Jarena Lee and Black Women Preachers in the Great Awakening

The Great Awakening and the Rise of Female Preaching

As religion entered the 18th century, it brought with it a sweeping revival. The growth of that revival was overwhelming — more people attended church than in previous centuries. Churches of all denominations appeared throughout the established colonies and cities of the United States, and religious growth spread across England, Wales, and Scotland as well. This era, known as the Great Awakening, was the environment in which women like Jarena Lee first found their calling to preach.

Evangelism, the epicenter of the movement, drew parishioners through the preaching of both the Old and New Testament. Churches were erected — grand and humble alike — by the rich and the poor. Within those walls, class distinctions dissolved; everyone sought comfort in church attendance and in hearing the word of God. The largest Protestant groups consisted of Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists. Older denominations — Anglicans, Quakers, and Congregationalists — were unable to keep pace with this growing Protestant revolution.

In 1787, the Constitution of the United States was written. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both served on the drafting committee, and they agreed that religion was a freedom and that no one should have religious beliefs dictated to them. Many immigrants who had come from England and elsewhere welcomed this hard-won liberty. They were no longer compelled to conform to the dictates of any particular religion — such as Catholicism — as they had been in their home countries.

It was in this climate that women like Jarena Lee, Anne Howard Shaw, and Maria W. Stewart began their missions to preach and spread the word of God. Although female preachers appeared throughout the country during this period, most were forgotten because no one took care to preserve their memory. Catherine Brekus captures the dilemma these women faced: "As biblical feminists, they were caught between two worlds. Revolutionary in their defense of female preaching, yet traditional in their theology, they had been too radical to be accepted by evangelicals, but too conservative to be accepted by women's rights activists."

Female preachers could not fit comfortably into any existing group, and so they were left out of the historical record. Later scholars and advocates chose to revive the female preacher movement and restore the memory of women who served God. Jarena Lee was the first among them to be reclaimed.

Although many great women both before and after her shaped the lives of American women, Lee was among the first of her era to rebel openly against the religious establishment. She preached at a time when it was restricted not only for women, but for Black Americans. She lived under conditions in which she could have been kidnapped, sold into slavery, or killed — and yet none of that stopped Jarena Lee from fulfilling what she understood to be her mission and calling in life.

Jarena Lee: Life, Calling, and Obstacles

Jarena Lee felt a deep connection to religion from an early age. Because of this, she was able to rebel against the conservative gender biases of the church to become one of the first female preachers of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. As an evangelist, Lee traveled on foot and would walk as far as sixteen miles in a single day. By the age of forty, the unordained minister had logged 2,325 miles on the Gospel circuit.

The origins of her preaching career trace to around 1850, at the annual meeting of the Philadelphia Conference of the A.M.E. Church, where a group of women formed an impromptu organization dedicated to God's mission. Their purpose, in the eyes of historians, was to arrange preaching appointments from their own ranks at stations within the Philadelphia Conference. Jarena Lee was most likely among these ecclesiastical insurgents. The organization did not survive, and at the next General Conference in 1852, a resolution to license women to preach was defeated by a large majority of delegates. As Albanese notes, "Jarena Lee's role in these debates, and in the rising agitation among black women in the A.M.E. Church for equality of access to the pulpit, has not been recorded in the standard histories of black Methodism."

Like many people, Jarena Lee was lost early in her life. She endured a poor childhood and worked as a servant in her youth. Her pain grew so severe that at one point she contemplated suicide. In her own words, she described the torment: "I seemed to hear the howling of the damned, to see the smoke of the bottomless pit, and to hear the rattling of those chains, which hold the impenitent under clouds of darkness to the judgement of the great day."

The catalyst for her suicidal despair was, in part, a sermon delivered by a local Protestant missionary. As described by Haywood, Lee "was beset to hang [herself] with a cord suspended from the wall enclosing the secluded spot," living as she did during the aftermath of the Second Great Awakening, surrounded daily by the religious fervor it aroused. The missionary's words reminded her of her sins and the weight of her mistakes, igniting guilt and regret. Ultimately, Lee was prevented from taking her life by what she described as the "unseen arm of God." After moving to Philadelphia, she was inspired by the preaching of the Reverend Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and became a committed believer.

Five years later, she experienced a vision that confirmed her decision to begin preaching. She approached Reverend Allen, who told her she could hold prayer meetings. However, because the church's discipline did not provide for female preachers, she remained restricted in what she could do. She recorded in her journal both the limitations placed upon her and the role she believed God played in helping her face those obstacles. Her journal entries demonstrate how she used Scripture to argue against the exclusion of women from religious ministry:

"And why should it be thought impossible, heterodox, or improper for a woman to preach? seeing the Savior died for the woman as well as for the man. If the man may preach, because the Savior died for him, why not the woman? seeing he died for her also. Did not Mary first preach the risen Savior, and is not the doctrine of the resurrection the very climax of Christianity — hangs not all our hope on this? Then did not Mary, a woman, preach the gospel? For she preached the resurrection of the crucified Son of God."

She eventually married Joseph Lee, a pastor, in 1811 and quickly became disheartened in the first year of marriage. Her stifled desire to preach contributed to health problems and depression. Over the next six years, she suffered considerable loss within her family — her husband died along with several others. Two children survived, a two-year-old and a six-month-old, and they gave her the strength to pursue her passion.

It was a moment during one of Reverend Allen Williams's routine sermons that finally unleashed that passion. When the reverend seemed to lose the spirit of his delivery, Lee rose to give a stirring exhortation, which she proclaimed was God's way of manifesting his power through her. Moved by her speech, Reverend Williams rose to sanction her right to preach. As Sernett records: "Upon hearing Bishop Richard Allen preach one afternoon in 1804, Jarena Lee (b. 1783) embraced the opportunity to unite with the African Methodists of Philadelphia. Some five years later she felt the call to preach and entered upon a charismatic ministry that would carry her to many parts of the African-American Methodist connection." From that moment forward, Jarena Lee's life became dedicated to evangelizing and challenging the prejudices that barred women from the ministry.

Lee's Ministry, Autobiography, and Legacy

Women faced enormous hardship in their attempts to preach the word of God. They encountered resistance even in white churches and were denied positions based solely on their gender. As Albert Raboteau notes, Jarena Lee was one of the first to pursue this calling: "One of the first black women to challenge the rule against women preaching was Jarena Lee."

Lee devised several strategies to advance her work as a preacher. She had printed in Philadelphia a pamphlet of twenty-four pages entitled The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, a Colored Lady, Giving an Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel, through which she made her work and mission known to a wider audience. She also kept a journal while traveling, which she later expanded into her autobiography. The expanded version appeared in 1849 as Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee, Giving an Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel. To cover her travel expenses and room and board, she sold copies of her book at church meetings and while on the road.

The book generated some controversy, both because it challenged sexism in the church and because its meaning was not always clear — a difficulty that led some of her female friends to attempt to explain it to the male members of the A.M.E. Church committee. Even so, the book raised important questions and paved the way for other women who followed in her footsteps. Thanks to her work, more and more female preachers were inspired to pursue their true calling.

The memoirs of American women in religion share a pattern: they use their varied and remarkable life stories to illuminate common religious themes. Jarena Lee, for instance, endured life separated from her children and preached without financial support. Women who preached lived through intense Christian piety — whether from a very young age or following a specific conversion experience — and found it difficult to manage the hostility they encountered. They were especially shaken by the shifting attitudes within their own denominations during the 1830s and 1840s.

As the Freewill Baptists, Christian Connection, Methodists, and African Methodists grew in numbers and institutional strength, they developed resistance to the radicalism that had marked their early histories. Those who had once made room for female preachers now placed formal obstacles in their path. As Albanese and Stein document, women were sometimes brought to trial: "In a dramatic church trial in Cherry Valley, New York in 1830, the Methodist hierarchy excommunicated Sally Thompson when she refused to stop holding meetings."

In the early nineteenth century, the majority of members in these sects were poor farmers, laborers, and artisans with little political influence. The Protestant work ethic, however, drove them to work hard, save their earnings, and build better futures for their children. Over the span of forty years, these small, persecuted sects grew into flourishing denominations. As they grew, they built seminaries to educate men for the ministry, discouraged visionary enthusiasm, and insisted that converts behave with restraint during meetings — abandoning their earlier support for female preaching. Ironically, the very groups that had once protested against the established churches eventually became the establishment.

By 1844, the Methodists had become the largest single denomination in the United States, with a membership exceeding one million. By that point, female preachers faced new restrictions on their speech. Churches and meetings that had once welcomed them shunned them or urged them to serve God in other, less visible ways. Women were put on trial for what was now called rebellious behavior. They were denied the right to testify in their own defense, and their names were removed from church record books and clerical memoirs. Female preaching became so taboo that earlier male supporters were embarrassed by their own previous endorsements. Evangelicals deliberately attempted to erase women like Jarena Lee from historical memory. Were it not for manuscript church records, early nineteenth-century religious periodicals, and the memoirs of these courageous women, no trace of their remarkable lives would remain.

One reason why female preachers were so easily removed from history was their lack of organized allies. Had they allied themselves with women's rights activists, their memory might have been preserved by the liberal reformers who demanded women's full political, economic, and legal equality. This alliance never formed, because the two groups of women saw little common ground. Female preachers did not wish to associate themselves with controversial figures such as the platform speaker Fanny Wright, who advocated for women's rights, divorce, and birth control. Meanwhile, suffrage activists like Susan B. Anthony were reluctant to claim "sisterhood" with evangelical women. They could not understand why female preachers would devote their lives to a system that restricted them, and they wanted women to champion female equality through devotion to the cause of women's rights rather than the cause of God.

In nineteenth-century culture, femininity was defined in terms of caregiving, and a woman's primary role was that of mother. The ideal woman made her home a sanctuary — a haven for her husband and children from the competitive world outside. The Christian home became a locus of piety, and motherhood became the central vocation of the Christian mother. Female preachers did, however, advocate for equality in their own way — by attempting to transform a system so thoroughly embedded in the daily lives of people that changing religious beliefs meant changing social standing.

For many American women, religion provided a path to sanctification in their private lives and helped them fulfill roles larger than those of wife and mother. It also opened opportunities for semi-public activity outside the home, and in some instances brought genuine public recognition. During the nineteenth century, pious women taught Sunday school and served as unpaid assistants to their clergyman husbands, both at home and in missions abroad. A minority became preachers or religious leaders in their own right.

A passage recorded by Ditmire offers a vivid glimpse of Lee's daily ministry on the road:

"On Monday morning I left for Bridgeton; we having no Society there, I preached in the Court House to a large assembly of different denominations. I felt a degree of liberty in speaking, and I then stopped a few days with them, and was kindly received and entertained. I then proceeded on to Fair-field, and endeavored to labor for them at 11 o'clock, Sabbath morning, and at 3 o'clock, P.M. To crowded houses of respectable and quiet congregations, and the Lord poured out his spirit upon us and we had a solemn waiting in his presence, for which my soul rejoices even now."

Lee also worked alongside prominent church leaders such as Sandy F. Ray, as noted in McMickle's encyclopedia of African-American Christian heritage. She sought to unite her community — particularly Black Americans — following the injustices of enslavement. Sernett illustrates how white slaveholders often regarded missionary work among enslaved people not as compassionate outreach but as a pretext for tighter control: "Few Masters appear Zealous or even pleased with what the Missionaries try to do for the Good of their Slaves; they are more Cruel some of them of late Dayes than before. They hamstring, maim, and unlimb those poor Creatures for Small faults." Lee understood how Black Americans had reversed the negative uses of religion and turned it into a source of communal unity and saving grace, forming their own traditions in the process.

Lee spent thirty years as an itinerant preacher. Even after the AME issued a definitive ruling in 1852 barring women from preaching, Lee spent the majority of her adult life doing exactly that — without pay, without ordination, and without institutional protection. She moved from New Jersey to Philadelphia at age twenty-one and, when she began preaching, delivered three sermons per week and walked six miles per day.

Some have criticized her decision to leave her children in pursuit of her calling. Homiletics scholar Anna Carter Florence offers a compelling defense:

"Preaching is a way of living and speaking in right relationship with God. It is a way of standing in one's own life, before God and others. A preacher who denies this denies her very self; she goes down into the pit. She gets swallowed by the whale. She gets tossed this way and that until she relinquishes false notions of what her life should be and submits to God. And God does not adhere to human articulations of polity: God calls whom God will. If the preacher is a poor black woman in antebellum Philadelphia in the year 1811, a woman whom no one will believe and for whom living out the call will be unimaginably difficult, so be it: God does not call preachers to be believed. God calls preachers to preach. Lee had tried standing in someone else's life; it hadn't worked. She was ready to stand on her own."

When Lee left her home, the call came abruptly, but she departed responsibly. She entrusted the care of her children to close friends and to the supervision of Richard Allen. She also understood home not only in terms of family, but in terms of spiritual community — being in right relationship with God and God's people. The Spirit led her to what she understood as a duty, and even without income she received kindness and charity from the people she preached to. As Florence writes, "Certain poverty, strenuous travel, broken health, exhausting pace: these were the rigors that defined itinerant life, and for thirty years, Lee lived with them." Her determination illuminated the path for others and is what makes her great.

Jarena Lee oriented the pulpit toward justice. She is rightly considered the first female preacher of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church. In her own book she documents her many travels and interactions with audiences who, for the most part, treated her well. She relied heavily on the generosity of others, as she was unlicensed and received no pay. There were occasional hecklers — including, she notes in the middle of her book, a Black man who interrupted her preaching for some time — but she engaged him on Scripture and eventually earned both his silence and his respect. Much of her writing records the miles walked each day and the towns visited. She noted that some towns had no churches and that she was obliged to preach outdoors, lending the whole enterprise a grassroots quality.

Women during that era received no income from preaching. They preached wherever and whenever they could, relying entirely on their ability to instill in audiences the values they themselves held. Topics such as conversion and temperance featured prominently. These women had to convey their message quickly and with enough spiritual energy to hold a crowd. Because men were generally regarded as the authoritative voices of religion, women like Lee had to demand respect in certain instances and earn it steadily through tireless effort. She logged many miles each day, her journals recording bouts of ill health caused by the strain. On the final page of her journal she writes:

"My health being very much impaired, I knew not but that I should be the next one called away, but the Lord spared me for some other purpose, and upon my recovery I commenced travelling again, feeling it better to wear out than to rust out — and so expect to do until death ends the struggle — knowing, if I lose my life for Christ's sake, I shall find it again. I now conclude — by requesting the prayers of God's people every where, who worship in His holy fear, to pray for me, that I ever may endeavor to keep a conscience void of offence, either towards God or man — for I feel as anxious to blow the Trumpet in Zion. And sound the alarm in God's Holy Mount, as ever; — Though Nature's strength decay, And earth and hell withstand — To Canaan's land I'll urge my way, At HIS Divine command.

But here I feel constrained to give over, as from the smallness of this pamphlet I cannot go through with the whole of my journal, as it would probably make a volume of two hundred pages; which, if the Lord be willing, may at some future day be published. But for the satisfaction of such as may follow after me, when I am no more, I have recorded how the Lord called me to his work, and how he has kept me from falling from grace, as I feared I should. In all things he has proved himself a God of truth to me; and in his service I am now as much determined to spend and be spent, as at the very first. My ardour for the progress of his cause abates not a whit, so far as I am able to judge, though I am now something more than fifty years of age.

As to the nature of uncommon impressions, which the reader cannot but have noticed, and possibly sneered at in the course of these pages, they may be accounted for in this way: It is known that the blind have the sense of hearing in a manner much more acute than those who can see; also their sense of feeling is exceedingly fine, and is found to detect any roughness on the smoothest surface, where those who can see find none. So it may be with such as I am, who has never had more than three months schooling; and wishing to know much of the way and law of God, have therefore watched the more closely the operations of the Spirit, and have in consequence been led thereby. But let it be remarked that I have never found that Spirit lead me contrary to the Scriptures of truth, as I understand them. 'For as many as are led by the Spirit of God are the sons of God' — Rom. viii. 14. I have now only to say, May the blessing of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, accompany the reading of this poor effort to speak well of his name, wherever it may be read. AMEN."

Bibliography

Albanese, Catherine, and Stephen Stein, eds. Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women's Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century. Edited by William L. Andrews. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.

Bell, D. "Allowed Irregularities: Women Preachers in the Early 19th-Century Maritimes." Acadiensis [Online], Volume 30, Number 2 (3 March 2001).

Brekus, Catherine A. Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Ditmire, Susan. "Cape May County." usgennet.org. (accessed May 2, 2013). (Primary source)

Florence, Anna Carter. Preaching as Testimony. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007.

Graham, Isabella. The Power of Faith. BiblioLife, 2008.

Haywood, Chanta M. Prophesying Daughters: Black Women Preachers and the Word, 1823–1913. Columbia: University of Missouri, 2003.

Lee, Jarena. Religious Experience and Journal of Jarena Lee: Giving an Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel (1849). Kessinger Publishing, LLC, 2010. (Primary source)

McMickle, Marvin A. An Encyclopedia of African-American Christian Heritage. Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 2002.

Raboteau, Albert J. Canaan Land: A Religious History of African-Americans. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Richardson, Marilyn. Maria W. Stewart, America's First Black Woman Political Writer: Essays and Speeches. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Sernett, Milton C. Afro-American Religious History: A Documentary Witness. 2nd ed. Durham: Duke University Press, 1985.

Tyson, John R., ed. Invitation to Christian Spirituality: An Ecumenical Anthology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.