Glimpses of Reformed women leaders from our history

Jane Dempsey Douglass

Remembering the women who have given leadership in our churches is an important step in gathering the courage today to press for full freedom for women to use their gifts in the church's life. There have been such women in all our churches, though till recently their stories were seldom told. Since I am from the West, I shall provide a few glimpses of European and North American women who affirmed women's equality with men as made in the image of God and who gave some sort of public leadership, formal or informal, in the church prior to the twentieth century.

We must restrict ourselves to glimpses because the whole history of women's leadership is not yet known. There has been a remarkable surge of interest in the last twenty years in locating, publishing and interpreting the writings of women, but the task has barely been begun. Some aspects of women's historical roles in the church will never be known, because for most Christian history only a small percentage of women were educated sufficiently to write and leave a literary legacy for us to discover. Male church historians have seldom told us very much about women's life and thoughts, and what they tell us is often biased against women. Fortunately recent research has shown that there is a rich literature written by women of the church for us to explore, so many women's voices from the past are being heard again.

The context

We have heard in previous chapters about the leadership of women in the earliest church. During the middle ages, however, women lost most of the opportunities they had once had for public roles in the church. The order of deaconesses in the Eastern church disappeared. Queens and empresses were no longer so visibly involved with church councils as they had been in the fourth and fifth centuries. Cloistered nuns, however, still normally had the possibility of studying and writing. In very rare cases religious women were acknowledged to have a special gift of grace from God which gave them the authority to speak publicly in the church. For example, the learned German abbess, Hildegard of Bingen, in the twelfth century wrote about her mystical experiences; she also produced significant studies on the Bible, theology, and medicine, as well as poetry and music. She went on preaching tours and corresponded with the Pope and other church leaders. In fact she was a remarkable exception to the general rule that women were to keep silent in the church.¹ But the rule still held.

At the time of the Renaissance, in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, Christine de Pizan in France wrote a series of books protesting the disparaging treatment of women by male writers. She called into question the knowledge and authority of learned men who claimed women were inferior to men by their created nature; and to demonstrate the positive characteristics of women, she recounted the activities and virtues of significant women in the Bible, in classical antiquity, and in the history of the church down to her day. She showed her understanding of the way men's scorn for women undercut women's judgement about their own nature and led women to despise what is womanly.² Thus she initiated a literary debate about women's nature which was still being carried on by both men and women at the time of the Reformation. This debate concerned whether women should be educated and how, and whether their "weakness" was the result of biological nature or their upbringing. The question of the proper reading of biblical texts concerning women and women's public role in the church was raised in some of these writings, so the issue was on people's minds.³

Reformed women in the sixteenth century

There were women in cities associated with the development of the Reformed tradition who read the Bible differently than their female colleagues. They saw in the Bible not only the familiar passages teaching women's subordination but also passages teaching women's freedom in the church to use the gifts given by them by the Holy Spirit.

Katherine Zell (d. 1562) was such a woman in Strasbourg. When her husband, Matthew Zell, one of the reforming pastors of Strasbourg was excommunicated for marrying her, she published a letter to the bishop in defense of clerical marriage, declaring: "You remind me that the apostle Paul told women to be silent in church. I would remind you of the word of this same apostle that in Christ there is no longer male nor female [Gal. 3:28] and of the prophecy of Joel [2:28-9]: 'I will pour forth my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters will prophesy.' I do not pretend to be John the Baptist rebuking the Pharisees. I do not claim to be Nathan, upbraiding David. I aspire only to be Balaam's ass, castigating his master."⁴ In other words, she desired to be a prophetic voice.

Katherine published other tracts. One was for the consolation of wives whose husbands were in exile because of their faith, citing Isaiah 49:15, where God is spoken of as a mother who can not forget her nursing child. Another consolation tract was for a magistrate of the city who was quarantined with "leprosy." This tract was a meditation on the Lord's prayer, which included these thoughts: "Our Father, who art in heaven. he is called not Lord or judge, but Father. And since through his Son we are born again we may call him grandfather, too. he may be likened also to a mother who has known the pangs of birth and the joy of giving suck."⁵ There was also a collection of hymns edited by Katherine.

Katherine was not primarily a writer, however. She visited the prisoners and the sick and arranged care for floods of refugees. When she saw serious deficiencies in the way one of the city hospitals was being run, she sent the City Council a scathing set of criticisms with recommendations for reform. The Council complained, but it adopted her recommendations. She accompanied two of the ministers visiting troops assembled at the time of the Peasants' War; they pleaded for peaceful solutions. Finally, just before her death, she conducted a funeral service for an Anabaptist woman at 6 a.m. because the husband could not accept the conditions laid down by the pastors for conducting a funeral. Since she held no public office at all, she was often criticized for her abrasiveness and her "imperiousness" in involving herself in such activities. She seems to have felt the call of God to do so.⁶

Marie Dentière was a former nun and abbess who married a Protestant minister and went to Geneva with her husband and children during the period just before the Reformation when the attempt was being made to convert the inhabitants of the city to the evangelical faith. We know from the chronicle of a nun in Geneva that Marie went to the convent to preach to the nuns and to attempt to persuade them to convert to Protestantism and leave the convent. She wrote and published at least two books. One is the first Protestant history of the Geneva reformation, published in 1536,⁷ a small booklet describing how God was at work liberating the city from the tyranny of the Pope and of the Duke of Savoy. It is more a theology of history, an account of the victory of the Gospel, than a chronicle, though it follows the principal events. Her theology is very much in the tradition which came to be known as Reformed, marked by emphasis on the authority of the Scriptures and on God's work to save humanity because of God's grace alone, without any merit on the part of those saved. It is striking that she is very conscious of the women in biblical history, speaking of Abraham and Sarah, Elizabeth and Zechariah, and very much aware of violence against women in her own day.

Three years later, also in Geneva, she published another small book,⁸ addressed to Marguerite, the Queen of Navarre, a Renaissance woman who was also writing on topics concerning women. Marie's book contained among other things a "Defense of Women." In defense of women's right to interpret the Scriptures, she discussed the bold roles God gave to women whose stories are recorded in the Bible: for example, the mother of Moses who defied the law to protect her son; the Samaritan woman at the well who became a preacher after her encounter with Jesus; the women at the empty tomb who were instructed by Christ to go and preach. She concludes, "If God has given graces to some good women, revealing to them something holy and good through his Holy Scripture, should they, for the sake of the defamers of the truth, refrain from writing down, speaking, or declaring it to each other? Ah! It would be too impudent to hide the talent which God has given to us, who ought to have the grace to persevere to the end."⁹ Marie argues powerfully for one Gospel of the undivided Christ: "I ask, didn't Jesus die just as much for the poor illiterates and the idiots as for the shaven, tonsured and mitred lords? Did he only say, 'Go, preach my Gospel to the wise lords and grand doctors?' Did he not say, 'to all'? Do we have two Gospels, one for men and the other for women? One for the educated and the other for the multitude? Are we not all one in our Saviour? In whose name are we baptised, in that of Paul or of Apollo, in that of the Pope or of Luther? Is it not in the name of Christ?"¹⁰

This book, highly critical of some new pastors in Geneva and urging women's freedom to announce the Gospel as God calls them to do so, was confiscated by the city officials and never permitted to be distributed. Marie, like Katherine Zell, made her male colleagues uncomfortable because she did not fit their understanding of the proper role of women. Once the Reformation was established in Geneva, she no longer played any public role.¹¹

A Reformed woman who did not hold public office was Jeanne d'Albret (d. 1572), Queen of Navarre and daughter of Marguerite of Navarre. She became one of the influential leaders of the Huguenot movement in France. She invited Reformed ministers into her lands to preach, including Theodore Beza, who stayed at her court to preach for three months and continued afterwards to advise Jeanne. She publicly announced her adherence to Calvinism in 1560. A year later she declared that Calvinism and Roman Catholicism would stand on equal footing in her lands. When a papal legate wrote urging her to return to Rome, she replied: "... I am following the example of Josiah who destroyed the high places. I am not planting a new religion but restoring an old one...I have forced no one with death, imprisonment, or condemnation...I do not condone outrages committed in the name of religion and I would punish the offenders...With regard to the words, 'This is my body,' you should compare the twenty-second chapter of Luke. If I err I may be excused as a woman for my ignorance, but yours, as a cardinal, is shameful. I follow Beza, Calvin and others only insofar as they follow Scripture...You say our preachers are disturbers. That is just what Ahab said to Elijah. Read I Kings chapter 18...I pray...that you may be brought back to the true fold and the true shepherd and not to a hireling."¹² Jeanne's husband, Antoine de Bourbon, was also for a time active in the Huguenot movement, but was finally persuaded by political concerns to return to Roman Catholicism. As the wars of religion intensified, he even held Jeanne a prisoner in an effort to force her to give up Calvinism; but she steadfastly refused.

Jeanne had been present at the unsuccessful Colloquy of Poissy, called in hopes that Protestants and Roman Catholics would come to some agreement concerning religion. As the wars brought violence and persecution, she continued to work for peaceful coexistence. When Huguenot troops in their zeal went on an iconoclastic rampage in a Roman Catholic church, melting down ornaments, Jeanne gave the church her pledge to pay for the damage. Although she gradually established Calvinism in her lands, she allowed the Mass to continue and did not punish those who declined to accept Calvinism. Thus she also established for herself a reputation as one of the rare rulers of the sixteenth century who never put anyone to death on account of religion.

When the wars put the Huguenots in great danger of extinction, they gathered at La Rochelle to consolidate their forces in a city of refuge. Jeanne spent three important years there while the Reformed Church of France was being organized, signing all the decisions of the church's synod. While there she was an administrator for the city and a nurse for the wounded. She helped fortify the city and coped with 60,000 refugees. She confidently used her considerable gifts in public office, and she demonstrated strength to defy all human authorities whom she perceived to be leading her away from obedience to God.¹³

Though Huguenot women held secular public offices, church offices normally were closed to them. The office of the deacon was actually opened to women for a few years at the end of the sixteenth century in the Rhineland Synod of Wesel, however.¹⁴

The first Reformed ordinations of women to the ministry

In the United States, the first woman fully ordained to the ministry of the church was Antoinette L. Brown. She was ordained in the Congregational Church at South Butler, New York in 1853. A graduate of Oberlin College, she had taken graduate theological courses at Oberlin College but had not been permitted to take the degree. After her ordination she became pastor of a congregation for a short time. Other women pastors followed her in the Congregational churches.

The sermon at Antoinette Brown's historic ordination service was preached by the Rev. Luther Lee on the story of Pentecost in Acts 2, focusing on Peter's quotation from Joel 2:28: "... I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy." He emphasized that the women present at Pentecost also received the Holy Spirit, and he argued that the four prophesying daughters of Philip were not unusual in the New Testament community. Mr. Lee took a critical step, however, in claiming that these prophets are to be understood as ministers of the Gospel, justifying the ordination of women. "A prophet is not exclusively one who foretells, but who explains prophecies, and teaches; and to prophesy is to explain prophecies and to teach. In this sense every gospel minister is a prophet, and every prophet under the new dispensation is a gospel minister. Here then were four female gospel ministers, daughters of one man. When it is said, 'Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,' the meaning is, your sons and daughters shall become teachers, or gospel ministers."¹⁵ Mr. Lee saw ordination as recognition of God's call to ministry, and he believed God had called Antoinette Brown. "'We are not here to make a minister. It is not to confer on this our sister, a right to preach the gospel. If she has not that right already, we have no power to communicate it to her.' Lee argued that all they could do was testify to their belief that Antoinette Brown was 'one of the ministers of the New Covenant, authorized, qualified and called of God to preach the gospel of his son Jesus Christ.'"¹⁶

The first Presbyterian woman minister was Louisa Mariah Layman Woosley. From the age of twelve she felt called to serve God in the ministry but believed that was impossible. She married a farmer and had two children before she began to read the whole Bible carefully, noting every place where women were mentioned. Then she was "convinced of the fact that God being no respecter of persons, had not overlooked the women, but that he had a great work for them to do."¹⁷ After a struggle of the soul, first denying the call to the ministry, then affirming it, she was invited to preach in 1887 and began a long career as a successful evangelist. She presented herself as a candidate for the ordained ministry in 1887 and was ordained in 1889 by Nolin Presbytery of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. Almost immediately challenges to her ordination were made, but with the support of her home presbytery she managed to retain her status as a minister through difficult years. After 1911 her status seems not to have been further challenged. She served as Stated Clerk of Leitchfield Presbytery for twenty-five years, represented the presbytery at the General Assembly of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church three times, and was moderator of the Kentucky Synod in 1938. She preached thousands of sermons and brought many new members into the church. In her sermons she spoke of God as "tender as a mother," and she liked to use the image of God as a mother hen as a symbol of God's compassion.¹⁸

Not till after 1950 was it normal for Presbyterian women in the United States to be ordained as ministers. The two largest Presbyterian churches voted to permit ordination of women as ministers in 1956 and 1965. The former had already ordained women elders and deacons for some time; the latter began ordination to all three offices at the same time.

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