Reviews in American History

In 1831, Freewill Baptist minister David Marks published a memoir in which he recounted, among other things, meeting a number of popular female preachers. When a second edition of his autobiography was published posthumously in 1846, however, many of his earlier references to female preachers were omitted. Expurgated were such seemingly innocuous comments as a reference to Dolly Quinby as a “labourer in the gospel” (p. 296). In Strangers and Pilgrims, Catherine Brekus sets herself the task of discovering what happened in the 1830s to make the mere mention of female preachers so disturbing, and to restore the pioneering women who publicly preached between 1740 and 1845 to their rightful place at the center of early American history.

As an example of religious history, Strangers and Pilgrims is truly outstanding. Brekus is almost without exception sympathetic to the 123 preaching women at the heart of the book. This approach allows Brekus to analyze preaching women within the context of their time, rather than judging them by today’s standards. Furthermore, Brekus refuses to reduce religious history to a reflection of other phenomena. For Brekus, religion must be examined both in light of broader social, cultural, and intellectual developments, and in terms of changes internal to denominations and theology. In Strangers and Pilgrims, religion is always at least partly an independent variable (pp. 16–17). Brekus’s attention to society and denomination leads to her most important addition to the literature on early American religion: a convincing position between the existing poles of interpretation about whether the Second Great Awakening was democratizing.

Brekus begins her book forcefully, pointing out that female preachers have, for the most part, been lost to history because they proved too radical for later evangelicals to memorialize and too conservative for feminists to remember. Brekus seeks to rediscover these women and tell their stories. Indeed, Brekus [End Page 382] declares that she prizes “the storytelling dimension of history” (p. 17). Readers soon learn that this is not an empty claim; at points Strangers and Pilgrims has the narrative drive and excitement of a good historical novel. Brekus promises to tell the tale of the rise and fall of female preaching in early America, and her narrative structure keeps the reader’s interest throughout.

Brekus’s chronology starts in 1740 with the Great Awakening in New England. During this largest colonial religious revival, women (along with African Americans and lower-class men) found unprecedented opportunities to exhort. Though criticized by Old Light opponents of the revival, laypeople were so excited by the Awakening’s religious passions that they refused to let such obstacles prevent them from preaching. Brekus thus aligns herself with historians who focus on the Awakening’s radical aspects. ¹ According to Brekus, the revivals had the “revolutionary effect” of breaking down restrictions on lay religious speech (p. 44). This portrayal is, arguably, overdrawn. Laypeople often spoke their minds during disputes with their ministers before the Awakening. Nonetheless, Brekus’s central contention holds: during the revival, more women publicly preached (as opposed to exhorting in private) than ever before.

When the revivals spread into Virginia in the 1760s and 1770s, new Separate Baptist churches allowed women to speak publicly, contesting the dominant Anglican practice. Going beyond what New Lights allowed in New England, early Virginia Baptists created independent leadership positions for women. Modeling themselves after the early apostolic church, women were appointed eldresses and deaconesses. This is one of the few moments in the book, however, when the South proved more radical than the North. Because the South’s patriarchal culture was especially hostile to female preaching, the rest of Strangers and Pilgrims is centered in the northeast and the northwestern frontier.

When Brekus turns to the American Revolution and its impact on female preaching, her focus is on rapid change, as she follows Gordon Wood in declaring the Revolution “radical” (p. 70). ² “Seemingly overnight,” Brekus argues, America became...