Deaconesses: Weaving Women into 19th-Century Transnational Protestantism

By the end of the nineteenth-century, the origin story of Protestant deaconesses came together across various countries, languages, and religious denominations. A single sentence written by Paul in his letter to the Romans names Phoebe, a deaconess from Cenchrea (Romans 16:1-2), the basis upon which both Protestants and Catholics would continue to debate the role of women in the church. Despite significant variance in their founding stories, most sought to connect the emergence of a global deaconess movement directly to biblical and apostolic precedents. This makes sense both theologically, as Protestants rooted in sola scriptura, but also worldly, as confessional and national competition threatened to divide Protestants throughout the century. Influenced by the Pietism and the Awakening Movement, some Protestant social reformers argued that the deaconess was a normative rather than exceptional role for women in the early church and believed that they could unite Protestants against global networks of Catholic Sisters.

This paper examines the transnational renewal and expansion of the deaconess role across nineteenth-century Protestant communities in Europe. It is driven by the existential historical question of what it meant to identify as “Protestant” or evangelisch rather than with the more sectarian divisions among Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, Mennonites, and Quakers. Based upon the personal and institutional records of the deaconesses, trained at Kaiserswerth (Germany as nurses and teachers, the paper places these deaconess houses and other independent institutions of Protestant women in conversation with each other across regional, national, and imperial frames of inquiry. Such debates continue today as German Catholic archbishops, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and American evangelical Protestants are again probing the theology and history of the deaconess in order to bridge religious tradition with the shifting social norms of the modern world.