While women have historically made up an overwhelming percentage of America’s religious practitioners, their roles in shaping the practice as well as the doctrines of American religious groups have too often been underappreciated and undertold. For the last several decades, scholars have been working to overcome this deficit, posing questions about the ways in which women understood their relationship to religious authorities, the reasons a woman might or might not act upon a felt call to religious leadership or preaching, and of course, the many ways in which religious women have been inspired by their beliefs to pursue justice and reform in their societies.

This volume is indebted to all of the work being done by scholars in those fields to help contextualize my understanding of what was happening around the various women represented here in their own day. Yet it is not primarily an effort to argue for or against one particular approach to understanding the deeply nuanced relationship between America’s women and their respective religious beliefs. Rather, it is an attempt to allow those women to speak for themselves so that when we speak of concepts like “antebellum evangelicalism,” “anti-Catholicism,” or even the Civil Rights Movement, we better understand them not as monolithic moments in time, but as moments of intense engagement between men and women of many different persuasions. This is, of necessity, a selective and not exhaustive collection: I have focused attention on documents written by women who were associated with the leadership of their respective religious organizations in some way. While I realize that the experiences of these women may have differed in significant ways from that of their less-vocal if not less-engaged or thoughtful sisters, I nevertheless think it is important to begin our publication of documents by religious women with texts by individuals who were most clearly situated in a way to shape the discourse of their time.

I am indebted to David and Ellen Tucker for their years of friendship and deep discussion of the place of religious believers of all kinds in the American tradition and to the Ashbrook Center, for supporting the work we do in the Religion in American History and Politics program.