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Early 19th Century Camp Meetings & Changes in the Role of Women in America

 The early nineteenth century camp meetings drew so many people that it was impossible for one or two preachers to meet the spiritual and practical demands for preaching, exhortation and ministry. While the location might be associated with a particular denomination (the Cane Ridge Meeting House was Presbyterian, for example), preachers and lay-ministers from every denomination in attendance were pressed into service. This cross-denominational cooperation and collaboration is one of the characteristics that made the revivals so contagious, in my opinion. Even women were exhorters. Of course, this was an unheard of practice in the days where men and women sat in different sections of a church and where women were not invited nor expected to preach to or to teach men. Women exhorters were protested but one preacher retorted to the critic this way, as recorded in A.P. Mead's 1860 history of the camp meeting revivals, Manna In The Wilderness:

"You think women are proper teachers for our schools, and every circle of our society except religion. God employed a dumb ass to rebuke the prophet [Balaam whose story is recorded in Numbers 22:21-35], and a dunghill fowl to send conviction to the heart of backslidden Peter [See Mark 14:72]; and I see no reason why a woman should not reprove sin... You and your creed belong to a bygone age, when a woman scarcely dared speak in the presence of her husband, and silence and inaction were enjoined on account of her (supposed) inferiority. That day has passed. Woman has been redeemed by the blood of Christ and exalted to equality with man in the privileges and blessings of the Gospel dispensation."

Mead went on to quote: “…I pity the man that has no higher views of woman’s nature and duty and influence than to wish to put her under foot, and then endeavor to sanctify the meanness of the act by pleading for it the sanction of religion…” 

Historians think that the camp meetings and the Second Great Awakening may have initiated the conditions that led to changes in women’s roles resulting in today’s attitudes of gender equality. African American women who were at the camp meetings played a vital role in the establishment of the first black churches on the frontier. In fact, the leadership women showed at these camp meetings opened the way for their leadership in Christian missions, benevolence and temperance societies. These camp meetings probably are and initiated the earliest efforts towards suffrage. 

By Lesley Barker, PhD c. 2021

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