This book - Centro de Estudos Anglicanos

98THE EPISCOPALIANSareas through the work of various women’s organizations, the Girls’ FriendlySociety being the most notable. Founded in England, the Girls’ Friendly Societycame to the United States in 1877 when Emily M. Edson, a member of St. Anne’sChurch in Lowell, Massachusetts, established a chapter of the organization at herparish. Edson was concerned about the fate of young women working in the textilemills in her area, and she convinced other women in her church to meet regularlywith the millworkers. She hoped that “watching over the [workers], makingfriends with them, bringing them to the notice of the clergyman of the parish, andtaking an interest in their welfare” would benefit them “in the most exposed andtrying period of their lives.” 52 Two other chapters were soon formed in Massachusetts,and by 1885 the society had not only spread to Maryland and New Yorkbut also formed a central governing council. Adopting the rules of the Englishassociation prohibiting anyone “who has not borne a virtuous character” fromjoining the society, Episcopal women set up educational programs, lending libraries,and classes in needlework, and they engaged the young women withwhom they met in discussing topics such as “Good Manners” and “Good Taste.” 53Concurrent with this trend, Episcopal Church leaders made tentative but definitesteps toward the professionalization of the denomination’s women workers.In September 1857, William Whittingham, the bishop of Maryland, “set apart”(though he pointedly did not “ordain”) Adeline Blanchard Tyler and five otherwomen as the first American deaconesses. Serving at St. Andrew’s Church inBaltimore, the deaconesses ministered as nurses to the sick and dying in the city.In succeeding decades, bishops in other dioceses followed Whittingham’s example.In 1864 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Richard Hooker Wilmer set apart threewomen as deaconesses; eight years later, Abram Littlejohn of Long Island establishedan order of deaconesses in his diocese, empowering seven women “to servethe widow and the orphan, the sick and the destitute, the wretched and the distressed.”54 Although the exact status of deaconesses within the ordained hierarchyof the church later proved controversial, the women who served in that role atthe end of the nineteenth century managed a variety of social service tasks. 55 Theydirected programs in large parishes influenced by the institutional church movement,where space was available for health clinics, schools, recreational activities,and other programs for working-class Americans. Deaconesses also served insettlement houses, worked as matrons in church hospitals and children’s homes,held positions at girls’ schools, and labored in far-flung missionary outposts inJapan and China.Finally, at the most progressive end of the social gospel spectrum, a small buthighly influential group of Episcopalians envisioned the complete transformationof American society through the auspices of the church. Unlike evangelical Protestantreformers, who in the antebellum period had attacked slavery and alcoholismfor contaminating the sanctity of the individual will, these socially radicalEpiscopalians were often inspired by Anglo-Catholic sacramental views andstressed both the corporate nature of the church and the responsibility of Christiansfor all of society. 56