Abstract:

Based on the biblical example of Phoebe and drawing on European precedents, American Protestants at the end of the nineteenth century created the office of deaconess. During the movement's heyday, from 1880 to 1930, more than two thousand women from a dozen denominations chose to remain single, wear a uniform garb, and receive an allowance as they lived and worked together nursing, teaching, care giving and occasionally evangelizing. The disparate diaconates took their character through the unique cultures and histories of different denominations but were linked by theologies focused on saving the soul by meeting the needs of the body.

Deaconesses played on ambiguities in assumptions about women's nature and social position to argue that women were especially needed, and fitted, for deaconess work. While harnessing maternalist strategies and rhetoric, deaconesses challenged the institutions of marriage, motherhood, and home by deliberately choosing to remain outside them. Deaconesses also engaged deeply with American Catholicism, both real and imagined. Catholicism served variously as precedent, threat, exemplar and foil for the diaconate. As unsalaried workers, deaconesses promoted an allowance as the hallmark of a consecrated life, eschewing ambition and financial gain. In fact the needs-based allowance linked deaconesses with other women of the time and only served to mask deaconesses' real need for money. Deaconesses looked to the ordained clergy as a model of a consecrated profession just as ministers used deaconesses to bolster their newly professional standing. But what deaconesses created was not an equivalent of the clergy; it was a singular vocation for women. Built on these shifting understandings, the deaconess office proved to be a fragile creation.

This dissertation analyzes the paradoxical group of women called deaconesses. Deaconesses invoked common Protestant American assumptions as they defined their vocation, and studying deaconesses uncovers much about the culture in which they lived. But in their work and especially in their unique lifestyle, deaconesses stood apart from mainstream culture in important and revealing ways. Examining deaconesses complicates traditional narratives of American religious history and challenges the facile reduction of women's religious history to the quest for ordination or ecclesiastical equality.