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Suffering and Salvation in Eighteenth-Century Methodism

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Suffering and Salvation in Eighteenth-Century Methodism 13 Mack 11/8/05 9:26 am Page 157 SUFFERING AND SALVATION 157 Does gender matter? Suffering and salvation in eighteenth-century Methodism PHYLLIS MACK In the first essay in this volume, David Hempton describes Methodism as a women’s movement: that is, a movement in which women have constituted half — and sometimes more than half — of the total membership. For most of the last two centuries, the response of historians to this well-known fact of Methodist history has been to ignore it. Scholars writing from within the Methodist tradition haven’t seen much to celebrate in Wesley’s predilection for female companions and acolytes, while secular historians have viewed women’s emotionalism as a form of hysteria arising from sexual and social frustration, not authentic religious experience.1 Feminist scholars have been equally uninspired by the history of early Methodist women. If feminists can be said to share a common goal, it is to give women more agency, and neither the emotional behaviour of the revival meeting nor the discipline and sobriety of Methodist daily routines have appeared to hold much promise as examples of women’s self-assertion or creative leadership.2 Happily, historians of the past two decades have produced enough published work to demonstrate not only the numerical importance of women in early Methodism but also their prominence as preachers, exhorters, and pillars of the spiritual communities that sustained the movement during its formative 1 For example, a recent, highly influential work defines Methodism as being ‘about sex’ and views Methodist women’s spirituality as fuelled as by their infatuation with John Wesley, who encouraged their ‘crushes’ by his extensive letter-writing and gentlemanly demeanour, enhanced by meticulous attention to his clothing and hair: Henry Abelove, The evangelist of desire: John Wesley and the Methodists (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1990). Unless otherwise stated, all manuscript sources used in this essay are from the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, Deansgate. 2 Phyllis Mack, ‘Religion, feminism, and the problem of agency: reflections on eighteenth-century Quakerism’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 29 (2003), 149–77. 157 13 Mack 11/8/05 9:26 am Page 158 158 BULLETIN JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY years.3 Mary Bosanquet Fletcher, Sarah Crosby, and Hester Roe Rogers are familiar names, or should be familiar names, to any serious student of Wesley’s spiritual revival. The question I want to raise here, then, is not, ‘were women important’, but ‘was gender itself important?’ The answer to this question is not at all self-evident. Christian worship is a mode of experience in which gender differences are ideally effaced, since all souls are believed to be equal (and are referred to as feminine) in their relationship to God. It is also an experience in which gender may be perceived as fluid. Thus the seventeenth-century Puritan Increase Mather described ministers as breasts through whom the congregation imbibes the milk of the Word, while the early Christian martyr Perpetua imagined herself as a bearded man confronting the wild beasts in the arena.4 In short, while it is obvious that gender is important institutionally, in the way power and authority are distributed in a religious movement, it is less obvious that gender is important religiously: that the acts of contemplating Jesus on the cross or singing a hymn were experienced differently by women and by men. Historians, literary critics, and anthropologists studying gender have raised several questions that might profitably be asked by the student of early Methodism: What was the relationship between gendered religious symbolism and the self-perception of actual men and women? How did women’s and men’s vocations and activities intersect and influence each other? Did Methodist women share a collective consciousness of themselves as women? Most importantly, how does our picture of Methodism as a whole change when we take our stand with women: that is, when we stop measuring women’s achievements by male standards and attempt to share, however imperfectly, their own perspective as worshippers, thinkers, and sufferers? In this essay, I want to examine one facet of the early Methodists’ spirituality, their understanding of the body and the meaning of pain, and the relationship between their views of health and illness and the images of a wounded Christ that abound in Methodist hymns. Obviously, the crucified Christ was a central 3 Earl Kent Brown, Women of Mr Wesley’s Methodism (New York and Toronto:The Edwin Mellen Press, 1983); Paul Chilcote, John Wesley and the women preachers of early Methodism (Metuchen, NJ and London: The American Theological Library Association and the Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1991); Susanna Wesley: the complete writings, ed. Charles Wallace Jr (Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997);Vicki Tolar Burton, ‘John Wesley and the liberty to speak: the rhetorical and literacy practices of early Methodism’, College Composition and Communication 53 (2001), 65–90; Gareth Lloyd, ‘Sarah Perrin (1721–1787) — early Methodist exhorter’, Methodist History, xli (2003), 79–88; Anna Lawrence, ‘The transatlantic Methodist family: gender, sexuality and evangelicalism in England and America, 1735–1815’ (University of Michigan, Ph.D dissertation, 2004). 4 Increase Mather, David serving his generation, quoted in David Leverenz, The language of Puritan feeling: an exploration in literature, psychology, and social history (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1980), 1..
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