ABSTRACT

Few challenged the ability of godly women to arouse spiritual instincts and lead their female friends, children, servants, and even husbands, to God. The controversy surrounded not women’s guidance over private lives, effected in private homes, but their role in addressing larger audiences in the public space of the church. If the leadership tried to pacify conservative elements by denying women’s authority they might lose key female members. In Lyme, Connecticut, for example, seven women were cited for ‘usurping the authority over the church and for neglecting the public worship of God in this place and church meetings and for building up a meeting hild by our admonished members’. Two years later two more women joined them.11 In other words, evangelicalism often gave women a voice, but when they exercised that voice many were judged to be the founders of scandal and divisions.