10.6092/issn.2611-2752/11643
Social Gospel is a product of the history of American Christianity and Methodist churches became part of it after the Civil War. Notwithstanding the predominant historiography of male historians writing about an apparently only-male movement, Social Gospel is tied to the path of female suffrage designed by American Methodist women between 1880 and 1920. The aim of this essay is to present a step in the research related to the role of Methodist women in the Social Gospel movement and to the fight for women's vote. The figure of Anna Howard Shaw is presented as a preliminary key study.
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Comrades in a Sacred Cause. Methodist Women, Social Gospel and the Suffrage Movement in the Early Twentieth Century
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https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/11643                                                             ISSN 2611-2752




 Comrades in a Sacred Cause. Methodist Women, Social Gospel
     and the Suffrage Movement in the Early Twentieth Century

                                               Francesca Cadeddu

                                            Published: November 10, 2020



                                                       Abstract

       Social Gospel is a distinct product of the history of American Christianity and Methodist churches
       became part of it after the Civil War. Notwithstanding the predominant historiography of male
       historians writing about an apparently only-male movement, Social Gospel is tied to the path of
       female suffrage particularly designed by American Methodist women between 1880 and 1920. The
       aim of this essay is to present a step in the research related to the specific role of Methodist women
       in the Social Gospel movement and to grasp how it affected the fight for women’s vote. The figure
       of Anna Howard Shaw is presented as a preliminary key study.
       Keywords: Social Gospel; Women Suffrage; Methodism; Anna Howard Shaw; Theology.




Francesca Cadeddu: Fondazione per le scienze religiose (Italy)
 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0214-1734
 cadedduf@gmail.com;  https://www.fscire.it/index.php/it/ricercatori/francesca-cadeddu/
Francesca Cadeddu is Senior Researcher at Fondazione per le scienze religiose, Bologna (Italy), where she works
on religious literacy in Europe and the history of Methodism in Italy and the United States. She serves as Secretary
General of the European Academy of Religion, is Associate Editor for Brill Research Perspectives series in Religion
and Politics and member of the Editorial Board of the journal USAbroad. She recently edited the book Religious
Literacy, Law and History: Perspectives on European Pluralist Societies (Routledge, 2018) and her contribution
John Courtney Murray for The Oxford Handbook of Reinhold Niebuhr (Robin W. Lovin and Joshua Mauldin
eds., Oxford University Press) is forthcoming.



Copyright © 2020 Francesca Cadeddu                                                                                     59
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons BY License.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Comrades in a Sacred Cause                                                                              USAbroad. Vol. 3 No. 1S (2020)




1 The Social Gospel
The Social Gospel movement is a distinct product of the history of American Christianity and of the
liberal trends which emerged within its theology in the 1830s, but it acquired a real interdenomina-
tional status only after the Civil War. It emerged at the historical crossroads where, on the one hand,
the white middle class was reacting with fervour to scientific progress and its potential social impli-
cations, while, on the other hand, Christian theological schools were searching for a more functional
vision of society and church relations, against the firm individualism of the early-nineteenth-century
Protestant conservativism.1 Its male leaders were not activists in its modern meaning, but preachers
and teachers whose voices were heard in churches, seminaries and divinity schools. They generally
did not define themselves as socialists, but almost all of them supported producer cooperatives and pub-
lic ownership of natural monopolies. Those who belonged to the left wing of the movement embraced
class struggle while those who were more radical particularly insisted on the issue of neo-abolitionism.
     According to Gary Dorrien, Social Gospel also had a racial connotation, as it “had two major his-
toric wellsprings: one social gospel came out of historic white Protestant churches and was primarily
about economic domination and ethical corruption; the other came out of black Protestant churches
and was primarily about forging a new abolitionism.”2 While the white Social Gospel was an attempt
of the churches (initially Unitarian, then after the Civil War also Congregationalist and Episcopalian
churches, extending to Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian churches only later in the century)3 to
give an answer to the challenges and confrontations imposed by the trade unions regarding the condi-
tions of the poor and the working class, the black Social Gospel is rooted in the Methodist, Baptist and
Episcopalian churches of the 1880s, as an attempt to fight back the oppression, exclusion and racist
hatred that emerged in the post-Reconstruction era.
     The many souls of the movement, thus, do not express a shared doctrine, but a common endeav-
our in building a just society, focussed on the individual as a tool of salvation. As a result, the success
story of the Social Gospel and its relatively long heritage is not just the reforms it proposed — which
could be considered part of the wider Christian social movement that arose on the two sides of the
Atlantic — but its modern, liberal theology of social salvation, rooted in ideas such as those of “so-
cial justice” and “social structure.” Wherever there was a social structure, a social salvation could pair
individual salvation. Thus, society became an active subject of redemption4 and it became the first
ecumenical soil on which American denominations could identify themselves as a whole.5
     In my recent essay “The Woman’s Cause is Man’s: Social Gospel, metodismo e lotta per il suffragio femminile
negli Stati Uniti,”6 I presented a literature study which led me to understand how, notwithstanding the
predominant historiography of male historians writing about an apparently only-male movement,
the social action movement which in 1886 takes the name Social Gospel is inextricably tied to the path
of female suffrage particularly designed by Methodist women in the United Sates between 1880 and
1920. The more I locate the movement in the history of Methodist women, the more I find it tied to
their own spiritual, theological and ecclesiastical experience. The aim of this article is to present a step
in the research related to the specific role of Methodist women in the Social Gospel movement and to

1.   Martin E. Marty, Modern American Religion, vol. 1, The Irony of It All. 1893–1919. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
     1986, 286 ff.

2.   Gary Dorrien, “Practical Cooperation: The Movement of Social Gospel,” in A History of the Desire for Christian Unity. Ecu-
     menism in the Churches (19th-21st Century), dir. Alberto Melloni, vol.1, Leiden: Brill, 2021.

3.   Charles Howard Hopkins, The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865–1915. New Haven: Yale University
     Press, 1967, 18.

4.   See Gary Dorrien, New abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015; Gary
     Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology. Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805–1900. Lousville: Westminster John
     Knox Press, 2001, 311-314.

5.   In May 1908, the Methodist Episcopal Church General Conference approved its Social Creed, which would become the
     basis for the Social Creed of the Federal Council of Churches, signed seven months later in Philadelphia. See Dorrien,
     “Practical cooperation.”

6.   **Francesca Cadeddu, “The Woman Cause is Man’s’: Social Gospel, metodismo e lotta per il suffragio femminile negli Stati
     Uniti.” In I metodisti nello spazio pubblico. Diritti e giustizia sociale fra Europa, Asia e America, ed. Maria Fallica, Roma: Carocci,
     2019, 98-115.



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Comrades in a Sacred Cause                                                                           USAbroad. Vol. 3 No. 1S (2020)




grasp how it affected the fight for women’s vote. As a preliminary case study, I will present the figure
of Anna Howard Shaw — a Methodist minister and the President of the National American Woman
Suffrage Association (NAWSA) — and the reasons for her fight for women’s suffrage through the lens
of the white, “female” Social Gospel.



2 History Writing about the Women of the Movement
Female social gospelers emerged from the margins of historiography, as all women did, only in the
1970s, when women’s studies and social history interlaced their significance, methodology and sources
also on the history of modern American religion and theology. As Kathryn Kish Sklar already pointed
out in 1980,7 this does not mean that the history writing about American women and religion did not
have a past. Indeed, it had a pre-history (1880-1960), still dominated by a weak conceptual frame-
work; followed by a second stage (1960s) of documented historical evidence, matched by a theoretical
framework and female and feminist perspectives on the past “to probe the history of women’s rights
and interests.”8 Then the third stage, which is characterised by the move from an approach to history
of women religious as a history of oppression to a history of empowerment through religious beliefs.
And finally, the fourth stage (1970s), the author’s own contemporary stage, in which historical schol-
arship was “using methods ranging from oral history to computers to take a closer look at the effects
of class, community, ethnicity, and race upon women’s experiences in religion and society.”9 Once
again, their role in history (and its account) meaningfully matched the role they played and aimed at
playing within the faith communities they belonged to.
     It is precisely during Kish Sklar’s “fourth stage” that the history of Methodist Women earns
renewed attention and it is accompanied by an intellectual investment from the United Methodist
Church10 in its own history, with a project on women’s history supported by its General Commission
on Archives and History. The main outcome of the endeavour, along with a widely participated
conference, is the volume Women in New Worlds. Historical Perspectives on the Wesleyan Tradition, whose
great merit is the decoding of the depths and variety of the American Methodist women’s spiritual
search and its inextricable connection to the demand for new roles for women in church and society.
     From the 1980s, scholarly research on the role of women in the movement has been decreasing
— if not disappearing — along the same lines of the general inquiry on the Social Gospel itself.11
It is, therefore, difficult to say whether the role of activists, which the writers of Women in New Worlds
assigned to the women they studied (in opposition with the male founders of the movement that male
historiography had presented and will present up until Dorrien — thinkers, theologians, preachers),
was more of a projection of their roles than a real fact. In any case, the sources that they present
make it evident that female social gospelers transformed their social critique into organizations and
associations, and into an active and lively diaconate, otherwise called social action.12 Was this, as


7.    Kathryn Kish Sklar, “The Last Fifteen Years,” in Women in New Worlds. Historical Perspectives on the Wesleyan Tradition, eds. Hi-
      lah F. Thomas and Rosemary Skinner Keller. Abingdon, Nashville: General Commission on Archives and History of the
      United Methodist Church, 1981, 48-65.

8.    Kish Sklar, “The Last Fifteen Years,” 52.

9.    Kish Sklar, “The Last Fifteen Years,” 56. It is at this stage that the history of non-Protestant communities emerges, as a result
      of both the end of their cultural ghettoization and the opening of archives and repositories. See Ann Braude, “A Religious
      Feminist—Who Can Find Her? Historiographical Challenges from the National Organization for Women,” The Journal of
      Religion, 4 (2004): 555-72.

10. UMC is the largest American Methodist denomination, formed in 1968 with the union of the Evangelical United Brethren
    Church and The Methodist Church.

11.   Christopher H. Evans seems to be among the very few scholars – if not the only one – who keeps researching the So-
      cial Gospel and its diverse meanings all through the twentieth century and in the two decades of the twenty-first. See
      Christopher Hodge Evans, The Social Gospel in American Religion. A History. New York: New York University Press, 2017;
      The Social Gospel Today, ed. Christopher Hodge Evans, Louisville and London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001; Christo-
      pher Hodge Evans, “From Militant Methodism to Secular Christianity: The Social Gospel in American Methodist Historical
      Narratives,” Methodist History, 3 (2000): 147-159.

12. See Wendy Deichmann Edwards and Carolyn De Swarte Gifford, ”Introduction: Restoring Women and Reclaiming Gender in



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/11643                                                                                        61
Comrades in a Sacred Cause                                                                        USAbroad. Vol. 3 No. 1S (2020)




Norma Taylor Mitchell argued,13 the victory of social feminism over radical feminism in the Methodist
tradition?



3 Female Social Gospelers
The women who took part in the movement mostly carried out the roles of missionaries, family
preachers and teachers, and their role in the institutional and theological life of denominations was
kept under strict control at least until the 1880s, when some of them were allowed to earn University
degrees in Theology and receive ordination.14 Raffaella Baritono precisely identifies, in the claim of
the right to speak in church, to be preachers and not just to preach, the claim to be recognised as
individuals. For middle-class Christian American women in the first half of the nineteenth century,
such a claim meant to be recognized as agents of their own destiny, moral subjects capable of being
responsible for their own community and, eventually, citizens of the United States.15
    The Declaration of Sentiments expressed their claim for such a right in 1848, but the demand grew
stronger as their role in Church missions acquired also a spiritual dimension, and the Deaconess move-
ment decisively penetrated American Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopalian and Evangelical churches,16
developing a mission to the poor which questioned the economic system exploiting them. In fact, ac-
cording to Mary Agnes Dougherty, who studied the lives of 509 women who became deaconesses in
the late 1880s and 1890s, “The existence of the Methodist deaconess movement in 1888 — a movement
aimed at serving humanity’s physical needs — indicates that the Social Gospel was formulated much
earlier than scholars have claimed and that churchwomen played a central role in its evolution.”17
    Throughout the century, while pursuing domestic roles in the public sphere through their par-
ticipation in Christian reforming society activities and organizations, such as the Young Women’s
Christian Association and Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, women no longer only belonged
to the private sphere, but acquired new languages of self-definition as well, and embraced the fight
for their rights in the civil as well as in the churches’ domain.18 Nonetheless, it is Baritono again who,
while seeing the suffragist movement aroused together with this new awareness, warns us about a turn,
which she places in the second half of the same century, towards a more “secularised” approach of the
suffrage movement, where such a connection would get lost.19 And indeed, such a secularising trend
was identified also by Dougherty, who showed how the professionalisation of social work, taking place
at the turn of the twentieth century, “bred secularization”20 and became a dilemma, if not a threat, for
the Methodist deaconess movement at its peak (more than a thousand consecrated women in 1910).
To them, professional training brought social work out of the realm of church activities, but at the

      Social Gospel Studies,” in Gender and the Social Gospel, eds. Wendy Deichmann Edwards and Carolyn De Swarte Gifford, Urbana
      and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003, 1-17.

13. Norma Taylor Mitchell, “From Social to Radical Feminism: A Survey of Emerging Diversity in Methodist Women’s Orga-
    nizations, 1869-1974,” Methodist History, 3 (1975): 21-44.

14. For a reconstruction of the role of women as clergy and laity in the Methodist tradition, see William T. Noll, “Women as
    Clergy and Laity in the 19th Century Methodist Protestant Church,” Methodist History, 2 (1977): 107-121.

15. Raffaella Baritono, “The Bible is the great Charter of human rights. Emancipazioniste e suffragiste americane nell’Ottocento,”
    in Donne cristiane e sacerdozio. Dalle origini all’età contemporanea, ed. Dinora Corsi, Roma: Viella, 2004, 243-260, 245.

16. Margit Herfarth, “The European Roots of the American Methodist Deaconess Movement,” in Women Pioneers in Continental
    European Methodism, 1869–1939, eds. Paul W. Chilcote and Ulrike Schuler, London: Routledge, 2019, 65-82.

17.   Mary Agnes Dougherty, “The Methodist Deaconess: A Case of Religious Feminism,” Methodist History, 2 (1983): 90-98. See
      also Mary Agnes Dougherty, ”The Methodist Deaconess, 1885-1918: A Study in Religious Feminism,” (PhD. dissertation, Uni-
      versity of California-Davis, 1979); Carolyn De Swarte Gifford, “Sisterhoods of Service and Reform: Organized Methodist
      Women in the Late Nineteenth Century: An Essay on the State of the Research,” Methodist History, 1 (October 1985): 15-30.

18. See Barbara Hargrove, Jean Miller Schmidt, and Sheila Greeve Davaney, “Religion and the Changing Role of Women,” The
    Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 480 (1985): 117-31. See also Rosemary Skinner Keller, “Creating
    a Sphere for Women in the Church: How Consequential an Accommodation?,” Methodist History, 2 (1980): 83-94, whose
    case study is the empowering role of the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church.

19. Baritono, The Bible, 245.

20. Dougherty, The Methodist Deaconess, 97.



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Comrades in a Sacred Cause                                                                    USAbroad. Vol. 3 No. 1S (2020)




same time it offered them a chance to distinguish their role from the many volunteers in the church
and prepare them to hold office in the church.
    Did the Social Gospel become, for the Methodist women of the early twentieth century, only a
means to carry out other reforms such as prohibition or the improvement of municipal government?
Was the motivation of Methodist suffragists driven by a secularised self-representation, which had
nothing in common with their widespread role of social gospelers? Starting with their biographies,
which are now supported by archival repositories made available to researchers (some of them also on-
line),21 it is possible for historians to discover the way theology informed historical praxis and events,
including social reform, but not the fight for suffrage which characterized those years.22



4     Anna Howard Shaw
In the first approach to the study of the life and thoughts of these women, Anna Howard Shaw (1847-
1919) offers a multiplicity of insights. The choice to focus on Shaw is motivated by her role of leader-
ship in the Methodist church, as well as in the suffrage movement, enabling that a key line be drawn to
unite the dynamics of women’s ordination, social action and the extension of suffrage. More broadly,
as Mary Pellauer argued, she is “particularly interesting as a case study of the synthesis of feminism (a
word she knew and defended), the republican faith and mainstream American Christianity.”23 Even if
analysing her role makes the author run the risk of highlighting the profile of a woman who fits in with
the main narrative and doesn’t challenge its theoretical assumptions, this is meant to just highlight a
step of a research which requires further literature and archival study and exploration of biographies,
such as, among others, that of Frances Elizabeth Willard (1839–1898), who was “converted” to woman’s
suffrage, or Jessie Daniel Ames (1883–1972), who also fought for racial justice, or Caroline Merrick, who
was Southern Methodist and the President of the state suffrage association in Louisiana.
    Anna Howard Shaw was a white, English-born woman who grew up in the frontier of Michigan
in a modest family with a Unitarian background. She became a self-taught teacher in the frontier
school at the age of fifteen years old. Eight years later, she gave her first sermon at the request of
Dr. Peck, “a man of progressive ideas,”24 a presiding elder of her Methodist district who supported
the ordination of women. Thirty-six sermons later, in the following spring, she was presented at
the Annual Methodist Conference of her district of Grand Rapids as a candidate for the licence of
preaching, and the enthusiasm of the delegates assured her this role. In 1873, without even completing
the high school program, she entered Albion College and she soon emerged as one of most highly
skilled women orators, both on campus (as a licensed preacher she had no tuition fees to pay) and in
the temperance circles (not yet organized in that area). The recognition she received for her preaching
activity, the ambition she held strong in earning a theology degree and the economic independence
from her family — along with “some inheritance from [her] visionary father”25 — made her realise
that she had to take her career more seriously and take the step of entering Boston Theological School.
    She joined the school on February 1876, at a time when Anna Oliver, another Methodist woman,
would have soon become the first American woman to earn a degree in theology from that same
school. Being the only woman in a class of forty-three students did not discouraged her, nor did the
fact that, differently from her male fellow-licensed preachers, she had to pay for board and accom-
modation and, therefore, suffered “cold, hunger and loneliness,”26 which was relieved only partially
by the seventy-eight dollar check she was entrusted with, from a benefactor of the Women’s Foreign

21. Charles Yrigoyen Jr., “New Finding Aid: A Guide to Materials on Women in The United Methodist Church Archives,”
    Methodist History, 4 (1996): 263-264.

22. For a recent literature overview on the history of women and Social Gospel see Susan Hill Lindley, “You Have Stept Out of
    Your Place”: A History of Women and Religion in America. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996, 135-147.

23. Mary D. Pellauer, Toward a Tradition of Feminist Theology. The Religious Social Thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B.
    Anthony, and Anna Howard Shaw. New York: Carlson Publishing, 1991, 220.

24. Anna Howard Shaw, The Story of a Pioneer. New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1915, 58.

25. Ibid. 82.

26. Ibid. 84.



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Comrades in a Sacred Cause                                                                    USAbroad. Vol. 3 No. 1S (2020)




Missionary Society. More than anything else, it was the self-humiliation to put her motivation at stake
and made her look for a sign to understand if “the Lord’s work for [her] layed outside the ministry.”27
In her autobiography, Shaw ascribes the turning point of her theological career, not to the ministry
who asked her to work for a revival week in a local church (for which she was not paid), but to the
woman she met outside that church, whose grandson, after many years of a wild life, was converted
that night while listening to her preach. It is to the conversion of a young, poor boy that she saw the
Lord’s will and accepted her fate.
     From that event on, she graduated, started preaching and left for a European tour; she later re-
turned to Massachusetts to serve at the first church of her own, in Cape Cod.
     I was in the ministry, and I was greatly handicapped by the fact that, although I was a licensed
preacher and a graduate of the Boston Theological School, I could not, until I had been regularly
ordained, meet all the functions in my office. I could perform the marriage service, but I could not
baptize. I could bury the dead, but I could not take members into my church. That had to be done by
the presiding elder or by some other minister.28
     Above all the inequalities she suffered as a woman, she could not stand the fact that she was not
able to administer the sacraments. For this reason, she formally applied for ordination at the New
England Spring Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, held in Boston in 1880. Ironically,
Anna Oliver applied as well. Neither of them was successful. However, Shaw tried again on the 12th
of October of 1880, when the Conference of the Methodist Protestant Church (to which she became a
member overnight) finally approved her ordination (and paid her a third of the salary that was received
by her young, male, fellow-preachers).
     The happy-ending of this story and the success with which Shaw was eventually destined should
not distract us from the (un)surprisingly way in which the memories from the first thirty-three years
of her life recall the inequalities described by the Declaration of Sentiments. Here, specifically in those
lines regarding remuneration, teaching of theology, access to college and Apostolic authority, her in-
volvement in the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association (which took place only after she earned
a diploma as physician at the Boston Medical School in 1885) seems consequential. The Association
was led by Lucy Stone, while Henry Backwell was associated with her. In its activities, Shaw finally
felt that her call “as a minister of soul and body” to the women “must begin at the very foundation of
the social structure. Laws for them must be enforced and some of those laws could only be made and
enforced by women.”29
     This reaction to injustice inspired her “theology of suffrage,” and Susan Anthony (President of
NAWSA) would later make her part of the “Great Cause.” It seems that what historians now call the
“secularising trend” was actually having an effect on the movement, which at that time was folding on
the language of equality and rights. So Anthony saw in Shaw the chance to gain back the reputation
of religious orthodoxy which she was not entitled to reclaim.30 Finally, Shaw guided the NAWSA
from 1904 to 1915, the period which is often considered as the most difficult of the movement, when
fragmentation over tactics and the issue of segregation warmed its souls.31
     Beverly Zink-Sawyer, in her book, From Preacher to Suffragists, reads Shaw’s theology of suffrage
through the lens of Aileen Kraditor’s categories of argument: the “argument from justice” — which
characterised the early years of the movement — and the “argument from expediency,” based on “the
belief that women [are] morally superior to men and could — and should — exert that influence polit-
ically, and the belief that God had created women morally superior and intended for them to use their




27. Ibid. 85.

28. Ibid. 122.

29. Ibid. 140-141. Emphasis is added.

30. Pellauer, Toward a Tradition, 224.

31. Trisha Franzen’s Anna Howard Shaw. The Work of Woman Suffrage is a biographical work aiming at dismantling the bias shared
    by many historians which attributes to Shaw’s presidency a phase of chaos and ineffectiveness in the life of the NAWSA.
    Unfortunately, the author seems to miss an in-depth analysis the role of theology in Shaw’s thought. Trisha Franzen, Anna
    Howard Shaw. The Work of Woman Suffrage. Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2014.



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/11643                                                                              64
Comrades in a Sacred Cause                                                                      USAbroad. Vol. 3 No. 1S (2020)




gifts in service to humanity.”32 Therefore, according to Zink-Sawyer, since the delivery of her famous
speech “The Heavenly Vision” (1888), Shaw basically embraced an extension of the nineteenth-century
ideology of True Womanhood, asking women to apply their unique gifts for the moral improvement
of the United States.
    Nonetheless, any analysis of Shaw’s speeches which extends beyond the turn of the century to
include the years of her NAWSA presidency would not just show an evolution in her thought, but also
a deeper interconnectedness among the (theological) reasons of suffrage and social reform. Among
others, her presidential addresses are a precious source from which is possible to trace a roadmap
of her thought: the recognition of the role of women in society, women’s economic independence,
their status of victims of the materialism and corruption of corporate power, the rule of people under
God, and the divinity of the Gospel of democracy.33 Finally, the work conducted by Mary Pellauer
and presented in Toward a Tradition of Feminist Theology, paves the way for a placement of Shaw’s ideas
into the American political theory of the first decade of the twentieth century — recalling that old
pattern of a feminist “argument from justice” as a tool for progress and the uplifting of society — as
well as in the framework of a Gospel-inspired reform of society, otherwise called Social Gospel.



5     Conclusions
The essay presented here is the preliminary result of research regarding a specific chapter of the his-
tory of a Christian tradition in the United States, Methodism, in the decades when it inspired, arguably
more than in other periods, a full engagement with the social and political transformations of the
country. This engagement also took the shape of women’s fight for suffrage and the coinage of a
(Methodist) theology which could respond to the quest for equality by challenging social, economic
and cultural equilibriums within and outside the church. If it is true that the political culture of the
United States was changing, and the moral and religious language started to be considered as a part of
the past — replaced by the neutral and efficientist language of social sciences34 — it is also true that
in the Social Gospel these two apparently detached worlds found common ground, inspiring action,
and women’s activism.
    The project that guides this research will develop towards a more specific analysis of Methodist
history, theology and thought in the first two decades of the twentieth century, while engaging with the
more secular political thought of those years to grasp the meaning of the social reform at the backbone
of Social Gospel. The aim is not to define the “Methodist exception,” but to show how Methodist social
action and the ministry of diaconate were particularly suitable for offering answers, challenging the
economic and social structures responsible for inequalities. Finally, it will insist on the life and work
of the Methodist women in the suffrage movement, who discovered ways to conciliate theology and
political action, and found the words, “For the cause that lacks assistance Gainst the wrong that needs
resistance, For the future in the distance, And a woman’s right to do.”35




32. Beverly Zink-Sawyer, From Preachers to Suffragists: Woman’s Rights and Religious Conviction in the Lives of Three Nineteenth-
    century American Clergywomen. Lousville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003, 179.

33. Anna Howard Shaw Papers are held in the Mary Earhart Dillon Collection, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Har-
    vard University, Cambridge, Mass. The collection is accessible from https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/8/
    resources/8041/collection_organization.

34. Baritono, The Bible, 258.

35. Frances E. Willard, Address of Frances E. Willard, president of the Woman’s National Council of the United States founded
    in 1888, at its first triennial meeting, Albaugh’s Opera House, Washington, D.C., February 22-25, 1891. [Washington, D.C.:
    Rufus H. Darby, Printer, 1891], 2, https://www.loc.gov/item/ca00003105/. The text quotes, with minor mistakes, the hymn
    “I live far those who love me,” later entitled “What I live for” and written by George Linnaeus Banks (1821-1881), English
    Methodist writer and member of the Manchester Sun Inn Group of labouring-class poets. See George Linnæus Banks,
    “Faith: Hope: Love: Service. What I Live For,” in The World’s Best Poetry, eds. Bliss Carman, et al., Philadelphia: John D.
    Morris & Co., 1904.



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Comrades in a Sacred Cause                                                           USAbroad. Vol. 3 No. 1S (2020)




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Comrades in a Sacred Cause                                                    USAbroad. Vol. 3 No. 1S (2020)




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