Female Ministry; or, Woman’s Right to Preach the Gospel
Catherine Booth’s pamphlet arguing from Scripture that women may preach. She holds that the public ministry of women is not forbidden in the Bible but enjoined there by precept and example.
Catherine Booth takes the objections to women preaching one at a time. She argues that custom is being mistaken for nature, that 1 Corinthians 11 assumes that women prayed and prophesied in the assembly, that the silence required in 1 Corinthians 14 concerns disorderly questioning, and that the prophecy of Joel quoted at Pentecost and Paul’s words in Galatians 3:28 put women beside men in the work of the gospel.
The preface says that the argument had first appeared as Female Teaching and that this edition drops the controversial passages. The Salvation Army’s own chronology gives 1859 for her first pamphlet. It is her own statement of the case for women preachers.
Cited in
- July 1865, firm date