RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Women’s Work in the Church
to God ceased to be in the foreground of moral consciousness. The persuasion that the vocation of women was the home was in part the effect and in part the cause of the decline in female education. This idea agreed with the views of Protestant Reformers, and prepared the way for the dissolution of nunneries. To this important revolution the growing change in social ideas, the decline of the system of association not only in religious but in artizan and commercial life, with the development of individualistic tendencies, contributed quite as much as the disorders of the monasteries and their failure to serve the public need.
Before the Reformation women had been conspicuous in attempts to reform or to preserve the purity of the Church. Toward the close of the sixth century Theodolinda, queen of the Lombards, ex-
tirpated the Arian heresy from her 4. Women realm. In the eleventh century Marin Reform. garet, patroness of Scotland, wife of R Malcolm Conmore, instituted important reforms in the church of that country. St. Catharine of Sienna (q.v.) in the fourteenth century was not only hospital nurse, prophetess, preacher, and reformer of society, but did much to reform ecclesiastical abuses. In the sixteenth century St. Theresa (q.v.) wrought a remarkable reformation in the Carmelite monasteries and convents of Spain. It was largely due to her reforming work within the Roman Catholic Church that the progress of Protestantism was arrested in Spain. In the seventeenth century Angélique Arnauld’s attempt at Port Royal to reform abuses in the monastic system, though rejected by the Roman Church, and without ultimate success, gives her a high place among women. The dissolution of religious houses had led to the formation of the great hospitals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They were preceded by many small confraternities for the care of the sick. Such were found in nearly every village in Germany; they were always religious—lay hospitals did not exist until long after this. In them, as in the earlier monasteries, men and women worked together, though they communicated only for the needs of the service. The Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul (q.v.) more nearly resemble a modern church society than any previous form of benevolent activity in the Church. Under the direction of St. Francis de Sales (q.v.), his friend Mme. de Chantal founded the first Order of Visiting Nurses and herself acted in that capacity. Rosa Gavona, a Sardinian needlewoman, built up a society of young and unprotected needlewomen, which spread into many towns. The members take no vows, but support not only themselves, but the sick and infirm of their order. Marie Agnesi of Milan, rich and noble, a celebrated mathematician and theologian, and the recipient of many public honors, founded a hospital in her own house. With the reforms which were the reflex influence of Protestantism upon the Roman Catholic Church, new associations of women came into being, not so free as the early hospital and other associations, yet not strictly cloistered. See MacpaLenn, ORDERS or St. Mary.
Ill. Under Protestantism: The development of
the sense of individuality which was the special
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contribution of Protestantism did not restore woman to her early position of usefulness in the Reformation churches. Unlike Romanism, the
1. Early Reformed Church found no sphere for Examples the activities of uneducated women, of Service. and the lowered educational standards and opportunities conspired with the
growing conviction that woman’s sphere is properly domestic to close against her for two hundred years the door of activity. Yet there were noble exceptions. Katherine Zell of Strasburg stood with her husband for toleration, Argula von Grumbach held her own as a controversialist, and by a letter which she wrote to Luther turned his thought to matrimony. Luther’s brave wife, Katherine von Bora, was an important factor in his reforming work. In France Queen Marguerite of Navarre (q.v.), the friend of Calvin, her sister, Renée of France (q.v.), her daughter, Jeanne d’Albret (q.v.), mother of Henri IV., were nursing mothers of Protestantism. Charlotte de Laval persuaded her husband, Admiral Coligny, to take up the sword for the Protestant faith. In England Queen Catherine Parr, Lady Jane Grey, Elizabeth herself, served the Protestant cause. Anne Clifford, countess of Pembroke (1590— 1676), rebuilt churches, pensioned distressed clergymen, admitting dissenting ministers to the bounty, repaired and restored almshouses, and built a hospital for poor women. Jane Welsh, daughter of John Knox and ancestress of Mrs. Carlyle, stood nobly for the Protestant faith. The rise of Quakerism made women prominent. Judge Fell’s widow, Margaret, the wife of George Fox, William Penn’s first wife, Gulielma Springett, Mary Dyer the martyr, and many others preached the doctrine of the “inward light.” Friendly patrons were Lady Claypole, also connected with the Cambridge Platonists (q.v.), and Elizabeth, abbess of Herford, who welcomed Penn, and who was attached to the Labbadist party of Holland (see LaBapim, JEAN DE, La- BADISTS). The great ornament of that party was Anna Maria van Schurman, accounted the most learned and accomplished woman of her age. The cause of religion in the eighteenth century owes a great debt to Susannah Wesley (q.v.), the mother of the Wesleys, and to Lady Huntingdon (see Huntinepon, Sevina Hastings), the foster mother of ministers during the evangelical revival, in which Miss Anne Steele, the hymn-writer, had a part. Margaret Baxter, who shared her husband’s prison in the common jail, was a woman of large charities, as was Lady Rachel Russell. Hannah More (q.v.) carried on a large work of free education of the poor. With her pen and influence she rendered important aid to Wilberforce in his crusade against slavery, and also instituted an important temperance work among country clergy and farmers. The mystic Jane Lead (q.v.) was the English founder of the Philadelphian Society for the dissemination of the ideas of Jakob Boehme and her own revealings. From one branch of this society came Ann Lee, founder of Shakerism in America. Jemima Wilkinson in this century founded the White Quakers. The Pietist movement in Germany shows the prophetess Eleanora von Merlau, and Frau Peterson, who shared her husband’s literary toil in defense of
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