Priscilla Papers ◆ Vol. 28, No. 2 ◆ Spring 2014 • 17 KRISTIN KOBES DU MEZ is Associate Professor of HIstory at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her research areas include gender and religion in nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. history; connections between gender, religion, and foreign policy; and gender issues in world Christian- ity. She serves on the editorial board for Perspectives: A Journal of Reformed Thought. Selfishness One Degree Removed: Madeline Southard’s Desacralization of Motherhood and a Tradition of Progressive Methodism Kristin Kobes Du Mez M. Madeline Southard (1877–1967) is known among Methodists today for her pioneering work for ecclesiastical rights for women, particularly for the pivotal role she played in the 1920s in open- ing up ordination to women in the Methodist Church.1 Among religious historians, she is known for founding the International Association of Women Ministers (IAWM) in 1919, an interde- nominational organization that, by the 1920s, included around 10 percent of female ministers in America, and which continues to this day.2 Southard also achieved a certain notoriety in her younger years, when she accompanied the infamous Carry Na- tion on one of her saloon-smashing crusades, and later when she traveled the country preaching and speaking on women’s rights, sufrage, and sexuality from a biblical perspective.3 Less well remembered is Southard’s theological writing. In 1927, she published he Attitude of Jesus toward Woman, a work of feminist theology in which she drew upon her own experi- ences as a Methodist woman in late nineteenth- and early twen- tieth-century America. She wrote it to provide a biblical founda- tion for women’s rights.4 She devoted a signiicant portion of her book to the ideal of Christian motherhood, or, more accurately, to her eforts to undermine that ideal. Southard had come of age in the late Victorian era, when motherhood had been elevated to be women’s sacred calling in both church and society. As a devout Methodist, Southard knew well the idealization of Chris- tian motherhood. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the home had come to play an increasingly central role in the Methodist faith, and women had come to occupy a sacred space within the home. As wives, and especially as mothers, Methodist women were to model Christ’s self-sacriicing love and exemplify the special virtue for which Victorian women were celebrated.5 And yet, within Methodism, there was a conlicting ideal. From the earliest days, Methodists’ emphasis on the spiritual au- thority of individual believers had empowered women to rise to positions of leadership and transcend conventional roles. Within late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Methodism, these competing impulses remained in tension. Domesticity persisted as a powerful cultural ideal for middle-class women, but, at the same time, the rise of the holiness movement—with its renewed emphases on individual spiritual empowerment, the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit, and the pursuit of “social holiness”—once again bolstered women’s claims to religious and social authority.6 his dual heritage contributed to the proliferation of nine- teenth-century social reform movements. Deemed especially vir- tuous and charged with protecting their homes from the evils of the world, growing numbers of Protestant women realized that, in order to do so, they would need to move far beyond the do- mestic sphere. Combining domesticity with religious and social empowerment, these enterprising women set out to reform the world through missions, temperance, and social purity reform.7 Methodist women were oten at the forefront of these social en- terprises. With her activist work in temperance and social purity reform, Southard was no exception.8 Even as women found they could justify the expansion of their activities, the domestic ideal nonetheless constrained wom- en’s activities and identities in signiicant ways. For women to claim social power, they needed to conform to the contours of the domestic ideal—an ideal sometimes diicult, if not impos- sible, to attain—and an ideal that Southard increasingly came to believe conlicted with the expansive understanding of Christian womanhood she found in the Scriptures. She sought through her theological writings to divest motherhood of its religious import, a crucial step in her eforts to construct a Christian foundation for women’s rights.9 The greatness of man and the glories of womanhood Even as she fashioned a career combating the social and religious elevation of domesticity and motherhood, Southard’s personal journals reveal a more conlicted relationship with the domestic ideal. hough she felt God had called her to public ministry, pri- vately, she yearned to experience the love of a husband and the “dream of motherhood.”10 hroughout her career, she struggled to reconcile the choices she had made to pursue an unconven- tional woman’s life with the inner longings she fought to keep at bay. In her youth, she had turned down suitors because she felt she did not love them with the depth of love necessary for a true marriage, and she later relected how she had been “too absorbed in intellectual and spiritual life, in public service” to consider marriage at that time, noting that she likely “would have chafed under its sacriices.” Instead, she wanted “to be great (and have the right to do great things) as man is great.” By the time she was in her thirties, however, her longing for some of the traditional “glories of womanhood” had intensiied, conlicting with her call to public service.11 In her journals during this period, she tells of a “dull pain” that was always with her, a longing for a home, a husband, and children. Her pain was intensiied by her belief that God had “gently whispered” to her that she would have “this git, this glory of motherhood.” As the years went by, she struggled to keep faith: “My soul cries out again, almost in anguish, that I too may share