In a lecture about the deaconess movement to a group aspiring to join the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) Diaconate, I commented that it was a worthy movement that could not be sustained. A young woman asked: why? I tried to explain that young women like her would not train, as the original deaconesses had, for four or five years to be sanctified scullery maids. She would not agree, thinking they wanted to fill an office in the church like she was hoping to. This helped me understand again the way a word can be filled with different content over time.
Legath comes to this story having not heard of the deaconess movement until her graduate years. Her interest in the movement and her study of it gives others a picture of a world that is no longer. Her brief discussion about the influence of the nineteenth-century translation of the Authorized Version of the Bible—which translated διακονια as “deaconess” to describe the role of Phoebe in Romans 16:1—helps us see the problem. One can read in all the deaconess literature an almost desperate effort to base their movement on this one verse in the Bible. That being said, the deaconess movement, begun in the nineteenth century in England and Germany and active around the world, flourished as women saw in the office a chance to serve their Lord in a new way.
Legath divides her work between the historical and topical: the first chapter, “A Tapestry,” explores the various deaconess communities she found in America, both English and German, especially Fliedner of Kaiserwerth, with no mention of the community in Neuendettelsau. She sees two streams in America: the one, Protestant, including Methodists, Evangelical Reformed, Baptists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians; the other, Lutheran. The Protestant orders divided into two groups: those like the Methodists rooted in the Social Gospel movement and the high church Episcopalians who saw deaconesses more liturgically. The Lutheran divided by ethnicity immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia. Legath focuses her attentions mostly on the Protestant side—Methodists, the General Synod of what merged into the United Church of Christ, and Episcopalians. She conflates all of the Lutheran ethnic divisions into one. As the book went on, it was clear that the Eastern German Lutherans of Baltimore, especially, spoke for all Lutherans in America, neglecting the Scandinavian mother houses.
The topical chapters deal with fundamental issues in the movement: deaconesses and gender, Catholicism, the allowance, and the ordained ministry. I found these chapters harder to follow: the references wandered around chronologically and were less generously sourced than they might have been, especially on gender issues. While it is true that ideas about women and their “natural” characteristics persisted far into the twentieth century, there was a change after the turn of the last century when women who would have become deaconesses tended to become nurses without the restrictions of the office of a deaconess. Was that because of a change in thoughts about gender? Maybe.
The anti-Catholicism rampant among Protestants worldwide then also made for complications as young Protestant women took on the garb and lived in motherhouses. Many thought these resembled nunneries, an idea Protestants felt they had to fight. This chapter, which seems repetitious, gets at some significant historical issues many do not know about today. The giving of meager allowances to the deaconess is also well worth exploring. One might argue that such a practice drove young women toward careers in nursing or teaching that paid women salaries—although usually half what men got, since men were assumed to have several mouths to feed at home.
Legath makes few forays into the rich collections of Scandinavian Lutheran deaconess materials, which she decided to conflate with the German. It skews the story somewhat. Scandinavians tended to be less patriarchal than Germans, as seen in women running the mother houses. For example, Elisabeth Fedde—founder of the Deaconess Motherhouse in Brooklyn and Minneapolis—spoke publicly for her communities more than the men who ran her boards, although they admittedly had more power, which she resented.
I found the final chapters on where the diaconate is going worthwhile. Legath follows the development of the movement and shows how it morphed into the renewal of the deaconate throughout the worldwide church. The movement has redefined itself and become a much more liturgical office and vocation than most founders imagined. The author shows this by looking closely at the Lutheran Deaconess Association (LDA) out of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. It started much later than the others, and it has persisted and redefined itself through the turbulence of the 1960s. At issue: the nature of a woman. Was she naturally more caring and suited for the vocation? These criticisms of the traditional notion of women struck at the self-definition of many a deaconess. As the Lutheran churches struggled through the merger that established the ELCA in 1988, the LDA became leaders in the move to make women full participants in the new church. Their leader, Louise Williams, an important source for Legath, helped her reflect on these issues.
The author also describes the remaining office of deaconess as practiced in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, which does not permit women pastors and has over three hundred deaconesses. The trajectory of the diaconate as it helped argue for women pastors—hardly the goal of the original deaconesses—is something Legath considers in closing. Ecumenically, the office of deacon has been an issue for the past decades. The ELCA this summer will now vote on making deacons equal to those of the Episcopal Church and its three-fold ministry. Thus, an ELCA diaconal minister, who could trace the origins of her office back to a motherhouse, will hold an office far from what the early founders had imagined. Legath helps unravel some of this for readers who have never heard any of these stories.
