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In the early months of 1878, a young woman of 18 and her colleague arrived at the train station in Barnsley, Yorkshire, embarked on a crusade. She had been sent by William Booth to open a branch of the Christian Mission in this mining town. Here work was tough—when it was available—and people were inured to the frequent changes of fortune that industrialization brings.

The teenager was Rose Clapham, an uneducated factory worker from South London, whose task was to find her own congregation, persuade them into the largest building in town, the local theater, and to preach until they surrendered to Christ.

She reported what happened in the September 1878 edition of Christian Mission magazine:

“On the Monday I went into the open air with my colleague, Jenny Smith, and when they saw us two little things stand there, hundreds of colliers [coal miners] came round us at once. After we had held our meeting, we walked off to our hall … the colliers came after us, and God touched their hearts.… We have had nearly 700 [decisions for Christ] since we went there … we have got 140 members, and they can all preach better than I can.”

Rose Clapham was one of a veritable army of “Hallelujah Lasses”—working class women, poorly educated and often extremely young, who were caught up in the revivalist fervor of William Booth’s Christian Mission. Their activities (along with those of their male counterparts) between 1878 and 1885 transformed an inner-city mission into a nationwide crusade.

Six of the seven women who, with George Scott Railton, pioneered the Army’s official work in the U.S. in 1880. Only one woman was over age 20; their only training was during the voyage from England. Despite that, in under 3 months the women had founded 10 corps, with 200 services each week.

How, or from whom, did this motley group of teenage heroines arise?

Catherine Booth, wife of William and mother of his eight children, was refined and well-educated, in a very different mold from the girl preachers who looked to her for inspiration and support. Eloquent and compelling in speech, articulate and devastatingly logical in writing, she had for over twenty years defended the right of women to preach the gospel on the same terms as men. At first, Catherine and her husband had shared a ministry as traveling evangelists, but now she was in great demand as a preacher in her own right, especially among the well-to-do. A woman preacher was a rare phenomenon in a world where women had few civil rights, no place in the professions, and only rare ventures into the glare of publicity. Catherine Booth was both a woman and a fine preacher, a magnetic combination that attracted large numbers to hear her and made its own statement about the validity of women’s ministry.

Catherine Mumford’s pious, sheltered upbringing in the small market town of Ashbourne, Derbyshire, hardly seemed to qualify her for a public role and the rigors that come to an evangelist’s wife. Her mother was a model of Victorian piety, a pillar of the local Methodist church and queen of her home, who taught her only daughter the rudiments of education and the duties of middle-class Victorian womanhood.

But during Catherine’s adolescence a spinal curvature led to years of enforced idleness. In this period Catherine’s mental and spiritual development leapt forward. She began to read voraciously the writings of favorite evangelical authors from both sides of the Atlantic. Charles Finney and James Caughey from the United States, the Wesleys and Adam Clarke from England, helped to bring about first, assurance of her salvation, and then, a growing conviction that in the ideal church women would be free to preach the gospel and share in the Christian ministry alongside men.

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