This book - Centro de Estudos Anglicanos

94THE EPISCOPALIANSgymen as “priests.” Finally, Cummins announced his intention to encourage otherfreedom-loving Americans to join his denomination so that the Reformed EpiscopalChurch might present a united Protestant front against the menacing spectersof Romanism and atheistic unbelief. 37Despite Cummins’s aspirations—not unlike those of broad church Episcopaliansin the same period—to oversee the creation of a pan-Protestant “nationalchurch,” the founding of the Reformed Episcopal Church did not lead to a fullscaleexodus either of evangelicals from the Episcopal Church or of Congregationalists,Presbyterians, Methodists, or Baptists from their own denominations.In fact, most evangelical Episcopalians who had once been Cummins’s alliesdenounced his actions, and the handful of clergy who joined him were, like Cheney,men seriously at odds with their bishops. As a result of the Reformed Episcopalschism, low church Episcopalians began to reaffirm the “Episcopal” partof their religious identities, while Cummins’s new denomination not only remainednumerically small but also became increasingly less “Anglican” over thenext several decades. 38THE WOMAN’S AUXILIARYIn the aftermath of the Civil War, as the male leaders of the Episcopal Churchwrangled and divided over churchmanship issues, Episcopal women increasinglyfound opportunities to unite in the exercise of their ministries in the church. Eventhough most American churchgoers were women and women had been the mainstaysof church life ever since the seventeenth century, ordained leadership remainedalmost exclusively a male province in American Christianity in themid-nineteenth century. Although a few women had been ordained in the Congregational,Unitarian, and Universalist churches, in most denominations womennot only were barred from seeking ordination but also were excluded from participationin the governance of their parishes and denominations. In the 1860sand 1870s, however, significant changes began to occur in the formal religiousactivities of women in the United States. Despite the stereotype of the middleclassVictorian woman entrusted exclusively with the care of family and home,women began to press for more active religious roles, extending their domesticresponsibilities into the work of missionary and moral reform societies. Followingthe Civil War, every major Protestant denomination organized a national women’sorganization, and in 1874 the influential, interdenominational Women’s ChristianTemperance Union also was founded. 39Among Episcopalians, the Protestant Episcopal Freedman’s Commission sponsoredthe first extensive use of churchwomen in a mission field, sending them towork as teachers among African Americans in the postbellum South. The establishmentof the Bishop Potter Memorial House in Philadelphia in 1867 also offeredinstruction to prepare women both for social service work in urban parishesand for missionary work on the western frontier. Moreover, in an effort to drawtogether and encourage the missionary concerns of Episcopal women at the na-