"Faithful Child Of God": Nancy Towle, 1796-1876
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis is an attempt to understand the shifting attitudes toward ordained female leadership through the study of one of the over one hundred women who were preaching in America between 1740-1845.Nancy Towle (1796-1876) found her identity and vocation in the revivals of evangelical Christianity.Between 1821-1832 she was an itinerant evangelist, traveling more than twenty thousand miles in twelve states, Canada, England and Ireland, preaching among many different Christian communities in a variety of settings.An educated woman from an elite Hampton, New Hampshire revolutionary family, Nancy Towle began preaching when dissenting sects welcomed the participation of female preachers.As the sects became established denominations and excluded female preachers, Nancy Towle entered a publishing campaign to protest and defend the role of women in the evangelical enterprise.She published three books and a newspaper.This thesis examines Towle's memoirs in comparison with those of other evangelicals, traces her biography in historical context and analyzes each of her publications to see how they are a defense of female piety and preaching.Her publications provide valuable information not only about herself, but also about the community of female preachers who were active in the revivals of the early nineteenth century.As if aware that female preachers would be forgotten, Towle was determined to preserve their lives in print.Nancy Towle was not only a theologically conservative evangelical preacher, but also an advocate for female equality.Just as her itineracy spanned the fluid historical period of welcome then exclusion for female preachers, Towle bridged the ideological gap between the evangelicals and the woman's rights activists.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".