Sanctified Sisters

ebook A History of Protestant Deaconesses

By Jenny Wiley Legath

cover image of Sanctified Sisters

Sign up to save your library

With an OverDrive account, you can save your favorite libraries for at-a-glance information about availability. Find out more about OverDrive accounts.

   Not today

Find this title in Libby, the library reading app by OverDrive.

Download Libby on the App Store Download Libby on Google Play

Search for a digital library with this title

Title found at these libraries:

Library Name Distance
Loading...

The first history of the deaconess movement in the United States
In the late nineteenth century, a new movement arose within American Protestant Christianity. Unsalaried groups of women began living together, wearing plain dress, and performing nursing, teaching, and other works of welfare. Modeled after the lifestyles of Catholic nuns, these women became America's first deaconesses.
Sanctified Sisters,the first history of the deaconess movement in the United States, traces its origins in the late nineteenth century through to its present manifestations. Drawing on archival research, demographic surveys, and material culture evidence, Jenny Wiley Legath offers new insights into who the deaconesses were, how they lived, and what their legacy has been for women in Protestant Christianity.
The book argues that the deaconess movement enabled Protestant women—particularly single women—to gain power in a male-dominated Protestant world. They created hundreds of new institutions within Protestantism and created new roles for women within the church. While some who study women's ordination draw a line from the deaconesses' work to the struggle for women's ordination in various branches of Protestant Christianity, Legath argues that most deaconesses were not interested in ordination. Yet, while they didn't mean to, they did end up providing a foundation for today's ordination debates. Their very existence worked to open the possibility of ecclesiastically authorized women's agency.

Sanctified Sisters