When we tell the story of evangelicalism, we usually reach for famous pastors, theologians, and institutions. But what happens when we turn our attention to the women who taught, organized, wrote, fundraised, evangelized, and sustained evangelical life across generations? In this episode, hosts John Fea, Dan Hummel, and Maggie Capra are joined in the studio by historian Andrea Turpin for a wide-ranging conversation about women as co-creators of evangelicalism at every level.

Beginning with the story of Welsh evangelist Jesse Penn-Lewis—who built a transatlantic preaching career through evangelical institutions even as those institutions remained led by men—the conversation explores how women shaped evangelical spirituality, education, missions, and ministry, often precisely because formal leadership roles were closed to them. Along the way the group examines the relationship between evangelicalism and feminism, the history of women’s education, the rise of women’s missionary organizations, and how historians are rethinking who belongs in the story of American evangelicalism. It’s a conversation about power, influence, faith, and why some of the most consequential figures in evangelical history have so often remained in the background.

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Andrea Turpin is a professor of history at Baylor University, specializing in women’s history, the history of education, and American religion. She is the author of a study of gender and the founding of American higher education, and is currently at work on a project on women in the fundamentalist–modernist controversy, focused on the era’s women’s missionary organizations. 

IN THIS EPISODE

· Jesse Penn-Lewis and the paradox of a woman building a preaching career through male-led institutions—and why her central concerns were the Holy Spirit and spiritual warfare, not chiefly “women’s issues.”

· “Progressive” as a historical category: why 19th-century evangelicals often pushed furthest on women’s education—and what “progressive compared to the wider culture” does and doesn’t mean.

· Evangelical pragmatism and women’s education: Mary Lyon and Mount Holyoke, and the coeducational (and biracial) founding of Oberlin under Charles Finney.

· The waves of feminism, from the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments through second- and third-wave feminism—and the surprisingly loose correlation between religious affiliation and support for suffrage.

· Teaching as women’s sanctioned space: Sunday school, Henrietta Mears, the “deputy husband” and Republican motherhood, and the long argument over 1 Timothy 2:12.

· Egalitarian vs. complementarian: how two categories hardened in the early 1990s, and Turpin’s case for a lost middle—“complementarity without hierarchy.”

· Women’s missionary organizations and church polity: how women held evangelism and social service together as the fundamentalist–modernist split tore them apart—and why polity determined whether anyone listened.

· Recovering hidden labor: Biddy Chambers and the making of My Utmost for His Highest, and a call for women in evangelicalism to donate their papers to the archives.

PEOPLE, PLACES, and TERMS

· Jesse Penn-Lewis — Welsh evangelist; author of The Magna Carta of Woman and War on the Saints.

· Mary Lyon (Mount Holyoke) and Charles Finney / Oberlin College.

· Phoebe Palmer, Hannah Whitall Smith, Henrietta Mears, Helen Barrett Montgomery, Biddy Chambers.

· Beverly LaHaye, Phyllis Schlafly, Elisabeth Elliot; the Equal Rights Amendment.

· Evangelical feminists: Nancy Hardesty, Letha Dawson Scanzoni, Sharon Gallagher.

· Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and the “deputy husband”; Anne Hutchinson; the Grimké sisters and Christabel Pankhurst.

Key terms: evangelical pragmatism, postmillennialism, separate spheres, egalitarian and complementarian, “women’s work for women.”

BOOKS MENTIONED

· Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750 (Knopf, 1982).

· Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (Liveright, 2020).

· Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth (Brazos Press, 2021).

· Margaret Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present (Yale University Press, 1993).

· Donald W. Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage (Harper & Row, 1976).

· David R. Swartz, Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).

· Brantley W. Gasaway, Progressive Evangelicals and the Pursuit of Social Justice (University of North Carolina Press, 2014).