March 3, 2008
june.avignone@rochester.edu
In the early 20th century, trying to make a living for
an African-American woman typically meant hard work and low pay. Laboring
under the twin burdens of racial prejudice and patriarchal hierarchy, black
women were often relegated to scrubbing floors, washing clothes, laboring
in fields, or caring for the children of white families.
Despite these economic and social challenges, a group
of African-American women managed to negotiate power for themselves and the
black community. Decades before the civil rights movement, half a century
before the women’s movement, these women discovered a surprisingly
potent path to power. Their secret, says Anthea Butler, author of Women in the Church of God In Christ: Making A
Sanctified World, was living a sanctified life.
“The women in the Church of God in Christ
wielded social, political, and spiritual power in the church by their
example of living the sanctified life,” says Butler, an
assistant professor of religion and classics who specializes in
African-American religions, evangelicalism, Pentecostalism, and gender
issues. “By being moral and spiritual exemplars, they were able
to share power and at times take power away from a male-dominated
clergy.”
In this first major study of what is now the largest
Pentecostal denomination in the United States, Butler acted as both a
scholar and participant observer to tell the rich stories of the founding
members of the church’s Memphis-based Women’s Department
from 1911 through the1960s.
“As a youth-oriented culture, we need to move
beyond what we assume about these older women in their Sunday finery, furs,
and hats,” says Butler. “They wanted not only to
do ‘right by God,’ but to open pathways for women and the
black community through their own brand of religiously based social
activism.”
While doing research in places like Chicago, Memphis,
and Florida, Butler interviewed senior church members and sorted through
old boxes of files and papers found in their attics, basements, under beds,
and as Butler recalls, “nearly electrocuted myself when I plugged my
laptop into a house with poor wiring.”
The information she gathered was vital to the
church’s history and “may otherwise been lost forever to time,
trash, or Alzheimer’s disease,” Butler notes.
Women in the Church of God In Christ was recently published by the University of North Carolina Press.
Respectable dress and deportment were important
“spiritual weapons” throughout the church’s history, as
were cleanliness, moderation of food intake, fasting, prayer, and
abstinence from alcohol, a concept derived from I Corinthians 6, which
states that the body is a “temple” that must be kept cleansed
for the Holy Spirit to remain in it.
By living the sanctified life, women in the Church of
God in Christ could perceive themselves as set apart, despite what white
racists or resentful outsiders could say to the contrary, Butler
says. As Arenia Mallory, president of the Church of God in
Christ’s Saint’s Industrial school admonished her students,
one should “Walk in dignity, talk with dignity, and live with
dignity.”
By using their charismatic authority, women in the
Church of God in Christ were able to become social power brokers both
inside and outside the church setting, working for biblically based social
reforms aimed at alleviating poverty and discrimination and improving
educational opportunities. Lillian Brooks Coffey, for example, started a
home for older church women in Detroit in the 1940s and worked closely with
Mary McLeod Bethune for the National Council of Negro Women. Church
members eventually took their mission to Washington, D.C., through the
auspices of the National Council of Negro Women, to which many belonged.
“What is absolutely amazing is that these
uneducated women, who worked 10 to 12 hours a day or more, were able to
connect to community and civic leaders in the 1930s and 40s,” says
David Daniels, professor of church history at the McCormick Theological
Seminary and an ordained minister in the Church of God in Christ.
“Dr. Butler shows that being sanctified was not just a personal means
of salvation, but a way of networking with the world that took these women
and their social agenda all the way to the White House.”
For Butler, even today as U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton
makes a run for president, the issues that women in the Church of God of
Christ faced mirror broader concerns women still confront
today. Despite the advances of the feminist movement, some women still
make less than their male counterparts, childcare costs remain high, and
sexual exploitation and violence against women has not abated, she says.
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