Chapter 5
MAKE US A POWER
When Black women spoke about power, they used a term that was as vague as it was blunt. They found it sometimes necessary to be that forceful, especially in contests with men who spoke in metaphors of war. Yes, battles ensued when Black women aimed to exert authority over men—in churches, at conventions, and at the ballot box. But that did not form the whole picture. Anna Julia Cooper offered a more nuanced portrait of what power looked like. It included self-governance: “Only the Black woman can say when and where I enter.” It was driven by a quest for dignity: “The quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood.” Her power would not come at the expense of others or by gamesmanship: “Without violence and without suing or special patronage.” And her ultimate aim was dignity for men and women both. Cooper explained that when she as a Black woman took her seat or cast her ballot, “the whole Negro race enter[s] with me.” Women’s power was a route to dignity for all.1
RECONSTRUCTION OFFERED AN unprecedented set of promises to Black Americans. Southern states, as a condition of reentry into the Union, rewrote constitutions that fulfilled the purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment. Black Americans wasted no time and clamored to enter politics, at conventions, in legislative chambers, and in the streets. For the first time, Black Southerners acted as agents of their own governance—making laws and setting the terms for how power and resources would be shared. With the more than two thousand African Americans who held office during Reconstruction—from a US senator and Congress members to sheriffs and postmasters—the reality of a nation that was beyond slavery and white supremacy came into view. By the presidential contest of 1868, Black men in the North and South were at the polls, many of them casting their very first votes.2
Black women also played a part in this radically new scene. Black men may have been positioned to cast ballots, but women shaped all the deliberations that led up to Election Day. Black-led political meetings included women who helped to steer the future of their communities. Women’s presence and their voices ensured that this new political culture was porous, informal, and alive with community spirit. Men would eventually serve as delegates, chairs, and spokespeople, but women prepared them to reflect the views of their families and their communities. When Election Day came, women went the polls and kept watch for those who might try to intimidate men who came out to cast their ballots.3
Black women knew the power of the vote and what it meant to use it. How to get there was the question. One way forward might have been joining the work of two new national women’s suffrage associations: the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) and the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), where women were lobbyists and organizers and spearheaded litigation. But only a small number of Black women joined these new suffrage associations. The racism that persisted there often drove them out. And suffrage alone was too narrow a goal for Black women. They went on to seek the vote, but on their own terms and to reach cures for what ailed all humanity. The vision that Harper had promoted in the American Equal Rights Association showed Black women their own path.4
Too soon, Black women learned that the urgent interest of all of humanity included those very close to home: that of their husbands, sons, and fathers. The hard-won voting rights of Black men were under attack. Starting in 1877, federal authorities—Congress and the courts—made a devastating pullback from enforcement of Reconstruction’s democratic promise. State by state, Southern lawmakers began to roll back the gains that new constitutions and civil rights acts had promised. This regime change took hold over the course of two decades, imposed by fits and starts, but from the start it was part of one movement that aimed to reimpose white supremacy. Violence and intimidation worked together with poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and literacy tests to keep Black men from the polls and office holding. The United States was on its way to a new political order, a new American apartheid regime built upon disfranchisement, segregation, and lynching, known colloquially as Jim Crow.
There was no reason to think that any constitution would protect Black women. Their rights were tested early on right where Frances Ellen Watkins Harper had told the AERA that they mattered most, in transportation. In 1872, Josephine DeCuir tested who she was before the law after a steamboat company refused her entry into a ladies’ stateroom as she headed north, up the Mississippi from New Orleans. In protest, DeCuir spent the night in an anteroom intended for nursemaids and their charges rather than lay her head in the “bureau,” short for the Freedmen’s Bureau, the colloquial moniker that Southern ship operators gave to their quarters for Black passengers. DeCuir was not a newcomer to this dilemma. Captains and clerks later recounted the many instances in which she had groused, held fast to a white-only ladies’ seat, and insisted on equal access. She spoke only through her lawyer during the lawsuit—in a complaint, during cross examination, through briefs—never submitting to questioning. That would only repeat the original offense.5
DeCuir relied upon Louisiana’s 1868 Constitution, a text drafted by radical men, Black and white. Article XIII guaranteed: “All persons shall enjoy equal rights and privileges upon any conveyance of a public character… without distinction or discrimination on account of race or color.” In the proceedings, DeCuir heard the steamboat’s indignities now recrafted into words. She was curiously said to be like a white man—someone absolutely barred from the ladies’ cabin. She was also compared to “repulsive and disagreeable” persons whom everyone agreed steamboat operators could exclude, segregate, and expulse at will. At the US Supreme Court, the state laws that guaranteed DeCuir’s right to travel as she chose were said to violate the US Constitution’s commerce clause, an impermissible regulation of trade between the states. It was a clinical conclusion that could not cool the hot indignity that DeCuir felt.6
The doors to courthouses and legislatures were closing on Black women who aspired to win their rights and preserve their dignity. There was, however, another opening. In their churches, Black women saw the chance to make a revolution that was all their own. There, debates over women’s power had a long history and struggles in churches kept Black women close to the institution-building work in which they took pride. A churchwomen’s movement kept them linked to men, children, and even those women who opted out of politics. Churches also insulated Black women from the worst that white supremacy had in store.7
THE EARLY YEARS of Reconstruction kept preaching women busy as their churches shifted their focus from the North to the South. The AME Church relocated its headquarters from Philadelphia to Tennessee, and the AME Zion Church similarly left New York for North Carolina. Church leaders—especially those among Black Methodists—called upon women to help fill new sanctuaries with new converts. The status of these women was, however, far from settled. Women worked in their churches holding only loose and even unorthodox understandings of how high they could rise. Even as they faced uncertainty and skepticism, these women widened their circles, preached across lines of denominations and of color. They relied on a time-tested strategy: women’s effectiveness would win them expanded power.
Amanda Berry Smith had success in the pulpit but never managed to breach the color line that divided her from white women preachers. She had been born enslaved just outside of Baltimore. Her father worked to liberate their family and relocated Smith and her siblings to the Free State of Pennsylvania. Her parents saw to it that Smith went to school, but too soon she was sent out to work, earning her living as a domestic worker, a cook, and a washerwoman. Her hardships only increased when Smith lost first one and then a second husband, along with four of her five children. She had long sensed that she was called to preach, but widowhood gave Smith the freedom to learn precisely what that meant. Smith got her start at her local sanctuary, Philadelphia’s Green Street AME Church. By 1869, she was traveling regularly between churches and camp meetings, where she became known as a powerful evangelist, a reputation that eventually carried Smith and her ministry to England, India, and Africa.8
Smith never felt limited by the obstacles that men placed in her way. Many Christian leaders drew sharp lines between denominations. Smith did not. She paid little mind to whether her hosts were Methodists, Baptists, or Presbyterians. She preached to anyone who would listen. Though born in Maryland, Smith never regarded herself as limited by her Southern roots or her origins in the United States. She traveled the world and found common ground with other Christians and candidates for conversion everywhere she went. Smith also did not defer to any color line. Her greatest supporters were laywomen—Black and white. Smith knew how some church leaders used women’s sex to limit their power. She pushed back, speaking out openly in support of women’s right to preach and be ordained to the ministry.9
The racism Smith encountered marred her work. Often, white women preachers kept her at the margins. She was disappointed in more than one encounter with Sarah Smiley, a popular preacher who started life as a Quaker but spent her career preaching to a wide range of Christian sects. In 1870, Smith was invited to hear Smiley speak during a Bible reading at the Twenty-Fourth Street Methodist Church in Brooklyn, New York. Upon arrival, Smith was encouraged to sing a hymn prior to Smiley’s taking the pulpit, and she obliged. Smith then stayed on to hear Smiley’s Bible reading but was taken by surprise when she was inexplicably escorted out of the sanctuary. One of Smiley’s confidantes explained that Smith was not welcome to share the venue with her white counterpart. Smith left, tearful and despondent.10
Smith and Smiley met a second time in another awkward encounter when both were touring Britain. Smiley offered Smith advice about her preaching schedule and, at first, her suggestion sounded generous. Smiley discouraged Smith from making a stop at Broadlands, where, Smiley advised, Smith would encounter ideas that would trouble her mind. Smith kept to her original schedule and only later discovered Smiley’s true, self-serving intention. Smiley hoped to redirect Smith to where Smiley’s associates hoped that Smith would draw large crowds to their events. Smiley did not mean to protect Smith from troubling ideas; she had meant to save her own supporters from the disappointment and embarrassment of small crowds. Smith only learned this later, a discovery that left her feeling exploited by another preaching woman.11
Smith was also slighted in print. She never met Phebe Hanaford, author of the 1877 book Women of the Century, published for the centennial of the United States to document the national debt owed to women. Hanaford was an ordained pastor in the Universalist Church, a suffragist allied with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan Anthony and the American Equal Rights Association, and a prolific writer. Her 640-page tribute to American women included hundreds of biographical essays that highlighted women’s “patriotism, intelligence, usefulness, and moral worth.” Across twenty-seven chapters, Hanaford charted women’s contributions to US history and culture. Somehow, she overlooked Amanda Berry Smith.12
Hanaford did mark the achievements of African American women, though only in a paternalistic and diminishing tone. She wrote of women like the eighteenth-century enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley, who demonstrated Black women’s intellectual capacities: “Even African women, despised as they have been, have intellectual endowments.” The part that Wheatley’s “mistress” played in the poet’s education further demonstrated the virtue of white slaveholding women: “Colonial women, though some of them slaveholders, were not destitute of a lively interest in those the custom of the times placed wholly in their charge.” Mary Peake, a teacher of former slaves on the Sea Islands, evidenced the morality of the American Tract Society when it endorsed “Christian effort without regard to race or color.” Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was “one of the colored women of whom white women may be proud.” Why other women should take credit for the self-made Harper, Hanaford never explained. Among those noted under the heading “Women Lawyers,” was Charlotte Ray, an 1872 graduate of Howard University Law School: “Ray… said to be a dusky mulatto, possess quite an intelligent countenance.” She “doubtless has also a fine mind, and deserves success.” Sculptor Edmonia Lewis was included among “Women Artists,” a “waif” possessed of “perseverance, industry, genius, and naïveté,” all of which had earned her the admiration of white Americans. In every instance, Hanford offered only backhanded praise when it came to Black women.13
Hanaford gave generous space to churchwomen activists of all sorts. Three chapters—“XIII. Women Preachers,” “XIV. Women Missionaries,” and “XIX. Women of Faith”—made up 15 percent of the book overall. Hanaford lauded the great contributions that American women had made to religious life. The same chapters were, however, remarkable for whom they left out. Not one African American woman nor one Black churchwomen’s organization is mentioned. It is a notable omission. Hanaford certainly was aware of Smith and women like her. The Woman’s Journal, one of Hanaford’s principal sources, along with the national press reported regularly on Smith’s work. It was an awkward oversight and at worst it was an erasure of Smith and other Black women preachers.14
Critics subjected all preaching women to similar criticism. In turn, preaching women, Black and white, agreed that men regrettably monopolized the pulpit, leaving women unacknowledged and uncompensated for their talents and labors. All women faced skepticism when they stepped into the pulpit, and they defended themselves by claiming a true calling from God. Laywomen supported preaching women—as hosts during their visits, companions during their travels, and devoted listeners during their sermons. Still, a color line kept Smith from Smiley’s meeting halls and Hanaford’s pages. Not to be overlooked or forgotten, Smith wrote herself into the record in 1893 when she published her life story, An Autobiography: The Story of the Lord’s Dealings with Mrs. Amanda Smith, the Colored Evangelist.15
AS CHURCHWOMEN OF the 1870s prepared to make a full press for their rights, they renewed an old struggle. Boundaries of race and gender limited the work of women, from Jarena Lee in the 1820s to Amanda Berry Smith in the 1870s. Laywomen had consistently done the work—raising funds, staffing Sunday schools, attending to ministers, and filling the pews at each service. But something new arose in the years after the Civil War. Perhaps it was an accumulation of struggles over many decades, like a boiling over of women’s demands. Debates in the secular realm certainly fueled it, when churchwomen heard Black women in political circles making claims to power. Black women were disappointed by the outcome of the preceding decade’s debates over voting rights in the American Equal Rights Association. They had won a half victory only when some among that coalition endorsed the Fifteenth Amendment. But that compromise did not end their quest for political power. They brought those same aspirations to church.16
Eliza Ann Gardner led the way. She had come of age in Boston in the decades before the Civil War. During the day, her home life ran on the rhythms of work and school. Her father, James, labored as a stevedore and eventually became a modest entrepreneur in a busy port, where he hired “his own crew” and provided “the handcarts, blocks, tackles, and winches to load or unload vessels and to move cargo between ship and warehouse.” Eliza spent days at school, where she excelled through a “keenness of her mind” and “retentiveness of her memory,” though none of this excused her from lending a hand to everyday chores.17
Evenings and weekends were different. Whether she was eavesdropping while perched on the edge of a settee, pouring cups of tea, lost with her nose in the pages of The Liberator, or at attention during church or in a meeting hall, Eliza came to know many of the era’s radical luminaries. Thinkers from William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, and Frederick Douglass to Sojourner Truth and Charles Sumner stretched her horizons across the endless miles of the lecture circuits. These were lessons in politics that no primer taught.18
Gardner’s home, 20 North Anderson Street, was set in Boston’s West End. There, and in nearby Beacon Hill, Black Bostonians clustered around institutions such as the Baptist African Meeting House and the Abiel Smith School, where, as a girl, Gardner attended the city’s only public school for Black students. Her family’s home was, however, no ordinary place. In the years before slavery’s abolition, the Gardner home was known as a “Bethel” for fugitive slaves, a safe haven for those fleeing bondage and the grasp of fugitive hunters. After her parents’ deaths, Gardner transformed it into a place of needles, thread, and fabrics, the tools of her trade as a dressmaker. Yet it remained a haven, as Gardner extended a caring hand to young women in need of work. She also took in boarders, men and women who traded coins for a warm and dry bed, which ensured that Gardner remained financially independent late into her ninth decade.19
Officers of Convention of 1895 (Mrs. J. St. P. Ruffin, Mrs. Hannah Smith, Mrs. Florida R. Ridley, Miss Eliza Gardner). Historical Record of 1895–1896 of the Colored Women of America, 1902
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY
When those who admired Gardner dubbed her the “Julia Ward Howe of her race,” they complimented the strength of her commitments—antislavery and women’s suffrage were interests Gardner shared with Howe, a white Bostonian. There, the similarities between the two parted ways. Gardner centered her activism in a spiritual home, the AME Zion Church. In 1858 she made her public debut when organizing a fundraiser for her local congregation, the Columbus Avenue AME Zion Church. It was a start at transforming women’s church work. Gardner and three others titled themselves “managers,” and then held a fair “for the laudable purpose of raising funds to enable them to build a more comfortable House for the Society to worship in.” Gardner never aspired to be a helpmeet to those men who controlled her denomination. Instead, as a woman manager she was prepared to lead others for the good of the collective “society.” Gardner discovered how to build women’s power and it was a project that would last a lifetime.20
By the 1870s, Gardner was ready to directly address churchwomen’s rights, and this turn was no happenstance. She was a student of history and knew that, since the 1840s, Black Methodist women had been demanding, and for a brief time had even won, the right to preaching licenses. Something new was in the air, however, and it was talk of women’s suffrage. During the 1860s, Gardner had witnessed how abolitionists and women’s rights allies had clashed over women’s voting rights in the American Equal Rights Association. At home in Massachusetts, she had seen Black women activists, along with the Republican Party and statehouse leadership, put women’s suffrage on the agenda, only to fail. There was more work to do.21
At the podium, Gardner never failed to put women’s concerns first. “Our fathers and mothers, too, fought to secure that glorious boon of liberty,” Gardner admonished those who assembled in Boston at the 1876 centennial celebration of the Declaration of Independence. The emphasis is hers. Women’s fundraising, she believed, was a key to their power, and Gardner’s remarks came along with a $100 contribution on behalf of the Ladies’ Charitable Association, a “society composed of colored women.” As if to underscore the women’s political savvy, she emphasized that they had “voted” to assist the Centennial Committee—operating by political, even democratic, principles. Then came the bargain: “We have made this effort for more than one reason,” Gardner explained. Black women had been among the nation’s founders and “are American citizens, all attempts to waive our claims to that title to the contrary notwithstanding.” Gardner hoped to be thanked for the women’s gift, and then expected to be fully recognized as a rights-bearing citizen. Had they been listening, leaders in the AME Zion Church would have done well to take heed. Gardner was coming for them next.22
In 1868, the Sisters of Zion, women of Gardner’s Boston congregation, turned to the matter of church law, the Doctrines and Discipline. They began by giving it a close, careful read. Sexism, they discovered, was baked into the foundation of their denomination. So, the women got to work, demanding that terms like man and male be purged from law. In anticipation of an upcoming general conference, they drafted a request that the church’s governing body “remove all words, etc., from the Discipline of our church which prohibits females from having the same rights and privileges as male members.” It was a request made “respectfully” but unequivocally. Women like Gardner expected to have the same rights as their fathers and husbands.23
The general conference did as asked, and the law changed, without a fight. For Gardner’s and Zion’s churchwomen, it was a first victory, but they were not done. The women formulated a next set of demands that included a call for their right to hold office. And again they won. The church created the Office of the Deaconess, a team of women lay leaders to be appointed within each congregation. Soon women began appearing in church conferences as delegates representing the men and women of their state or region. They took seats as decision makers—hundreds gathered to debate the church’s future—engaged in lawmaking, and otherwise directed AME Zion’s governance. It was a sea-change. Soon women preachers received licenses as part of ordinary business, and few objected when a woman stepped into the pulpit to interpret the scripture. Women petitioned for control of their missionary work and won a new Ladies’ Home and Foreign Missionary Society, where they controlled the direction of benevolent work, including how the dollars and cents they raised were spent.24
Gardner led by a style that mixed directness with wit. She won over both men and women with an appeal to equality in AME Zion. The key to her success lay in the terms of a bargain in which women leveraged their labor to win power: “If you will try to do by us the best you can… you will strengthen our efforts and make us a power; but if you commence to talk about the superiority of men, if you persist in telling us that after the fall of man we were put under your feet and that we are intended to be subject to your will, we cannot help you.” It seemed that the churchwomen’s movement in AME Zion had won. Then, trouble surfaced. As women—those ordained to the ministry—stepped up to exercise power over men, Zion Church plunged into stormy waters.25
WHEN JULIA FOOTE and Mary Small became the first women ministers in the AME Zion Church, Emily Bird-Walters stepped in to defend them. Bird-Walters explained them as two facets of women’s collective power in 1899. Foote and Small were not exceptional when they became equal to men, she explained. They were just two figures among a pantheon that included writer and lecturer Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, journalist and antilynching advocate Ida Wells-Barnett, artist Edmonia Lewis, and club leader Victoria Earle Matthews. The women ministers were in step with AME Zion’s own Eliza Ann Gardner and the itinerant preacher Amanda Berry Smith. Such women, although their concerns and goals varied, Bird-Walters saw as parts of a whole: “While she shines as a star of greatest magnitude in the home… she can also when sufficient opportunity is given or circumstances demand, shine as brilliantly on the platform, in the halls of legislation and in the arenas of art, science, literature, philosophy and reform, as man.”26
Bird-Walters wrote emphatically. She had to. A maelstrom had erupted when the two women—Foote and Small—rose to the pinnacle of ministerial authority, ordained as deacons with full rights to preach, preside, and participate in church governance. If this breakthrough was to survive its opponents, it would do so only if advocates and allies stepped into the fray. Women in AME Zion had been talking about their rights for decades. Their strides were evident. And still there were those who aimed to halt their progress and impose a ceiling, preserving the highest offices for men alone. Two women who had long labored for the church and, some argued, deserved their ordination by right, inspired the charge against sexism.27
Foote was the more seasoned of the two. Her career had a rough start when, in the 1830s, her minister expelled her from a Connecticut congregation for holding prayer meetings without his permission. Her response was to organize with other women and petition for a license. To prove her calling was genuine and her skills formidable, Foote held open-air meetings, where women demonstrated their capacity to attract converts. In 1879, Foote recounted this rocky beginning in a spiritual memoir, A Brand Plucked from the Fire: An Autobiographical Sketch. With a book in hand, Foote’s public work was newly launched. By the early 1880s, she was crisscrossing the country and logging thousands of miles as a much-sought-after evangelist, a featured speaker who drew the lapsed, reluctant, and curious into Methodism. She need not preach churchwomen’s rights to endorse that cause; as one commentator in Topeka, Kansas, put it: Foote’s presence “encourages our women; too many of them believe as the men do that a woman should not preach, nor occupy a public position in the church.”28
Mary J. Small, born a generation after Foote, came late to her calling, joining the church in the 1870s after her marriage to minister John Small. Initially, she resisted the feeling that she was destined to preach, “being somewhat unfavorable to lady preachers.” Her time was occupied with raising the two young nieces who lived with the Smalls. She finally gave in to “the call of the blessed master” in 1892 and began to interpret the word of God. Small stepped out from her husband’s shadow, secured a license, and was soon sharing the Sunday pulpit with him in their local York, Pennsylvania, congregation. Unlike Foote, who built her reputation as a traveling itinerant, Small remained close to home until she was promoted to the intermediate post of Elder in 1896. With that, she extended her reach, headlining weeks-long revivals in major venues, while also directing the work of the Ladies’ Home and Foreign Missionary Society. Critical to Small’s rise—she was elevated to the office of Deacon in 1898—were her alliances with powerful men, including her husband, who would soon to be elected a bishop, and ministers, who saw up close her capacity to win converts to their congregations.29
Churchwomen broke through and became equals in AME Zion, and a firestorm erupted, one fueled by white supremacist forces from outside of the church that were robbing Black men of their political rights. The promise of Reconstruction’s experiment in interracial democracy was being brutally crushed by the imposition of a new, racist regime, that became popularly termed Jim Crow. In courts, in legislatures on city streets and along rural lanes, violence, disenfranchisement, and segregation were changing the terms of Black life. Black men’s brief but very real contributions to new, postwar lawmaking were being undone. Black churches and schools remained among the few institutions available to those men who aspired to leadership. In AME Zion, many men and some women experienced the suppression of their political and economic lives. Women were urged to step back and let men regain the lead.30
Foote and Small ducked below the crossfire as Zionites took to the pages of the church’s newsweekly, Star of Zion, to debate the women’s fates. Opinions flew as fast as the paper was delivered across the nation. Neither woman spoke publicly. Instead, their supporters spilled countless bottles of ink defending them. Some members of AME Zion clashed face-to-face in conferences, as happened in 1898 when Small was ordained an elder at the May meeting of the Baltimore Conference: “When it became known that she was a candidate a number of ministers protested and asked the bishop to give them a hearing.” But most protests were delivered in print through exchanges so heated that even local papers noted the furor: Zionites were hurling “cannon balls” at “female preachers” and faced a “hot time” ahead as the “question of female elders in Zion Church is being fought and discussed from every point of the compass.” For observers, the spectacle provoked one part concern and another part amusement. Everyone wondered: Would leaders strip Foote and Small of their ordinations?31
The debate consumed all of 1898. Men approached the matter of women’s rights as if it were something to be worked out between them. They underestimated Zion’s women, who refused to let men determine their fate. Their prior victories emboldened women who had tasted power by voting, holding office, and controlling the purse strings of missionary societies. They worked apart from men in the office of the deaconess. Churchwomen joined the debate, wielding words, lobbing opinions, and otherwise speaking out. They were being tested, and, in response, the women of Zion did not sit back and follow the debate but directed its course with the sharpness of their pens and tongues.32
Views on women’s ordination paralleled controversies in politics. The question was put: Should the ideas about women’s equality that were animating politics—including the suffrage movement—penetrate policy and practice in the church? Some argued that, whatever might be transpiring in the secular world, the church should remain independent and indifferent: “The ‘New Woman’ is becoming most too new. The next General Conference should toll the death knell of this petticoat ministry.” Women preachers might be fine, even if women in politics were not. The Reverend Josie Mayes, herself an evangelist, supported women like Julia Foote. In the church, women’s talents, Mayes admitted, were often superior to those of men. Still, Mayes could not endorse a “new woman” when she aspired to mount the rostrum and remodel politics. That would be going too far.33
For some, ordaining women was consistent with progress: “The nineteenth century is one of improvement in all lines, ecclesiastical, literary and scientific.” Churches were like political parties, the argument went. All such institutions should expect to keep up with the “times,” as Rev. B. J. Bolding put it. That meant supporting women like Foote and Small, whose status reflected an improvement. Sarah Dudley Petty, wife of a Bishop, addressed the matter with a poetic flourish: “Christian generosity, keeping pace with the advanced ideas of to-day, has overleaped the once insurmountable barriers, and to-day, to the called female church worker there is no majestic Shasta looming up before her, with sexual prejudicial peaks and impregnable sentimental buttes saying ‘thus far shalt thou come and no farther.’” Sexism, then, should be relegated to the past.
When it came to women’s equality, for Reverend Chambers the answer was obvious: “Woman is not man’s equal, and the claim is simply ridiculous.” Those who agreed with Chambers relied upon old stereotypes: “A woman is not physically able to pastor a church.” The duties were beyond women’s reach: “She is too timid and fearful to get up at one or two o’clock in the night, unless some man is with her, and go across the city to see the sick or pray with some one ready to die.” Women might compromise the dignity of church rituals: “She is not able and would be a pitiful looking object standing in the river trying to baptize a lot of heavy men and shouting women.” No matter that women had long endured on the lecture circuit: “It would be too hot and dusty in the Summer and too cold and slushy in the Winter for her to walk ten, fifteen and twenty miles on a circuit in the country to try to preach the gospel.” The demanding itineraries Foote and Small kept, effort witnessed firsthand by dozens of congregations, directly refuted charges of women’s physical fragility.34
In contrast, others spoke of women as equal to men. “‘In Christ Jesus there is neither male nor female,’ Gal. 3:28, is the magna charta [sic] of women’s rights in the church. If it means anything, it is that males and females stand on equal footing in Christ’s Church.” Bishop James Hood chided: “On the question of woman’s rights I should like if possible, to be clearly understood.” He pushed back against the view that “woman is the weaker vessel.” “The test of strength is not what a thing is capable of doing once or for a little while,” Hood explained, “but its capacity for endurance.” Hood spoke as though he had seen women in action: “Put a woman in the sick room and let her be anxious respecting the recovery of a loved one, and where will you find a man possessing the staying qualities that are found in her?” The differences between men and women did not determine their fates: “It could be admitted that man is stronger physically, it must be remembered that we have a mental as well as a physical nature, and to find the strength of an individual you must consider the entire person, body, life and soul.” Maggie Hood-Banks, a bishop’s daughter, linked arms with Foote and Small: “Our idea has been to show to the world woman as she is, that she is equal in all respects and where the power of imagination, perception and emotion of the soul is the point of judgment, she is superior, in many respects, to man.”35
Among church leaders were men who followed the lead of women, from Maria Stewart to Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and condemned sexism and racism as equally wrong. AME Zion should dispense with both. Bishop Hood explained what equality meant in his church: “Christianity is destined to give, eventually, both to woman and to the Negro, the rights of which they have long been deprived. Both can fully rely upon that heaven-born system, and wait with confidence supreme.” It was time to reject arbitrary lines of difference drawn by men, not God, and Eliza Gardner urged Zionites to view women ministers in the long history of their church: “It has been one hundred years of joy and sorrow, labor, conflict and triumph. The century has witnessed the emancipation of man and the almost severed bonds of woman. ’Tis glorious though that this grand old Church… is the first religious organization to accord to women… the same rights she accords to [men,] the sterner sex.”36
The debate threatened to reveal that women were not merely equals but often outperformed men. Even commentators who opposed ordaining women managed to undercut men’s leadership: “We have too much useless ordained male timber lying around in all of our conferences; why begin now on the women?” Mrs. Rev. Moore cut through much of the long-winded opposition: “Brother S. A. Chambers says there is no authority for the ordination of women. Our brother does not see through eyes of faith, but looks at Sister Small with eyes of jealousy.” The church should avoid squandering women’s distinct contributions: “Suppose God has a work for this sister to do which some of us men cannot or will not do, and we attempt to get into her way; what will be the consequence?”37
The debate over women’s power went to the heart of Christianity. Mrs. Franklin Clinton, widow of a late minister explained: “Some of you brethren talk about women being unfit to deliver Christ’s message. Christ commissioned them first Himself to carry the good news. While men were clamoring for his blood it was the women who pleaded at the cross to have His life spared. Where were His disciples when women rushed through that murderous crowd of soldiers to the very foot of the cross? Women embalmed his body and first greeted Him after the resurrection.” Women had been most Christ-like, she chided: “If you brethren would listen more to women you would arouse the world.… Why not arouse a missionary spirit and help these poor churches and ministers and not fret about who will be Bishop? Christ was the first missionary. Brethren, imitate him.” Her tone was mocking, reflecting Mrs. Clinton’s confidence, earned during many years of leadership in church missionary societies.38
Foote and Small were among the many women preachers who had already earned a track record of success. They converted one skeptic: “After hearing a number of these [women,] partly out of curiosity as most of us do for a time or two.” Clarissa Betties, writing from Calvert, Texas, defended Reverend Small: “Let her alone; she is doing what you won’t do. I will be glad when the time comes that those men will find something to do and let Rev. Mrs. Small alone.” Women laid the church’s foundation, sustained ministers, sanctuaries, and Sunday schools: “Methodist women… know well enough that we form a majority of the membership; that we furnish a large part of the spiritual life, and that we collect most of the money of the Church. We believe and know that this entitles us to share in the government of the Church; and whether the Church law provides for it or prohibits it, cuts no figure with us. We shall continue to claim our rights.”39
Most difficult to refute was the view that Black Christianity rejected all bigotry: “The doctrine of equality, Christianity thunders against all wrong and seeks to breakdown every stronghold of oppression, blotting out the distinction of race, sex or caste. From this point of view there is neither Jew, Greek, bond nor free, male nor female, for all are one in Christ.” If AME Zion fully committed to women’s equality, it would stand above all other denominations. Changes to church law erased “the only discrimination against the rights of women found in our laws, blotting out that relic of a state of barbarism in which ‘might makes right.’” This was a logical and even natural extension of an insistence upon racial equality: “For a hundred years we have been pleading for and demanding the equal rights of citizens, without regard to color. Is it any wonder that we recognized the fact that the same arguments which, as to equality of rights, abolish the sex line.” History mattered. “As a rule where a white man was an abolitionist he was per consequence an advocate of women suffrage[.] Fred Douglass was consistently an ardent advocate of both Negro and of woman suffrage. These lines are from his pen: Right is of no sex, Truth is of no color, God is our common Father, And all mankind are brothers. To my mind they are not only epigrammatic, but immortal.”40
Eliza Gardner watched from her “sick room” in Boston as opinions flew on the pages of the Star of Zion. Finally, she felt compelled to speak, and her words were harsh: “I have read with pain some of the articles that have been sent to the Star vilifying woman, for some of them were unworthy of the pen of a true woman. And as I read some of their bitterer passages, I wondered if mother, wife, and sister had inspired in these gentlemen no chivalry, and if so of what sort it could be.” The bar was high, she conceded, for men, who must accommodate to the full effects of women’s rights. It was also high for women, who would now bear the new burdens that power imposed. AME Zion was not alone and was instead part of a greater shift toward women’s equality in all things. Zionites watched as white Methodists wrestled with similar questions when the head of the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement, Frances Willard, tried to take a seat in their general conference: “Our Church has seen to it that… there should be no bar to place or position on account of sex,” Gardner boasted.41
Churchwomen’s rights were women’s rights, and the values that promoted suffrage also supported the right to ordination. Bishop Small explained: “Two things caused [me] to become an American citizen—America’s tenacious clinging to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and her fearless and liberal recognition of her women. In [my] mind, these are the things which will make any nation great; and if this country perseveres in holding up these two principles, nothing can keep her from standing at the head of the nations of the world.” A nation, like a church, only showed its weakness when it aimed to “baffle the success of a woman… to legislate her to the rear.” Lay leader John Dancy confessed that “he believed in woman’s rights as much as he did in man’s,” and urged that “woman’s cause is man’s; They rise or sink together Dwarfed or God-like, bond or free.”42
In some moments, the debate over women’s ordination clearly borrowed from ideas about the vote. Mrs. Holden, before writing to the Star of Zion, likely had read Anna Julia Cooper’s words in A Voice from the South: “Should we ask what factor was most needed in taking the world for Christ, we would say woman, for a nation, as a river, cannot rise above its source. Neither can a nation rise above the virtue, intelligence, strength and character of its womanhood, for women are the mothers of men.” The thinking of white women suffragists could also be heard. When Maggie Hood-Banks analogized the status of women to that of enslaved people, she was borrowing directly from Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, who in 1836 had likened the oppression of women to that of enslaved people: “If we confine our views to the female slaves, it is a restitution of our own right for which we ask—their cause is our cause—they are one with us in sex and nature.” Coming from Hood-Banks, the analogy was all the more potent. If the position of AME Zion’s women had been like that of enslaved people, those same women were descended from people who had actually been enslaved.43
The debate came to an end only as women drove a bargain that had been proposed long ago by Eliza Gardner. Women’s work for AME Zion was dependent on men’s support for their leadership. Hood-Banks explained, “For centuries woman was considered inferior to man, and in view of this fact had no rights man was bound to respect.” It was a neat play on language from the notorious Dred Scott case. No African American wanted to be charged with bigotry analogous to that of Chief Justice Roger Taney, who in 1857 declared that no Black American could be a citizen of the United States. There was a way forward for her church, Hood-Banks suggested: “With the advance of Christianity she began to be more respected, more noticed, thus honored more, until now there is no place or position too great for her to hold.” If women’s possibilities were limitless, so was their bargaining power. Her tone turned stern: “I warn you that the women are not always going to submit to the second place. They are not always going to work hard to raise money unless they can have full control of all the facts connected with it. They are getting very tired of ‘taxation without representation,’ and equally tired of raising money for some of the men, who cannot raise their salaries.”44
Hood-Banks’s final quip—“Fair play, brethren”—put the men of her church on notice. And she was heard. Before the year was over, most had heeded her warning and the opposition to women’s ordination quietly fell away.45
CHURCH ACTIVISM DEMANDED that women be armed with ideas and with stiff backs. It also demanded that they spend time on the road. Church conferences, local, regional, and national, were sprinkled throughout the year and across the nation’s landscape. Meeting minutes did not reflect the many hours and multiple conveyances it took to get to the next city or a far-flung hamlet. Conference deliberations generated the collective will that was essential to the Methodist model of governance and could only be enhanced (but never replaced) by newspaper columns or pamphlets. Nothing was riskier for Black churchwomen than those hours in carriages, on the rails, and aboard streetcars. Whether traveling in the company of men, oftentimes their minister husbands, or alone, Black women faced a cruel and dangerous set of arrangements. More than any other travelers, they risked the indignity and danger of cars designed for men or the prospect of ejection from the ladies’ cars set aside for women travelers and their companions.46
Selina Gray traveled with her husband, William, a minister, foremost concerned with the fragile health of their small child. They were seasoned travelers headed, one day in 1881, between Cincinnati and their home in Lexington, Kentucky. The family had purchased first-class tickets and expected to ride in the ladies’ car, where men were permitted to enter in the company of female travel companions. A judge explained his version of Gray’s dilemma: “She had a right to say that she would not travel in the smoking-car. It is very unpleasant for gentlemen, sometimes, to sit in a car of that character. Not every man likes smoke; not every man likes tobacco. It is bad enough for them to force a gentleman… let alone forcing a lady there with a sick child.” To this, Gray added, the “refusal was because she was a woman of color wholly.” Gray never boarded the train. Instead, her family split up, with her husband heading home in the smoker while Gray waited behind with their child, returning later by another route that would accommodate them in the ladies’ car.47
Little was sure as Black women, tickets in hand, exposed their lives to the whims of brakemen, conductors, and railway officials. Women were armed, if only with expectations borne of past travels, and they pressed on, trying to meet the urgent demands of sick and dying children or expectant and demanding employers. Risk taking—defiance in the face of those who aimed to regulate their travel—became part of the bargain, and the ladies’ car was a proving ground. Entering coaches of plush seats and respectable comportment—or attempting to—was a defining encounter that, to see it through, might justify missing a workday, compromising health, or separating a family. Dignity and indignity fused as women invited ridicule, discomfort, disarray, and worse.48
Anna Julia Cooper had women like Selina Gray in mind when she penned her 1892 manifesto, A Voice from the South. Cooper had been born enslaved in North Carolina on the eve of the Civil War. She was trained first in the nearby Saint Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute and later at Oberlin College. She would go on to earn her PhD from the Paris-Sorbonne University in 1925, when she was in her sixties. But in 1892, she was a founder of the Washington, DC, Colored Women’s League. By day, Cooper taught Latin at Washington’s M Street High School. During the evenings, she was at work on her book, which argued that it was time for Black women to claim political power.49
Cooper regretted that Black women were marginalized in churches. Her example was an 1886 gathering of Protestant Episcopal Church ministers. They, Cooper charged, had failed to win members among Black Americans in the South. Why? Black men and women had been overlooked. White church leaders had failed to invite Black men into the denomination’s leadership, rendering its work “purely theoretical” and “devoid of soul.” Their second error was the failure to develop “Negro womanhood.” Black women’s leadership was “fundamental to the elevation of the race,” Cooper explained. The church had missed an opportunity when it failed to build upon their “agency in extending the work of the Church.” The failure had been fatal: The “church training, protecting and uplifting our colored womanhood [is] indispensable to the evangelization of the race.”50
Cooper also knew that women like Gray experienced cruel scrutiny on trains and streetcars. The choice that they faced—between the smoker and the ladies’ car—captured the stakes that Black women had in winning power. Cooper’s wit was her weapon when she wryly promised that Black women would comply with laws that demanded they sit somewhere other than the ladies’ car. They would do so in a utopian world in which railroads provided to Black women cars that were equal in all other respects to those available to white women. It would be a marvel: “I might wonder at the expensive arrangements of the company and of the state in providing special and separate accommodations for the transportation of the various hues of humanity.” Of course, such a turn was impossible.51
Cooper added her story to the many that women told about traveling while Black. Drawing upon a true experience, Cooper speculated that she might comply with a request to change her seat if a gentlemanly conductor asked that she move to a well-appointed car set aside for Black ladies. But anything less would win only her rebuke. She told how she resisted when “a great burly six feet of masculinity with sloping shoulders and unkempt beard swaggers in, and, throwing a roll of tobacco into one corner of his jaw, growls out at me over the papers I am reading, ‘Here gurl,’ (I am past thirty) ‘you better git out ’n dis kyar ’f er don’t, I’ll put yer out.’” Cooper revealed her contempt for the man, an “American citizen who has been badly trained.” And she did not give up her seat.52
Above all else, securing dignity most concerned Cooper: “There can be no true test of national courtesy without travel.” It was the demands of her body and of her spirit that set the country’s high bar. Travel invited vulnerability: “The Black Woman of the South has to do considerable traveling in this country, often unattended.” She affirmed a collective tale of rough indignities, “personal violence to colored women traveling in less civilized sections of our country, where women have been forcibly ejected from cars, thrown out of seats, their garments rudely torn, their person wantonly and cruelly injured.”53
Cooper had been wounded when the politics of respectability failed despite her efforts to be “quiet and unobtrusive in her manner, simple and inconspicuous in her dress.” Still, “gentlemanly and efficient” railroad conductors failed to extend to Black women the same courtesies they eagerly provided to others. Black women lifted their own satchels and steadied themselves as they stepped down to the platform. They bore this “unnamable burden” silently, their discomfort quietly signaled by “the heaving bosom and tightly compressed lips.” There were innumerable inconveniences and slights to be endured, but the truest burden was “the feeling of slighted womanhood [which] is unlike every other emotion of the soul.”54
Black women aspired to freedom from the tyranny of conductors and brakemen, one dimension of their full liberation. Which car one rode in was a matter of equality: “When I… apply for first-class accommodations on a railway train, I do so because my physical necessities are identical with those of other human beings.” The “unique position” of Black women upset the same routine transactions. They were confronted “by both a woman question and a race problem,” in Cooper’s analysis, a dilemma that remained generally “unknown or… unacknowledged.” It was not enough for Black women to fight their battles for the ladies’ car, be it with wit, writs, or fisticuffs. They would also need to speak for themselves. No one else could: “Our Caucasian barristers are not to blame if they cannot quite put themselves in the dark man’s place, neither should the dark man be wholly expected fully and adequately to reproduce the exact Voice of the Black Woman.”55
Struggles over the ladies car inspired Cooper’s battle for women’s rights and the vote. When they confronted railroad officials and the passengers who witnessed their abuse, Black women joined the “great national and international movement… based on the inherent right of every soul to its own highest development, [a] movement making for woman’s full, free, and complete emancipation.” Black women’s dignity would emerge through a movement that saw how “its own ‘rights’ are the rights of humanity”: “Woman’s cause is the cause of the weak; and when all the weak shall have received their due consideration, then woman will have her ‘rights,’ and the Indian will have his rights, and the Negro will have his rights, and all the strong will have learned to at least deal justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly.”56
CHURCHWOMEN HAD MANAGED a revolution in AME Zion. It reflected one dimension of the needs, concerns, and goals that Black women carried with them as they moved between sacred and secular spaces in the 1890s. Julia Foote, Mary Small, and Eliza Gardner led a women’s movement in their church. They did not leave their politics in the sanctuaries of their denomination. Instead, they brought them along into emerging civil rights circles. Julia Foote accompanied Zion’s Bishop Alexander Walters to gatherings of T. Thomas Fortune’s new National Afro-American League, a precursor to the twentieth century’s NAACP. The league’s New York City branch elected Walters a delegate to an upcoming convention. Foote made an impression strong enough to secure her place as an alternate delegate, empowered to speak on civil rights and church politics. When Mary Small was not attending church conferences, she could be found at Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) gatherings. There, she provided opening “devotional exercises,” a scriptural reading, which fit with her status as a minister. Also in the WCTU, Small linked arms with women working toward women’s suffrage and passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.
In 1895, Eliza Ann Gardner was among the Black women leaders who convened a first meeting of the National Association of Colored Women. It was the birth of a movement that would mobilize Black women’s power for many decades to come. Gardner was singled out for leadership, a recognition of her years championing women’s rights in the church. The convention designated her its chaplain. Gardner provided the opening and closing prayers at the association’s very first meeting. She was a force behind the founding of another Black women’s movement, one that combined their energies to tackle national problems under the motto “lifting as we climb.”57
When Eliza Ann Gardner signed an 1899 letter, “Yours for Zion and the complete redemption of women every where,” she expressed a political philosophy in which the struggle for the rights of churchwomen was one facet of a fight for women’s rights everywhere. AME Zion activist women moved nimbly between sacred and secular circles, cross-fertilizing each with ideas about their rights—including their capacities to vote and hold office. These were not women who made stark choices between the pulpit and a temperance hall, or between missionary society fundraising and a club movement convention. Just as political debates informed their religious deliberations, women’s work in churches was a route to rights consciousness, an occasion for honing arguments, and a proving ground for their capacities for leadership, governance, and even political wrangling. In this there was power.58