"Exquisite powers": Ann Baker Graves and Corinthia Read Williams, obedient revolutionaries.

We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: change prepares the ground for revolution.--Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time, "A Time of Juveniles," 1967.

If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.--Abigail Adams to John Adams, March 31, 1776.

Ann Jane Baker Graves and Corinthia Read Williams began an obedient revolution among nineteenth-century Southern Baptist women. Their obedience to conservative Christian norms served as an unintended Trojan horse that brought progressive feminist ideals inside the walls of Southern Baptist institutions. A decades-long movement of resistance to inequality peaked in 1888 at Richmond, Virginia, with the founding of Woman's Mission to Woman, Auxiliary to the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).

Acting in fear of "an entering wedge to women's tights and platform speaking," according to Baltimore mission supporter Susan Pollard, the 1888 SBC meeting in Richmond, Virginia, made maleness mandatory for messengers by adding the term "brethren" to its constitution. (1) The same week, in the same city, as the brethren formally excluded their sisters from the SBC franchise, Pollard and fellow Baltimorean Annie Armstrong presented to a gathering of Baptist women a constitution for Woman's Mission to Woman, Auxiliary to the SBC (WMU).

Cultural Change, Radical Feminism, and Changed Baptists

Changes in American culture created a conservative reaction that altered woman's status in the nineteenth century, which in turn resulted in the radical feminist movement. Graves's and Williams's quiet Baptist insurgency used the rhetoric of the former to accomplish many of the goals of the latter. In this way, Baptist women benefited from a movement they rejected.

American women of this period were born into an era of social upheaval. (2) American industrialization and a capitalist economy produced a rising middle class whose female members had an ever-shrinking place in civic and economic affairs. (3) Confinement to the domestic sphere was the main feature of woman's changing status in this period.

Most of society expected the ideal woman to follow what Barbara Welter called the "Cult of True Womanhood," with its central values of piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. (4) In reality, for the middle class and poor, this ideal, when realized, consisted of a lifetime of prescribed labor: an endless cycle of washing, cooking, and childcare; for women wealthy enough to have these things done by less fortunate women, it meant existence as an object of ornamentation and male entertainment. (5) Feminist Susan B. Anthony once gave thanks that she never married, saying marriage offered woman only two choices: to be a drudge or a doll. (6)

Women had few options to alter their circumstances. Married women had no legal tight to own property, to bring suit for injury, or even to gain partial custody of their children. They could not vote to change their status. They were subjects of the political process, not participants in it. Societal norms censored them for dating to so much as speak publicly of these matters. Ken Burns, maker of the documentary, "Not for Ourselves Alone," quipped, "They had fewer rights than an insane lunatic--male, of course--in an asylum." (7)

Over time, abolition and temperance arguments awakened women's zeal for social reform and awareness of their own domestic limitations. Especially in the northern states, consideration of slaves' inalienable human rights and the injustice of their uncompensated servitude eventually motivated women to reflect on their own humanity and the subtler injustices of their own political and economic situation. Abolition and feminism created a powerful alliance for change. (8) Similarly, women and children left destitute by alcoholic men kept reformers conscious of the inability of wives and mothers to bring their situation to public awareness, much less seek legal redress.

Declaration of Rights and Sentiments: Charter for the Women's Rights Movement

The first Women's Rights Convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, adopted a Declaration of Rights and Sentiments with twelve amendments. (9) Elizabeth Cady Stanton, best known for her later work on suffrage with Susan B. Anthony, wrote this charter document for women's rights along with eleven of its twelve amendments. (10)

The writings of Graves have numerous parallels to the progressive ideals set forth in the Declaration of Sentiments. Each addresses the injustice of women being treated as decorative objects, the church's cooperation in limiting women's divinely ordained potential, the necessity of equal education, and the justified use of civil disobedience, among other things. (11) The progressive positions of both Graves and the Seneca Falls founders were preceded by the public stands of radical women such as Frances Wright (12) and the Grimke sisters, Angelina and Sarah. (13) Graves and Stanton joined a revolution in women's status already in progress, generated by earlier changes in their culture. Both decided to act publicly to free American women from discrimination for the good of all. Both, in the words of April Whitman speaking of Graves, effected "a change in the power structures that defined public and private lives." (14)

Ann Baker Graves, Obedient Revolutionary

Graves, born in 1904, was nine years older than Stanton and sixteen years senior to Anthony. Swaddling fledgling feminism in the rhetoric of the religious status quo, Graves eventually brought it in modified form into Southern Baptist life. Born into a well-to-do Baltimore family (15) and an active member of the Methodist Episcopal Church, she graduated from Mr. Moody's Female Academy with highest marks in 1818 and married John J. Graves, a New York City physician, in 1831.

While rearing seven children in Baltimore, (16) Graves became a popular author. Under the name Mrs. A. J. Graves, she penned Woman in America, Girlhood and Womanhood, The Harcourts and The Christian Lawyer, as well as other works. (17) Her most successful book, Woman in America, first appeared in 1841, seven years before the Seneca Falls Convention, and stayed in print for a decade after it, through eleven editions. Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen in their text on nineteenth-century American women writers, called this book the first "comprehensive assessment of women's situation in the United States." (18) Woman in America assessed the status of American women in chapters titled "Domestic Women," Fashionable Women," "Intellectual Women," and "Great Moral Women." Graves's goal was to promote model womanhood for young women by writing about ideal types.

Woman in America was a conduct or advice book, a "wildly popular" genre in that time of social transition, according to scholar April Whitman. (19) Whitman defined conduct books as writings that advised young people, usually white Christian females, how to "conduct their lives successfully, particularly as related to gender roles." (20) Carolyn Haynes noted that conduct books were the favorite venue for conservatives to express their views concerning women, and that in most instances, the advice in them consisted of telling women it was God's will that they stay in the domestic sphere and out of the masculine spheres of politics and capitalism. (21)

Up to a point, Woman in America followed this conservative pattern. Concerning woman's place in the culture, Graves wrote: "That home is her appropriate and appointed sphere of action there cannot be a shadow of doubt; for the dictates of nature are plain and imperative on this subject, and the imperatives given in scripture no less explicit." (22) In the relation of a wife to husband, Graves counseled: "She must not assume to herself any right of participation with him in the management or control of civil or political affairs." (23) Graves assessed the claims of those she called "ultra-reformers and social disorganizers," and though she granted they might be well-intentioned, she believed they were "justly condemned, as tending to draw woman from her appropriate sphere" in the church as well as in the home. (24) She lamented "the erratic course of many of our female reformers, believing that they have inflicted deep injury, where they intended good, by drawing woman away from her true and allotted sphere--domestic life." (25)

Simultaneously, Graves railed against women's typical domestic roles. She believed the abuse of woman by man had created a place in society for women limited to that of "toy, beast of burden, slave, or captive." (26) Graves feared American women, whether overworked or over pampered, had become too much at the mercy of men. She wrote: "We condemn the Chinese for barbarously crippling the feet of their women, while we, with scarcely more humanity, and with deeper injury, cripple in ours the growth of all that is vigorous in thought or energetic in action, by keeping them bound from infancy to maturity in habits of indolence, and of helpless dependence." (27)

Graves believed religious custom shared part of the guilt, arguing, "This prevailing system of acted, spoken and written flattery [in God's name] tends as directly to degrade woman from her true position as any of the barbarous customs of heathenism." (28) She called for women to focus on their Christian liberty, writing: "The pernicious effects of the slavery to which she was subjected in past ages of heathenism and ignorance still cling to her, nor has she learned to appreciate and improve, as she ought, the precious boon of the liberty Christianity has extended to her." (29)

On the same page that Graves grieved over the actions of "our female reformers," she spoke of finding hope in their reforms: "There is a revolution going on in the female minds at the present day," she wrote, "out of which glorious results may arise." (30) Educated, self-determined, thinking women were the glorious results that Graves envisioned. She believed that "to fulfill the great purposes of her being, woman must be sufficiently educated[before marriage or children]. (31) Knowledge is power,Graves reasoned, so knowledge was needed to give "efficiency to female influence." (32)

Knowledge alone, was not enough, however; it needed to be put in the service of independent thinking in Graves's view. "Women must be made to think--to acquire wisdom as well as knowledge," she wrote, and wisdom required freedom from drudgery, for "wisdom is the result of deep, patient, untiring reflection." (33) Intellectual women, in Graves's conduct book, were defined as those "whose opinions are the result of their own reflection." (34) Citing an anonymous English writer, she agreed "that there are many readers among American women, but that thinkers are rare." (35)

Anticipating being placed in the radical camp for her views on female education, Graves conceded that some used the argument for intellectual equality as an ulterior motive to gain the "same political rights and privileges of man," but averred that such a strategy undermined the American family. (36) On the other hand, she did not yield the point of men's intellectual superiority. She dodged that debate altogether on the ground that until women's opportunities equaled those of men, the argument was pointless, and she called for a halt to denigrating women's intellectual qualities by the customary jests offered by those who "can bear 'no rival near the throne'; and would rather keep woman a jeweled captive in a 'bower of roses'--the passive recipient of man's adulation in his idle hours, than see her elevated to her true position in society as a thinking, responsible being." (37) Her passion for female education rose from her own sense of lost opportunity. In her twenties, she wrote in her diary:

   My brightest dream of happiness would be to realize and spend my
   days in solitude and devote my hours to reading and reflection....
   How often have I envied the life of the student, his midnight
   lamp, ... his privilege of spending all his hours in study without
   knowing the word of reproof for devotion to his studies.... But,
   alas! such a life is not for woman, she must relinquish this to
   man, to those who can enjoy seclusion and yet benefit mankind by
   the result of their studies. (38)

Woman in America managed to wed the contrasting conservative and progressive ideal types of womanhood by claiming priority for a third ideal type called, by Linda Kerber, "Republican Motherhood." In this rhetorical model, the ideal woman was presented as one who served her country through the proper upbringing of her children. (39) Graves wrote, "In America women must train all children to be good citizens as well as good men." (40) 'All' is italicized by Graves in this quote to emphasize the education of girls as well as boys. If mothers did not educate boys in civil, political, and worldly matters, who would? If mothers did not educate their daughters, who would educate the next generation of boys? (41)

In Graves's view, fathers were so occupied with the details of business that mothers had to keep abreast of "the current literature of the day, with the progress of science, and the new and useful truths it is constantly bringing to light" lest they be absent from her household. Women thus were required by virtue of their station as obedient homemakers to become the intellectual center of the family.

Ann Baker Graves No Radical

Why Graves did not fall in line more with Stanton's and Anthony's work for women's suffrage is a matter of conjecture, but perhaps her church affiliation played a role. Many of Stanton's followers were active churchwomen. The Seneca Falls convention was held in a Wesleyan chapel, and Anthony's successor was the Reverend Doctor Anna Howard Shaw, an ordained pastor as well as a medical doctor, who pastored churches in the Methodist Protestant denomination, founded in Baltimore in 1828.

More influential perhaps on Graves were the close ties between the abolition movement and women's rights. While she did not write about slavery in her diaries or letters, the Baptist church she joined in the 1850s belonged to the pro-slavery SBC, and two of her sons served in the Confederate army. (42)

Whatever the reasons for Graves not affiliating with Stanton's work, clearly Graves and Stanton made very different lives from the raw materials of early feminism. Graves worked to empower women from within the institutions of Protestant Christianity. Stanton found ecclesiastical structures too restrictive and tried to reform them from the outside. Graves's peculiar contribution was to bring instruments of insurgency into male-ruled Christianity by means of sincere obedience to the dogmas of domesticity.

Ann Baker Graves, the Baptist

The Graves children led their mother to the Baptist tradition. In 1848, Richard Fuller baptized her eldest child, fifteen-year-old Rosewell Graves, into Seventh Avenue Baptist of Baltimore. Seven years after his baptism, Rosewell Graves, M.D., sailed for China where he spent the rest of his days as an SBC missionary. (43) Sometime after 1851, his mother, a prominent Methodist, joined the First Baptist Church of Baltimore.

Prior to Graves's joining, the church had gained the nickname, First Female Church of Baltimore, because its membership was overwhelmingly female, and because First Baptist women voted on church matters and served on committees. (44) This odd state of affairs was the result of a church dispute that led the women of the church to win the right to vote in a civil court case. In 1835, First Baptist Church, Baltimore, changed its constitution to allow "female members, minors and colored persons to vote." (45) In 1845, the male members voted to remove that part of the franchise, since a recent vote to oust the pastor, Stephen P. Hill, had failed due to his support among the women. The church split, and Hill and the disenfranchised members sued in civil court and won. A large number of the losers of the court case withdrew from First Baptist and founded Seventh Baptist, Baltimore, the church that Rosewell would join and a church where women were not allowed to vote for another sixty years. (46)

The victory for women at First Baptist Church left the incoming pastor, John Montgomery Wilson Williams, without "a deacon or a Sunday School superintendent, or a single male teacher, or a man who could lead in public prayer." (47) Graves must have felt fight at home. A short distance away, the famous preacher, Richard Fuller, at Seventh Baptist was "carrying all before him." Yet First Baptist Church, Baltimore, survived, even thrived. Calling his church's female members "wise, prudent, sensible, working women," Williams wrote, "You will not be surprised after this at my faith in women." (48)

Ann Baker Graves and Corinthia Read Williams's Baptist Women's Work

At his mission in China, missionary Rosewell Graves implemented his mother's ideal of educating women by hiring native women to deliver the Bible to females inaccessible to him in Asian culture. (49) Eventually Graves adopted this cause, which so neatly fitted her interests in educating women at home to increase Christian piety and improve society.

Through the years, Graves and her friend Corinthia Read Williams built institutions to house their progressive ideals. Williams, born to an Eastern Shore plantation family in 1827, was baptized into Red Bank Baptist Church as a youth and there married J. M. W. Williams before she turned twenty. (50)

The first women's group to support Rosewell's Bible women met in 1867. In 1869, inspired by a former female missionary from New York, Harriette Brittan, Graves and Williams founded a Baltimore branch of the Union Woman's Missionary Society (UWMS). The UWMS, an interdenominational society, began in reaction to the refusal of the Congregationalist's American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to commission single women missionaries for work with native Asian women. (51) The next year, 1870, Williams launched a society solely for Baptist women, the Baptist Woman's Mission to Woman (WMW). Ann Graves served as corresponding secretary and Mary Armstrong, mother of Annie Armstrong, as vice president.

As long as Graves lived, the Baltimore WMW kept a tight rein on how its resources were spent. Although its sister Baptist societies soon began to give their funds undesignated to the SBC's Foreign Mission Board, Graves insisted that the Baltimore society's funds be spent only "to give light to the women who sit in darkness." In February 1873, the Baltimore WMW sponsored Rosa Guerizini of Rome as a Bible woman under the supervision of the Italian mission director, W. N. Cote. (52) When Cote left the position, his replacement, George Boardman Taylor, suggested Guerizini be released and the WMW money be used to support the male students at the mission's theological School. The minutes of the WMW, June 3, 1873, stated that the group agreed to the release of Guerizini "as a matter of expediency," but suggested Taylor get the money for his ministerial students elsewhere. In October, the WMW constitution was altered to read: "This Society reserves to itself the right to control and appropriate all the funds raised" and forwarded a copy to the Foreign Mission Board. At the same meeting, the Baltimore women placed all their funds in a local bank, "until needed for the specific purposes to which they shall be donated by vote of the Society." Guerizini was re-employed by Taylor payroll by February 1874. At the death of Ann Jane Baker Graves in 1878, obedient women were engaged in a revolution regarding women's status among Southern Baptists.

Two years after Graves's death, Williams led in founding Southern Baptist home mission work by beginning societies in First Baptist Church and Eutaw Place Baptist, Baltimore. Annie Armstrong, then thirty-one years old, headed the Eutaw Place chapter. To "Miss Annie" passed the mantle of leadership in 1888 with the founding of the Woman's Missionary Union. Williams died in 1893. With her died the progressive and obedient but revolutionary spirit of nineteenth-century Southern Baptist women's leadership.

Armstrong led women's mission work among Southern Baptists with faithful courage, shrewdness, and unequaled energy, but she did not lift the banner of woman's rights like the nineteenth century Christian feminists had. Armstrong refused to speak to mixed audiences of men and women. (53) She resigned all her offices in Southern Baptist life in protest against women being trained for mission work in the same classroom as men at the WMU Training School in Kentucky, after which she never attended another SBC meeting. (54)

Before her death, the bolder Williams had been teaching a mixed Sunday School class, men and women, for over forty years. (55) She spoke out plainly concerning the status of women in the church, and was skillful in her obedient, revolutionary rhetoric. After seeing the packed crowd at the first meeting of the WMW, she wrote that a missionary in India regarded the conversion of one woman as equal to that of twenty men, so far as the propagation of the gospel was concerned. Then she wrote of her regret at the gifts of women being wasted by men through the years:

   Alas! that the high types of manhood, who have reflected honor upon
   our nation, should have been so slow in attaining to the full
   height of civilization as measured by their estimate of woman: to
   be content to see these exquisite powers used as a toy for their
   entertainment, or in frivolous self-gratification, when they might
   be gathering fruit unto eternal life and preparing for themselves
   an immortal crown! (56)

In 1906, the year Armstrong retired in frustration, eighty-six-year-old Susan B. Anthony delivered to the National American Woman Suffrage Association in Baltimore the last speech of her life. She died, as had Elizabeth Cady Stanton, without ever seeing a woman vote legally under the United States Constitution. Ann Jane Baker Graves and Corinthia Read Williams died without ever seeing a woman vote as a messenger on the floor of the Southern Baptist Convention. Susan B. Anthony, the last survivor of these four, titled that last speech, "Failure is Impossible."

(1.) Mrs. James Pollard [Susan Tyler], "History of WMU," paper presented at twenty-fifth anniversary of woman's work in Maryland (Maryland/Delaware Baptist Convention Historical Collection, n.d.).

(2.) April Lynn Whitman, "Traces of the Subversive: Mrs. A. J. Graves and the Use of Conservative Discourse in Nineteenth Century American Women's Conduct Books," unpublished master's thesis (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Graduate College, 2001), 7.

(3.) Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen, Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States, Pittsburgh Series in Composition, Literacy, and Culture (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), 5.

(4.) Whitman, "Traces," 17.

(5.) Jeanne Boydston, "Cult of True Womanhood," PBS: Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, http://www.pbs.org/stantonanthony/resources/index.html?body= culthood.html, accessed May 22, 2005.

(6.) Quoted in Explore the Women's Movement, http://www.pbs.org/stantonanthony/, accessed May 25, 2005.

(7.) Abby Johnson, "Story of Women's Right to Vote May Open Some Eyes," Nevada Appeal, 13 October 1999, http://www.yuccamountain.org/archive/opion99.htm, accessed May 31, 2005.

(8.) Nancy A. Hewitt, "Abolitionist and Suffragist Collaboration," PBS: Not for Ourselves Alone http://www.pbs.org/stantonanthony/resources/index.html? body=abolitionists.html, accessed May 28, 2005.

(9.) "Declaration of Rights and Sentiments" (Seneca Falls, NY, 1848), PBS: Not for Ourselves Alone http://www.pbs.org/stantonanthony/resources/index.html? body=dec_sentiments.html, May 25, 2005.

(10.) Ibid. Lucretia Mott supplied the twelfth amendment, which called for equal access for women to employment and for "the overthrowing of the monopoly of the pulpit."

(11.) Mrs. A. J. Graves, Woman in America: Being an Examination Into the Moral and Intellectual Condition of American Female Society, reprint, 1841 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1855), 173.

(12.) Wilentz and Sean, "Wright, Frances," in The Reader's Companion to American History, ed. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty (Houghton Mifflin Company), Answers.com, http://www.answers.com/topic/franceswright?method=5>, May 25, 2005.

(13.) Pamela R. Durso, The Power of Woman: The Life and Writings of Sarah Moore Grimke (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2003).

(14.) Whitman, "Traces," 3.

(15.) Mary Baleigh Anderson, "Ann Jane Baker of Baltimore," The Window of YWA (September 1945), 5-7, 24.

(16.) Blanche Sydnor White, Our Heritage, History of Woman's Missionary Union Auxiliary to MBUA 1742-1958 (Baltimore: WMU, 1959), 22.

(17.) Anderson, "Ann Jane Baker of Baltimore," 6.

(18.) Eldred and Mortensen, Imaging Rhetoric.

(19.) Whitman, "Traces," 6.

(20.) Ibid., 4.

(21.) Carolyn A. Haynes, Divine Destiny: Gender and Race in Nineteenth Century Protestantism (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 82.

(22.) Graves, Woman in America, 143.

(23.) Ibid., 170.

(24.) Ibid., 140.

(25.) Ibid.

(26.) Ibid., 177.

(27.) Ibid., 193.

(28.) Ibid., 180.

(29.) Ibid.

(30.) Ibid. xvi.

(31.) Ibid. 183.

(32.) Ibid. 195.

(33.) Ibid. 194.

(34.) Ibid. 165.

(35.) Ibid. 188.

(36.) Ibid. 167.

(37.) Ibid. 169.

(38.) Ann James Baker, "Diary, 1824-1828," Diary of Ann James Baker (Graves), 407, Graves Family Papers (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society).

(39.) Whitman, "Traces," 17.

(40.) Mrs. A. J. Graves, Woman in America: Being an Examination Into the Moral and Intellectual Condition of American Female Society, reprint, 1841 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1855), xviii.

(41.) Whitman, "Traces," 22.

(42.) Ann James Baker, "Letter," Letter from Mr. William B. Graves to Dr. John J. Graves, August 25, 1862, from Richmond, VA, Graves Family Papers (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society).

(43.) Wm. Loyd Allen, You Are a Great People: A History of the Maryland/Delaware Baptists, 1742-1998 (Nashville: Providence House Publishers, 1999), 114.

(44.) John Wilson Montgomery Williams, Reminiscences of a Pastorate of Thirty-Three Years in the First Baptist Church of Baltimore, Md (Baltimore: J. F. Weishampel, Jr., 1884), 9.

(45.) Minutes of the First Baptist Church, Baltimore (In possession of the church), October 3, 1845.

(46.) Allen, You Are a Great People, 84.

(47.) Ibid., 7.

(48.) John Wilson Montgomery Williams, Reminiscences of a Pastorate of Thirty-Three Years in the First Baptist Church of Baltimore, Md. (Baltimore: J. F. Weishampel, Jr., 1884), 7.

(49.) Joseph T. Watts, "The Rise and Progress of Baptists in Maryland," The Maryland Baptist 18, no. 10 (October 1935): 293.

(50.) Blanche Sydnor White, "Mrs. J. W. M. Williams," in Far Above Rubies (N.p.: Woman's Missionary Union of Maryland, Inc., 1966), n.p.

(51.) Woman's Union Missionary Society, 1860-1974, box 379 (Wheaton, Illinois), Billy Graham Center Archives, http://www.wheaton.edu/bgc/archives/GUIDES/379.htm#3, May 27, 2005.

(52.) Allen, You Are a Great People, 119.

(53.) Bobble Sorrill, Annie Armstrong, Dreamer in Action (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1984), 181.

(54.) Alien, You Are a Great People, 144-45.

(55.) White, Our Heritage, 32-33.

(56.) Mrs. J. W. M. (Corinthia) Williams, "Woman's Mission to Woman" (Baltimore: J. Weishampel, Jr., 1881), 10.

Wm. Loyd Allen is professor of church history and spiritual formation, McAfee School of Theology, Atlanta, Georgia.