The Women of the Revival — The Half We Cannot Name

What the records did not keep

This chapter has no single name at the top of it, and that is the first thing worth saying about it.

Every other chapter in this book is built on a man whose dates, posts and famous sentences were written down. The women of the revival were at least half of it — by every serious account, the movement ran through households and through networks of women as much as through pulpits — and they are far harder to name.

The reasons are not mysterious. The people keeping records were missionaries and church officials writing about ordained men. Positions that generated paperwork were held by men. When a movement's most important events happen in a marriage, a compound, a group of women meeting to confess, they leave less behind than a synod does.

So this chapter is going to be honest about a gap rather than filling it with invented figures. What can be said is what the revival did in the lives of women, and that is substantial and documented in the aggregate even where the names are lost.

What the revival gave women

A voice in the meeting. The revival's core practice was testimony and public confession, and it did not restrict either by sex. In a setting where formal religious authority was male and European, a movement in which anyone might stand and speak of their own sin and their own forgiveness gave women a spiritual standing the surrounding church structure did not.

Leverage inside marriage. This is the least romantic and possibly the most important. Balokole conversion meant confessing specific sin, which in practice meant men confessing adultery, drunkenness, theft and cruelty — out loud, to their wives among others. Households were reordered. Decisions began to be shared. The movement pressed hard against polygyny. For a great many women, the revival's arrival was not an abstraction; it was a change in the man they lived with.

A recognisable identity. Balokole women were identifiable — in dress, in the ordering of their households, in their hospitality, in the practice of confession. That is easy to caricature and was caricatured at the time. It also meant belonging to something visible, in one's own right, that was not simply an extension of a husband's status.

What we should do with the silence

Two things, and they pull in different directions.

The first is to resist inventing. It would be easy, and it would feel generous, to construct a representative woman for this chapter and give her a name and a story. It would also be a lie, and a book that is about people who refused to pretend cannot pretend on their behalf.

The second is to refuse the conclusion that they were not there. An absence in the record is evidence about the record. The revival's own theology gives us the argument: if the movement's engine was ordinary people confessing ordinary sin in ordinary rooms, then the fact that we have the names of the men who preached and not of the women who did the same work in kitchens tells us who was holding the pen.

What they teach us

Most of the church's work has always been done by people we cannot name. This chapter is unusual only in admitting it.

A movement is tested at home. The revival's claim to be real rests less on its conventions than on whether the men who confessed at them behaved differently in their own houses. The women were the ones positioned to know.

If you are keeping the record, notice whom you are leaving out. That is not a modern preoccupation imposed on the past. It is a practical instruction for anyone writing anything down now.

The text underneath it

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

The revival got further with the first two clauses than most movements of its era, and further with the third than the church around it. Not all the way. Neither have we.

A prayer

Lord, thank You for the ones whose names we do not have — the women who confessed, forgave, kept households and carried this thing without being written about. Forgive us for the records we kept badly. Teach me to notice who is doing the work in front of me, and to say so while they can hear it. Amen.