Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 28:2 (Spring 2014)
Article: Selfishness One Degree Removed: Madeline Southard’s Desacralization Of Motherhood And A Tradition Of Progressive Methodism
Author: Kristin Kobes Du Mez

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PP 28:2 (Spring 2014) p. 17

Selfishness One Degree Removed: Madeline Southard’s Desacralization Of Motherhood And A Tradition Of Progressive Methodism

Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Kristin Kobes Du Mez is Associate Professor of History at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her research areas include gender and religion in nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. history; connections between gender, religion, and foreign policy; and gender issues in world Christianity. She serves on the editorial board for Perspectives: A Journal of Reformed Thought.

M. Madeline Southard (1877-1967) is known among Methodists today for her pioneering work for ecclesiastical rights for women, particularly for the pivotal role she played in the 1920s in opening up ordination to women in the Methodist Church.1 Among religious historians, she is known for founding the International Association of Women Ministers (IAWM) in 1919, an interdenominational organization that, by the 1920s, included around 10 percent of female ministers in America, and which continues to this day.2 Southard also achieved a certain notoriety in her younger years, when she accompanied the infamous Carry Nation on one of her saloon-smashing crusades, and later when she traveled the country preaching and speaking on women’s rights, suffrage, and sexuality from a biblical perspective.3

Less well remembered is Southard’s theological writing. In 1927, she published The Attitude of Jesus toward Woman, a work of feminist theology in which she drew upon her own experiences as a Methodist woman in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century America. She wrote it to provide a biblical foundation for women’s rights.4 She devoted a significant portion of her book to the ideal of Christian motherhood, or, more accurately, to her efforts to undermine that ideal. Southard had come of age in the late Victorian era, when motherhood had been elevated to be women’s sacred calling in both church and society. As a devout Methodist, Southard knew well the idealization of Christian motherhood. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the home had come to play an increasingly central role in the Methodist faith, and women had come to occupy a sacred space within the home. As wives, and especially as mothers, Methodist women were to model Christ’s self-sacrificing love and exemplify the special virtue for which Victorian women were celebrated.5

And yet, within Methodism, there was a conflicting ideal. From the earliest days, Methodists’ emphasis on the spiritual author...

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