ABSTRACT
Evidence of the processes by which women have been deprived of equal status is usually hard to come by, but eighteenth-century Moravian Church records offer a trove of such evidence. To spread its Pietistic perspective, the Church developed settlements and missions around the world – in Europe, North America, the Caribbean, South America, Labrador, Africa, and Ceylon. In many of these places the Church established archives that still exist today. The governing council minutes, daily institutional diaries, spiritual autobiographies, and prolific correspondence housed in these archives reveal in great detail why and how eighteenth-century Moravians first established significant leadership roles for women and then undid them a generation later. In a previous essay, I have outlined both processes as they played out in the top Moravian governing councils, which always convened in Europe.2 In this essay, I investigate how directives of European leaders to dismantle women’s leadership throughout the Church were implemented in far off Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
