How to Shipwreck the World: The Controversy over Women and the Division of the Restoration Movement

In 1888, a thirty-eight year old mother of six, named Clara Babcock was lecturing on the Women’s Christian Temperance Union circuit, when a Christian congregation affiliated with the American Restoration Movement invited her to speak at their church. She accepted the invitation and when the congregation asked to ordain her as their preaching minister, she agreed. Babcock was the first woman within the Restoration Movement to be ordained as a minister. Her ministry was a successful one – the two congregations at which she preached soon outgrew their building and were forced to erect larger ones, and between her ordination in 1888 and her death in 1924, she is reported to have baptized 1502 individuals. In the next few years, the legitimacy of her ordination would come into question among the contributors to the Christian Standard, but as the Restoration Movement possessed no official ecclesiastical hierarchy, her ordination was never invalidated.1 In the same year Babcock was ordained, the Restoration Movement congregations of the South confronted the question of women engaging in the ministry of the church when a series of articles was published in the Gospel Advocate, the leading periodical among Southern Restoration Movement congregations of the time. In a comparison of the two discussions th