Preaching the Feminist Gospel?: Witnessing and Framing Black Christian Feminism through the Life of Reverend Addie Wyatt

Historical scholarship on African American Christian women's religiosity has largely been preoccupied with interrogating churches as spaces wherein which women accepted, questioned, balanced, overturned, or disengaged entirely from patriarchal notions of power seemingly inherent in Christian ideologies and in the leadership of black churches. Much of this scholarship focuses solely on the early half of the twentieth century or on women's activities and status almost exclusively within the church. This paper will take a different approach by analyzing the ways in which African American congregations (made up primarily of black women) opened up religious spaces and engaged feminist, racial, and religious conceptualizations of justice and fairness in an attempt to bridge sacred and secular in the language of equality. Perhaps best known, if known at all, as a prominent national labor leader in the United Packinghouse Workers of America and its successor unions, as a firebrand Chicago and national civil rights activist, or as a founding member of the Coalition of Labor Union Women and proponent of the Equal Rights Amendment, Addie Wyatt is less known as an ordained minister and co-pastor of Vernon Park Church of God which she and her husband founded in Chicago in 1955. In high demand throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and even into the 1980s, Rev. Wyatt addressed congregations across the nation on the rights and responsibilities of women in the church and in society—as workers, wives, mothers, voters, and leaders. Rev. Wyatt and others like her offered an alternative to conservative religious and anti-feminist readings of the Bible and interpretations of Christianity. Through sermons, speeches, articles and correspondence with congregations, this paper will discuss how Rev. Wyatt and everyday church-going women actively negotiated their status as black women and their relationships to one another, to God, and to society.