Limited Liberty The Legacy Of Four Pentecostal Pioneers

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Book Reviews / Pneuma 31 (2009) 105-160

Estrelda Y. Alexander, Limited Liberty: The Legacy of Four Pentecostal Pioneers (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2008). xiv + 193 pp. $16.00 paper.

In January 1936, Los Angeles Times columnist Alma Whitaker jubilantly proclaimed “Aimee Turns Feminist.” Famed evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson had just denounced gender discrimination in the pentecostal movement. Estrelda Y. Alexander’s Limited Liberty: The Legacy of Four Pentecostal Pioneers focuses on McPherson, and three other pioneering pen- tecostal women — Mary Magdalena Lewis Tate, Florence Louise Crawford, and Ida Rob- inson. Her purpose is to delineate “the strategies they employed to secure leadership roles for themselves and other women clergy within the movement” (p. x). A minister herself, as well as a theologian, Alexander is not just interested in these women for history’s sake. She believes that they matter today. “As contemporary pentecostal women struggle to gain full clergy rights and to change a tradition . . . it is important that models of courageous fore- mothers who challenged their limited liberty within the early movement sustain them in the struggle” (p. xiv).

Nevertheless, this is not a happy story. Each of the women proﬁ led had to abandon the increasingly hierarchical, more established pentecostal denominations of the 1910s and 1920s to do what they believed God had called them to. Rather than challenge their fellow believers to embrace the egalitarianism of the gospel, they established new pentecostal denominations. “T ey sought not only freedom to preach, but full clergy rights — liberty to set up their congregations as they saw ﬁ t, oversee those congregations, and direct the work of other ministers” (p. 147). Yet their legacy, like their liberty, was limited. For the most part, leadership in the denominations they built is now primarily in the hands of men. Alexander identiﬁ es how and why the promise of the early years was lost. “T ese women more or less ‘dictated’ doctrine and institutional polity based on what they believed God revealed to them personally. By acting in this manner, they failed to put into place a mechanism to replicate the type of institutional leadership qualities among the women who worked with and for them that could sustain the legacy of women’s leadership within their own denominations or allow a pattern of such leadership to be replicated in sister Pentecos- tal denominations” (p. 156). Tate, Crawford, Robinson, and McPherson were charismatic individuals who were more interested in preparing souls for heaven than preaching gender equality on earth.

Alexander relies heavily on secondary sources for her arguments, which is at times a problem. Only a handful of professional historians have studied the pentecostal movement, and despite the prominence of women in pentecostalism, few scholars have provided any sustained gender analysis. Unfortunately for Alexander, Anthea Butler’s book on women in the Church of God in Christ, as well as my own work on McPherson, appeared at roughly the same time as Limited Liberty. T ese books illustrate that the newest generation of pentecostal historians is paying far more attention to gender than their predecessors. It may well be that ministers and theologians looking for models to emulate will have many more examples, and a lot better understanding of those examples, to choose from in the next few years.

Temporary periods of gender egalitarianism and ministerial equality tend to occur dur- ing great revivals. During the Great Awakening, the revivals of the early nineteenth century,

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Book Reviews / Pneuma 31 (2009) 105-160

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and in the pentecostal revivals of the early twentieth, women discovered exceptional oppor- tunities to preach and lead. Yet in every case, as revival ﬁ res waned, men reestablished control. I am not sure that Tate, Crawford, Robinson, and McPherson can really help. It may take a religious revival combined with an explicit feminism to make permanent the sorts of changes that Alexander hopes for. Nevertheless, Limited Liberty is a fascinating account of pentecostalism’s early pioneers.

Reviewed by Matthew Avery Sutton

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