Canadian Methodist Women, 1766–1925: Marys, Marthas, Mothers in Israel

Jay Newman is a professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph. His
books include Inauthentic Culture and Its Philosophical Critics and
Biblical Religion and Family Values.

Independent scholar Marilyn Fдrdig Whiteley provides here a concise but
comprehensive survey of the major ways in which Canadian Methodist women
expressed their Methodist faith in the period prior to the absorption of
Canadian Methodism into the new United Church of Canada.

Making efficient use of extensive archival material, including personal
papers and Methodist periodicals, Whiteley shows us how Canadian
Methodist women provided hospitality to itinerant preachers, performed
the duties of ministers’ wives, participated in ladies’ aid groups
to help in the building and maintenance of churches, organized and
taught in Sunday schools, supported missionary work and eventually
actively participated in it, worked at social reform projects in the
spirit of the Social Christianity and Social Gospel movements, promoted
temperance, and ultimately took on major leadership roles in some of the
Methodist churches.

Whiteley’s accounts are agreeably readable, and she provides
appropriate and vivid images of representative figures such as Annie
Leake, Nellie McClung, and Elizabeth Sutherland Strachan. She
endeavours, not entirely successfully, to indicate how the distinctive
spiritual vision of the Wesleys enabled and often led Methodist women to
express their faith in ways that would have been inappropriate for women
of other Christian denominations, and she notes in this regard, for
example, Methodism’s itinerant ministry and the Methodist system of
class meetings.

For some students of Canadian religious history, perhaps particularly
those interested in the latest advances in cultural studies and feminist
theory, Whiteley’s approach to her subject may well seem
extraordinarily old-fashioned. Certainly many readers will regard
Whiteley’s overall attitude toward the Methodist women whose spiritual
lives she chronicles to be overly sentimental and often far too
generous. Whiteley’s survey will generally satisfy devoted Methodists
and others who want to be able to take a positive view of these women,
but it will disappoint those readers who want to know more about the
contribution of Methodist temperance crusaders, bigoted proselytizers,
and kindred types to some of the more unappealing features of Canadian
culture. Still, this is a useful study that is accessible to general as
well as academic readers.