WOMEN'S MINISTRIES IN THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH, 1850-1920 (SISTERHOOD, DEACONESS, MISSIONARY, SETTLEMENTS, NURSE).
Contributors: Columbia University.
Published: 1985
Number of pages: 316
Subjects: History, United States.
Description: Although many historians have written of the influence of the Social Gospel upon American Protestantism, none of them have studied the relationship of women to the Social Gospel. This study of women in the Episcopal Church contends that their work was crucial to the development of the Social Gospel in that institution for they initiated the church's ministry to sick, poor and disadvantaged people and staffed the programs and institutions designed to minister to such populations. By the early 1900s, women increasingly urged that the church come to terms with the need for social and industrial reform.

This dissertation traces the evolution of women's work within the Episcopal Church. Sisterhoods organized in the 1850s offered Victorian women a socially respectable way to offer their lives in Christian vocations. Institutions founded by those sisterhoods initiated the church's movement into social service ministries while also providing valuable training for such ministries to laywomen volunteers. In the 1870s such laywomen organized the Woman's Auxiliary to the Board of Missions which became a principal source of revenue and publicity for the church's missionary program. The move towards professionalism of the 1880s established the order of deaconesses--educated church workers living in the secular world.

Exercising social service ministries, the women grew in self-confidence. The Woman's Auxiliary voted to use its triennial United Offering primarily for the support of women missionaries. The deaconesses united to set their own professional goals. The Companions of the Holy Cross pressed for church-involvement in economic and political issues. Yet all these developments were deemed inconsequential by church laymen and clergy who, at the 1919 General Convention, refused to incorporate women into Episcopal policy-making councils and definitely excluded them from the church's political arena. The Victorian ideal of separate spheres for men and women still held sway within the Episcopal Church.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 46-08, Section: A, page: 2420.

Thesis (PH.D.)--COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, 1985.

School code: 0054.