Member-only story
Sanctified Sister Slips Away
What led Miss Adah Pratt to break her holy vow to despise men?
On April 14, 1908, Miss Adah Pratt of Washington, D. C. and Mr. Benjamin Franklin Hoover of Philadelphia, PA were married. The event itself, a Philadelphia wedding, was unremarkable. Thousands of couples had done it before. What made it extraordinary was that Adah was a member of a female religious group, the Sanctified Sisters, a group that had cut men out of their lives. When Adah Pratt vowed to love, honor, and cherish the blushing B. F. Hoover, she shattered another promise: the vow of a sisterhood that taught her it was sinful to live with a man, and a perversion of God’s design to allow a man to have power over them.
With this single act of defiance, Adah Pratt severed ties with the sisters who had been her companions for nearly thirty years. She became an apostate, a sinner, subjugated her virginal flesh to the depraved lusts of a man.
She became, in short, a wife.
History
The organization Adah fled — the Women’s Commonwealth, also known as the Sanctified Sisterhood — was the brainchild of a Texas visionary named Martha McWhirter. In the late 1870s, Martha, her husband, and their four children moved to the small town of Belton, Texas. She found the town deeply dissatisfying, and…
