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Commentary
WESLEYAN WISDOM: A turning point for women in our journey Donald W. Haynes, Mar 5, 2009
Donald W. Haynes
By Donald W. Haynes UMR Columnist
From a mother’s influence on John Wesley to the high percentage of women as elders in the current United Methodist connection, the role of women in our Methodist story is a rich lode worth much “mining.”
We see much of this in Susanna Wesley, mother of John and Charles Wesley, some of this in the seven Wesley sisters, more of this in the early class-meeting leaders and exhorters, and some in women who were preachers.
Jerena Lee of the Bethel AME Church in Philadelphia was told in the 1820s, “Methodism does not call for women preachers.” Her response, based on Numbers 22 was, “If an ass could reprove Balaam and a barn-yard fowl could reprove Peter, why should not a woman reprove sin? Maybe a woman is like the lowly ass as a beast of burden, but let me tell you one thing—‘the ass saw the angel and the man didn’t.’”
One of the sad ironies of Methodist history is that as the movement developed into a denomination, its membership began to reflect less of a New Testament faith community and more of American middle-class culture. The number of women exhorters and preachers dwindled as the denomination grew in membership and muscle.
Catherine Brekus of the University of Chicago Divinity School wrote accurately, “By the 1840s, the domestication of Methodism was complete—female preachers were deliberately forgotten.” The earlier freedom of women’s witness, exhorting and preaching was abandoned.
In the 19th century, no woman’s influence on Methodism surpassed that of Frances Willard from Illinois. She wrote a memorial to the 1880 General Conference asking that “all male nouns and pronouns pertaining to stewards, trustees, Sunday school superintendents, class leaders, exhorters, and both local and traveling preachers be removed from the Discipline and that the word ‘male’ be expunged altogether.”
At the time she was president of the powerful Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which eventually packed enough muscle to effect an amendment to the United States Constitution! She is second only to Susan B. Anthony in promoting women’s suffrage.
In 1888, five women, including Frances Willard, were elected as lay delegates to the Methodist Episcopal General Conference. The bishops asked the conference not to seat the women until they were passed by the Credentials Committee, knowing that the chair was the church’s leading antagonist to women’s rights—James Monroe Buckley, editor of the New York Christian Advocate.
Lay delegates had first been allowed at annual and General Conferences in 1872, and Buckley insisted that if anyone had thought the word “laymen” would be interpreted to include women, no laymen would have ever been admitted! The Credentials Committee voted that the duly elected women could not serve as delegates.
For the ceremonial opening of the General Conference, the women were seated with their delegation. But acrimonious debate led by Buckley prompted his motion to pass, denying the women their rights and instructing “that the women’s train tickets be paid so they can return to their homes where they belong.”
The five women were ejected from their seats and replaced with male reserves.
Willard later wrote, “I confidently predict that we five women whose election was disavowed will have more enviable places in history than any who opposed us on those memorable days.”
In 1889, she wrote a book, Woman in the Pulpit, and helped to organize the New Century Club, dedicated to women’s rights in the Church. The first Methodist Church to seat women delegates was The Methodist Protestant Church in 1892. The Methodist Episcopal Church followed suit in 1900, and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South delayed until 1922, four years after the Constitution gave women the right to vote in political elections.
It would be an even longer road to ordination for women.
Anna Oliver
Anna Oliver changed her name so as not to embarrass her prominent New York family, and went to Georgia following the Civil War to teach the children of former slaves. She was graduated in 1876 from Boston School of Theology and was called by the Boston Globe “the first woman in America to receive a B.D. degree.”
She and an African-American female colleague re-opened a closed church in Passaic, N.J., and according to the local newspaper, showed a 500 percent increase in membership, only to see the bishop of the Newark Conference replace her with a man. The church closed, and was bought at auction by a group of laity who installed Oliver as their pastor!
Her Quarterly Conference recommended her for ordination in 1880, and the alumni of her alma mater petitioned the conference, “Resolved, that our delegates . . . are hereby instructed to use their influence to remove all distinction of sex in the office and ordination of our ministry.” The same James Monroe Buckley who prevented the seating of women lay delegates railed against Oliver’s ordination. It was refused and the Judiciary Committee upheld the ruling.
Broken in health, Oliver went to Europe for recovery but died Nov. 21, 1892. At her funeral, another woman Methodist preacher, Anna Shaw, delivered the eulogy. When “the roll is called up yonder,” Miss Anna Oliver will doubtless be among the Methodist sainthood.
Anna Howard Shaw
Born in England, Anna Howard Shaw was Methodism’s second female seminary graduate, earning her bachelor’s degree in 1878 from Boston School of Theology after being denied a room or scholarship for board. She once was down to “one box of crackers for food, no heat in my apartment, and shoes burst open at the sides.”
She was denied ordination at the same General Conference that denied Anna Oliver. They personally called on Bishop Edward Andrews, but were told there was no place for women in the ministry of the Methodist Episcopal Church.
Shaw responded, “I shall get out. I am called to preach the gospel; if I cannot preach it in my own Church, I will certainly preach it in some other Church.”
She was subsequently ordained by the Beekman Methodist Protestant Church at Tarrytown-on-Hudson. The minutes show “she was received with no extended debate on the abstract question of ordination of women.”
Of the three branches of Anglo Methodism, the Methodist Protestant Church was clearly the pioneer for women’s rights. In 1921, the Rev. Lyman Davis, whose church had voted to ordain Shaw, wrote for the General Conference, “Our argument goes like this: if a candidate for the ministry appears before this conference and gives the evidence of having ‘all the gifts, graces, and acquirements essential to the office of the ministry . . . ; and if in the training for these natural power, the candidate has received a thorough education; and if there is superadded to these gifts and acquirements a self-consecration which is so vital and sincere as to become a living sacrifice, shall the ordination be refused simply because this candidate is a woman?”
Methodist Protestant Edward Drinkhouse writes in his book, History of Methodist Reform, “some ideas are kept alive by nothing less than manifest destiny.” Yet in “unification” negotiations, the smaller Methodist Protestant Church was unable to convince the two larger “episcopal” branches that women should be ordained in the 1939 formation of the Methodist Church.
God opened other doors for Shaw: She received an M.D. degree from Boston in 1885, and became president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1902. She was the first woman ever to receive the “Presidential Citation” for standing “unchallenged throughout her career as the greatest orator among women the world has ever known.”
Her autobiography, The Story of A Pioneer, was published in 1915. When the 19th amendment was ratified in 1919, much credit was given to Shaw. The people of her native Big Rapids, Mich., said upon her death, “She cut a path through the tangled underwood of old tradition to broader ways.”
Yet the road to “full clergy rights” did not come until 1956, and then through Z.T. Johnson, president of Asbury College, whose oratory and parliamentary maneuverings prompted the General Conference to overrule a committee recommendation to defer the matter for “further study.” Johnson’s college had seen the blessings of women from the holiness branches of Methodism and the Salvation Army.
Ironically, we owe the first Methodist ordinations to the Methodist Protestant Church and the eventual full clergy rights to a brother from the holiness movement of Methodism! God has a marvelous way of raising up a voice to blow the trumpet of right, even in a culture of wrong!
Dr. Haynes is a retired clergy and instructor in Methodist Studies at Hood Theological Seminary. dhaynes11@triad.rr.com
Donald W. Haynes
Anna Howard Shaw 
