with five children. While there, she attended a revival service at the Methodist Episcopal Church. Adult life Smith worked as a cook and a washerwoman to provide for herself and her daughter after her husband was killed in the American Civil War. By the time Smith was thirty-two, she had lost two husbands and four of her five children. Attending religious camp meetings and revivals helped Smith work through her grief and avoid depression. She immersed herself in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and met with Phoebe Palmer, a Methodist preacher who led the Wesleyan-Holiness movement. In 1868, Amanda Smith testified that she had experienced entire sanctification. In 1867, the National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness was organized and Smith began preaching the doctrine of entire sanctification at camp meetings. Prayer became a way of life for her as she trusted God for shoes, the money to buy her sister's freedom, and food for her family. She became well known for her beautiful voice and inspired teaching and hence, opportunities to evangelize in the South and West opened up for her. African-American women in the nineteenth century took the way they dressed very seriously and so did others. Being a preacher and traveling as much as Amanda did, she thought out her dress carefully. Wherever she went, she wore a plain poke bonnet and a brown or black Quaker wrapper, and she carried her own carpetbag suitcase. The appearances of women in the nineteenth century have been described as "[Especially] fraught with volatile meanings, as the line between seemingly overly sexual or appearing presumptuously dressed above one's station was a fine one." African-American women struggled with receiving the respect they deserved even if they dressed the part of a lady. This was due to "Shadowed stereotypes bred in slavery of wanton Jezebels and pious Mammies". If free, African-American women dressed out of their respective class, judgments would be made against them. In 1878, Smith arranged for her daughter, Mazie, to study in England. The two traveled overseas and stayed in England for two years. On the journey over, the captain invited her to conduct a religious service on board and she was so modest that the other passengers spread word of her. She next traveled to and ministered in India, where she stayed for eighteen months. Smith then spent eight years in Africa, working with churches