Jenny Wiley Legath - Sanctified Sisters: A History of Protestant Deaconesses

Jenny Wiley Legath

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

www.nyupress.org

2019 by New York University

All rights reserved

This publication is made possible in part from the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University.

References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Legath, Jennifer Anne Wiley, 1975 author.

Title: Sanctified sisters : a history of Protestant deaconesses / Jenny Wiley Legath.

Description: New York : NYU Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018059693 | ISBN 9781479860630 (cl : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: DeaconessesProtestant churchesHistory.

Classification: LCC BV4423 .L44 2019 | DDC 262/.14082dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018059693

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Dedicated to the memory of my mother,

Betsy Marshall Wiley,

who had a diaconal heart

I am not a deaconess. I had never heard of deaconesses until I took a course on liberal Protestantism at Harvard Divinity School. There I discovered Methodist deaconesses acting out the Social Gospel at the turn of the twentieth century. These college-educated women forsook marriage to canvass tenements, Americanize immigrants, and attempt to solve the countrys assorted social illsall while dressed like Catholic nuns. My foremothers for generations were dyed-in-the-wool Methodists; how had I never encountered deaconesses, or even known that they existed? Their legacy should have been my birthright. Further study revealed additional deaconesses of a different sort. Instead of marching around the cities trying to fix people, these deaconesses lived together in tight-knit motherhouses, and the people they tried to fix in their work as hospital nurses were very similar to themselves, German-speaking farming folk with little education. I was inspired to figure out what it was about the deaconess vocation that spoke to such different women and compelled them to choose this unique life. I had to tell their story.

***

In the years that it has taken me to write this book, I have accumulated debts of gratitude that can never be repaid. David Hall, Ann Braude, and the late Bill Hutchison prepared me to meet the deaconesses in my studies at Harvard. At Princeton, Leigh Schmidt helped me to develop my idea, and Marie Griffith advised it to completion. The Religion Departments American Religions workshop was essential in helping me rework each chapter. May I never have to write a book without the benefit of careful reading and feedback from our graduate students and our powerhouse faculty Wallace Best, Jessica Delgado, and Seth Perry. Judith Weisenfeld, especially, offered continual, critical encouragement throughout the process, stepping in as my unofficial mentor at just the right time. Nicole Kirk provided crucial early inspiration, and she and Kate Cart, Elesha Coffman, Rachel McBride Lindsey, Jessica Parr, Tisa Wenger, and Rachel Wheelermy virtual villagehave sustained me with camaraderie and grammatical advice. Colleagues and fellows at the Center for the Study of Religion have supported me both personally and professionally. Robert Wuthnow (may he never retire) has served as the ideal boss and wisest advisor. Anita Kline fixed my crown every day and never let the world know it was crooked. Meredith Butts proved a fearless research assistant. I thank the archivists who opened their doors to me, and the deaconesses who shared their stories with me. My editor at NYU Press, Jennifer Hammer, demonstrated faith in the project before it was warranted. My in-laws, Joan and Regis Legath, were always ready with care and babysitting. My father, Jeff Wiley, has always believed in me and never doubted I could write a book. May I do the same for my children, Jack, Will, and Cole, who remind me every day what is important. My husband, Jeff, read every word of this book and cheered me on when I needed it most. Having listened to me talk about deaconesses for most of our marriage, he is as happy as I am to see this book completed.

At age ninety-two, Sister Ella Loew reminisced, Across from where we lived there was a convent, and I used to admire those sisters, and I said to this old uncle, I said, You know, if I was a Catholic girl, I would want to be a sister. Loews uncle surprised her with the news that their own Protestant church had sisters too, and in that moment, she knew she had found her calling. Ella Loews mother objected to her new mission: Oh my, my mother had a wooden ear. She would not listen to that. So, she would suggest, you go to business college, you do this, do that. Yet Loew persevered in declaring her intentions, and after three years, her mother finally relented. In 1910 Loew left her home in Leavenworth, Kansas, and traveled three hundred miles east to become a deaconess probationer at the hospital in St. Louis. After four years of classes and practical nursing training, Ella Loew became a non-Catholic sister when, at the age of twenty-five, she was consecrated as a deaconess in the Evangelical Synod, a small German American Reformed denomination that later became part of the United Church of Christ. Interviewed in 1981, she happily recounted her lifes work as a nurse and her close relationship with her sisters, including the Mennonite sisters who had trained with her before going to work at their own hospital. Although Loew averred that women are the making of the church, when asked if she would have gone to seminary had that option been available, she answered, No, I never felt that was my life. She concluded, I have never regretted it, never. It hasnt all been roses by any means. Ive had many trials and tribulations, but we overcome them, too. I felt that it was a life worthwhile. She was not alone in her calling. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, thousands of Protestant women in the United States who sought a worthwhile life became deaconesses.

What these women pursued in the female diaconate, the order of deaconesses, was a total, encompassing life devoted to Christian service. Since her conversion as a young woman around the year 1900, Louise Epkerrs had been doing plenty; it was the being part that was a problem. American women who became deaconesses were left unsatisfied with the piecemeal doing of acts of Christian mercy. They wanted to find a new way of being in which their very lives were a testament to Gods grace. This is what made the deaconess movement unique in the history of American religion: it was an experiment in a new way of being a Protestant Christian woman. The work itself was not novel, but the holistic life in which it was embedded was. Deaconesses sought to consecrate every aspect of their lives to Christian service, from the way they dressed to where they lived to how they prayed and worshipped.