Women and the shaping of British Methodism

Persistent preachers, 1807–1907

Jennifer M. Lloyd

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781847797353
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Parties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A response to the prominent Methodist historian David Hempton's call to analyse women's experience within Methodism, this book is the first to deal with British Methodist women preachers over the entire nineteenth century. The author covers women preachers in Wesley's lifetime, the reason why some Methodist sects allowed women to preach and others did not, and the experience of Bible Christian and Primitive Methodist female evangelists before 1850. She also describes the many other ways in which women supported their chapel communities. The book also includes discussion of the careers of mid-century women revivalists, the opportunities home and foreign missions offered for female evangelism, the emergence of deaconess evangelists and Sisters of the People in late century, and the brief revival of female itinerancy among the Bible Christians.

1

Women in eighteenth-century Methodism

Oon her forty-second birthday Catherine Cowlin O’Bryan sat down to reflect on her Methodist conversion experience nearly a quarter-century before. She had lived in the Devon village of Stoke Damerel for about a year. It was probably in one of the new small villas that were filling in the area between Stoke Damerel and the rapidly growing town of Dock (soon to be renamed Devonport), where she often preached in the newly opened Bible Christian chapel on Prince’s Street. She probably did not feel settled; the family had moved five times in the eight years since her husband William O’Bryan had left the Methodists to found the Bible Christian Connexion. We can imagine her, emboldened by her birthday, taking a few quiet moments to herself, shut away from the noise and bustle of her five girls. Perhaps Mary, the eldest, aged sixteen, and fourteen-year-old Thomasine were watching the younger three. Her husband was probably away, travelling the circuit. She sat in front of a gray exercise book with a dark red binding on the left edge. Two holes punched in the center of the front and back covers could be tied together for some measure of privacy. She intended to begin her autobiography, ‘The Experience of Catherine Cowlin,’ writing with a modesty typical of such women’s testimonies, ‘In the fear of the Lord, I have taken up my pen, for the sake of my dear children hoping that they might be profited thereby, to write something of my worthless life.’ ¹

Perhaps her husband and daughters had encouraged her; William was at that time (1823) publishing an account of his early years in the Bible Christian Magazine. She may also have been motivated by her impending departure by sea to preach on the island of Guernsey. Such journeys were always risky.

With little preamble she launched into describing her teen years in the 1790s. Her mother was strict and she defied her by enjoying dancing and playing cards until, aged fourteen, ‘I over heated my blood [by dancing] and suffered much through pain and weakness of body untill I entered on my nineteenth year. But even in these years I still (after all my vows and resolutions) loved sin, and revered Satan and was truely led captive by the divil at his will.’ However, her parents attended Methodist meetings and she continued to go with them. Persistence had effect; at eighteen she experienced religious enlightenment while listening to a preacher in her brother-in-law’s house. She then reported something that had clearly given her pause: she received unwelcome attention from a local Methodist preacher: ‘But to my great astonishment he began to be light and trifling, and to talk on a subject that I could not even dare to think on at that time … till then, I had looked on the Methodist preachers, to be next to Angels, and therefore dared not to think an evil thought of the least of them.’ Undeterred, she became zealous, alarming her parents who ‘did not like so much of religion’ and threatened to ‘cut her off.’ This had the opposite effect; perhaps to avoid the importunate preacher, she joined a more distant Methodist society a ten-mile walk away, and began to attend four meetings each Sunday.²

Here the account ends; she had no time to describe the feelings of unworthiness she later expressed in poetry, or her struggle toward perfection, both common experiences for Methodist women. Perhaps she never had time to write again, perhaps it was too daunting to describe her marriage, her six pregnancies, the death of her four-year-old son, her husband’s departure from Methodism, her own preaching career, and her frequent moves. But in the eight pages she managed that day she described an experience typical of many teenage girls who turned to Methodism: early enjoyment of simple pleasures but with a nagging sense of sin, a conversion experience before she was twenty, and increasing zeal thereafter. It was a story told many times in obituaries of Methodist women.

The story she did not tell was less typical. Catherine and her descendants were among an exceptional group of nineteenth-century women who felt called to preach and were not deterred. Catherine herself was an essential partner to her husband in founding the Bible Christian Connexion, including preaching alone on a mission to the Isle of Wight; she continued to speak at meetings after she and her husband emigrated to the United States. Her eldest daughter Mary began to preach at age sixteen, spent two years as a travelling evangelist before her marriage, and then had a fifty-year career as a local preacher. By mid-century, although the Bible Christians still allowed women to preach, they allowed them neither power nor responsibility, and Mary’s daughter Serena took a different path, becoming an independent evangelist and eventually the best-known woman preacher in Australia. Mary’s grandson married a fellow missionary in China, evangelizing the ‘heathen’ being an attractive religious career for women at the end of the century. These women’s lives exemplified both their determination to be heard in religious settings and their willingness to adapt to circumstances and overcome obstacles. They were not alone; a substantial number of women in Methodist sects spoke in public, and a few managed to make careers in religion despite opposition from all-male hierarchies and prejudice in their congregations. They had to be adaptable, to take advantage of new opportunities as others closed to them. Initially they flourished in conditions similar to those on the American frontier, in borderlands where Methodist preaching had not yet reached, where religious hierarchies were fluid, where women daring to speak in public drew curious crowds. Later in the nineteenth century other women took advantage of new opportunities in urban settings, in settler colonies, or among the ‘heathen.’ In each case they had to battle with a paradox, identified by Joan Scott, that to claim the right to speak as individuals untrammelled by the assumptions of inferiority associated with the term ‘woman,’ they had to identify themselves as women, to admit the connotations of the term while simultaneously battling them.³ As Lucy Lind Hogan has pointed out, ‘nowhere were these constraints more profoundly felt than by women in the church. There, the controversy surrounding the public speaking of women was not the prelude to, but more often the central point of, contention.’⁴ To claim the right to speak women had to transgress the almost universal ban on their speaking, a ban backed by biblical authority. Some women, and also some men, argued for their right to do so on theological grounds, but most, like Catherine O’Bryan, simply felt an overwhelming urge to speak and did so. The justification, if any, came later. These are the stories of ordinary women who felt what one of them, Mary Bosanquet, defined as an ‘extraordinary call.’

John Wesley himself accepted that certain exceptional women were chosen by God to speak in public. This chapter explains how Methodism created a welcoming and empowering religious environment for women, and how Wesley came to sanction the actions of some who were emboldened to take on public roles. Methodism was both the product and the reflection of its time, combining an Enlightenment faith in progress with the religious enthusiasm of evangelical revival.⁵ It owed very little to Old Dissent, the sects that had emerged from the religious and political ferment of the English Civil War and Interregnum between 1641 and 1662. However, a brief discussion of the history of Dissent is essential since both John Wesley and his successors had to grapple with and try to avoid the penalties imposed on Dissenters until the nineteenth century. Most Dissenting sects (Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers) originated in the Puritan (Calvinist) movement within the established Church of England and did not clearly separate from it until after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. Blamed for the extremism of the late 1640s and under suspicion for potential subversive activities against the restored monarchy, Dissenters suffered persecution during Charles II’s reign. Between 1661 and 1670 the Restoration Parliament passed a series of acts penalizing Dissenters known as the Clarendon Code after the king’s chief minister, Lord Clarendon.

Of the various Acts of Parliament included in the Code, the Conventicle Act, banning all meetings for worship larger than five people except those conforming to the Church of England, was to be the most restricting to Methodism. The effect of the Clarendon Code was to create the condition of Nonconformity, a personal commitment to worship outside the established church, a line drawn with far greater clarity than before, although those with less tender consciences could evade the Code’s provisions through ‘occasional conformity,’ attending Holy Communion in the parish church once a year and worshipping elsewhere the rest of the time. It now required courage, fortitude, and determination to embrace Dissent, resulting in smaller but in many cases more committed congregations. Michael Watts has calculated that between 1715 and 1718 there were 1,934 Dissenting congregations in England and Wales, with Dissenters comprising 6.21 percent of the total population of England and 5.74 percent of the Welsh. This was an increase over the 1,610 licenses to preach issued in 1672, but since the numbers for the earlier date did not include Quakers and some Baptists and Congregationalists, the statistics suggest at least stagnation.⁶

The political climate for Dissent changed when James II became England’s first openly Roman Catholic king since the Reformation. Now Catholicism rather than Nonconformity became the chief enemy. After William III ousted James in the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, the Convention Parliament that confirmed William and Mary as joint rulers passed the Toleration Act, allowing licensed meetings of Dissenters who took the oaths of allegiance and supremacy. However, Dissenters still had to apply to a bishop, archdeacon, or magistrate to hold meetings, permission they were unlikely to get for the large outdoor gatherings that were a prominent feature of eighteenth-century evangelicalism. Toleration of Dissent proved a mixed blessing. Persecution tends to increase zeal and commitment; its relaxation often produces complacency and lesser enthusiasm. By 1730 Dissenting sects were in most cases reduced in number and had fewer ministerial recruits. Congregations were often isolated and their separateness discouraged active evangelism, especially as many years of persecution had encouraged worshippers to turn in on themselves rather than reach out to others. There was a shift from evangelism, actively seeking to convert unbelievers, to education of those already committed to the congregation.⁷ Bryan Wilson described this as a shift from sect to denomination. He defined a sect as an exclusive but voluntary association of members with ‘a high level of lay participation,’ and practising expulsion of offending members, while a denomination has formal admission requirements, accepts conventional morality, rarely expelling members, and worships in formal services conducted by professional trained ministers.⁸ Toleration also affected loyalties to the established church, introducing the idea that attendance at Church of England services was not required but voluntary. Thus in the eighteenth century both the Church of England and Old Dissent were on the defensive and poorly placed to lead a religious revival, leaving space for a new movement, Methodism.⁹

Methodism, like Puritanism, began as a movement within the Church of England. John and Charles Wesley, sons of an Anglican rector, were ordained, Oxford-educated Church of England priests, as were several of their early associates. Methodism remained within the established church until after John Wesley’s death, largely because neither John, nor especially Charles, wished to make the break. A contributory factor was avoidance of the continuing, if reduced, penalties against Dissent, particularly the Conventicle Act. Wesley insisted that Methodists pay tithes and church rates and continue to receive communion from their parish priests. He largely succeeded in preventing Methodists from meeting at the same times as Church of England services, ensuring that meetings could be held without applications to licensing authorities. Methodism was also doctrinally distinct from most Dissent in that Wesley emphatically rejected the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, the doctrine that God has already chosen who is to be saved, believing that all may experience God’s grace and work toward Christian perfectio...