1 The Social Gospel

The Social Gospel movement is a distinct product of the history of American Christianity and of the liberal trends which emerged within its theology in the 1830s, but it acquired a real interdenominational status only after the Civil War. It emerged at the historical crossroads where, on the one hand, the white middle class was reacting with fervour to scientific progress and its potential social implications, while, on the other hand, Christian theological schools were searching for a more functional vision of society and church relations, against the firm individualism of the early-nineteenth-century Protestant conservativism.¹ Its male leaders were not activists in its modern meaning, but preachers and teachers whose voices were heard in churches, seminaries and divinity schools. They generally did not define themselves as socialists, but almost all of them supported producer cooperatives and public ownership of natural monopolies. Those who belonged to the left wing of the movement embraced class struggle while those who were more radical particularly insisted on the issue of neo-abolitionism.

According to Gary Dorrien, Social Gospel also had a racial connotation, as it “had two major historic wellsprings: one social gospel came out of historic white Protestant churches and was primarily about economic domination and ethical corruption; the other came out of black Protestant churches and was primarily about forging a new abolitionism.”² While the white Social Gospel was an attempt of the churches (initially Unitarian, then after the Civil War also Congregationalist and Episcopalian churches, extending to Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian churches only later in the century)³ to give an answer to the challenges and confrontations imposed by the trade unions regarding the conditions of the poor and the working class, the black Social Gospel is rooted in the Methodist, Baptist and Episcopalian churches of the 1880s, as an attempt to fight back the oppression, exclusion and racist hatred that emerged in the post-Reconstruction era.

The many souls of the movement, thus, do not express a shared doctrine, but a common endeavour in building a just society, focussed on the individual as a tool of salvation. As a result, the success story of the Social Gospel and its relatively long heritage is not just the reforms it proposed — which could be considered part of the wider Christian social movement that arose on the two sides of the Atlantic — but its modern, liberal theology of social salvation, rooted in ideas such as those of “social justice” and “social structure.” Wherever there was a social structure, a social salvation could pair individual salvation. Thus, society became an active subject of redemption⁴ and it became the first ecumenical soil on which American denominations could identify themselves as a whole.⁵

In my recent essay “The Woman’s Cause is Man’s: Social Gospel, metodismo e lotta per il suffragio femminile negli Stati Uniti,”⁶ I presented a literature study which led me to understand how, notwithstanding the predominant historiography of male historians writing about an apparently only-male movement, the social action movement which in 1886 takes the name Social Gospel is inextricably tied to the path of female suffrage particularly designed by Methodist women in the United Sates between 1880 and 1920. The more I locate the movement in the history of Methodist women, the more I find it tied to their own spiritual, theological and ecclesiastical experience. The aim of this article is to present a step in the research related to the specific role of Methodist women in the Social Gospel movement and to grasp how it affected the fight for women’s vote. As a preliminary case study, I will present the figure of Anna Howard Shaw — a Methodist minister and the President of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) — and the reasons for her fight for women’s suffrage through the lens of the white, “female” Social Gospel.

2 History Writing about the Women of the Movement

Female social gospelers emerged from the margins of historiography, as all women did, only in the 1970s, when women’s studies and social history interlaced their significance, methodology and sources also on the history of modern American religion and theology. As Kathryn Kish Sklar already pointed out in 1980,⁷ this does not mean that the history writing about American women and religion did not have a past. Indeed, it had a pre-history (1880-1960), still dominated by a weak conceptual framework; followed by a second stage (1960s) of documented historical evidence, matched by a theoretical framework and female and feminist perspectives on the past “to probe the history of women’s rights and interests.”⁸ Then the third stage, which is characterised by the move from an approach to history of women religious as a history of oppression to a history of empowerment through religious beliefs. And finally, the fourth stage (1970s), the author’s own contemporary stage, in which historical scholarship was “using methods ranging from oral history to computers to take a closer look at the effects of class, community, ethnicity, and race upon women’s experiences in religion and society.”⁹ Once again, their role in history (and its account) meaningfully matched the role they played and aimed at playing within the faith communities they belonged to.

It is precisely during Kish Sklar’s “fourth stage” that the history of Methodist Women earns renewed attention and it is accompanied by an intellectual investment from the United Methodist Church¹⁰ in its own history, with a project on women’s history supported by its General Commission on Archives and History. The main outcome of the endeavour, along with a widely participated conference, is the volume Women in New Worlds. Historical Perspectives on the Wesleyan Tradition, whose great merit is the decoding of the depths and variety of the American Methodist women’s spiritual search and its inextricable connection to the demand for new roles for women in church and society.

From the 1980s, scholarly research on the role of women in the movement has been decreasing — if not disappearing — along the same lines of the general inquiry on the Social Gospel itself.¹¹ It is, therefore, difficult to say whether the role of activists, which the writers of Women in New Worlds assigned to the women they studied (in opposition with the male founders of the movement that male historiography had presented and will present up until Dorrien — thinkers, theologians, preachers), was more of a projection of their roles than a real fact. In any case, the sources that they present make it evident that female social gospelers transformed their social critique into organizations and associations, and into an active and lively diaconate, otherwise called social action.¹² Was this, as Norma Taylor Mitchell argued,¹³ the victory of social feminism over radical feminism in the Methodist tradition?

3 Female Social Gospelers

The women who took part in the movement mostly carried out the roles of missionaries, family preachers and teachers, and their role in the institutional and theological life of denominations was kept under strict control at least until the 1880s, when some of them were allowed to earn University degrees in Theology and receive ordination.¹⁴ Raffaella Baritono precisely identifies, in the claim of the right to speak in church, to be preachers and not just to preach, the claim to be recognised as individuals. For middle-class Christian American women in the first half of the nineteenth century, such a claim meant to be recognized as agents of their own destiny, moral subjects capable of being responsible for their own community and, eventually, citizens of the United States.¹⁵

The Declaration of Sentiments expressed their claim for such a right in 1848, but the demand grew stronger as their role in Church missions acquired also a spiritual dimension, and the Deaconess movement decisively penetrated American Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopalian and Evangelical churches,¹⁶ developing a mission to the poor which questioned the economic system exploiting them. In fact, according to Mary Agnes Dougherty, who studied the lives of 509 women who became deaconesses in the late 1880s and 1890s, “The existence of the Methodist deaconess movement in 1888 — a movement aimed at serving humanity’s physical needs — indicates that the Social Gospel was formulated much earlier than scholars have claimed and that churchwomen played a central role in its evolution.”¹⁷

Throughout the century, while pursuing domestic roles in the public sphere through their participation in Christian reforming society activities and organizations, such as the Young Women’s Christian Association and Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, women no longer only belonged to the private sphere, but acquired new languages of self-definition as well, and embraced the fight for their rights in the civil as well as in the churches’ domain.¹⁸ Nonetheless, it is Baritono again who, while seeing the suffragist movement aroused together with this new awareness, warns us about a turn, which she places in the second half of the same century, towards a more “secularised” approach of the suffrage movement, where such a connection would get lost.¹⁹ And indeed, such a secularising trend was identified also by Dougherty, who showed how the professionalisation of social work, taking place at the turn of the twentieth century, “bred secularization”²⁰ and became a dilemma, if not a threat, for the Methodist deaconess movement at its peak (more than a thousand consecrated women in 1910). To them, professional training brought social work out of the realm of church activities, but at the same time it offered them a chance to distinguish their role from the many volunteers in the church and prepare them to hold office in the church.

Did the Social Gospel become, for the Methodist women of the early twentieth century, only a means to carry out other reforms such as prohibition or the improvement of municipal government? Was the motivation of Methodist suffragists driven by a secularised self-representation, which had nothing in common with their widespread role of social gospelers? Starting with their biographies, which are now supported by archival repositories made available to researchers (some of them also online),²¹ it is possible for historians to discover the way theology informed historical praxis and events, including social reform, but not the fight for suffrage which characterized those years.²²

4 Anna Howard Shaw

In the first approach to the study of the life and thoughts of these women, Anna Howard Shaw (1847-1919) offers a multiplicity of insights. The choice to focus on Shaw is motivated by her role of leadership in the Methodist church, as well as in the suffrage movement, enabling that a key line be drawn to unite the dynamics of women’s ordination, social action and the extension of suffrage. More broadly, as Mary Pellauer argued, she is “particularly interesting as a case study of the synthesis of feminism (a word she knew and defended), the republican faith and mainstream American Christianity.”²³ Even if analysing her role makes the author run the risk of highlighting the profile of a woman who fits in with the main narrative and doesn’t challenge its theoretical assumptions, this is meant to just highlight a step of a research which requires further literature and archival study and exploration of biographies, such as, among others, that of Frances Elizabeth Willard (1839–1898), who was “converted” to woman’s suffrage, or Jessie Daniel Ames (1883–1972), who also fought for racial justice, or Caroline Merrick, who was Southern Methodist and the President of the state suffrage association in Louisiana.

Anna Howard Shaw was a white, English-born woman who grew up in the frontier of Michigan in a modest family with a Unitarian background. She became a self-taught teacher in the frontier school at the age of fifteen years old. Eight years later, she gave her first sermon at the request of Dr. Peck, “a man of progressive ideas,”²⁴ a presiding elder of her Methodist district who supported the ordination of women. Thirty-six sermons later, in the following spring, she was presented at the Annual Methodist Conference of her district of Grand Rapids as a candidate for the licence of preaching, and the enthusiasm of the delegates assured her this role. In 1873, without even completing the high school program, she entered Albion College and she soon emerged as one of most highly skilled women orators, both on campus (as a licensed preacher she had no tuition fees to pay) and in the temperance circles (not yet organized in that area). The recognition she received for her preaching activity, the ambition she held strong in earning a theology degree and the economic independence from her family — along with “some inheritance from [her] visionary father”²⁵ — made her realise that she had to take her career more seriously and take the step of entering Boston Theological School.

She joined the school on February 1876, at a time when Anna Oliver, another Methodist woman, would have soon become the first American woman to earn a degree in theology from that same school. Being the only woman in a class of forty-three students did not discouraged her, nor did the fact that, differently from her male fellow-licensed preachers, she had to pay for board and accommodation and, therefore, suffered “cold, hunger and loneliness,”²⁶ which was relieved only partially by the seventy-eight dollar check she was entrusted with, from a benefactor of the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society. More than anything else, it was the self-humiliation to put her motivation at stake and made her look for a sign to understand if “the Lord’s work for [her] layed outside the ministry.”²⁷ In her autobiography, Shaw ascribes the turning point of her theological career, not to the ministry who asked her to work for a revival week in a local church (for which she was not paid), but to the woman she met outside that church, whose grandson, after many years of a wild life, was converted that night while listening to her preach. It is to the conversion of a young, poor boy that she saw the Lord’s will and accepted her fate.

From that event on, she graduated, started preaching and left for a European tour; she later returned to Massachusetts to serve at the first church of her own, in Cape Cod.

I was in the ministry, and I was greatly handicapped by the fact that, although I was a licensed preacher and a graduate of the Boston Theological School, I could not, until I had been regularly ordained, meet all the functions in my office. I could perform the marriage service, but I could not baptize. I could bury the dead, but I could not take members into my church. That had to be done by the presiding elder or by some other minister.²⁸

Above all the inequalities she suffered as a woman, she could not stand the fact that she was not able to administer the sacraments. For this reason, she formally applied for ordination at the New England Spring Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, held in Boston in 1880. Ironically, Anna Oliver applied as well. Neither of them was successful. However, Shaw tried again on the 12^th of October of 1880, when the Conference of the Methodist Protestant Church (to which she became a member overnight) finally approved her ordination (and paid her a third of the salary that was received by her young, male, fellow-preachers).

The happy-ending of this story and the success with which Shaw was eventually destined should not distract us from the (un)surprisingly way in which the memories from the first thirty-three years of her life recall the inequalities described by the Declaration of Sentiments. Here, specifically in those lines regarding remuneration, teaching of theology, access to college and Apostolic authority, her involvement in the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association (which took place only after she earned a diploma as physician at the Boston Medical School in 1885) seems consequential. The Association was led by Lucy Stone, while Henry Backwell was associated with her. In its activities, Shaw finally felt that her call “as a minister of soul and body” to the women “must begin at the very foundation of the social structure. Laws for them must be enforced and some of those laws could only be made and enforced by women.”²⁹

This reaction to injustice inspired her “theology of suffrage,” and Susan Anthony (President of NAWSA) would later make her part of the “Great Cause.” It seems that what historians now call the “secularising trend” was actually having an effect on the movement, which at that time was folding on the language of equality and rights. So Anthony saw in Shaw the chance to gain back the reputation of religious orthodoxy which she was not entitled to reclaim.³⁰ Finally, Shaw guided the NAWSA from 1904 to 1915, the period which is often considered as the most difficult of the movement, when fragmentation over tactics and the issue of segregation warmed its souls.³¹

Beverly Zink-Sawyer, in her book, From Preacher to Suffragists, reads Shaw’s theology of suffrage through the lens of Aileen Kraditor’s categories of argument: the “argument from justice” — which characterised the early years of the movement — and the “argument from expediency,” based on “the belief that women [are] morally superior to men and could — and should — exert that influence politically, and the belief that God had created women morally superior and intended for them to use their gifts in service to humanity.”³² Therefore, according to Zink-Sawyer, since the delivery of her famous speech “The Heavenly Vision” (1888), Shaw basically embraced an extension of the nineteenth-century ideology of True Womanhood, asking women to apply their unique gifts for the moral improvement of the United States.

Nonetheless, any analysis of Shaw’s speeches which extends beyond the turn of the century to include the years of her NAWSA presidency would not just show an evolution in her thought, but also a deeper interconnectedness among the (theological) reasons of suffrage and social reform. Among others, her presidential addresses are a precious source from which is possible to trace a roadmap of her thought: the recognition of the role of women in society, women’s economic independence, their status of victims of the materialism and corruption of corporate power, the rule of people under God, and the divinity of the Gospel of democracy.³³ Finally, the work conducted by Mary Pellauer and presented in Toward a Tradition of Feminist Theology, paves the way for a placement of Shaw’s ideas into the American political theory of the first decade of the twentieth century — recalling that old pattern of a feminist “argument from justice” as a tool for progress and the uplifting of society — as well as in the framework of a Gospel-inspired reform of society, otherwise called Social Gospel.

5 Conclusions

The essay presented here is the preliminary result of research regarding a specific chapter of the history of a Christian tradition in the United States, Methodism, in the decades when it inspired, arguably more than in other periods, a full engagement with the social and political transformations of the country. This engagement also took the shape of women’s fight for suffrage and the coinage of a (Methodist) theology which could respond to the quest for equality by challenging social, economic and cultural equilibriums within and outside the church. If it is true that the political culture of the United States was changing, and the moral and religious language started to be considered as a part of the past — replaced by the neutral and efficientist language of social sciences³⁴ — it is also true that in the Social Gospel these two apparently detached worlds found common ground, inspiring action, and women’s activism.

The project that guides this research will develop towards a more specific analysis of Methodist history, theology and thought in the first two decades of the twentieth century, while engaging with the more secular political thought of those years to grasp the meaning of the social reform at the backbone of Social Gospel. The aim is not to define the “Methodist exception,” but to show how Methodist social action and the ministry of diaconate were particularly suitable for offering answers, challenging the economic and social structures responsible for inequalities. Finally, it will insist on the life and work of the Methodist women in the suffrage movement, who discovered ways to conciliate theology and political action, and found the words, “For the cause that lacks assistance Gainst the wrong that needs resistance, For the future in the distance, And a woman’s right to do.”³⁵