women likely saw threads of their own contests over gender and power as they observed Free Will Baptist women being ordained in the 1870s.65 In all, African American churchwomen knew that their own struggles over the parameters of religious authority paralleled those being waged by their white counterparts.

Black churchwomen’s demands sat uneasily alongside the demands of the National Woman Suffrage Association (nwsa) led by Susan Anthony and Elizabeth Stanton. During its January 1874 convention, the nwsa adopted a set of resolutions, the terms of which were a perverted take on the rights being sought by black churchwomen. The intersection of race and gender was complex. While urging the adoption of Charles Sumner’s civil rights bill in Congress, the nwsa penned its own civil rights agenda, this one for women. Women’s rights were awkwardly set up alongside the rights of African American men, and the convention called upon Congress to adopt ‘‘a civil rights bill for [women’s] protection . . . that shall secure to them equally with colored men all the advantages and opportunities of life.’’ This resolution may have struck a dissonant cord with black women, who likely heard the rights of black men being set up against the rights of women. However, the terms of the convention’s fifth resolution likely elicited sympathy from black churchwomen. It demanded that women be ‘‘admitted to all theological seminaries on equal terms with colored men; to be recognized in all religious organizations as bishops, elders, priests, deacons; to officiate at the altar and preach in the pulpits of all churches, orthodox or heterodox; and that all religious sects shall be compelled to bring their creeds and biblical interpretations into line with the divine idea of the absolute equality of women with the colored men of the nation.

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