A History of the Episcopal Church (Third Revised Edition). Robert W. Prichard

Roles for Women

      The suppression of monastic orders during the Reformation eliminated the major official church roles played by women in the late medieval church. With the notable exception of female monarchs, women had little influence over the governance or liturgical leadership of the Church of England. They could serve neither as clergy nor as members of the vestry. There were, however, a variety of indirect ways in which women influenced the shape of colonial religious life.

Women often served as sextons of colonial parishes. Grace Soward was, for example, the sexton (the person responsible for the care of church property) of the upper church in Stratton Major Parish (King and Queen County, Virginia) from 1730 or earlier until 1763. She was followed as sexton by an Ann Soward, suggesting that in some cases the position was passed down in families.⁶⁶ Thomas Soward, who was probably Grace’s husband, appeared in the vestry minutes as a processioner (i.e. one who walks the bounds between properties in order to avoid disputes among landowners) and pew holder, which would seem to indicate that the family was trusted and for some periods of time at least moderately prosperous.⁶⁷ The vestry at Stratton Major understood the washing of the minister’s surplice to be a separate responsibility but at times gave that responsibility to the Grace Soward as well.⁶⁸

Women played a role in the Christian education and evangelism of children and servants. They taught in schools sponsored by Dr. Bray’s Associates. Enslaved people with female owners were roughly 50 percent more likely to be baptized than those with male owners, another indication of women’s interest in Christian education.⁶⁹

Women played decisive roles in translating the official feasts and fasts of the church year into household practice. Upper-class women also subverted church teaching by transferring baptisms and weddings from the church to the home—a space over which they had greater control.⁷⁰ Classic Church of England works on the ministerial life, such as George Herbert’s Country Parson (1652), stressed the need for clergy to have hospitable, godly households that could serve as models of Christian family life, something not easily accomplished without the active cooperation of a spouse.⁷¹ Sarah Harrison’s refusal, on three askings in her marriage service, to say that she would obey her husband (Commissary James Blair) may be an indication that clergy spouses did not understand their role in shaping a Christian household to be a subordinate one.⁷²

      Women and men contributed to the growth of the Church of England in the American colonies in the first half of the eighteenth century in both numbers and influence. The pace of growth would not continue uninterrupted throughout the century, however. Two important events—the Great Awakening and the American Revolution—would soon leave lasting marks on the denomination.

       NOTES

1. In Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford, 1976), Henry F. May distinguished four overlapping periods in the Enlightenment: the Moderate Enlightenment (1699–1787); the Skeptical Enlightenment (1750–89), the Revolutionary Enlightenment (1776– 1800), and the Didactic Enlightenment (1800–15). More recently, historian Jonathan I. Israel offered an overlapping but slightly different set of categories in his Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001). He combined elements from May’s second and third categories, resulting in a tri-part scheme of moderate, radical, and the counter-Enlightenment. The present chapter focuses on the two historians’ first periods, a time in which leading intellectuals believed the fruits of new scientific discovery were compatible with revealed religion. While the three subsequent chapters do not pick up May’s or Israel’s remaining labels, they deal with issues closely related to them.: Chapter 3 discusses enlightened skepticism as a backdrop to the Great Awakening. Chapter 4 deals with religion in the era of the American Revolution. Chapter 5 uses the term rational orthodoxy to refer to May’s Didactic Enlightenment and Israel’s counter-Enlightenment.

2. Thomas Sprat, quoted in Margaret Purver and E.J. Bowen, The Beginnings of the Royal Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 2.

3. Purver and Bowen, Beginnings of the Royal Society, 2.

4. James R. Jacob, Henry Stubbe: Radical Protestantism and Early Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 3–4. Jacob credits Stubbe with being “the first to point out the character of this alliance between the latitudinarian churchmen and the Royal Society.”

5. Bob Tennant, “John Tillotson and the Voice of Anglicanism,” Religion in the Age of Reason: A Transatlantic Study of the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Kathryn Duncan (New York: AMS Press, 2009), 104.

6. The debate was a logical offshoot of the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone. Protestants agreed that God forgave sinners because of the righteousness of Jesus Christ, rather than because of any righteousness of the sinner’s own. Seventeenth-century Christians went on to ask by what criteria God chose to apply Christ’s righteousness to some and not others. Those of the Calvinist party—a not entirely accurate label since predestination did not play the prominent role in the writing of Genevan Reformer John Calvin that it would in early seventeenth century—argued that no human action could influence God’s choice. Arminians, drawing their name from Dutch Reformed theologian Jacobus Arminius, believed, in contrast, that God took human response into account in selecting recipients of grace. The Calvinist party predominated in the Congregationalist, Presbyterian, and Reformed churches. Both parties were represented in the Church of England.

7. William Fife Troutman, Jr., “Respecting the Establishment of Religion in Colonial America” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1959), 58–62; S. D. McConnell, History of the American Episcopal Church from the Planting of the Colonies to the End of the Civil War, 3d ed. (New York: Thomas Whittaker, 1891), 64–65.

8. Robert Sullivan, “The Transformation of Anglican Political Theology, ca. 1716–1760” (Lecture delivered at the Folger Institute, Washington, D.C., 26 September 1986).

9. Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1982), 120–21. Isaac notes that the religion of colonial Virginia reinforced the social order.

10. Annates (from the Latin for year) were a year’s income from certain church positions that from the 13th century on were expected to be paid to the pope as a thank offering by those nominated to those positions. Henry VIII claimed the income for the English crown in his nationalization of the church in the 1530s.

11. For a discussion of