Catherine Booth, the Army Mother

In the nineteenth century, when most pulpits in England were shut tight against women, there lived a woman who pried one open and never apologised for it. Her name was Catherine Booth, and history would call her the Army Mother. She helped to found the Salvation Army, that great marching company of the poor, and she did it not by standing quietly behind a famous husband but by standing beside him, and sometimes a step ahead. She was a preacher, a writer, a theologian in her own right. And in a world that told women to keep silent in church, she would not.

Catherine had been a thoughtful, sickly girl who read deeply and thought hard. She married a fiery young preacher named William Booth, and together they began to wonder what could be done for the forgotten people of England's slums. But a question pressed on her that she could not shake. If God had given her a mind, a voice, and a love for souls, why must she keep them folded up and hidden?

The answer came in a small Methodist chapel. One Sunday, by the account remembered of her, William was preaching when Catherine rose from her seat and walked to the front of the congregation. People turned. A woman, standing, in church, about to speak. Her own husband, startled, asked her what she wanted. She said she wanted to say a word. Her heart was pounding. She later admitted she felt she could have died on the spot. But she opened her mouth, and she spoke of Christ, and the people listened. William, watching, saw it plainly. He announced that his wife would preach that evening. And she did.

From that trembling moment a force was loosed that nothing could fold back up. Catherine Booth preached to packed halls. She wrote a bold pamphlet defending the right of women to speak for God, answering every objection thrown at her with Scripture and with steel. She raised her children and she raised her voice, and she would not be told the two could not go together. When the Salvation Army was born among the drinkers and the destitute of London's East End, she helped build it on a daring rule. Women could preach. Women could lead. Women could command. A woman, in that Army, could rise as far as her gifts and her God would carry her.

This was no small thing. In the respectable churches of her day, such a notion was scandalous, even dangerous. Catherine and her people were mocked in the streets, pelted, shouted down, dismissed as fanatics. Yet she joined the preaching of the gospel to hard, concrete mercy. She cared about drunken husbands and beaten wives, about hungry children and women crushed by poverty and shame. She believed the message of Christ belonged in the gutter as much as in the cathedral, and that the people who carried it there might just as well be women.

She died of cancer in 1890, after a long and painful illness borne with the same steadiness she had shown in that chapel. Thousands upon thousands filed past her coffin. The Army she had helped raise marched on across the world, into more than a hundred nations, its ranks full of women who preached and led because Catherine Booth had stood up first.

They called her the Army Mother, and the name fits, but do not make it small. She was not a gentle figure in the background. She was a general of the spirit, a woman who took the gifts God had placed in her and refused to bury them in the ground. When the church told her to sit down, she rose. And because she rose, an army of others learned that they could rise too.