Frontier Spirit: The Brave Women of the Klondike

Margaret Kechnie is head of the Women’s Studies Program at Laurentian
University. She is the co-editor of Changing Lives: Women in Northern
Ontario, and the author of Organizing Rural Women: The Federating
Women's Institutes of Ontario, 1897–1919.

At its founding, the Salvation Army made clear in its regulations and
doctrinal statements that women had the right to exercise any ministry,
from preaching to corps leadership. As it turned out, few women officers
outside the extended family of founders William and Catherine Booth
attained senior positions, while married women officers disappeared into
their husbands’ shadows.

In this solidly researched book, Andrew Eason searches for the reasons
why women did not play a more prominent role in the first 50 years of
Army history. He traces the progressive yet ambiguous views of both
William and Catherine Booth on gender equality. He also produces
extensive documentation of the experiences and views of female officers
on gender roles in the Army’s life and work.

In the end, Eason identifies three main reasons for the divergence
between the theology and the practice of gender equality in the
Salvation Army. First, evangelical teaching in the 19th century
emphasized aspects of the apostle Paul’s teaching that advocated
silent, secondary roles for women in church life. Second, popular
psychology of the day placed great emphasis on “sexual
difference”—the idea that men and women were suited for
gender-specific roles in life by virtue of differences in temperament
and physical build (i.e., men were rational and physically strong, and
thus equipped for public leadership, while women were emotional and
physically weak, and therefore suited to spiritual and emotional nurture
in the home). Third, with the British Empire under threat from European
rivals and rebellious colonial natives, society put a premium on
motherhood as the moral backbone of the imperial race.

Women in God’s Army provides yet another example of how difficult it
is for Christians with the best of doctrines to be consistently
counter-culture in practice.