Women Shaped by Colonial Culture and Religious Patriarchy

from Freedom From Sanctified Sexism - Women Transforming the Church by Mavis Rose, pp. 1-18

Allira Publications, 17 Cervantes Street, MacGregor, Queensland 4109, Australia.
Copyright: Mavis Rose 1996.
Republished on our website with the necessary permissions

Christianity came to Australia with the First Fleet in a particularly unattractive, moralistic form, propagated by evangelical Church of England military chaplains, hired by the British colonial government to help maintain order in a penal settlement. The clergy were under the authority of the Governor, and their inclusion in the First Fleet contingent was associated more with social control than pastoral ministry. As observed by historian Manning Clark, Anglican religion had “an obvious social usefulness in a convict society, for it preached in favour of subordination and against drunkenness, whoring and gambling”. Even if the clergy had wished to empathise with the convicts in their suffering and degradation, their conditions of employment made it difficult for them to show more than a modicum of compassion.

The traditional, socially stratified parish structures to which a priest was accustomed in England were absent in the penal colony, although by 1823, when the chaplaincy period ended, parishes had been established around pockets of population growth. The duties of the early Anglican clergy extended beyond establishing churches and schools and ministering to their congregations. The Rev. Samuel Marsden, a prime example of early Australian churchmen, combined the roles of cleric, magistrate, landowner and farmer, his agricultural interests being assisted by free convict labour. To the majority of convicts, the early Anglican leaders were regarded as judgmental and self-interested, sycophants of the colonial power rather than independent ministers espousing the values preached by Jesus Christ, such as love and concern for the oppressed.

With the end of the chaplaincy period, Anglicanism remained close in perspective to the colonial government but it had to become financially independent, in competition with other Christian denominations. Because of the varying pattern of colonial expansion within Australia and the difficulties of early travel, Anglicanism developed distinct regional characteristics and a weak national coherence. Ruth Sturmey, in her study of Anglican women, points out that in Sydney, “the Church of England’s job was to help transform convicts into obedient, orderly, decent and industrious Christian colonists”. The majority of its clergy were low church evangelicals and Moore College, the clergy training centre which was later established in Sydney, was more akin to a “calvinist reformed” than an Anglican college, maintaining the puritanical trend set in the early period of colonisation. Sydney diocese was to remain the foremost bastion of Anglican subordination of women.

Tasmania and Brisbane’s initial settlements were also penal, Brisbane an extension of New South Wales. While the dioceses retained much of the conservatism of Sydney, their churchmanship became more Anglo-Catholic. Melbourne, on the other hand, was settled privately by pastoralists and business entrepreneurs. The vigorous moralistic outlook of Sydney Anglicanism was less noticeable in Melbourne. Melbourne Anglicanism developed a more pluralist and liberal outlook.

Adelaide was also a free colony but its founders incorporated into their settlement policy a religious ideal of forming one united Protestant church among those who took up land there. The settlers were predominantly non-conformist Protestants escaping from religion dominated by the English elite, so there was an element of religious liberation from Anglicanism in the ethos of Adelaide’s founding colony. As if to counteract this non-conformist trend, Adelaide Anglicanism developed an elitist, strongly high church orientation. As Sturmey described the situation, “the story of Adelaide Anglicanism in the colonial period is pre-eminently the story of the triumph of an imported clerical caste and its wealthy lay supporters over a low church laity more at one with the ‘common Christianity’ of the colony’s founding ideals”.

Western Australia’s geographical position isolated it from other colonial churches. The majority of the Swan River Colony settlers were Anglicans, who looked directly to the Church in England for guidance rather than to their clerical brethren in eastern Australia. The first Swan River Colony chaplain, Rev. John Burdett Wittenoom, was a conservative High Churchman. According to A. T. Williams in his study of the growth of the Anglican Church in Western Australia, Wittenoom had been attracted to Australia by the lure of landed property for his four sons. As a pastor, he lacked compassion and his attitude to the settlers was “ultra-patronising, unbending and conservative”.

From the beginning of British colonisation of Australia, there was institutionalised a concept that women’s main function was to serve the purposes and desires of men, a concept which spilled over into the Church. There was minimum regard for women’s needs or preferences. When Governor Phillip reported the difficulties caused by the imbalance of males over females in the colony, British courts were asked to impose harsher sentences on women, irrespective of their offences, so that sufficient females could be transported to the colony to satisfy the requirements of the men. The 1812 Select Committee on Transportation reported that female convicts on arrival on the shores of Australia “were indiscriminately given to such of the inhabitants as demanded them and were in general received rather as prostitutes than as servants”. To obtain adequate food and shelter, convict women had little option but to enter into what the clergy regarded as unsanctified liaisons with men, thus automatically placing women in what the Church deemed a state of iniquity. Lawful marriage, which could have redeemed women’s perceived unholiness, was often impossible because most of the men and many of the women were already married with spouses and families in the British Isles. A minority of wives and children accompanied the First Fleet.

The Church of England transported to Australia through its colonial clergy the patriarchal traditions of Western Christianity, including the inhibitions about females and their sexuality which Christian theologians had acquired in the early centuries of the Church’s history. Negative views about women had been strongly influenced by Greek dualistic concepts of spirit and body, the former being perceived as noble and divine and the latter earthy and evil. Maleness was associated with spirit and femaleness with body. The theme of the inherent sinfulness of the female body was further developed in the Manichaean school of philosophy which infiltrated the Church in the third century and remained a significant influence in Christian thought. In Manichaeism the evil power and attraction of human sexuality was seen to be strongest in women. As David Denholm observed in his study of the early period of white settlement, “Colonial Australia had a distinctly Manichaean depth to it”. Women were regarded as a source of evil because they made sexual intercourse difficult for men to resist.

The pioneering nature of colonial Australia made life rough for all women. But for female convicts the situation was exacerbated by having limited freedom in determining their lifetyle and social relationships. For female convicts without a spouse, prostitution and domestic servitude were almost the only options for survival. As Anne Summers points out in her work on Australian women, female convicts were frequently categorised by the officials as “those damned whores”. Thus Church and State together reinforced a concept in early Australia of the intrinsic profligacy of women, this devaluation making it less reprehensible for men to exploit females. This meant that Christian outreach to the convict women was obstructed from the first by the perception that they were an evil influence in the colony despite the fact that the settlers were so dependent on them for providing home comforts.

Undoubtedly there was a general tendency to treat women as commodities at the disposal of men rather than as full human beings with independent legal rights. In Australian Anglicanism, women had limited input into how the church should develop within the unique environment in which it had put down new roots. Women could encourage the formation of parishes, express private opinions and exert indirect pressure, but the final authority, the legitimated power, was in the hands of men. From the start, the colonial governments of Australia and the Church of England stressed that the place of women was in the home or in some domestic-based job such as maidservant, nurse or teacher of children.

The prevailing exploitative attitudes about convict women in early New South Wales tended to be applied also to free single women arriving in the colony. The British Government encouraged unmarried women to emigrate to Australia to redress the overabundance of males, but, despite their free status, there was little choice open to these single women but to agree to become wives or servants of the hordes of males awaiting their arrival on the quayside. Caroline Chisholm, a devout Roman Catholic and one of the most ardent critics of the treatment of single female immigrants, was influential in changing the practice of bringing boatloads of unmarried women to Australia. She believed that the most practical way to free women from male appropriation was to change the immigration pattern, filling the colony with respectable, married women and their families rather than single women. Caroline Chisholm argued that high-principled married women would act as “God’s police”. They would be protected from predatory males by their legal marriage status and virtue. at the same time helping to raise the level of morality in the colony. In those days, violence by abusive husbands within legalised marriage was not raised as a serious issue.

Transportation to Australia ceased in 1852. by which time the majority of the population consisted of free settlers or emancipists. As the colony stabilised and prospered, the values of Victorian England impinged on the libertine and unruly pattern of living of the early penal settlement, with women living in marital relationships which accorded more with the middle-class norm. The image of the good mother and homemaker had increased religious significance in nineteenth century Christianity. Up to the end of the eighteenth century, Western theologians and philosophers had harboured doubts about women having souls. By the nineteenth century, a volte face had taken place, with a belief that woman had a superior religious nature.

The nineteenth century ideal encapsulated middle-class women in a domestic framework within which they were expected to be the expounders of the highest moral values. This view of women continued into the twentieth century. It was reflected in a sermon by Archbishop Wright of Sydney when preaching to a congregation of women in St. Andrew’s Cathedral on 25 March 1915. Wright declared that “women are the traditional guardians of the faith”, adding “We cannot explain woman’s mysterious inheritance of religious instinct, but it is her responsibility to use it”.

The feminist historian, Sheila Rowbotham, has drawn attention to male self-interest in the theory of women’s superior religious nature in that a woman’s soul became “the repository of those moral values that were not meaningful or useful outside the home in the conduct of political and economic affairs as well as the repository of those religious attitudes no longer espoused by the self-determining men who conducted those affairs”. Certainly, in terms of Australian Anglicanism, to acquire status within their parish, churchwomen had to accept unquestioning subordination to male clergy and, in theory, to husbands also, while at the same time carrying heavy responsibility for upholding Christian values in the home and ensuring the economic viability of the parish.

The virtuous, middle-class matron became the standard by which women in general were assessed by the Australian Churches. Pressure on women to remain within the home environment was evident in articles in Anglican papers. For example, in Brisbane’s The Church Chronicle of 1 February 1907, in an article entitled “What shall we do with our Girls?”, there was a warning against women seeking work in shops or factories which allow “that liberty and independence for which there is so great an outcry, with very little understanding of what liberty and independence are”. The writer advised that “domestic service - given a good mistress - affords a far better training for a girl than the factory”.

There was an on-going ambiguity in the Australian Anglican Church about motherhood. On the one hand it was exalted to the extent that Archbishop Wright of Sydney in 1910 declared that “the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world” and “the life and work of the mother is in some measure representative of the life and work of God himself”. On the other hand, the principle of “male headship” gave authority in the home to the father of the family, despite the acknowledgement that Australian men were in general irreligious and less devout than women.

The severe Depression of the 1890s and the deprivation which followed in its wake made the Australian churches more aware of the need for social outreach to the disadvantaged. Churchmen recognised that they depended on the asistance of women in tackling pastoral ministry to women and children in dire poverty. The Church was also committed to mission work among outback families and the indigenous population and, in the post-World War I period, had increased responsibility for mission work among the indigenous peoples of Papua New Guinea. From the end of the nineteenth century, churchwomen’s groups dedicated to give pastoral and economic assistance began to form, mirroring those forming in the Church in England. The best known of these groups were the Mothers’ Union and the Girls’ Friendly Society, women guilds and various mission support auxiliaries.

In view of the heavy emphasis on virtuous motherhood in the nineteenth century, it was not surprising that the most influential and powerful churchwomen’s group to form within Australian Anglicanism was the Mother’s Union. The Mothers’ Union fitted perfectly Caroline Chisholm’s vision of mothers as “God’s Police”. In Australia, the Mothers’ Union started in Port Adelaide in 1894, spreading to Melbourne and Tasmania in 1895, to Sydney in 1896, and to Brisbane in 1903. In its infancy, its central leadership was predominantly drawn from wives of leading clerics or important laymen. According to Sturmey, in the early period, especially in Sydney Diocese, “it was deliberate policy that the position of president was to be filled only by a governor’s wife or an archbishop’s wife, the reason being that upper class women should extend their privileged hand to help and be an inspiring example to those women below them”, a verification of the elitism so often ascribed to Anglicanism.

The main aims of the Mothers’ Union were to uphold the sanctity of marriage, to make mothers aware of their responsibility for training their children wisely and to set an example of mothers leading their families in purity and holiness of life. The Mothers’s Union viewed marriage as a sacred lifetime commitment, which must be maintained whatever the cost. Judd and Cable observed in their work on Sydney Anglicanism that “the Mothers’ Union upheld an ideal of marriage and family life in which the spiritual wife and mother triumphed over the sinful - and implicitly male - influences which intruded from outside”. The Mothers’ Union ideal therefore adhered to the concept of married women gaining holiness within impeccable married life and motherhood but at the same time identified the corruptive force as being in the male court. In the context of early Australian denigration of single women, Mothers’ Union puritanism constituted a fierce rebuttal of attempts to make women the scapegoats for men’s sexual desires. However, puritanism can become very inflexible and dogmatic, based on an ideal rather than reality.

Having stressed the sanctity of marriage, divorce developed into a very contentious issue for the Mothers’ Union. It was difficult for the Mothers’ Union to sanction an escape route from marriage for women who were abused and violated by their husbands. Divorced Anglican women automatically lost their eligibility for Mothers’ Union membership, even when clergy attitudes to divorce became more liberal in the mid-twentieth century. Although women who remarried after divorce or married a man whose divorced wife was still alive were readmitted to Holy Communion by their church leaders, the Mothers’ Union doggedly held on to its view that divorce violated the sanctity of marriage and continued to close its membership to communicant divorcees. This action meant that by the mid-twentieth century, the Mothers’ Union had standards stricter than the rules of discipline set down by the Anglican Communion. This determination to stick to its founding principles was to bring the organisation into increasing confrontation with clergy. But then the power and status of the Mothers’ Union rested, as in the case of the Virgin Mary, on its immaculate motherhood.

A Commission on the Objects and Policies of the Mothers’ Union set up under the English Bishop of Willesden in 1969 sent out a questionnaire to bishops of all dioceses of the Anglican Communion in which the Mothers’ Union operated. There were ten replies from the bishops in Australia. Seven bishops advocated relaxation of the Mothers’ Union rules, but believed nonetheless that “the best interest of society can be served by a group under the Mothers’ Union”. One Australian bishop was severely critical of the Mothers’ Union for “adopting an outlook differing from the reconciling ministry and the merciful and forgiving nature of God’s Church” and another bishop stated that he had no branches of the Mothers’ Union and “had no plans to start any”. It would appear that many Australian bishops saw the benefits of the Mothers’ Union for keeping women in the domestic stereotype which accorded best with the traditions of the patriarchal church but they preferred that its rules be relaxed so that modern Australian women, especially the wives of re-married Anglican men , were not alienated from the Church by the Mothers’ Union’s excessive moral rectitude.

From its inception, the conservatism and narrow outlook adopted by the Mothers’ Union brought the organisation into contention with church feminists, although the Mothers’ Union, like most churchwomen’s organisations, was conceived in the period of first wave feminism. A bid for more meaningful roles in State and Church was a phenomenon among middle-class Western women in the mid-nineteenth century, reaching a peak in the early twentieth century. One effect of this first wave of feminism on Western Christianity was to create an upsurge of religious fervour among churchwomen. Out of this zeal grew new evangelistic and social endeavours, usually on the initiative of women, though in the case of Anglicanism, mostly under the patronage of supportive clergy.

From cautious accounts of the prevailing situation in the “Motherland” reported in the Australian Anglican church press in the opening years of the twentieth century, the militant women’s suffrage movement in particular was causing clergy concern. Feminist philosophies inspired activist English churchwomen to dare to challenge male monopoly of the Church, including the Anglican priesthood. Where the activities of English church feminists were reported in the Australian Anglican press, it was usually in terms of intense disapproval. For example, in an editorial in The Church Chronicle of July 1914, the English suffragettes were likened to the tricoteuses of the French Revolution:

The savage element in each case bubbles over, but with this difference, that in France it has always been confined to the lowest and coarsest members of the community, while in England the leaders at any rate are reported to be ladies of refinement by birth and education. The inability of the police to stay their wild pranks seems inexplicable to one who calmly reads the reports in Brisbane....

Concern was evident that upper class women, the backbone of Anglicanism, were in revolt against the Establishment.

Archbishop Donaldson of Brisbane, when visiting Warwick Parish in 1915, made clear his distaste for conflict between the sexes: “Most unnatural of all, there has been growing the cold, ugly phenomenon among us of sex hatred - the hatred of women for men and of men for women - which threatens the most sacred and intimate relations of our race...”. Archbishop Donaldson failed to mention the positive aspects of Anglican feminism, that the churches in England and also, as we shall see in succeeding chapters, those in Australia were to benefit enormously from the energy released by the nineteenth century women’s movement. Pastoral, missionary and social needs were being met by zealous women volunteering to devote their lives in service to God. As England’s leading Anglican activist, Maude Royden. pointed out, the first wave women’s movement “was not primarily political, it was social, psychological and profoundly religious”. The problem for clergy was to contain female zeal so that it did not endanger Anglican male preserves.

In Australia, the challenge from Anglican women was much more low-key. Australian Anglican women were slower to emulate the activism of their English sisters. In the latter half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, Australian women had neither the time nor the confidence to query patriarchal structures. They were absorbed in proving their worth by exceeding in the roles designated for them in home and church. A great deal of their energies was also devoted to raising money to pay for the buildings necessary for church expansion.

In his monthly letter in the Sydney Diocesan Magazine of August 1911, Archbishop Wright expressed approval for the “new development of Women’s work in the Church”, as long as it did not give the impression that the Church was for women only. The fear of women monopolising the Church and as a consequence alienating Australian men was to be a recurrent theme in twentieth century Anglicanism. The Church, being a patriarchal institution, depended on having men for the priesthood and lay leadership.

Archbishop Wright needed the zealous women who kept the Church alive and growing, but he feared the numerical strength of women should they become infected with feminism and consolidate. This he made clear in 1911:

Nothing is more remarkable than the way in which women have come forward in recent years to take an important place in Church life. I do not allude to the voting power now placed in the hands of women in Church vestries and other official meetings. It is open to serious question whether it might not prove an injurious departure if the men were to leave the Church to the “regimen” of women. I do not say that there is an immediate danger, but I have been a little alarmed to observe from some statistics that women outnumbered men in some vestry meetings.

Archbishop Wright was aware of the segregation of the sexes in Australian society and the irreligious tendencies of the average Australian male. Australian Anglicanism was not as integrated into public life as the Established Church of England; it tended to be regarded as part of the private sphere which by association was the woman’s domain.

In similar vein, the Rev. Dr. Radford, later Bishop of Goulburn, in an address entitled “The Opportunity of Women” in St. Andrew’s Cathedral, Sydney, on 19 October 1913, stated that “great as the work of the collective movements of women for social or even for religious purposes” had been, “it is doubtful whether women in general are seen at their best or can do most good in their multitude”. Dr. Radford believed that “the most fruitful work done by societies of women is not the work done by their direct action as societies upon the world at large” but their work in inspiring the individual woman to make the best of opportunities in “the concentric circles of home and society and Church”. Dr. Radford clearly did not want Australian women to become radicalised like their English counterparts. Repeatedly, the Australian Church’s response to incipient feminism would be to exhort churchwomen to remain in the domestic sphere.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Australian universities were opening their doors to females, providing alternatives to domesticity for women. In a series of articles in The Church Chronicle on suitable careers for women, there was a noticeable stress on women’s professional training being devoted to service in foreign and home missionfields or other Christian work rather than in the secular work force. The Church was clearly anxious about professional women leaving the home environment for the public male workplace. This situation was discussed in an editorial in The Church Chronicle of 1 January 1913:

The question of careers for women has only become a pressing one within the last few years. We can most of us remember a time when commercial or professional employment was sought only by women whose circumtances admitted of no alternative... For the rest the vague term “home duties” was considered an adequate description of their employment when such was officially required.

First wave feminist zeal, when incorporated into missionary service, provided opportunities for churchwomen to widen the narrow parameters offered by home, society and Church. Missionary endeavour provided women with lifetyles which were spiritually more satisfying as their service to God was not so controlled by male clergy. In mission fields, women could often work more independently and, where working alone, exercise the ministerial and authoritative roles normally reserved for males. Colonial Australia was a place to which English Anglican women missionaries were often sent, especially as England’s demographic imbalance of females over males meant that England had a supply of women for whom marriage partners were not available. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, Australian Anglicanism was developing its own missionary organisations, such as the Australian Board of Missions (ABM) and the Australian branch of the Church Missionary Society (CMS).

Missionfields provided ideal situations for women to disprove the patriarchal myths about their innate inadequacy and physical weakness. Away from the limitations of the typical home parish, women demonstrated that they were not only resourceful but also capable of coping with hazardous conditions. In isolated areas where missionary women worked alone, there was no alternative but to play leadership roles in the church. Take, as one example among many, the Anglican Mission Station on Moa Island in the Torres Strait. During the years 1908 to 1912, this mission was in the charge of Deaconess Florence Buchanan, the only missionary on the island. Deaconess Buchanan, an Englishwoman who had originally settled in Australia for health reasons, was without question a female exercising authority in church and society as she built up a Christian community in a racially mixed environment.

That women were capable of enduring hardship and loneliness on mission stations often evoked a note of surprise from clergy. This is reflected in an Australian Board of Missions tribute in 1937 to one of its missionaries, Miss Nellie Hullett, who served on Nanju islet in Collingwood Bay, Papua:

She was fearless, and threw herself into the necessary work of taming these wild people and showing them that a Christian - even if a woman - could live amongst them and be their friend, and teach them by her life, what God’s servants had come to bring them. All this, and more, in loneliness and dependence on the divine aid alone, was done, and gradually the results appeared. A small number of hearers was baptized, a church was built and dedicated to S. Mary the Virgin, the school was established.... Crowds of people came for medical treatment.

The phrase “even if a woman” confirmed the Anglican male asumption that women were not as capable and worthy as men. So deeply were such attitudes entrenched that the fine performances achieved by women missionaries did practically nothing to enhance their status on their home territory or to break down prejudice against women taking leadership positions.

Missionary women often found it difficult to obtain work in the home church on their return from overseas service. The Bishop of Willochra’s memoriam in 1927 to Gertrude Robson, a former New Guinea missionary, gave the impression that clergy found women accustomed to independence and leadership on mission fields too difficult to handle at close proximity:

A strong, proud nature, virile, adventurous, of volcanic energy, of stern self-judgment, of wide culture, of romantic imagination and courageous experiment, ever growing into stricter self-discipline and more generous self-denial as ever more and more she found that the path of Christian following led not to romantic exploration and adventurous journeys, but plodding drudgery and patient service, ever finding deeper joy and peace in ministering to the men and women, and especially to the children, of New Guinea. She was sometimes wilful and sometimes exasperating, but she was a choice and noble spirit, with great ideals and sufficient resolution to put them unflinchingly into practice.

Missionary service could be life threatening. One of Australia’s renowned missionaries, Deaconess Mary Andrews of Sydney, was in China in 1939 when the Japanese army occupied the area where she was resident, though she managed eventually to return to Australia. In 1948 she returned to China and stayed on for two years under the Communist regime, despite the danger of being arrested. According to Mary Andrews, “most of the church missionaries who went to China from Australia in the 1920s and 1930s were women, unmarried, and usually working alone”. She observed:

The Chinese seemed to relate better to foreign women than to a man coming in, because women haven’t quite got the same airs of importance. They’re much more able as a rule to learn the language, because they’re patient and not afraid of making mistakes. Sometimes men are proud and don’t like making fools of themselves.

Deaconess Mary Andrews found that the Chinese “didn’t have the hang-ups and inhibitions about women that the men, especially clergymen, have in Australia”. On her return to Sydney, Deaconess Andrews was not allowed to minister at the same level as a male deacon, a right which she had had in China. The Anglican Church in South China was to prove to be one of the most enlightened in the Anglican Communion in regard to women’s ministry.

In many cultures, missionary women could gain easier access to the indigenous women, an important factor in the Christianising process. Yet in spite of the heavy reliance on women for the missionfields, the administrators of missionary societies were predominantly male clergy, as a survey of Australian Anglican missionary reports and diocesan year books reveal. This meant that missionary women could only indirectly influence policy making.

To entice women into missions, clergy had to appear to recognise their worth. In an article entitled “Women and the Mission Field” in The Church Chronicle of March 1915, the writer (unnamed) opened with the words: “Women and Missions are almost synonymous terms, for at the bottom of her heart every woman is a Missionary”. While extolling women missionaries as “noble, wonderful, inspired”, the writer could not resist re-establishing male pre-eminence, concluding the article with the remark: “And yet - though many people I know will disagree with me - I dare to place them second in the missionary scale”.

The problem for the Anglican Church was to attract sufficient men to the mission fields. In an address in 1922, the Bishop of Melanesia urged more Australian and New Zealand priests to offer themselves for missionary service, warning that “there was a danger of the missions becoming wholly staffed by women”. This would give an impression that women were capable of ministering to congregations without the presence of a male priest, a situation which clearly did not appeal to the patriarchal home church.

In the case of home mission work, women too were often in the majority among the missionaries. Although the Anglo-Catholic inland outreach was staffed to a large extent by bush brotherhoods, which included male priests, they depended on support from women’s religious orders and professional laywomen. The evangelical Bush Church Aid society was heavily dependent on women for its work serving pioneering outback families, as the following appeal made in June 1923 indicates:

Women of Australia have not yet fully realized the need of their ministry in the back-country. In one or two dioceses fine work is being done by them, but ever so much more is needed. The mother and growing girl in the Far West deserve the cheering, comforting ministrations of a Christian woman trained for her particular work.... The B.C.A. would like to hear of young women who have a vocation and who would like to do something for Australia.

Noticeable in the appeal was the linking of Anglican women’s mission work in the Outback with nation building. For the Evangelicals, as long as women worked under the authority of male mission administrators, there was less anxiety about their conducting worhip in distant missionfields.

Clergy mission administrators had a tendency to undervalue the work done by women missionaries. This was pointed out by Wilma Terry of Hawthorne, Queensland, in a letter to the editor of The Anglican in 1958;

The report of the work of the Bush Church Aid society is most interesting but the work of the nursing sisters remained unmentioned. The burden of the work of the society rests with them, and without their loyalty and devotion the Flying Medical Service would be as nothing. Is this another of these aspects of women working in the Church where they are passed over and forgotten?

The editor, at least, was sensitive to the criticism and hastily justified his own paper. “No appreciation of the work of these nurses and other women was expressed by the Organising Missioner, Canon T. E. Jones, in his very full report”. Thus the numerical supremacy of women in mission work did not necessarily gain them added recognition.

Women who did succeed in rising to the position of State Secretary of their missionary societies, such as Dorothea Henslowe of Tasmania (ABM) and Irene Jeffreys of Adelaide (CMS), had to face prejudice. Dorothea Henslowe recalled that in travelling around the diocese of Tasmania fulfilling speaking engagements on behalf of ABM, “there was considerable resentment because I was a woman in a predominantly man’s world”. Irene Jeffreys, as later chapters will reveal, became a determined campaigner for the greater participation of women in church leadership, including their admission to the priesthood.

Behind every church organisation and missionary society was a team of fund raisers, mainly women, working voluntarily to provide monetary support. Studies of “Parish Notes” in Anglican diocesan newspapers reveal the economic importance to the parish of women’s groups generally, their ascribed role being to enhance the coffers of the Church and its adjuncts, such as missionary societies and charitable organisations. Women working in such a voluntary capacity were not viewed by clergy as any threat to domestic stability, although their efforts often involved many hours of labour outside the home, such as selling goods on street stalls, running cafes, catering for functions, organising fetes, debutante balls or whatever means of making money or providing a service was being promoted. An example of such service comes from Christ Church, St. Laurence in Sydney, where during the Second World War the Rector asked his women parishioners to set up “comforts” for servicemen in the basement of the parish hall:

The women got to work, raised £500, cleaned, painted and furnished, put in heating systems, hot and cold showers, a place to wash and iron clothes. Then they added billiards and ping pong tables, radio, piano, and a quiet writing room and other comforts. Now there are 200 helpers and hostesses keeping the homely atmosphere by wearing simple cotton floral frocks instead of uniforms and joining in games and singing like one big happy family.

Parishes harnessed laywomen’s energies in a variety of ways, spiritual, musical and educative as well as through fund-raising. An article written in The Church Chronicle of 1 August 1927 by an Archdeacon Glover entitled “A Visit to Roma” showed that the same group of parish women could assume responsibility for different causes in their money-raising efforts:

The story of the Guild’s work in the Parish reads like a romance. It is largely due to the untiring efforts of its members that the Parish is not only steadily reducing its somewhat large debt on the building fund of the Church, but is also at the same time doing a wonderful work for Missions.

In the case of church building efforts, there was a noticeable tendency for the women’s considerable economic contribution to the overall cost to receive limited recognition. The Church’s dependency on women’s guilds was seldom highlighted during the splendid rituals of the dedication service of a new building, an example being the report of the dedication of St. Andrew’s Church, Caloundra:

The great event of the month has been the opening and dedication of the new Parish Church.....The servers of the Parish [all male], eighteen of them, did a magnificent job. Led by Paul Settler and guided by Alan Brown as M.C., they attended an army of be-coped clergymen and managed the intricacies of High Mass with such impressive dignity and confidence that one might well imagine that such ceremonial was just the normal thing for them.... It is a beautiful Church and the building is ideal for prayer, so with all those encouragements do make sure that it is in constant use.

Despite their hard work in financing the Caloundra church building, the main role of women in the ceremony was to fill the pews and provide a meal when the celebrations were over.

Women not only worked on money-raising projects but were expected to act as caterers and kitchen staff at parish and diocesan meetings, including catering for meetings of laymen’s groups. From the following report of a Church of England Men’s Society Provincial Conference at Beaudesert, women did not even join the men for the meals. They were there to cook and serve:

In the evening, members of the Ladies’ Guild served a real banquet.... Proposing a toast to the ladies, Mr. N. M. Macklin said the meal they had just consumed was the best thing they had experienced at any conference..... Mrs. A. P. Watson, President of the Guild, replied on behalf of the ladies, who were invited into the room whilst the toast was proposed and honoured.

The “Parish Notes” of Quilpie District, written by the Rector, the Rev. M. K. Timbrell, confirmed that domestic activities were regarded as appropriate Christian functions for women’s guilds:

There is a need for mundane things like arranging lunches and teas and the precious time God has given us has to be taken up with these things sometimes. Guild women know this and they must realise too that this is the limited function of a Guild - an organisation in which women work because they feel that as Christians they want to do something practical towards the support of the community Church they belong to.... To labour and sweat over the washing up for some Guild effort is a response to Christian Conviction.

In this way, clergy socialised Anglican women to believe that servility and unobtrusiveness were the attributes God valued most in the female sex, and particularly in married women. An article entitled “Christmas Angel” by M. C. Higgs draws attention to the stereotype of a worthy churchwomen:

Yes, we know her so well, don’t we ....with her cups of tea and the “few flowers” she pops in water for us. She is the backbone of every church congregation - there she is, like a bedraggled hen, on the wettest night - knowing apologetically that she is only one of the ubiquitous old dears whom the Vicar would gladly exchange for the bright and gilded youth so much more difficult to come by.

Bright young single women were not yet burdened with the heavy responsibility of being guardians of morality. They took on these tasks with the rite of marriage or, in the case of single women, with middle age. Mature churchwomen epitomised the Christian ideal of diakonia , and clearly they did gain religious security and a sense of community by participating in guilds and auxiliaries.

Churchmen were not adverse to exploiting the charms of young women to advance their mission, as reflected in the following appeal for voluntary female labour by the Brisbane Branch of the Mission to Seamen:

It is beyond dispute that the seaman desires feminine company when he comes ashore. Therefore the first and foremost task is to provide a team of hostesses, for most evenings of the week.... They need to be versatile, ready to play table tennis or billiards, to dance, or just chat over a cup of coffee. It is their job to see that every man, whatever his age, is made to feel at home in the Mission. Chaplain Morphet urgently appeals for voluntary workers who are not bogged down with past ideas and methods. We want active, versatile people with vision, prepared to work hard - people who are prepared to give of their best for the Kingdom of God through the Mission to Seamen.

By the end of the nineteen-sixties, there was a new breed of better educated, more confident and less conforming Anglican churchwomen emerging to challenge male supremacy in the Anglican Church. Women were beginning to query whether the traditional women’s groups, in particular the Mothers’ Union, served the best interests of churchwomen. In the nineteen-sixties, the enterprising wife of the Bishop of Gippsland, Evanne Garnsey, with the support of several other bishop’s wives, was active in the formation of Anglican Women of Australia (AWA) which it was hoped might serve as an umbrella group, a confederation into which all Anglican women’s groups might affiliate. Evanne Garnsey assured the Mothers’ Union that she did not regard AWA “as either criticism or rival”.

Although affiliated with the secular National Council of Women, the Mothers’ Union did not initially join Anglican Women of Australia. But it was not just the Mothers’ Union which was cautious about the new organisation. It was acknowledged at the National Conference of AWA in June 1982 that several bishops and clergy had also been opposed to its formation, perceiving AWA as merely an additional organisation rather than a structure which would unite Anglican churchwomen in a common purpose. Clergy tended to be suspicious of women’s solidarity and clearly there was a more progressive, wider dimension to AWA than was usual in Anglican women’s groups. AWA never reached the national proportions it had set out to achieve.

By the nineteen eighties, the Mothers’ Union, to survive, had to make adaptations. Perfectionist motherhood was no longer the strategy or ideal of women living in the age of second wave feminism. The Mothers’ Union reworded its aims from upholding the sanctity of marriage to being “specially concerned with all that strengthens and preserves marriage and Christian Family Life”. Another initiative to accommodate change was to set up a Young Wives Department, which in 1983 was renamed “Caritas”. The aim of “Caritas” was “Friendship in Action” with membership open to “everyone whatever their circumstances”. Caritas catered for working mothers as well as those opting to stay at home.

By the 1980s, the editor of the Anglican paper Church Scene admitted that traditional churchwomen’s groups were in decline:

Today women under the age of about 50 relate to the life of the parish churches rather differently because most of them have employment outside their home and are not, therefore, available for ladies’ guilds, women’s auxiliaries and so on. It may be that there is a little less fund-raising by women’s groups in our parishes than there used to be.

In the closing decades of the twentieth century, there was a new consciousness among younger women in particular that the Anglican Church was an organisation which discriminated against women to maintain male privilege. Young Anglican women were not prepared to accept a church which confined them in a domestic-type environment where they were subservient to the interests of men. Women were educated and had independent careers. They no longer needed the “virtuous motherhood” security blanket of the past because society in general had become more tolerant of irregular human relationships and the Church’s influence was waning.

In the following chapters, we shall trace in more detail how this late twentieth-century metamorphis in Australian Anglicanism evolved.

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