Some Turn-of-the-Century Women of the Cloth

The 1880s and 1890s saw women entering the fields of preaching and ministry in various religious denominations in increasing numbers.

Most women who felt a "call" to do Protestant church work answered that call within the narrow context of what was considered proper for a woman to do: They held prayer meetings, raised money to support foreign and domestic missions, participated in ladies-aid activities and organized social events at church.

When the Baptist women of Texas met in 1880 to form a statewide organization, they asked a man to preside, because it was considered improper for a woman to take charge of such an auspicious meeting. From that hesitant beginning, the Baptist women built a formidable organization by the turn of the century.

Some women were not so reluctant to speak up in public, however. Even those who were brought up in the tradition of women keeping silence in church overcame their hesitancy in their eagerness to share their religious beliefs with others. Some women held joint ministries with their husbands. Others presided over revivals and camp meetings on their own.

Many denominations distinguished between "preachers," who could only preach, but not perform certain rituals, and full-fledged, ordained ministers, who could. During the 19th century, there were many more female preachers than ordained ministers.

Among the women who carried their "call" into the pulpit, and who were active in Texas for a time, were these:

Rachel Watkins Dellgren Billings was born in Hiawatha, Kan. in 1861. Ms. Billings received her BS from Lombard University in 1886 and graduated from Ryder Divinity School with a Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1894. Together with her husband, a Unitarian minister, she served Swedish congregations in the Midwest for a time. After the Dellgrens divorced, she moved to Hico, Tex., and was licensed to preach in January 1898. She served as minister at All Souls Church for a year before she was ordained as a Universalist minister in Jan. 28, 1899. She remarried, moved to Arkansas, and was in charge of a church there from 1904 to 1906.

Eliza J. Rutherford was an ordained minister of the Methodist Protestant church. She received the "call" at a tent revival in Ennis, her hometown, in 1892. She and her husband had a joint ministry.

Mary Lee Cagle was probably one of the most active female preachers and evangelists in Texas. Born Mary Lee Wasson in 1864 in Moulton, Ala., she first felt the pull to do church work at the age of 15.

After she married Rev. R. L. Harris, a Free Methodist minister known as the Texas Cowboy Preacher, at the age of 27, she thought that she could fulfill her call by assisting her husband in his work – conducting women's prayer meetings and leading the singing at Harris' meetings. She knew that she would meet great opposition if she attempted to establish her own ministry.

In 1894, R. L. Harris organized the New Testament Church of Christ in Milan, Tenn., in which women were explicitly given the same right to preach as men. This new church was one of a growing number of congregations that were part of what is referred to as the holiness movement – an offshoot of traditional Methodism that came to include independent holiness churches and some Church of the Nazarene congregations, as well.

After Harris died in 1894, Mary Lee established her own ministry. While visiting Harris' family in 1895 in Whitney, Tex., Mary Lee organized a congregation in nearby Swedonia. Then she was asked to organize another about six miles away. This was the beginning of a lifetime of itinerant ministry. She traveled often between Tennessee and Texas, preaching and founding churches wherever she went.

In Texas, she concentrated her activities in the western counties of Taylor, Jones, Fisher and Nolan. Since it was unorthodox at the time for women to conduct camp meetings and revivals, Mary Lee found it easier to operate in the frontier atmosphere of West Texas than in the more traditional and established social order of the Old South.

Mary Lee was finally ordained in December 1899 in Milan, Tenn. During one of her meetings in Neinda, Tex., in the spring of 1898, Mary Lee converted Henry Clay Cagle, a local cowboy. They married in August 1900. Henry attended Texas Holiness University in Peniel, near Greenville in Hunt County, to train for their joint ministry. The university had been established for training Nazarene ministers, but it was also supported by Free Methodists and other holiness advocates.

Before 1908, Mary Lee Cagle had created at least 18 congregations, 11 of which were in Texas: Swedonia, Mount Zion, Roby, Center Point, Nubia, Buffalo Gap, Dora, Truby, Rising Star, Glen Cove and Tahoka. (The Buffalo Gap church building, built in 1901, is preserved today at the Buffalo Gap Historic Village south of Abilene.) The Cagles bought a house in Buffalo Gap and settled there.

In 1904, the New Testament Church of Christ united with the Independent Holiness Church to become the Holiness Church of Christ. Mary Lee and Henry Cagle continued to work within the new organization.

During her ministry, Mary Lee helped to bring many women into active ministerial roles. In 1906, of 49 licensed preachers of the united churches, five were women – almost 10 percent of the total. Seven of eight authorized home missionaries were women and six of 12 ordained foreign missionaries were female.

However, after the Holiness Church of Christ merged with two other sects to become the Church of the Nazarene in 1908, the percentage of female preachers gradually diminished. As of January 1989, fewer than one percent of Church of the Nazarene pastors were women.

Mary Lee Cagle preached her last sermon at Rotan in 1954 and died Sept. 27, 1955. Henry Cagle died six years later.

— Written by Mary G. Ramos and first published in the 1996-1997 Texas Almanac.