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You either respect or dislike Catherine Mumford Booth, the sweet, diminutive, but strong-minded wife of the Salvation Army’s founder, William Booth. In intellect she far excelled her husband’s modest gifts; in preaching she exceeded his powers of persuasion. Constance M. Coltman may have overstated the case: “It was she who turned an energetic, rather vulgar, but simple-minded dyspeptic into one of the great religious leaders of the world.”

Catherine was born in Derbyshire in 1829 to Methodist parents. Her father was an occasional lay preacher and carriage maker; her mother was a devout woman, who, after her father’s fall from grace to alcoholism, lived a lonely life with Catherine as her only solace. Except for a brief period in a girls’ school in Boston (England), Catherine learned to read, count, and analyze at home. Her biographers speak of her prodigious reading of the Bible, theology, and history.

The Mumfords moved to Brixton in South London in 1844. When Catherine refused to condemn Methodist Reformers in 1850, the Wesleyans expelled her. For the Reformers she led a girls’ Sunday school class in Clapham. At the home of Edward Rabbits, in 1851, she met William Booth, who also had been expelled by the Wesleyans for reform sympathies. William was reciting a temperance poem, “The Grog-seller’s Dream,” which appealed to Catherine, who had embraced the new Methodist passion for abstinence. Even as a young girl she had served as secretary of a Juvenile Temperance Society.

On his 23rd birthday, William took Catherine home after a service, and a love affair began between this apparently mismatched couple. They did not marry until 1855, because of William’s bumpy career. But in these years, through correspondence with her itinerant revivalist fiance, Catherine began to mold William to her beliefs for women’s ministry and against his occasional use of ale for a dyspeptic stomach.

William, now ordained by the Methodist New Connexion, spent three years as an evangelist before the conference appointed him to a “settled ministry” in 1857. Catherine played the role of parson’s wife, teaching classes of children and meeting with women’s societies. But the role did not suit her. She saw no reason why a woman’s ministry should not equal that of her husband.

During this period she discovered a model, American Wesleyan revivalist Phoebe Palmer. With William’s encouragement, Catherine wrote a pamphlet, Female Ministry: Woman’s Right to Preach the Gospel, in defense of Mrs. Palmer’s preaching. She complained that the “unjustifiable application” of Paul’s advice, “ ‘Let your women keep silence in the Churches,’ has resulted in more loss to the Church, evil to the world, and dishonor to God, than any of [its] errors.”

In January 1860, following the birth of their fourth child, she followed her own advice. At Gateshead, during William’s sermon, she asked to “say a word.” She witnessed to her timidity about claiming her calling, yet William announced that she would speak that night. She became a partner in her husband’s work and soon found her own sphere as a powerful preacher. Many agree that no man of her era, including her husband, exceeded her in popularity or spiritual results.

When the 1861 conference assigned William to another circuit, he resigned his New Connexion ministry; he wanted to do evangelistic work. The Booths preached revivals in Cornwall and Wales in 1861–62, but soon Catherine had her own itinerary. By 1864, her preaching was more valued than his. At one point, a publisher asked to print her sermons; she said she had not written them out. Was she simply avoiding wounding her husband’s ego?

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