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We are very sure that women were never intended for preachers. The entrance of women into the ministry and other public work, even if the scripture should not forbid it, would soon cut off the supply of raw material for making husbands and fathers. Somebody has to be the mother of the children and stay in the home to rear and train them. It would destroy our home life if women should, in any general sense, become public men.BS , June 9, 1892, p. 1.
Women preachers were linked with other examples of feminine "excess" that were anathema to southern men—abolitionists, suffragettes, and
peripatetic female lecturers.BS , February 22, 1894, p. 7. One man claimed that Baptist women really did not even want to speak publicly; those who did so had been
drawn out in the practiceby
unthoughtful brethren.BS , November 15, 1894, p. 8.
Critics commonly used derision and humor to discredit the idea of women preaching. The Baptist Standard editor, J. B. Cranfill, was unfailingly supportive of women's having a mission society, but he found female preachers easy targets for his humor. He quoted Samuel Johnson as claiming that
a woman's preaching is like a dog walking on his hind legs. It is not done well but you are surprised to find it done at all.BS , April 25, 1895, p. 7. He wondered if the proper appellation for such a woman was "pastoress" or "pasteurine." BS , February 15, 1900, p. 4. When Mr. Brown of Kansas City urged those attending the 1892 Southern Baptist Convention to discontinue separate organizations for the sexes and enforce equality in evangelistic causes, including women going into the pulpit on Sunday morning, reading the Bible, and explaining it, Dr. Cranfill responded by describing the situation in a way that
convulsed the convention with laughter.BS , May 19, 1892, p. 7. Another man responded to that proposal by declaring that
the appearance of women in the pulpitwas an extreme to which Southern women would not go,
they [being] intelligent and knowing propriety.Ibid.
The only serious plea made in support of women preachers by a Texas Baptist was published in the Baptist Standard in 1892 by the Reverend J. B. Cole of Plano. He argued that scriptural passages were being used to keep women from speaking to mixed, public assemblies in the same way they were partially applied a century before to impede the beginnings of Baptist mission work. He asked for a less prejudiced, selective interpretation of the Bible and pled with his fellow Baptists not to silence women's desire to speak their
blessed hopeto those around them.
We must surrender this old superstitious and barbarous club with which we have been beating back the army of earnest, Christian women, whose burning souls, long pent up, will lay into the breach by our sides and take the world for Christ,he urged his fellow Baptists. To the women he confessed:
My sister, you are just as free to tell the world of Jesus and his love as any man. No man has a right to try to bind your soul's longing to spread the news of salvation. . . plainly you should do all you can do as a Christian, to help the world to Christ.
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