Edited by John Lenton, Clive Norris, and Linda Ryan, Women, Preachers, Methodists brings together papers from two different conferences held in 2019 commemorating the 350th anniversary of Susanna Wesley's birth. The first conference, “The Bright Succession: After Susanna Wesley, Gender, Heritage and Faith,” was sponsored by the Methodist Heritage Committee at the University of Lincoln. The second conference, “‘An Extraordinary Call’: Methodist Women Preachers in Britain 1740 to the Present,” was organized by Lenton and Norris and supported by the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History at Oxford Brookes University. The thematic focus of the chapters in the volume naturally reflects the scope of both conferences and will appeal to readers interested in Methodist studies, religious history, women's studies, and gender and religion. Women, Preachers, Methodists will appeal to readers whose interests in such topics are devotional as well as academic. Contributors to the volume range from religious historians and theologians to Methodist ministers and preachers.
Organized into three sections, the volume begins with four chapters that examine the life and legacy of Susanna Wesley, including an introductory essay by Charles Wallace that discusses developments in the historiography on Susanna Wesley. William Gibson's assessment of Susanna's marriage casts a provocative light on the political dynamics that informed Susanna's relationship with her husband, while the other contributors to this section consider Susanna's influence on John Wesley and his ministry. Ryan, for example, looks at how John's thinking about child-rearing and female education was influenced by his mother in the context of eighteenth-century attitudes regarding gender and education, whereas Lenton considers how Susanna influenced her son's views on lay and female preaching via “an extraordinary call” (77).
The second—and longest—section of the volume, “Methodist Women Preachers: ‘An Extraordinary Call,’” documents the lives of Methodist women preachers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including essays on the experiences of these women within Welsh Methodism (which has been largely overlooked by religious historians) and among the Primitive Methodists and Bible Christians. David Bundy and Tim Woolly take a slightly narrower focus by examining the experiences of two women in particular. Bundy “rescues from oblivion a fascinating and virtually unknown figure” (11) in Catherine Smith, a wife of a Wesleyan minister who became a holiness preacher in the nineteenth century, and Woolley discusses the life and legacy of the American Methodist Phoebe Palmer, focusing specifically on Palmer's visit to Great Britain in 1859 and her views on sanctification. The chapters in this section document the manifold contributions of women in early Methodism and the struggles they faced in answering what they perceived as a divine call.
Women, Preachers, Methodists appropriately concludes with personal accounts by Christina Le Moignan, Judith Maizel-Long, and Michaela Youngson, three practicing Methodist ministers who describe their individual calls to the ministry and the challenges, both private and public, they encountered as women called to the ministry. Two of these women—Le Moignan and Maizel-Long—were two of the earliest women accepted into the ministry following the Methodist Conference's acceptance of women ministers in the early 1970s. All three of these accounts are, in part, testament to the legacy of Susanna Wesley and the women of early Methodism whose lives are examined throughout the volume. The accounts likewise bear testimony to these women's own faith and commitment to their ministerial office while advocating for representation and inclusion for any marginalized group within the church.
Taken as a whole, Women, Preachers, Methodists adds to a growing body of scholarship that documents the significant contributions women have made and continue to make within Methodism, beginning with Susanna Wesley; the editors have assured a balance of academic rigor and a profound respect for these women and the religious faith that ultimately moved and motivated them. To be sure, the articles highlight the politics surrounding these women's activities, including their efforts to assert themselves in the face of opposition, but the authors do not politicize the experiences of these women at the expense of losing sight of religious experience as just that—religious experience. Most, if not all, of the women who are the subjects of the essays in this book, including the three women who reflect on their own spiritual calls, embarked on their ministries not to turn the social order on its head, but to follow divine dictates.
The only minor reservation, outside of a handful of punctuation errors sprinkled throughout, relates to Lenton's introduction, which is devoted almost entirely to detailed summaries of the chapters that follow with relatively scant commentary regarding the history of women in Methodism. One wishes, for example, that a short section under the subheading “The Importance of Gender in Methodist History” had been significantly expanded. Lenton notes the inevitable gaps in a volume such as this that point to future research in gender and Methodist studies, but a more robust discussion of the current state of the field, how the volume contributes to that field, and where things are heading would have made a valuable contribution to gender and Methodist studies in its own right.
