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A Call to Service
THE MINISTRY OF WOMEN IN THE AUSTRALIAN CHURCH Social and Historical Perspectives An address by Dr. Janet West to the Annual General Meeting of the Movement for the Ordination of Women, Sydney, 21 July 2001 Analysis of the ministry of women in the Australian church and indeed in society as a whole is a recent phenomenon. Although women played an active role in the early church as prophets (daughters of Philip), teachers of both men and women (Priscilla) and organisers (Phoebe), these roles fell into desuetude as the church assumed monolithic power in the centuries that followed. Greco-Roman attitudes assumed monolithic power in the centuries that followed. Greco-Roman attitudes Towards women, which were based on the concept of the innate inferiority of the female vis a vis the male, were adopted by the early church fathers as part of the Divine ordering of society. Church control of education – which was primarily designed to serve the monastic system – ensured that literacy was the prerogative of men rather than women. When the first settlers from Europe arrived on these shores, the Reformation had taken place, the Divine Right of Kings had been rejected and freedom of worship was rapidly spreading. Within three decades people could choose their Catholic priest or their Baptist chapel with impunity. Two decades later, the Anglican church lost control of education as Governor Bourke over-ruled Bishop Broughton. It was to be access to education more than any other factor which was ultimately to emancipate women both socially and intellectually. There is a remarkable parallel between the exclusion of women from scientific professions over the centuries and their exclusion from the church. This was partly because most of the scientists were believers or, if they were Catholics, members of the priesthood. The world of science and mathematics in particular had been closed to women since the physicist, Hypatia of Alexandria, had been clawed to death by Christian fundamentalists in 412 A.D. Women continued to be barred from membership of all scientific societies until after World War II. Even Marie Curie was not accepted by the French Academy of Sciences in 1911, although she had won the Nobel Prize. Our own Georgiana Molloy was not given credit for her botanical discoveries and a proposal to name one plant after her was dropped by the Linnaean Society of Botanists in 1855. The famous Royal Society founded in 1660 by the deeply religious Robert Boyle and sustained by the equally pious Isaac Newton, refused to accept any woman member until 1945. It was said that the only female presence in the building was a skeleton in the Society’s museum of anatomy!
It is not surprising then, that interest in the role of women in the Australian church and indeed in society as a whole is a recent phenomenon. It is only since 1970, in the wake of second wave feminism, that serious study of the contribution of women to the nation has been undertaken. ‘Daughters of Freedom’ is the first attempt at a general history of women in the Australian church and for all its shortcomings has filled a gap in our collective knowledge of the ministry of women. This book might never have been written, had not a friend approached me at the launch of my biography of bishop Hilliard in 1987 and said, “You have written enough about male ecclesiastics, what about some work on women?” I said nothing but my mind went back to a positive experience I had undergone two years earlier at an evangelical church in Toronto. There I had been amazed at the absolute rightness of the grandmotherly figure who was distributing the elements alongside her fellow male clergy. My opposition to the ordination of women had melted at that very moment. This change of heart was further confirmed a few years later when both my daughters decided to leave the Anglican Church. One became a member of the Society of Friends, the other helps her husband run a house church in Sydney. It was a step not lightly taken but as educated women they felt their gifts were not being used in the Anglican Church in Sydney. As great lovers of Anglican worship, we were very sad to see them go but long term condescension eventually becomes too hard to take. Hence the motivation for writing the history of Australian churchwomen was both personal and academic. Having said that, my enthusiasm was initially blunted by the absence of information about these women. Despite the predominance of women in church congregations, official church archives barely mentioned them. I found that women were literally hidden in history. Apart from the records of the religious communities – so lovingly preserved by the sisters – the chief repositories of information I found to be the great public libraries of the land, such as the Mitchell, the Mortlock and the Battye. Diaries, letters and journals were scoured and more than 150 women were interviewed across the denominations. It was helpful to divide churchwomen into three categories – professional, semi-professional and amateur. The professional was either a nun, a deaconess, a missionary or a member of the clergy – someone employed by the church. The semi-professional was a clergy wife or daughter – someone who was not directly employed by the church but was partly official in function. The largest group were of course the laywomen – “amateurs” whose gifts and contributions varied widely from the dynamic philanthropist to the passive occupant of the pew. These women prayed with the Mothers’ Union, distributed clothing for St Vincent de Paul and the Dorcas Society, cooked and ran fetes for parishes and missions. From the earliest days the governors’ wives set an example of the apex of the pyramid of church-based social welfare. They founded orphan schools, distributed Scriptures and subscribed to benevolent societies. The energetic Lady Darling personally supervised eight charities (while raising seven children) in the 1820s in N.S.W. and Lady Jane Franklin was not far behind her in Van Diemen’s Land. A plentiful supply of domestic help also enabled such upper class women as Lady Marion Allen (seven committees and ten children) her cousin Eliza Pottie, to carry out similar works of mercy later in the nineteenth century. Many women of spiritual conviction embraced the temperance movement and from there moved to working for the vote for women as a means of improving the lot of families. The semi-professional churchwoman was the clergy wife or daughter – the all-important linchpin of the parish, at least till the 1990s when they tended to seek employment in the secular workforce. Bishops’ wives played an important part in their husbands’ dioceses both in official society and in the encouragement of clergy wives. Jane Barker founded the first church school for girls in the country – St Catherine’s at Waverley – when she saw how deprived of an education the daughters of country clergy were. Frances Perry of Melbourne helped to found the royal Hospital for Women with the aim of reducing the death of women in childbirth. Both women were childless themselves but did much for the children of others. Similarly, Dorothy Mowll pioneered institutional aged care in the mid-twentieth century. Most clergy wives saw their position as a vocation – it certainly was an unremunerated one! The clergy wife was often the key to a successful parish as she occupied the position of bridge between her husband and the parish. On the other hand, she could make life difficult for any female parish worker such as a deaconess. It is no co-incidence that the most vigorous female opponents of the ordination of women in Sydney are clergy wives. The professional churchwoman covers a wide variety of categories but the majority until recently have been single women. Roman and Anglo Catholic orders have done much to shape the Australia we know today through their sacrificial work in education. The Catholic historian, Brian Cosgrove, recently commented that “The church in this country was built on the backs of women” and there is no doubt that the Catholic hierarchy exploited their free workforce in order to extend the hegemony of what was initially a minority church. It was not without pain for them, however, when they encountered the iron will of a Mary MacKillop of the Order of St Joseph or of Margaret McRory of Sancta Sophia College. Female religious outnumbered male religious and secular clergy by 2:1 and although some were not remembered as good teachers or carers, most presented excellent role models to their pupils and to those who needed welfare or nursing. Interviews with a number of sisters revealed a surprising impatience with the male hierarchy. It is not difficult to conclude that the nineteenth century hierarchy’s denial of freedom and autonomy for women’s orders was an early factor in the rise of feminism in Catholic circles. Anglican orders also had their times of friction, although they were fewer in numbers. The Sisters of the Church received a frosty welcome in the Protestant Diocese of Sydney in the 1890s; their good work was never commended by their foes. The Society of the Sacred Advent worked on less than a shoestring on the frontiers of Queensland, the nuns never took a day off and consequently died prematurely. Deaconesses also worked very hard in Protestant dioceses but many found the autonomy of the mission field preferable to clerical supervision at parish level. Salvation Army women officers worked alongside men as evangelists and social workers but they lost their rank – until recently – if they married an officer beneath them. Eva Burrows became international leader of the Salvation Army but she acknowledges that her missionary background brought her the promotion that home service would have denied her. The final category of professional churchwoman – apart from women clergy themselves who were not examined in depth – was the missionary. Denied opportunities of leadership and autonomy in their home churches, many women expressed their vocation by serving as missionaries overseas and in the outback of Australia. Redoubtable women like Ellen Arnold of Bengal set up schools and hospitals, planted churches, preached and conducted services – options which were denied them in their home churches. By the 1890s women missionaries had begun to outnumber men by a ratio of 3:1. This ratio did not alter for a century which was when ordination offered an alternative. It is therefore not surprising that the leaders of movements to ordain women like Jean and David Penman and Patricia Brennan had served initially as overseas missionaries.
Until the last decades of the 20th century, the most traditional roles for the woman in the Australian church were fundraising and hospitality. These have traditionally fitted in with the raising of children, an occupation pivotal to the transplanting of society to a new and unfamiliar land. Such an attitude now appears archaic as a result of a revolution in the social climate which has occurred since 1970. Like it or not, women now have other priorities apart from marriage and the nurture of children.
1) Reliable contraception has enabled women to plan their lives. The consequent attrition of laywomen in churches and therefore usually of the men and children in their families, is a bleak prospect for churches in terms of finance and voluntary workers. Now that the roles of women in society have changed so markedly, many women coming to worship find it extraordinary, even risible, to be confronted with services led only by men. The Church will be the poorer until women can actively contribute to the richness and variety of Divine worship.
A genuine equality of leadership within each parish could restore a balance. The different voice that women can offer could restore a more socially realistic public face to the church – quite apart from its value in personal ministry. Flexibility and trust are important ingredients in a going concern. Gender equality is Scriptural and can only be enriching for the Church. |