The next major development in the diaconate, after the Protestant Reformation, occurred in the nineteenth century and originated in the Germanies. The Napoleonic Wars, which ended in 1815, left families disrupted, women widowed, and children orphaned. The industrial revolution, arriving later in Europe than in England, brought with it the problems of urbanization.
Germany made a unique contribution to urban work in the form of the Inner Mission, a program of social action and evangelism that began with rescue houses for children who were neglected or abandoned during the wars. In 1833, in Hamburg, Johannes Wichern founded a home for vagrant boys, educating them and training them, gathering them into groups of twelve to fourteen boys with an “older brother,” a new type of deacon. In 1839 Wichern founded a brother house and trained deacons for work in jails, slums, and places where many pastors would not go. As the movement spread in the Germanies and beyond, deacons were trained in other places, too, sometimes in conjunction with their female counterparts, deaconesses. The Inner Mission included institutions such as seamen’s missions, hostels, hospices, halfway houses, and homes to rescue women from PROSTITUTION and work such as visitation of prisons, distribution of literature, and youth work. Deacons would also work in hospitals.
The deaconess movement in the Germanies owes its origins to Theodore Fliedner (1800–1864), a parish pastor at Kaiserswerth on the Rhine River just below Düsseldorf, who was inspired by trips to England where he visited ELIZABETH FRY, the prison reformer, and to the NETHERLANDS where he became aware of Mennonite deaconesses. Fliedner established at Kaiserswerth a halfway house for women prisoners in 1833 and a kindergarten and a school for nurses in 1836, an orphanage in 1842, and a mental hospital in 1852. To staff these institutions he educated women to be nurses, teachers, and social workers, and called them deaconesses.
The Napoleonic Wars had left many women without men. Single women of rural or artisan families came to Kaiserswerth to be educated. Many became deaconesses, living together in mother houses, dressed in the blue dress and white bonnet of the Kaiserswerth deaconess, committing themselves for five years at a time, receiving no salary except pocket money and a promise that they would be cared for in their old age. From Kaiserswerth they were sent out to other parts of Germany and abroad. They founded the nursing movement in the Germanies, some of them heading up the hospitals in which they served.
The movement grew enormously both in numbers of deaconesses and of mother houses. In 1861 Fliedner organized a General Conference of deaconess mother houses. Besides Fliedner, others founded mother houses, among whom was WILHELM LÖHE of Neuendettelsau, Bavaria (1854). Some mother houses, such as Bielefeld in Westphalia (1869), built clusters of institutions for the sick, mentally ill, and elderly. Later, under Adolf Hitler, German deaconesses took heroic measures to protect these disadvantaged.
The deaconess movement spread beyond Germany to France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, RUSSIA, Austria-Hungary, and Britain. In 1862 the first deaconess of the Church of England, Elizabeth Ferard, was set apart by the Bishop of London. Her movement continues today in the deaconesses of St. Andrew’s House, London. However, the OXFORD MOVEMENT in England and its religious sisterhoods interfered with the attraction of the deaconess movement, as did the fact that nursing in England developed along secular lines, Florence Nightingale having stayed at Kaiserswerth but never having become a deaconess. British deaconesses were less involved in nursing than their Continental counterparts.
Methodists and Baptists in England also had deaconesses, and Methodism would play a prominent role when deaconesses spread to the New World, although the deaconess movement in America owes its foundation to William Passavant, a Lutheran pastor, who, after a visit to Kaiserswerth, consecrated his first deaconesses in America on May 28, 1850.
The Lutheran deaconesses movement in the New World followed the mother-house model of the Old World with centers in areas where Germans and Scandinavians settled: Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Brooklyn, and Omaha, for instance. In some centers there was training for deacons, too, in Colorado and Nebraska. Philanthropists and trustees founded deaconess homes and hospitals, but in the case of the Norwegians, a deaconess from Norway, Elizabeth Fedde, brought the movement to Brooklyn and Minneapolis. Lutheran deaconesses often spoke the language of the mother country to each other and in the mother house.
Although the deaconesses movement never became as large in the United States as it had been in Europe, there were deaconesses from many Protestant denominations: Reformed, Baptist, Episcopal, Congregational, Presbyterian, Mennonite, and Methodist. There were also interdenominational deaconess associations. Women of German descent were well represented, and sometimes mother houses in Europe, such as Bielefeld and Neuendettelsau, sent deaconesses to the United States. Deaconesses founded or staffed hospitals that dot the country today, some still with “Deaconess” in their titles, but it was not so much nursing that caught on among American deaconesses as the inner-city work of the Methodists.
Among Methodists in America, deaconesses got a later start than among Lutherans. Prominent Methodist women agitated for the deaconess cause, including the well-educated sisters, Jane and Henrietta Bancroft, deans of the women’s colleges at Northwestern University and the University of Southern California. The General Conference of the Methodist Church recognized deaconess work as an institution of the church in 1888, and the Chicago Training School for City and Home and Foreign Missions (1885) became the first school for deaconesses in the Methodist Church, although it was not limited to deaconesses. By 1915 Methodists had founded sixty such schools across the country in cities such as Boston, New York, San Francisco, and Grand Rapids.
Methodist deaconesses were particularly active in work in the inner city, especially among immigrants. They met women arriving at train stations and found them safe housing, helped people find work, opened clubs for young people, sponsored mother’s circles, and established kindergartens and nurseries. Aware of society’s problems, they opposed child labor (see CHILDHOOD) and were active in the TEMPERANCE movement.
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