Rachel Stearns and The Constant Question of Women's Religious Experience

Rachel Stearns, writing in 1834-1837 in her personal journals, reflects back a question that we are still hearing the echoes of today. That question is simply “What is the role that women play in religious experience?” and more specifically, “What is the role that women play in the authority of religious experience?” 

At the time of her conversion to Methodism, Stearns was involved in a religious situation that didn’t give the experience of womanhood much room to talk, and especially not to talk authoritatively. And while Methodists and other denominations have made great strides toward gender equality or some variation therein over the course of the last 180 years, this early version of that shift toward equality must have been exciting.

However, I can also understand Rachel Stearns’ hesitancies to speak up in her prayer meetings and “love feasts”. The context of the early 19th century was not, after all, one that was kind toward women in a way that gave them any sort of power, even over their own experiences. 

In this sense, I can see an argument for the case that religion has aided the empowerment of women. Rather than being concerned with the “cult of true womanhood”, that the more drastic first-wave feminists were taking violent swings at during this period, Stearns was also subverting the system by being allowed space to have some form of public say over a portion of her experience.

It may be for this reason that her religious experience seemed to overcome the other parts of her experience - such as the social and economic spheres of her life. By being given a version of autonomy, the portion of her life that she had that autonomy over would be bound to be given more weight than the rest.