Feminism, Pentecostalism, And Forging A Historical Consciousness

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Pneuma 35 (2013) 1-4

Feminism, Pentecostalism, and Forging

a Historical Consciousness

Dale M. Coulter

In the popular pentecostal mind, feminism and Pentecostalism go together like fire and ice. For some Pentecostals (as well as some feminist and womanist theologians), these two offspring of the modern world cannot occupy the same ground; indeed, the existence of one implies the destruction of the other. While the historical causes that give rise to such antagonism are undoubtedly com- plex, in many respects they revolve around a lack of historical consciousness and a failure to attend to the complex nature of both feminism and Pentecos- talism as historical movements. This special issue seeks to revisit both of these dimensions in the hope that Pneuma readers will begin to see the continuities and the areas in which fruitful dialogue may be possible.

As Hans Gadamer suggested in Truth and Method, historical consciousness is a mode of self-knowledge in its reflective stance toward the past and the tradition it represents. Over the past four decades pentecostal scholarship has been cultivating such a mode of critically reflective self-knowledge with impressive results. Nevertheless, what remains largely unexplored is the rela- tionship between the Holiness movement, early Pentecostalism, and the first wave of feminism, which historians argue began with the first women’s rights convention in New York in 1848 and concluded with women receiving the right to vote just after World War I in Britain and the United States, in 1918 and 1920, respectively. By exploring the overlap between first-wave feminism and the Holiness and Pentecostal movements, Pentecostals can continue to forge a his- torical consciousness that helps to locate them in late modernity and suggests that there is more common ground between these two movements than many think.

From the outset the first wave of feminism was bound up with the cause of abolition and fueled by Holiness preaching. This was no less true on the Wes- leyan side than it was on the Higher-Life side. Newly founded institutions such

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as Oberlin College, where abolitionism and women’s rights were fused with Holiness rhetoric, became a seedbed for such activity. Oberlin was the first col- lege to admit women. As a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Fran- ces Willard counted herself fortunate to have been influenced by Oberlin. Moreover, Willard reported having an experience of entire consecration under the ministry of Phoebe Palmer in 1866. She went on to become president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, where she employed such slogans as “everybody’s war” and “home protection” to talk about a large array of women’s issues. At the time of her death, Willard was the most famous woman in the United States, more so than either Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton. A statue of Willard, placed there in 1905 by her home state of Illinois, currently resides in Statuary Hall on Capitol Hill. Willard embodies both the fusion of the Holiness movement with the leading social causes of the day and the cross- fertilization between Oberlin perfectionism and Wesleyan soteriology. For many nineteenth-century Holiness women, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) became a place to express their theology and their support of women’s issues. The WCTU was more than an organization opposed to alcohol consumption; its actions covered a broad range of issues, including support for the ordination of women. Female evangelists like Hannah Whitall Smith and Carrie Judd Montgomery were members of the WCTU, which quickly morphed into an international organization with a presence on every continent. The mothers of Minnie Abrams and Lilian Yeomans had both been members, with Yeomans’s mother Amelia serving as vice-president of the Canadian branch as well as president of the Canadian Suffrage Club. Abrams, Yeomans, and Montgomery went on to shape early Pentecostalism signifi- cantly. All of these women saw the work of the WCTU as an extension of a Holiness (and later pentecostal) theology that promoted the healing of the soul of the body politic and the human body and soul. The WCTU served as one of the many global networks that provided a conduit for early Pentecostalism. The next phase of historical analysis in the service of forging a historical consciousness for Pentecostalism should include tracing out the various con- nections among the first wave of feminism and the Holiness and Pentecostal movements. For the women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was no distance between the issues concerning women and the advance- ment of God’s reign in society. The act of consecrating all to God on the human heart was a microcosm of the renewal of all culture.

In addition to a lack of historical consciousness, another reason why the popular pentecostal mind sees a chasm between the claims of feminism and the claims of Pentecostalism has to do with the complex cultural movement

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that became feminism’s second wave in the 1970s. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) is still viewed by some scholars as an important catalyst for this second wave. After interviewing a number of housewives, Friedan discovered a pattern of discontent and restlessness with their suburban existence and issued a call to allow these women to have careers. While Friedan’s analysis would later be criticized as being concerned exclusively with white, middle-class women, it helped to create a popular movement that led to academic feminism in the 1970s. In the United States secular feminism began to construct theo- retical accounts that supported the Equal Rights Amendment, Roe vs. Wade, and sexual freedom through contraception, while religious feminists in main- line Protestantism and Catholicism began to take up women’s issues and attempt to reconcile them with their faith. The popular pentecostal mind does not always differentiate the theological project of feminist thought from its secular counterpart, even though many differences between secular feminists, who see religion as hopelessly patriarchal, and religious feminists who wish to reconcile Christianity with feminist concerns parallel the divergences in the first wave of feminism between Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Francis Willard — and this does not even begin to dissect the various strands of feminist theology that currently exist.

If one moves into womanist thought, the thicket of issues grows. It was in reaction to analyses like Betty Friedan’s that Alice Walker sought to create con- ceptual and social space for African-American women in the late 1970s and early 1980s when she described what it meant to be a womanist. Some woman- ist scholars see a womanist as a black feminist, while others want to distance themselves entirely from feminism. The debate is ongoing. At the same time, Walker was consciously drawing on African-American women like Zora Neale Hurston, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth in painting her portrait of a womanist. As Yolanda Pierce suggests, Walker’s method sets a precedent to revisit the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and recover the entire range of voices among Holiness and early pentecostal women. Despite the complexities of grasping womanist thought, even the Pentecostal in the pew can agree that a common starting point is the need to recover all voices and bring them to the table when assessing the dynamics of Pentecostalism. This must also include voices like the Ghanian Pentecostal Afua Kuma, whom Mercy Oduyoye calls the first female theologian of Africa.

This issue offers a nudge in the direction of deepening the historical con- sciousness of Pentecostals by engaging in a dialogue with feminist and woman- ist thought. A recovery of all the early voices from the Holiness and Pentecostal movements will reveal that many of the issues remain. This is both a call for

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repentance and an opportunity to discern and move forward. Out of their own spiritual encounters, such women as Carrie Judd Montgomery, Mary Magdalena Tate, and Frances Willard began to recognize the distance between established interpretations of Scripture and the Scriptures themselves. They were not entirely prepared to describe gender as a social construction, but they recog- nized that gender roles were defined by the larger culture in ways that did not correspond to the gospel witness of the Spirit. Once Pentecostals begin to recover these voices and add another layer to their own historical conscious- ness, they will begin to see that there is plenty of room for dialogue with femi- nist and womanist perspectives.

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