Life Story: Jarena Lee (1783–1855)
Preacher of the Second Great Awakening

Life Story: Jarena Lee (1783–1855)
Preacher of the Second Great Awakening

Jarena was a very spiritual person, but she had never found a religious community that was right for her. About 20 years old, Jarena moved to Philadelphia to work as a domestic servant. In her spare time she went the many churches in the city. One day she attended a service at Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church and heard Bishop Richard Allen speak. As a formerly enslaved person, he founded the Church when the white parish he previously attended began segregating its services.
There was no segregation at Mother Bethel’s because all parishioners were Black. The services resonated with Jarena’s feelings and experiences. She asked to be baptized into the church.

Around 1807, Jarena felt God had called her to the ministry, but women were not allowed to speak in most Christian churches based on a scriptural prohibition.

Jarena became part of a broad spiritual movement called the Second Great Awakening that lasted from the 1790s to the 1840s. A religious fervor crossed the land and reached its peak in the 1820s, when Jarena began her missionary work.
It was not just a religious movement but also was a social revolution. A central idea was that anyone saved could be a spiritual leader. Women organized and flocked to the huge religious gatherings called camp meetings and converted in huge numbers. About 100 women became preachers who traveled the country like Jarena seeking converts. Many used their platform to popularize reform movements like temperance, abolition, and women’s rights. For example, Jarena joined the American Anti-slavery Society in 1839.

Jarena Lee and the other female preachers of the Second Great Awakening were trailblazers. At the start of her life, Jarena was not allowed to speak out at church services because people believed it went against the teachings of the bible. By the time of her death in 1855, religious women like Sojourner Truth were meeting with U.S. presidents to demand the abolition of slavery.

Jarena Lee: in Her Own Words
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_Z21MQcPNA

This resource is adapted from the New-York Historical Society’s Saving Washington: The New Republic and Early Reformers, 1790-1848 curriculum.

Women & the American Story
https://wams.nyhistory.org/building-a-new-nation/american-woman/jarena-lee/

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