Clergy - Their Attitudes to and Images of Women

from Freedom From Sanctified Sexism - Women Transforming the Church by Mavis Rose, pp. 19-38.

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

The Australian theologian, Dr. Barbara Thiering, in her work on Australian Christian women, has drawn attention to the significance of “the mateship ethos”, which she believes has been transferred to Church life, replacing “the Christian ideal of koinonia , or fellowship of men and women together in Christ”. Thiering has received a number of complaints from churchwomen that “discrimination against them is even greater in the Church than in secular life”. This suggests that the influence of the “male mateship” culture has widened the gap between clergy/laymen and women in the Australian church.

Female friendships and women’s achievements have not been idealised in Australian culture. The pioneering exploits which became the basic material for Australian historiography and legend have focussed on men’s activities, underplaying and obscuring the ingenuity and endurance of pioneering women. The larrikin image of “mateship”, reflected in Australian literature, embodied a revolt against domestication. Sturmey observes that “home’s link with the restraining and conserving influence of woman was perhaps greater in Australia than in comparable western nations” so the establishing of “an Australian male identity necessarily involved some level of rejection or downgrading of this sphere of women”.

The “mateship culture” had incorporated into it what churches considered to be immoralities, such as excessive beer-drinking, obscene language, and a taste for gambling and women. Clergy were expected to preach against such practices, which placed them in a position of opposition to male tradition, conversely associating them with moralising women and the private domestic sphere. As a result, clergy have been regarded by the typical “Aussie bloke” as being in a profession that is not only “wowserish” but also not quite masculine.

In 1954 the Rev. D. J. F. Williams, then Vicar of Mary Valley in Queensland, admitted from his own experience that Australian Anglican men who entered Holy Orders did feel to some degree alienated from their lay “mates” :

Somehow in the process of becoming a priest, a man becomes clericalised. In one sense, of course, this is as it should be, the disciplines of prayer, worship, meditation, study and manual work of the theological college are intended to develop habits and qualities of character such as will fit a man for the fulfilment of his vocation. But if it means in addition, as it so often does, that a man comes to think and feel in a manner quite unlike his contemporaries who did not share his vocation, then the result can only be that the young cleric’s ministry is hampered from the outset..... And whether we priests like it or not, I’m afraid it is true to say that in the eyes of the world at any rate, we are lumped together as being all of one type. Sometimes I think we are regarded as being members of a third sex!

Williams was admitting that being ordained to the priesthood was a counter culture experience, placing Anglican clergy in a situation which was vaguely hermaphroditic. Rev. Peter Hill of Melbourne too acknowledged an emasculating factor in his vocation when he stated that “we priests do, of necessity, spend a lot of our time working among the women of the parish, and I’m not so sure that the cassock does much for our masculinity either. What we appear to be speaks louder than the words we preach”.

Rev. W. G. Coughlan, an Anglican priest, who as Director of the Christian Social Order Movement was concerned to make the Church more relevant to Australian society, commented in 1946:

Churchpeople, in the main, do not understand the mental and emotional outlook of the man-in-the-street(90% “unchurched”); they have no realisation of what has been happening to the values, attitudes,and habits of thought of the bulk of our contemporaries under the pressure of the characteristic features of twentieth-century life.

Former Church Missionary Society secretary, Irene Jeffreys, admitted that “the average Australian, apart from the ‘faithful’ , would not know what a bishop did” and “if they did think of a bishop at all, it would be of someone at the top of the ecclesiastical ladder, wearing robes and rings, remote from the ordinary person”.

Archbishop Peter Carnley of Perth, when commenting in 1983 on the excess of women in Australian Anglican congregations over two centuries, queried: “Can it be that men have found it more difficult to fit into the essentially female role of the religious person, fashioned in terms of docility and subservience?” In Australia, the compensating factor for men uneasy about their cultural image when remaining within the Anglican Church was the assured status which it offered them within its hallowed walls.

In a review of the book Fishers of Men (a title in which the term “men” does not appear to be generic), by the Rev. J. E. Waits-Ditchfield, it was pointed out that one of the problems of winning men to the Church was “removing the stigma that the Church deals mainly with women and children”. The use of the word “stigma” demonstrated how strongly churchmen resented the fact that the major proportion of their congregations was female. There was a suggestion in this statement that churchwomen were being made the scapegoats for the lack of male participation in the Church rather than clergy facing up to more relevant factors for an absence of laymen, such as the influence of Australian male tradition and the shortcomings in how Christianity was presented. An editorial in the Church Chronicle of 1 January 1945, drew attention to the fact that “many upright men” had given up going to church because “always they felt aliens in the congregation and the service seemed alien to them”. However, “they are glad if the wife goes; glad, too, if the children really seem to be clicking with church-life, but for themselves - well, it simply leaves them cold”.

The cultural gap between the clergy and congregation widened while the majority of priests was being recruited from England. The Archbishop of Melbourne in December 1911 saw the pressing need for more locally trained ministers, arguing that “an imported clergy can never make a really national Church, for no matter how wholeheartedly they give themselves to this work, they are not natives of the soil and cannot enter into the national ideals and aspirations as those can who have breathed Australian air from their cradles”. Recruitment to the priesthood was an ongoing problem in Australia. Yet, during the First World War, there was an indication that the Anglican Church placed “Empire” before “priestly vocation”. Archbishop Donaldson of Brisbane made known that he would not “accept as candidates for Holy Orders any but men who are not able to enlist”.

Those men who did join a parish were treated as the church’s elite, especially those willing to train for ministry. Archbishop Wand of Brisbane, in his monthly letter of March 1937, was clearly trying to play down the imbalance of women over men in most parish congregations, stating that “the cynic often forgets the number of men who are actually engaged in Church work”, citing the choirmen and the servers in the chancel. Certainly, where on rare occasions a parish had an excess of men over women, there was a detectable note of jubilation, as in the case of St. George’s Mission Parish, Windsor, in Brisbane, where the missioner, the Rev. W. P. B. Miles reported that “75% of the congregation are men” and “my problem is to get enough jobs for them”. Laymen usually engaged in administration, decision-making, liturgical functions and repair and maintenance of property. The area where there were the most jobs available, the household chores, were the domain of women.

In a poem entitled “The Layman’s Job” published in the Church Standard of 7 January 1944, the importance of the male parishioner was emphasised:

Leave it to the parson and soon the Church will die,
Leave it to the womenfolk - the young will pass it by.
For the Church is all that lifts us from the coarse and selfish mob,
And the Church that is to prosper needs a layman on the job...
But the parson cannot do it, single-handed and alone,
For the Laymen of the country are the Church’s cornerstone.
When you see a Church that’s dying, it’s the laymen who have died,
For it’s not by song or sermon that the Church’s work is done,
It’s the Laymen of the country who for God must carry on.

Women fare badly in this poem. They are depicted as a deterrent to youth. No credit is given to them for their role in teaching children about their faith, their immense contribution to the Church’s housekeeping and social outreach and their efforts to keep the parish economically viable. Considering that women were in the majority in most congregations, it was hard to justify the statement that a church without men would die. Clearly to the writer a Church in which men were not prominent was suffering morbidity. The poem inferred that male gender constituted a crucial part of the Church’s belief system and celebrations.

Not unexpectedly, the poem was challenged, but only by one woman using a pseudonym. In a letter to the Church Standard of 6 October 1944 signed “Medica” of Bathurst, New South Wales, the writer pointed out that “minus the support of women, the Church of England in Australia would ere now almost have ceased to exist; yet they are practically unrepresented even on parish councils, much less on Synods”.

Similarly, in 1948, an editorial in the Church Chronicle included a poetic appeal for churchmen, with a preamble that “two world wars have left a gap in the supply which is hard to fill”:

Give us men,
Men, whose lives reflect the beauty
Of the saints of olden time;
Men who know and do their duty
As from rock to rock they climb.
If they stumble, born of woman.
All the humbler, all the stronger,
Haply struggling on the longer;
Not angelic, nobly human,
Very men of flesh and blood,
Yet of heaven’s own brotherhood,
Men of God,
Give us men, I say again,
Give us men.

There are interesting nuances in this verse. The first is the reference to the saints of olden time. The religious journalist, Alison Cotes, has pointed out in her article “All of Them Saints of God” that, although women were martyred and tortured equally with men in the early Christian Church, a much smaller proportion of women, and in particular of married women, was elevated to the Canons of the Saints. Sainthood was a male dominated sphere and the eschatological prediction in the above poem was that Heaven will have its “male brotherhoods”. Again, where women are mentioned, the connotations are negative. Male “flesh and blood” is “nobly human” (not carnal and evil as women’s flesh was regarded by early theologians) and if men “stumble”, it is because they cannot avoid being “born of women”.

Anglican women seeking a more meaningful role in Church affairs in the twentieth century found themselves facing a conservative, ambivalent response from the clergy. This ambivalence is exemplified in the following statement made by the Rev. A. R. Bartlett of Goulburn in 1914:

The one thing you must have heard about to-day is the emancipation of women. But why do we use that word “emancipation”? Since the Incarnation woman has never been a slave in our remembrance....She finds her highest vocation in the cultivation of those loves and sympathies that make home the dearest place on earth.

Yes, God has made me a woman,
I am content to be
Just what He meant - not reaching
For other things - since He
Who knows me best and loves me best
Has ordered this for me.

Bartlett drew attention to the duty of a churchwoman: “She is to work with men, through men and for men”, adding, without explaining the illogicality of his words, “Such a subordination is certainly not inferiority”.

Bartlett, in his address to women, was subtly socialising them to accept the nineteenth century ideal of “virtuous motherhood” as the highest vocation for women. Bartlett linked this to the principle of “male headship”. a concept which was to become increasingly bandied about by Sydney clergy to provide a bulwark against women gaining leadership positions in the Diocese. The “male headship” principle assumed that God ordered society at Creation so that women must always be subordinate to men. But, to prevent women reacting critically to the concept, it was subtly argued that subordination did not mean that women were inferior!

Bartlett, either consciously or unconsciously, dwelt on the “whore” image of the early colonial period, contending that “when the women of a nation are vain or frivolous, when their power of love, which should inspire purity, is degraded to sordid or carnal ends, when their power of inspiring men is forfeited by the vanity and childishness which can see nothing in life worth seeking but pleasure - believe me, the true life of a nation is withering at its root”. “Men are GOD’s trees”, he concluded, “but women are ‘GOD’s flowers”, “the wife, the mother, the sister, whose life has never been published, whose name is unknown to fame, whose face has never been stared at in photograph shops - she is Australia’s glory, she is the nation’s hope”.

While bearing responsibility for uplifting the church and nation, women must remain anonymous and invisible, as if wrapped in the psychological and historical equivalent of a yashmak. The spotlight was reserved for “God’s trees” - Anglican males - and to attract them the Church must not appear to have an overabundance of “God’s flowers”. There was no attempt to criticise male pleasure-seeking nor was advice given to laymen to shun the limelight. The Church wanted to show off its male members to prove that parishes were not too heavily weighted with females. Pictures of and stories about churchmen were so liberally displayed in church newspapers that an uninformed reader could easily assume that women were an inactive, minority group.

In an address to the Annual Meeting of the Mothers’ Union in Brisbane in March 1912, the Rev. Cyril Mayhew emphasised that boys “ought to think their mothers the best and most wonderful women in the world”. If they did not think so, “it was the mother’s fault, because she had in some way lowered the boy’s ideal of what a woman should be”. What girls thought of their mother, or the injustice of presuming the mother was at fault if her son happened to complain about her, were not discussed. No critique was made of this statement in the Mothers’ Union records. The Mothers’ Union tended to collaborate in upholding patriarchal traditions.

At the same Mothers’ Union meeting, a Mrs. J. J. Kingsbury, when speaking on “The Effect of Higher Education on Women and Girls”, expressed concern that subjects such as mathematics and science might “crush and warp the softer and more womanly side of a girl’s character”, suggesting that educated women should make use of their higher education by helping “their husbands and sons by being real companions both in understanding and knowledge”. Again the needs of daughters and career aspirations of wives were not mentioned. Higher education was not to be used to raise women’s status and enable them to compete with males in the workplace but rather to make them more interesting and stimulating companions for the males they served.

Among Anglo-Catholic clergy in particular, there was a tendency to compare devout, conformist churchwomen with the Virgin Mary, the perfect mother. Less compliant women were associated with Eve, the “fallen” woman who had led Adam astray in the Garden of Eden. Dr. Jill Robson, a Church of England convert to Catholicism, contended that Christian women have suffered because the Church has polarized models of women “into either Eve or Mary”.

Mary is a human being who completely responded to the will of God, she ought , I believe, to be accessible as a role-model for Christian women in general, whereas, in fact, by dwelling upon her life in the Communion of Saints rather than her life on earth, the Church has removed her from the realm of the possible. This has left women with the other pole, Eve, the type of harlot, the temptress, or adventuress, who represents female sexuality, which is given a very bad press. This polarization has made women ashamed of their own sexuality, ashamed of their own bodies, which have become associated with sinfulness (unless bodiliness is denied or cut off by virginity or prudery). And I suggest that this has been put onto women by men. It is men who have gone on about it, who have written and pronounced upon Mary’s virginity and Eve’s guilt.

An example of this correlation is seen in the Rev. Desmond Morse-Boycott’s article on “The Perfect Woman”, which appeared in the “Women’s Sphere” pages of The Church Standard of 9 and 16 December 1938:

A clergyman’s portrait of the Perfect Woman will probably be far more successful than a layman’s because, having all rights in theology, he can disarmingly take you back to Eve in the Garden of Eden and, having shown where all the trouble sprang from, escape feminine censure by pointing out the tremendous fact that first woman was not the Perfect Woman, prior to the Fall, but only the Innocent Woman.

In the next instalment of his article, the Rev. Morse-Boycott concluded on the theme of the Virgin Mary:

In truth, there has been only one Perfect Woman in the chequered history of humanity ... who has changed Eve’s sadness into Ave . Her name is Mary, ever Virgin-Mother of the Son of God.

In a further article entitled “If the Church Could Start Again” written in 1940, Morse-Boycott used the Virgin Mary to rationalise women’s exclusion from leadership and authority:

I do not think that, after a new Pentecost, the Church would have women clergy. If you want to hear why women ought not to be clergy, ask a woman. She’d tell you with venom. The Church has ever valued diversity of function. She has exalted one woman to the skies. Her reverence for motherhood has altered the status of woman, who is no longer an article of domestic furniture. She utilises the service of women to the utmost, in conventual life, nursing, the mission field and the school.

Again the areas approved for women were listed - the convent, nursing, the mission field and school teaching, extensions of the domestic role. There was also an interesting reference to the strong rejection of the concept of “women clergy” by churchwomen themselves, because of their reverence for motherhood, which must be confined within the private domestic sphere.

When the priesting of women became a major issue in the Australian Anglican Church half a century after Morse-Boycott’s remarks were made, it was invariably conformist churchwomen who were among the strongest opponents of the change, such as leading members of the Mothers’ Union and the newly formed group Women Against the Ordination of Women (WAOW). It is interesting that the National Co-ordinator of Women Against the Ordination of Women, Phyllis Boyd of Melbourne, opposed women’s ordination using the differing functions of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary as a basis for her argument:

Through the Messiah being born a male by a female, God makes a definite statement about the differing and complementary role of men and women ... The Christian Church has respected th importance of the difference in needs and roles of men and women...To believe in the male apostolic tradition and that the priest who blesses the sacraments does so as the representative of Christ does not mean that one believes in the inferiority of women....

In this view, the nineteenth century ideal of motherhood was re-established as the role that brought women closest to divinity. Motherhood, unlike fatherhood, must not be combined with priesthood. The model of male perfection was that of Jesus Christ and many Anglo-Catholic clergy and laity saw male priests as “icons of Christ” with the emphasis on Christ’s gender rather than his humanity, ethnicity, etc. Behind this theory lurked classical theologies which suggested that women’s tainted sexuality made them unworthy of representing Christ.

There was another factor in Anglican women’s rejection of women priests. Priesthood carried with it power and authority. As the American religious sociologist, Sandra Schneider, pointed out in 1983, “women who experience themselves as always subordinate to men and who depend on men for affirmation and approval are very threatened by the emergence of leadership potential in other women”. The instinct to cut down “the tall poppies” was to become an ongoing problem for Australian Anglican churchwomen.

So Eve and Mary became useful biblical models among Anglo-Catholic conservatives in the Australian Church for ensuring that churchwomen conformed to their traditional roles. As Bishop Hart of Wangaratta advised his female flock, “we have to choose between Eve and Mary - between the woman who is merely man’s help and joy, and the woman who is his spiritual superior and his inspiration.” Clearly, the increasing independence of twentieth century women, for Bishop Hart, was identified as a move in the direction of Eve. He contended:

Somewhat noisily and impatiently the modern woman claims what she believes to be due to her. The world is too masculine and woman must come to the rescue. There was a time when woman did not doubt that what she wanted seriously she would always find a man to do for her. That was when men’s hearts yearned to establish her above them. The needs of today will not be met by man-like women. The real need is that men shall know women to be - that women shall feel themselves to be - not daughters of Eve but children of Mary.

The Bishop was clearly aware of feminist stirrings and anxious to stifle them by pouring contempt on women who tried to break out of the domestic sphere. He developed a tendency to snipe at women in his writings, delighting in depicting them both as intellectual inferiors and social climbers:

Women, especially, are prone to follow the example of others in the style of their hospitality and entertainment. They read of what others do in a society generally regarded as higher than their own circle, and they copy them. Unfortunately the so-called ‘higher’ circles are too often empty-headed people without brains to understand, or the culture to admire high principles. They have tried one way after another to banish the dullness, which is really due to their own mental and spiritual dullness, and are for ever looking for something that has a new kick in it.

The Church discouraged women from pursuing professional careers and making use of their education, yet at the same time sneered at women for their “empty-headedness”. Dr. Barbara Thiering, commenting on this double-standard, contended that the Church treated women in the same patronising way in which colonial missionaries treated native peoples as, “dear things, not quite responsible, and on the whole to be treated like children”. Thiering was of the opinion that when domesticity dominated a woman’s life, it could warp her personality:

She loses her ability to read; anything beyond the level of women’s magazines is too hard for her, even if she is - or was - a graduate. She loses her social confidence, and her confidence in any professional abilities she might have had. She forms an exaggerated respect for the wisdom and capacities of men, who seem to be so much cleverer than she is, simply because their wits are in practice and hers have grown rusty. She has simply ceased to grow, and she knows it.

According to Anglican sociologist, Margaret Franklin, “in Australia the Church’s organisation and practice have reinforced the all-too-obvious sexism of Australian society, reserving leadership, scholarship and decision-making for men and casting women into serving and caring roles.

Even women’s use of cosmetics to try to improve their appearance and so lift their morale and self-esteem drew forth clergy disapproval, expressed with connotations of Eve the temptress. Lipstick in particular was condemned. The Bishop of Willochra exhorted his clergy to exclude “women and girls with painted lips” from receiving the Eucharist. In his opinion the “growing habit of painting the face and the use of lipstick is much to be deplored, and feminine charm has considerably depreciated since its introduction”. He suggested that the second chapter of St. Paul’s first epistle to Timothy be studied in this connection.

In an address to the girls of St. Anne’s School, Townsville, in 1938, Bishop Feetham of North Queensland likewise expressed his disapproval of cosmetics:

I look at the Women’s Realm column and I see there a most astonishing prescription for what the writers calls beautification, but what I should call uglification... The advice given to our grandmothers one hundred years ago was to wash their faces with Pear’s soap - “matchless for the complexion” - and I have no fault to find with that. The only other thing the girls of that time used for their complexion was to rub their faces with a slice of raw potato. That was the method of our grandmothers and they were the most beautiful women in the world.

The editor of Brisbane’s The Church Chronicle , the Rev. A. E. Saxon, frequently waspish in his comments on women, also criticsed those who wore make-up: “Looking at some of the photographs of society women in the newspapers, I wonder that their vanity does not make them remove their lipstick before being photographed, there is such a close resemblance between some of them and the conventional clown”. In similar vein, he wrote: “Probably one of the worst forms fear has taken is the inferiority complex which results in many girls and women spending recklessly their time and money with the hairdresser and maker of cosmetics”. Saxon did not mention that Australian husbands preferred their wives to improve their appearance that men gained social esteem from having a glamorous wife while their wives gained self-confidence through conforming to this patriarchal requirement.

For much of the twentieth century, both Church and State encouraged married women to concentrate on child-rearing, thus increasing Australia’s population. Immigration programmes continued to provide new settlers for Australia’s development in the post-World War I period, helping at the same time to swell the church’s ranks because so many immigrants originated from the British Isles. In the case of single female newcomers, the Anglican Church again emphasised the domestic role, as observed in the following excerpt from an article entitled “Immigration” in The Church Chronicle of June l927:

There is great scope for the introduction of girls and young women as household workers, and facilities to encourage them to come out could be increased considerably. The fact that in Queensland there are 50,000 males in excess of females shows that bringing out more female workers would not push anyone else out of a job....

In this passage there is an inference that the women would serve Queensland best as domestic servants and spouses for the excess of men rather than joining the secular workforce, an indication that the early colonial period’s concepts about single women serving male interests were persisting into the twentieth century among churchmen. In 1938, Canon Garland of Brisbane, when addressing a meeting of the State Council of the New Settlers’ League, of which he was President, expressed satisfaction that “the girl immigrants we bring here marry quickly and have their babies quickly”, adding that “there is no nonsense about birth control with them”.

The subject of contraception frequently evoked adverse comment in church papers and sermons. Yet, under Resolution 15 of the Lambeth Conference of 1930, in the section on “Marriage and Sex”, it was stated that “where there is a clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood, the method [of contraception] must be decided on Christian principles: and methods other than abstinence ”may be used, provided that this is done in the light of the same Christian principles:. The Conference recorded “its strong condemnation of the use of any methods of contraception-control from motives of selfishness, luxury, or mere convenience”.

Under Resolution 16 of the 1930 Lambeth Conference, the Anglican bishops recorded their abhorrence of abortion. Archbishop Wand of Brisbane made clear his strong rejection of abortion when writing on “Effective Christian Witness” in October 1938, at the same time displaying in his preoccupation with sexual immorality a lack of concern for the societal and economic pressures impinging on women who sought abortion during the height of Australia’s Great Depression. Wand stated:

The prevalence of abortion, it will be generally admitted, is an appalling evil in itself. But it is a symptom of an evil that is even more widespread. It arises, at least partly, from a general breakdown in the sphere of sexual morality....I should like to see the whole question of love, courtship and marriage, in all its aspects, taken out of the atmosphere of jesting and innuendo which generally pervades it, and placed on that high plane of seriousness which alone is worthy of what is, after all, the great adventure of most human lives. In this effort, we ought to be especially careful to enlist the support of our Mothers’ Union and our Church of England Men’s Society.

Here Archbishop Wand was not just assigning the role of “moral guardian” to the Mothers’ Union but also to the Church of England Men’s Society, at least an acknowledgement that males contributed to the abortion dilemma.

Despite economic hardship in the nineteen twenties and thirties, which forced married women to find work to supplement the family income, the Australian Anglican Church continued to exhort its female members to remain in the home environment. In 1937, in an address at St. Alban’s Anglican Church, Epping, Bishop Moyes of Armidale warned of the dangers of the workplace for women and its de-feminising influence. The churlish language of his outburst provides an example of the lengths to which leading churchmen were prepared to go to keep churchwomen tied to home duties:

Modern woman has extended her sphere of action. It is no longer confined to the home - she turns her attention to public life - to becoming a first-hand influence in affairs of social life, of business, of industry, of politics. The lure of the city draws the girl; she determines to take her part in the rush and turmoil of life. And sometimes, alas, the result is pitiful. She finds the environment too strong for her; she loses her special woman’s outlook and her reverence for life; she does not lift men to her higher level, but she becomes a mere copier of man, even of his dress and ways, even to copying his pleasures and his vices, and so she sinks to a lower level, dragging him down too. And woman loses her special gift of creative force when she sinks merely to copying man on the physical level. Delilah was not a creative personality. No, woman’s work is to help man to a higher level..... Woman’s task remains eternally her own - to draw nearer to God herself and so to be able to show God to man, and to lead man to God, to realise and make men realize the real value of human life.

Here we see the “moral guardianship” and the “feminine soul” ideologies again being firmly reinforced. The public arena was too corruptive for woman. By identifying with males and copying their ungodly ways, woman might lose her elevated nature and, as a result, be unfit to act as a purifier for men. Bishop Moyes’ address again raised questions about the logic of prevailing clergy arguments: Why were laymen, who had sunk to a lower level by exposure to the workplace, more suited than women to play the leadership roles in church and home? How could women effectively “lead man to God” when in the church’s order they were subordinate and had no legitimate authority?

The shortage of manpower during the Second World War resulted in women escaping from the home environment in an unprecedented way. Admonitions to women about moral laxity increased in intensity in church newspapers. In an article entitled “The Church and the Crusade against Venereal Disease”, sexual promiscuity was declared to be “a more deadly danger to society and personality in the realm of the Spirit than is Hitler in the realm of politics”, a very strong statement indeed and clearly a resurgence of the Manichaean perspective. Admittedly, women were not always categorised as the worst offenders. Bishop de Witt Batty of Newcastle conceded that “the moral situation is what it is to-day by the fault of men not less, but more, than the fault of women” because “men’s power is greater” and “broadly speaking their morality is lower”. Again, a leading churchman was drawing attention to the inferior morality of men without explaining why males supposedly ranked higher in the divine order.

It was a period when American troops were entering Australia in large numbers, although no direct reference was made to this fact. However, in a later section of his article, Bishop de Witt Batty reverted to the familiar “whore” theme, claiming that “there are a plentiful number of young women, many of them from what are called good homes, who are ready to sell themselves to the highest bidder in a market where money is plentiful and bidding keen”.

Archbishop William Temple of Canterbury also expressed concern about “sexual immorality” during the wartime crisis:

To use that function of our nature [sexual relationships] as an opportunity of passing amusement, always involves treating another person as a plaything or toy .... There is nothing nasty about sex as God made it.... But it must be treated with respect, and even with reverence, because it is the means by which men and women are enabled to act on behalf of God in the creation of His children. Although not restricting sexual intercourse within marriage, the Archbishop of Canterbury was nevertheless to some extent reiterating the Church’s adage that intercourse was primarily for procreation.

Married women who had extra-marital relationships during wartime were subject to intense condemnation, as indicated in the following statement by a padre which appeared in “Afield and Afloat: A Section for Men and Women of the Fighting Services” in The Church Standard of 20 July 1945:

At one time I used to feel terribly bitter about the womenfolk of Australia. Week after week soldiers came to me with heartbreaking tales of domestic tragedy - wives unfaithful, children neglected, homes broken up, savings gone,etc. etc. And when one knew as I did what fine young fellows these soldiers so often were, how they had played the game, how they worried and suffered undeservedly, one couldn’t be blamed for wishing one could get at the women with a tommy gun.

This item was reminiscent of the Jewish Law that women caught in adultery should be stoned to death.

Servicemen who entered into de facto relations with women during the war received more sympathetic comment. Cautious approval was expressed in The Church Standard on a clause in the Federal Government’s “Re-establishment and Employment Bill” relating to payments to de facto wives, conceding that, as dependents of servicemen, they could not be neglected and that “still less can the children of such unions be branded in such a way as to place them at a disadvantage”. No recriminations were aimed at the servicemen for failing to formalise their relationships or for neglecting their dependents, yet another indication of how reluctant clergy were to criticise male sexual misdemeanours.

A more discerning statement on wartime relationships between men and women was made by Bishop Burgmann of Goulburn during the first post-war General Synod in Sydney in September 1945. He conceded that “thousands of war-time marriages will probably break up - not because the young people who entered into them did not do so in good faith, but because they had been carried away by situations and the inhuman set of circumstances brought about by war”. “Instead of telling these young people we do not believe in divorce” he suggested, “we should try to help them make a success of any second marriage they may make, and give them our blessing.”

A reflection by the Rev. Bruce Wilson in 1978, then Rector of St. George’s, Paddington, N.S.W. and later Bishop of Bathurst, acknowledged that Australians had inherited from their mostly British forbears an attitude to sexuality “which has tended to polarise on the extremes of puritanism and pornography”:

Puritanism and pornography ... both do dirt on sex. Both deny the warm, human, bonding effect of sexuality in all human relationships. Before the changed attitudes of the last twenty years or so, the female was expected to uphold the puritan virtues. She was expected to say “no” to the male’s sexual advances. If she didn’t resist him, the man considered her to be a slut. He might spend part of the night with her, joke among his mates about “scoring” with her - but he would never consider marrying such an unvirtuous woman. Such was the hypocrisy of the puritan-pornographic mentality. The true female was expected to be sexless except in her duty to provide the male his “matrimonial rights”. “Barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen" was an Australian male joke not too far from the truth of the essential masculine attitude. The male was the sexual marauder.

It was in the “jokes” sections of the church press, which no doubt lightened the heavy ecclesiastical content of the papers, that Anglican male disparagement of women often surfaced, especially resentment of the power women exercised in their appointed zone, the domestic sphere. According to Thiering, women make “a good subject for after-dinner jokes” asserting that “the overt social level is not the one at which the Church does most damage to its women members”. The following humorous offerings in the church press certainly depicted married women as anything but perfect. They appeared as domineering rather than meekly submissive, with husbands who were not exercising “headship” thus creating examples of women acting contrary to the Anglican ideal:

When a man argues with a women ... it usually works out like this: He came. He saw. He concurred.

She was giving orders at express speed, for they were married, and he, though meek and submissive, was beginning to turn like the proverbial worm. “Do you think”, he enquired sarcastically, “that you rule the whole universe"?
“No,” she snapped, “but I rule the first letter of it!”

“But, my dear,” blurted the poor little henpecked husband, “You’ve been talking for half an hour, and I haven’t said a word.”
“No,” snapped his wife, “you haven’t said anything, but you’ve been listening in a most aggravating manner, and I’m not going to stand it."

Wife: I’m afraid the mountain air would disagree with me."
Husband: “My dear, it wouldn’t dare.”

Teacher: “What is the meaning of the word matrimony?”"
Pupil: Please, Miss, my father says it isn’t a word; it’s a sentence."

Dave: I say, Dad, what was the Tower of Babel?
Dad: Eh! The Tower of Babel: Wasn’t that where Solomon kept his 500 wives?

Jokes involving clergy could also portray women in unflattering ways :

What sort of a person is Mrs. X? was once asked of a clergyman, who replied: “Oh, a perfect old beast, but a very good Churchwoman."

A talkative woman at a big public dinner found herself seated between a bishop and a rabbi. “I feel as if I were a leaf between the Old and New Testaments", she announced coyly, interrupting the bishop as he was about to make a very telling point. “Madam”,he said coldly, “The page is usually blank.”

Although church writings tended to play down conflicts between clergy and churchwomen, items occasionally slipped into the Anglican press which revealed tensions. Sometimes such items had the form of “morality tales” to teach women their proper place in the parish, the following item being an example:

Here and there you find a “Mrs. Pertinacious” who thinks and acts as though she were the centre of the whole parochial system in which she lives and moves and has her being, and the consequence is that everything is out of focus for her, and she is never happy in church life. Mrs. Pertinacious, at the centre, with the rector, and the clubs, and the Sunday School, and all the other parishioners revolving around her, is a hopeless dream, practically a nightmare, and all the lady really is, is a centre of discontent.

Clergy admitted to being daunted by the indirect power wielded by women’s groups, as seen in this comment by the Sydney cleric and broadcaster, Rev. Ross Saunders:

I find it fascinating to reflect on the politics of women in the Anglican Church over the years. As a young clergyman, I was faced with ancient harridans who had ruled their families aggressively, and who, as the money-raisers in the parish, wielded ultimate authority over the men-only parish councils. The organists and choir mistresses found ways of keeping the clergyman in his place! I had often to be careful of the dear soul who looked after the sacred vessels!

That churchwomen could learn to play power games within the structures was also confirmed by an Anglican churchwoman who had spent her childhood on Norfolk Island. Her Aunt Val, she recalled, was known on the island as “the Bishop” because of her dominance of church affairs and most Anglican clergy sent to the island learned to listen carefully to her views to avoid conflict. On Sundays, at public worship or in evening council meetings, the clergy had laymen to give them support. During weekdays, clergy were more isolated, surrounded by churchwomen, whose group leaders were entitled to exercise the limited authority allowed to them within the domestic sphere.

Authoritarian women did not fit comfortably into a system which was structured on male dominance and female submissiveness. Obituaries of women in church papers often illustrated what the Australian Anglican clergy viewed as commendable behaviour in its churchwomen. The ideal churchwoman gave exemplary service in the roles reserved for women without intruding into the male sphere. Take, for example, the obituary of Emmie Agnew, who died in 1926:

For thirty years Emmie Agnew ... laboured unsparingly to sustain and extend the Kingdom of God in that quiet little corner of the earth [Dunwich, Stradbroke Island]. By Sunday School classes, by training confirmation candidates, by hospitality to the Priests visiting the settlement, by her unremitting care of the little Church and its ornaments, vestments and linen, and in countless other ways she showed continuously her loyal devotion and sincere Christianity. It was largely owing to her efforts that the Church of St. Mark was built.

Obituaries of women could also exclude the personality and activities of the deceased, as in the case of Mrs. W. Foxton Robertson, whose Christian name is not even mentioned, thus marking her merely as an appendage of various important Anglican men:

Mrs. W. Foxton Robertson, who died recently at North Sydney, was the last member of the family of one of Australia’s pioneer families .... Her father, the Rev. D. P. M. Hulbert, with his wife and four children, arrived in Sydney in December. Three weeks later he went to Goulburn and opened a school for boys. In 1864 he was appointed incumbent at Collector. Subsequently he retired to Goulburn. Mrs. Robertson was the widow of Mr. William Foxton Robertson, formerly police magistrate at Narrabri and Dubbo.

However, where a woman was a leading figure in society as well as in the church, as in the case of Miss Sibella Macarthur-Onslow, C.B.E., who died at Menangle, New South Wales, on 16 July l943, the oration was much more fulsome, commanding a whole page of The Church Standard. She was described as “a lady of rare quality” with “the kind of intellect which can grasp the significance of big events” and “was plainly a descendent of her pioneering forbears”. The elite always commanded respectful attention in Anglicanism, whether male or female, and Miss Macarthur-Onslow had not lost her identity through marriage and motherhood.

In conclusion, in the few items relating to women contained in the Anglican church press of the first half of the twentieth century, one learns how Anglican clergy socialised churchwomen to conform to the patriarchal pattern. Women were taught that the path to salvation and sanctity entailed motherhood, unobtrusiveness and subordination to males. In regard to laymen, the Church had to accommodate the male “mateship tradition” in order to attract the men it needed to uphold its patriarchal structures. Clergy were obsessed with the fear that men, already a minority in average congregations, would abandon the Church completely if women had too high a profile or appeared to be too numerous.

Many Anglican churchwoman accepted that it was their Christian duty to obey unquestioningly the rules set down by their church leaders. Among these were women who preferred that higher profile and leadership roles were not opened up to women. Churchwomen had learned how to build up avenues to indirect power within the male-dominant system. These attitudes were not surprising. Were the patriarchal system changed, the most likely candidates for more meaningful roles would be the women who had escaped from full-time domesticity into higher education and experience in the public sphere.

Anglican women were not as passive as the church record might suggest. All through the twentieth century there were women requesting more direct involvement in the decision-making processes, especially at the parish level. The struggle to allow women a voice in church affairs will be discussed in the next chapter.

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