Feminism comes from Christianity
- Elaine R Kelly
- Mar 3
- 11 min read
Updated: May 16
No, feminism is not a "worldly" or "sinful" thing to be avoided by Christians. Feminism comes from Christianity, Christians hearing God's word and obeying it.
Feminism is defined as advocating for the equality of the sexes. Feminists do not say women should rule the world or that women must have a career outside the home. Feminists advocate for a woman to be able to make her own choices about her life, body, work, and children. Her choices may change at different life stages. Feminism affirms a woman's equal opportunity to make choices. Her choices are not defined by men, society or the Bible; they are her choices. Much of the early advocacy of equal rights and opportunities, regardless of gender, was motivated by Christians after seriously studying the Bible.
Let me provide five examples of Christian women who advocated for the equality of the sexes.
Antoinette Brown Blackwell (1825 - 1921)
Antoinette Brown didn't start out advocating for equality of the sexes; she had a passion for theology and speaking. After completing a bachelor's degree at Oberlin College in Ohio in 1847, she lobbied for admission to theology. Oberlin Theological Seminary professors called the idea of a woman minister 'reckless, blasphemous and lacking in Christian precepts'. They eventually allowed her to audit the classes, but they would not grant her a graduation diploma or a license to ministry.
Nevertheless, she preached as an itinerant speaker. Rather than advocating for women's rights, she acted to obey God's call to preach the gospel. Her advocate was a Methodist minister, Luther Lee, who advocated for gender equality. He delivered a sermon at Antoinette's ordination testifying to her suitability as a preacher and her calling from God: "in our belief, our sister in Christ, Antoinette L. Brown, is one of the ministers of the New Covenant, authorized, qualified, and called by God to preach the gospel of his Son Jesus Christ."
Antoinette Brown Blackwell became the first woman ordained as a minister in a major American denomination. The Congregational church in South Butler, New York, ordained her in 1853.
Her faith led her to become active in many reform movements. She became an avid writer and public speaker on biblical interpretation, women's rights, temperance, and abolition of slavery. However, the temperance movement was essentially conservative, and they did not permit women to speak at their convention. Brown faced criticism as a woman preacher.
While her congregation had called her to ministry, she did not have the formal support of the national denomination. She had a crisis of faith when two infants in Brown Blackwell's parish died and she opposed the church doctrine that unbaptized children were damned. Brown left her position with the Congregational church, citing poor health and issues with church orthodoxy. In 1854, Blackwell wrote, "I [find] that the whole groundwork of my faith has dropped away from me." Today, we would say she deconstructed her faith because the church was promoting harmful doctrine. In effect, the church rejected her biblical interpretations and her as a minister.
"The sexes in each species of being... are always true equivalents - equals but not identical" - Antoinette Brown Blackwell
In 1856, Antoinette Brown married Samuel Blackwell and worked as an activist and public speaker. She and her sister-in-law, Lucy Stone, founded the New Jersey Woman's Suffrage Association in 1869. Brown's friends in the women's rights movement - Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony - questioned why Brown was serving the church, believing it was outdated and corrupt. The church's resistance to her preaching caused her to advocate for women's equality.
We fully believed, so soon as we saw that woman's suffrage was right, every one would soon see the same thing, and that in a year or two, at farthest, it would be granted. Antoinette Brown Blackwell
While she had left the Congregational Church, which opposed her ministry, she never left Christ. She returned to organized religion in 1878, joining the Unitarian Church, which recognized her as a minister. The Unitarian Church of that era was a Christian denomination which had broken away from other Protestant churches over differences including the damnation of infants and salvation only for the predestined elect.
Jarena Lee (1783-1864)
Like Antoinette Brown, Jarena Lee was not motivated to advocate for women's equality but to obey God's call. She was forced to advocate for women's equality when men attempted to stop her from obeying God's call for her to preach.
In 1807, Lee heard a voice telling her, "Preach the Gospel; I will put words in your mouth." Lee then told Richard Allen about her call, but he said that the Methodist Church did not allow female ministers. In 1811, she married, and her husband stopped her from preaching. At her husband's death in 1817, Jarena Lee again applied for a preaching license. In 1816, Richard Allen had co-founded the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) denomination because the Methodist Church did not allow Blacks to preach to Whites and required segregated seating. Like the Methodist Church, the AME did not allow women to preach.
Nevertheless, she became an itinerant preacher, travelling thousands of miles on foot. In one year alone, she "travelled two thousand three hundred and twenty-five miles, and preached one hundred and seventy-eight sermons."
In the face of constant hostility because she was a Black Woman preaching, she was forced to defend equal rights for women to preach as God called them.
"“If the man may preach, because the Saviour died for him, why not the woman? seeing he died for her also. Is he not a whole Saviour, instead of a half one?" Jarena Lee
Hearing her preach in 1819, Richard Allen became her advocate. Allen endorsed her as an exhorted and travelling minister, and she became the first woman licensed to preach. However, she was not ordained as a minister. Jarena Lee preceded Antoinette Brown as a female preacher, and her right to preach was officially acknowledged by AME authorities, but she was not ordained by a national church during her lifetime. The AME church posthumously ordained her in 2016.
Jarena Lee was also the first African American woman to write an autobiography. She wrote and published "The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee" in 1836. She was a pioneering figure in both theological writing and African American literary history.
The first white female autobiography was The Book of Margery Kempe, dictated to a scribe in England in 1438, including Kempe's life, religious experiences, travels, and family.
Sarah Moore Grimké (1792-1873)
Sarah and her sister, Angelina Grimke, were not initially motivated to advocate for women's equality. Their goal was to speak for the abolition of slavery. They were raised in a slave-holding family in Charleston, South Carolina, and were active in the Presbyterian church. Forced from their hometown because of their outspoken advocacy for abolition, they moved to Philadelphia and became members of anti-slavery groups. The two sisters published anti-slavery booklets in 1836, and the church responded not by addressing their concerns but by attempting to silence them on the basis of sex, saying women had no right to give letters or speeches to correct crowds of men and women.
Nevertheless, the women continued to write and speak. It was because the church ignored the women's writings that they realized the need to advocate for women's equal rights. They defended their role by quoting Jesus, who said:
"You [all people] are the light of the world".
The church's resistance to them speaking about slavery forced them to become advocates for the equal right of women to speak and teach.
During the Grimke sisters' tour of New England in 1836-37, they spoke to well over forty thousand people, teaching both men and women. Later, they spoke in the cause of suffrage, supporting the votes for women.
The Grimke sisters did not agree with the Presbyterian support of slavery and male hierarchy, and after moving to Pennsylvania, they joined the Quaker church, which worked against slavery and allowed women and men equal opportunities to preach or lead as the Spirit led.
Here are Sarah Grimke's thoughts in her own words:
"whatsoever it is morally right for a man to do, it is morally right for a woman to do." - Sarah Grimke
"[On the Adam and Eve story:] They both fell from innocence, and consequently from happiness, but not from equality." - Sarah Grimke
"I ask no favors for my sex, I surrender not our claim to equality. All I ask of our brethren is that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on the ground which God has designed us to occupy. - Sarah Moore Grimke, 1838" - Sarah Grimke
"Intellect is not sexed;... strength of mind is not sexed; and ... our views about the duties of men and the duties of women, the sphere of man and the sphere of woman, are mere arbitrary opinions, differing in different ages and countries, and dependent solely on the will and judgment of erring mortals." - Sarah Grimke
Nellie McClung (1873 - 1951)
Nellie McClung was an author, politician and social activist. A maternal feminist, her philosophy combined motherhood with equal rights for women to effect social change and reduce patriarchal injustice causing suffering of mothers and children. She argued that women should be in politics not to be like men but because women were different from men. She stated that "men make wounds and women bind them up".
She was instrumental in forming the Women's Political Equality League in 1912 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. In 1916, that led to Manitoba becoming the first province in Canada to grant women the right to vote. In 1914, the Manitoba Premier, Rodmond Robin, told Nellie McClung, "Nice women don't want the vote." McClung replied:
"By nice women . . . you probably mean selfish women who have no more thought for the underprivileged, overworked women than a pussycat in a sunny window for the starving kitten in the street. Now in that sense I am not a nice woman, for I do care." Nellie McClung
McClung felt she was following God's call on her life by speaking for the downtrodden. She wrote in 1915 that her advocacy was righteousness against injustice, born of a divine discontent. (In Times Like These, chapter VI, Nellie McClung).
McClung was elected to the provincial assembly of Alberta in 1921. She was one of the Famous Five Canadian women who took the Person's Case to the Supreme Court of Canada, asking that women be recognized as persons and therefore eligible to serve in the Senate. The case centred on whether the word "man" in the British North America Act held the meaning of "mankind" or "person" and referred to both males and females. On losing that decision, the Famous Five appealed to the British Privy Council and won.
McClung reviewed the Basis of Union of The United Church of Canada and found it said:
Article XVII Of the Ministry. We believe that Jesus Christ, as the Supreme Head of the Church, has appointed therein a ministry of the word and sacraments, and calls men to this ministry; that the Church, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, recognizes and chooses those whom He calls, and should thereupon duly ordain them to the work of ministry.
Nellie McClung noted that the British Privy Council defined man as meaning 'mankind' or 'person' and that women are persons and, therefore, eligible to be ordained ministers. McClung stated that denying a woman's right to preach denied a woman's equal worth as an heir in God's kingdom. McClung pointed to Lydia Gruchy, who had graduated with a Theology degree in 1923 and had been refused ordination.
Nevertheless, Lydia Gruchy did all the work of ministry, covering the pulpit for her male colleagues when she needed them to perform baptisms, communion, or weddings for her congregations. Being unordained meant that Gruchy did not have the tools needed to perform these tasks.
Lydia Gruchy became a test case, showing that women were capable of ministry. McClung repeatedly spoke and wrote in favour of Lydia Gruchy, who became the first woman ordained minister in a mainline church in Canada in 1936, thirteen years after she began working as a minister.
Nellie McClung saw that the Bible gave equal worth, freedoms, and responsibilities to women and men. Here are a few of her quotes:
“In dealing with the relation of women to the church... "God created man in his own image . . . male and female created he them." That is to say, He created a male man and female man....Further on in the story of the creation, it says: "He gave them dominion," ...There was no inequality to begin with. God gave them dominion over everything; there were no favors, no special privileges. Whatever inequality has crept in since has come without God's sanction.” Nellie McClung, 1915, In Times Like These
"The Christian Church has departed in some places from Christ's teaching – noticeably in its treatment of women. Christ taught the nobility of loving service freely given; but such a tame uninteresting belief as that did not appeal to the military masculine mind. It declared Christianity was fit only for women and slaves, whose duty and privilege it was lovingly to serve men. The men of Christ's time held His doctrines in contempt. They wanted gratification, praise, glory, applause, action – red blood and raw meat, and this man, this carpenter, nothing but a working man from an obscure village, dared to tell them they should love their neighbor as themselves, that they should bless and curse not." Nellie McClung, 1915, In Times Like These
“You shall know the truth—and the truth shall make you free, and this liberating truth is this:
Love your neighbor. Love is the fulfilling of the law." It is simple, but not easy. We have artificially restricted our love. Restricted it within families, classes and nations, and these restrictions cannot be removed by violence or force. There is only one way.”
- Nellie McClung, 1937, More Leaves from Lantern Lane
Addie Aylestock (1909 - 1998)
Fifteen years after Lydia Gruchy became the first White woman ordained to ministry, Canada had its first ordained Black woman. Addie Aylestock was already serving as a deacon while she was a student, but she was not permitted to be ordained when she graduated from the Toronto Bible College in 1945.
Nevertheless, Addie Aylestock served as a deacon, pastor, and lay preacher for six years. Again, her goal was not to advocate for gender equality but to obey her calling to preach. The British Methodist Episcopal (BME) was founded, supported, and led by Blacks, primarily escaped slaves, and located in predominantly Black neighbourhoods of Canada. Few Whites served as BME ministers. In 1951, thirteen years after she graduated from Bible College, the BME ordained her to ministry, and she became the first Black woman ordained in Canada.
Feminism comes from Women Obeying God's Call
These examples show that God called the women to preach God's Word, to spread the gospel, and to speak out against slavery, injustice, and poverty. But when hearers did not like the message, they silenced the women on the basis of sex. That's when these Bible-believing Christian women defended their equal right to speak and act as God called them.
History shows us that advocacy for the equality of the sexes was based on the Bible and on Christians who obeyed God's call. Christianity is the root of feminism:
"Biblical feminism cannot be historically linked with any secular feminist movement. But it is a singular fact that no secular feminist can trace the history of women's rights without lauding the efforts of many Biblical feminists, both men and women, beginning as early as the 1600's. Secular historians are more than willing to admit this and frequently honor the accomplishments of Christians in the long struggle for women's rights." Jocelyn Andersen, Woman this is WAR! Gender, Slavery and the Evangelical Caste System, 2010, page 30.
Conclusion
Feminism is not a dirty word. Feminism comes from the Bible, which calls all people equal, with equal worth, value, rights and responsibilities. The advocacy for equal rights for women began with Christians who based their beliefs and actions on the Bible and put God's word into practice, lifting up the lowly and empowering the powerless.
Christians need to take up the historic cause of being the light of the world. Don't hide a woman's light in the house, but let her out to share God's light with the world. The church and society will benefit from hearing what God has put in the woman's heart.
Elaine Ricker Kelly Author is empowering women with historical fiction about women in the Bible and early church and Christian blogs about women in leadership, church history and doctrine. Her books include:
Forgotten Followers from Broken to Bold, Book 1 (2022)
The Sword A Fun Way to Engage in Healthy Debate on What the Bible Says About a Woman's Role (2023)
Because She Was Called: from Broken to Bold, Book 2, A Novel of the Early Church, imagines Mary Magdalene's trip to testify before the emperor (2024)
Walk with Mara on Her Healing Journey: 21 Steps to Emotional Resilience (2024)
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