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Despite the unusually long period of consultation and argument in the Australian Anglican Church entailed in framing a Constitution which would make the church independent from the Church of England, women were almost entirely omitted from the final document which went into force in 1962. There was not even a reference to the Order of Deaconesses, the ministry for women which was most akin to Holy Orders. This omission typified attitudes to women, despite their numerical superiority in the Church. When the Deaconess Order was included in the Constitution in 1969, the demise of the order had been advised by the Lambeth bishops. The inclusion was therefore merely a ploy to establish a permanent diaconate for women which was not of the threefold order reserved for males, thus legalising the subordination of women in official ministry.
The new Constitution of 1962 was rigid in its construction. Once formulated, it required a high degree of consensus to effect change. This rigidity upheld the patriarchal status quo and, conversely, militated against the admission of Australian Anglican women to the priesthood, an important avenue to full equity. A partial breakdown of the barriers occurred in 1985 with the acceptance of a Canon in General Synod to ordain women to the same diaconate as men. Women’s entry to priesthood did not occur until 1992 and not through a direct priesting canon but by the revision of outdated laws inherited from the Church of England.
The actions taken by Bishop Dowling of Canberra/Goulburn and Archbishop Carnley of Perth in February and March 1992 to break the legal deadlock preventing the priesting of women symbolised the Australian Anglican Church’s ineffectiveness at the national level, forcing a return to the diocesanism of the pre-1962 period. As a result of the first priesting of women in Perth, the Australian bishops had no alternative but to give priority to the women’s priesting issue in order to create a semblance of national coherence. A seventy-five per cent majority of bishops at the 1992 General Synod supported legislation put forward by Archbishop Hollingworth of Brisbane to clear away inherited English laws which the Appellate Tribunal believed to be an obstacle to women’s ordination. When seeking Brisbane Diocese’s ratification of this General Synod legislation, Archbishop Hollingworth emphasised that the issue at stake was national unity. Although a church leader who had built his reputation on issues of social justice, Archbishop Hollingworth denied that the priesting of women constituted a matter of human rights or social justice for women. Churchmen have found it difficult to admit that the social gospel of Christ has been misrepresented to churchwomen for two thousand years.
Voluntary dependency, exemplified by the Australian Anglican Church’s decision to retain its legal nexus with the Church of England for such a long period, was based on regional politics rather than oppression by the Mother Church. In contrast, the dependency of Australian Anglican women has been more akin to colonialism, a situation where those whose power has been usurped have had inadequate weapons with which to confront the forces which dominate them, that is if they wish to remain within the Anglican Church. The enforced dependency of Australian Anglican women has been engineered by men who have sought to preserve and reproduce the patriarchal structure from which they have gained privilege supported by women who are comfortable in the system into which they have been socialised and in which they have won approval for conforming to it.
Patriarchy and colonialism are both insidious, complex power structures, usually rationalised in terms which suggest that their motives are Godly, self-sacrificial and beneficial. Anglican women in Australia are still grappling with the debilitating effects of an enduring ecclesiastical mythology which assumes that women are weaker, of lower intelligence, emotionally unstable and biologically impure, requiring the overlordship of superior, more competent, stronger human beings - Anglican males. Such indoctrination represents a form of androcentric “social darwinism”; it is not Christlike.
Sydney, the birthplace of Australian Anglicanism (and in 1992 still the largest, wealthiest and most powerful diocese) has retained to a marked degree the authoritarian, misogynist, moralistic outlook of the early colonial settlement. Attitudes towards women are more oppressive and colonial in Sydney than in any other diocese in Australia which also had penal origins. Only Sydney Diocese espouses a universal principle that women must be subordinate to the authority of men.
In Australian Anglicanism, women had practically no direct input into how the church should develop within the unique environment in which it had put down new roots. Women could express opinions and exert strong pressure, but the final authority, the legitimised power, was in the hands of men. From the start, the colonial government of Australia and its religious wing, the Church of England, stressed that the place of women was in the home as a wife and mother, or in the work areas approved for women, such as missionary, housekeeper, nurse or teacher of children. The private arena of women and the public sphere of men were early institutionalised in colonial Australia. The pioneering male and his “mates” became part of Australia’s culture and legend. The pioneering Australian woman in her private sector tended to be overlooked, despite the remarkable feats of endurance which she performed. Church history has likewise focussed on the actions of churchmen.
From the beginning of British settlement in Australia, there was deliberate exploitation of women, both by the government and church. Women were regarded as commodities at the disposal of men rather than human beings with independent rights. This attitude was not unique to Australia. The bishops attending the Lambeth Conference of 1930 admitted that women in general had for years been treated by men as if they were chattels, with inadequate legal rights to protect them.
In the home, the mother was expected to be the virtuous parent, at the same time submissive to a man allowed a very marked degree of latitude in his behaviour. Church leaders admitted that in practice churchwomen tended to be more faithful and devout than churchmen, but strangely this devotion was insufficient to make women eligible for leadership. In a patriarchal church, maleness, whether it was devout or not, was the key factor.
Australian cultural patterns encouraged men to flaunt religious mores. To attract males, Church leaders had to soften their condemnation of men’s libertine ways. Moral judgements of women were harsher than those of men. Women who had sexual encounters with men outside the strict code laid down or who appeared too worldly in their attitudes, dress and use of cosmetics, were categorised as “fallen”, like Eve. Men who engaged in extra-marital affairs tended to be treated more indulgently.
Up to the later decades of the twentieth century, there was little encouragement for women to make use of their professional talents. The clergy stressed that the public workplace was too independent for women, that with independence came “defeminisation”. Professional women were encouraged to work in mission fields, an area where the Australian Anglican Church was finding it particularly difficult to recruit sufficient men. Churchmen clearly preferred strong, single women with leadership abilities to work as far away from their home territory as possible. Married women were easier to handle because most married churchwomen were economically dependent on husbands who preferred their wives to conform to the norms for women. Dependency encouraged an attitude of acceptance of male power and control.
Churchmen in Australia were careful to report on English Anglican feminism in negative terms to discredit it. At the same time, through sermons and writings, women were led to believe that working under the leaderhip of males was a means of attaining sanctity. Thus the message being relayed to devout Australian churchwomen was that it was sinful to question their subordinate status since it was part of God’s holy order.
Obituaries of churchwomen which appeared from time to time in church newspapers, especially in the pre-World War II period, indicated that self-effacing but sacrificial devotion to the church and her family was the attribute which was most commended. Obituaries of churchwomen also indicated how easily their endeavours were underestimated or forgotten, as in the case of Emmie Agnew of Stradbroke Island and Mrs. Foxton Robertson of North Sydney. Mrs. Foxton Robertson’s obituary merely indicated that she was related to important men in the Church and in public life. The obituary revealed nothing of Mrs. Foxton Robertson herself, not even her Christian name.
In every churchwomen’s group under review, there emerge examples of carefully blurred but still discernible elements of exploitation of women by churchmen. Women’s guilds and women’s auxiliaries made very substantial contributions to the economic viability and expansion of the Anglican Church in Australia yet, apart from appreciative remarks in parish notes by individual rectors, there was inadequate recognition of the contribution of women in major reports on the Australian Anglican Church. As in typical colonial situations, the subjected class, in this case Anglican women, constituted the grossly underpaid and devalued work force which provided those in power with high esteem and economic viability.
At the local and diocesan level, few women, until the second half of the twentieth century, had an opportunity to sit on the parish councils and diocesan synods which decided how the money they had raised should be spent. In 1932, in the diocese of Willochra, a woman delegate legally elected to Synod by Port Lincoln parish, was barred from taking her seat because the bishop deferred to male opinion rather than upholding diocesan law. Most churchwomen could only lobby male councils to support their proposals. Australian Anglican women differed from their counterparts in North America where the women’s auxiliaries handled their own funds and made the decisions on how they should be allocated. This again indicated the extent of Australian Anglican women’s dependency vis-a-vis comparable overseas Anglican provinces such as North America and New Zealand.
In Australian Anglicanism, and in Sydney Diocese particularly, clergy were obsessed with the fear that men would leave the Church if it were revealed that there were more female members than male, an indication of how strongly the Australian male-dominant culture was entrenched in the Church. Because the Australian Anglican Church was disestablished, it did not have the same “public” status as the Church of England. In view of the strong segregation of the sexes into public and private spheres in Australian society, churchmen were anxious to avoid any perception in the community that the privatisation of the Anglican Church indicated that it was a place for women only
The rapid spread of the Mothers’ Union in Australia in the closing decades of the nineteenth century indicated that it was in tune with woman’s need to counteract the “fallen” image with which women had been branded in the early colonial period, exacerbated by negative views of women inherited from the early Church Fathers. Despite the Mothers’ Union’s dutiful adherence to the traditional emphasis on the domestic role of women and its stress that a woman should sacrifice her career to serve the interests of her husband and children, the group was not universally popular with Australian clergy. There was a reverent conformity in the Mothers’ Union which should have delighted the clergy but which many of them seemed to find irritating. The legally disempowered still have the freedom to carp and act as moral watchdogs if dissatisfied with the way churchmen were handling church affairs. By the mid-twentieth century, the Mothers’ Union’s outlook on divorce and re-marriage had become stricter than that of the church hierarchy, which caused so much concern that the Church of England set up a commission to examine the Mothers’ Union.
The emergence of young wives’ groups was a necessary step to attract to the Church succeeding generations of Australian women who might otherwise be disenchanted by the conservatism and narrow focus of the older women, although admiring of the good works and welfare agencies which the Mothers’ Union and ladies’ guilds supported.
Churchwomen’s groups began to decline in numbers in the latter half of the twentieth century as careers for women became acceptable in society generally. Young women were also more conscious in the less restrictive atmosphere of this period that they suffered a loss of status in the Church when they married, their identity being absorbed into that of their husband. Women who had been effective youth leaders or successful administrators when single found that, with marriage, they were required to play a less visible role and retire to the Church’s less public sphere. This attitude women were less prepared to accept in the second half of the twentieth century.
Laywomen’s groups in general were not as vulnerable in the church system as women in full-time ministry. Members of churchwomen’s groups were voluntary workers. They had more freedom to change groups, choose another denomination if they were dissatisfied with the Anglican system, or leave the mainstream of Christian worship. For women in formal ministry, the situation was much more complex, one of the reasons why the Church of England first wave feminists established the Central Council for Women’s Church Work, an organisation to monitor that women in full-time ministry had fair working conditions. Australian churchwomen never set up a similar organisation nor did churchmen encourage them to do so.
The introduction of women’s formal ministry in the nineteenth century stirred up a surprising amount of debate among Anglican clergy across the world. Fears expressed related basically to what inroads women would make on the traditional male ministry and whether women’s solidarity would endanger the system. There was tension between the desperate need for women to cope with social outreach and a basic reluctance to formalise women’s ministry.
Perceptions of women in formal ministry evoked, in a way surprising in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ancient associations of the feminine with pagan religions which worshipped goddesses as well as gods and had female as well as male priests. These fears alone epitomised how much importance maleness was accorded in institutionalised Christianity. Playing on these fears became a ploy used to prevent female ministry from evolving into female power.
In terms of eroding the power position of the male clergy, the introduction of the deaconess was potentially more dangerous than the revival of religious orders for women, the reason why in the early centuries of the Church women deacons had been moved from the public sphere into the private cloisters of the convent. While Lambeth Reports and Anglican Commissions devoted considerable time and thought to deaconesses, women in religious orders hardly rated a mention over the years from the end of the nineteenth century to the present time. Anglican nuns were no threat to the traditional concept that Holy Orders were the preserve of males.
Churchwomen had to be in Holy Orders to have direct power at the highest level. Feminist pressures were intense in England at the period of the 1920 Lambeth Conference. The bishops responded to lobbying by vaguely indicating that the deaconess was in Holy Orders. In 1930, when feminism was cooler, the Lambeth bishops modified their 1920 stance, declaring that the deaconess was in an order sui generis. The use of the feminine noun “deaconess” must signify a separate order of ministry from that of the male deacon.
In Australia, deaconess orders were shaped by the differing attitudes to women in ministry and the churchmanship of dioceses. Training was mainly centred in Sydney and Melbourne. Sydney Diocese was noticeably lukewarm at first to the formalisation of women’s ministry. The unannounced arrival of the Sisters of the Church increased support for the Deaconess Order which had been founded by the Archdalls. Deaconess House became the foremost training centre in Australian Anglicanism for women in formal ministry such as deaconesses, missionaries, social workers, parish assistants and clergy wives. Yet Sydney encouraged its single women, especially deaconesses, to serve outside its boundaries. It was therefore in foreign mission fields and frontier areas of other Australian dioceses that Sydney-trained women in ministry often carried out their most rewarding work. In Gippsland diocese, deaconesses were accorded the title of “Reverend”. In China, deaconesses were regarded as being on the same level as male deacons. The seeds of feminist unrest were nurtured when these women returned home to find severe constraints on their job opportunities and liturgical functions.
The pay and conditions of women in formal church ministry were well below that of the clergy, in spite of the responsible work load they carried. As the article by “Quiz” indicated, the opportunities for advancement for a deaconess were very few. Her diaconate signified not only permanent subordination but inadequate recognition and remuneration. A deaconess could change to more stimulating job situations but there were few senior appointments open to her. Those who did get accepted into responsible positions had to be very careful to endorse the principle of male headship. In other words, any feminist stirrings they had must be stifled until retirement or they would suffer job loss.
The women’s religious orders in Australia provided social welfare agencies and schools at a time when they were sorely needed. Most of the early sisters came out from England. There was strong Australian parental dislike of daughters entering religious orders in Anglicanism, fathers in particular resenting the vow of celibacy which ran counter to the established cultural norm of women serving husbands and children in the home.
There was an element of exploitation both within and without the religious orders. So great was the Church’s demand for their services that the small number of women who entered the orders were saddled with too onerous a workload with the result that invariably their health suffered, a factor also noticeable in Australia’s outback deaconesses and missionary nurses. Like most women in ministry, Anglican nuns were seen as a source of cheap labour. Yet responsibility for exploitation of women in religious orders could not be attributed solely to churchmen. Because of the autonomous nature of the orders, mothers superior had to share the blame.
Anglican religious orders have attracted more associates than fully professed members. An associate can combine marriage and family life or a career in the public sphere with a modified form of religious life. Without the support of associates, it would have been difficult for the dwindling women’s orders to remain viable. The expanding institutions which the sisters founded were eventually staffed by professional social workers and lay teachers, often under the administration of diocesan committees.
The conventual life has been effective in stemming the radicalism which the English religious orders displayed when first established. The sisters have not been as active and articulate in the twentieth century feminist movement in Anglicanism as other women in formal ministry, the exception being the small Community of St. Clare at Stroud. Yet in terms of providing secondary education for women and running hostels in outback towns so that girls could attend state schools, Anglican nuns have made a valuable contribution to the liberation of women. Higher education has been a significant factor in raising the awareness of Anglican women to their inequitable situation within the Church, leading to the growth of feminism in the second half of the twentieth century.
The clergy wife has been engaged in one of the most exacting areas of Anglican ministry. She has been a bridge between the private and public spheres of the Church yet expected to remain unobtrusive. For centuries, the clergy wife has had to adapt to the changing whims of the Church in regard to clergy marriage. In Australia, in the pioneering era, clergy wives found their conditions very harsh, particularly if no rectory were available while a parish was being established. Clergy in Australia did not have the assured income of their English counterparts, leading to financial stress.
Those clergy wives who were in a parish situation were so much the appendage of their husbands that it was difficult for them to project their own personality without running into criticism. The rector was the centre of attention in the parish; the wife was expected to remain quietly in the background, working in conjunction with or leading the women’s sector. If a clergy wife did not conform, her husband’s promotion could be affected as parish nominators tended to take the clergy wife into consideration when choosing a new rector. The situation of the clergy wife was sensitively assessed by the aboriginal people of North Australia in 1989 when presenting the retiring Primate, Sir John Grindrod, with a carved dugong, and his wife, Lady Dell Cornish-Grindrod, with a small shadow fish on a necklet.
The general epithet “unpaid curate” bestowed on clergy wives had an inbuilt acknowledgement of exploitation. Parishes expected clergy wives to carry out an auxiliary ministry alongside their husband for no extra payment. Clergy wives could seldom sit on parish councils as this could be regarded as giving too much power to the rector, an assumption that the clergy wife’s opinion would mirror her husband’s.
Bishops’ wives suffered less parish intrusion into their private lives but they were expected to remain detached from church politics, although this could be very difficult for them to do. Dorothy Mowll of Sydney was an exceptional bishop’s wife in that she did become an effective leader within a diocese which was fanatical about male authority. Her early years had been spent as a very resourceful and independent missionary in China. Bishops’ wives such as Zandra Wilson, Ann Carnley, Jean Penman and Lady Dell Cornish-Grindrod, were very supportive of the Movement for the Ordination of Women but it was very difficult for bishop’s wives to give overt support if their husbands were opposed to women’s priesting.
In terms of improving the status of women generally, the Second World War was a turning point. The waspish sniping at women and negative jokes in the church press of the first half of the century waned, and there was noticeably less condemnation of women working in the public sphere. The Second World War also brought the question of women’s ministry to a head when Bishop Ronald Hall of the Diocese of Hong Kong and South China set a precedent by ordaining a Chinese woman, Li Tim-oi, to priesthood in order that she might celebrate the Eucharist for an Anglican community stranded on the neutral Portugeese island of Macao.
The Second World War also brought into being the World Council of Churches with a women’s unit intent on breaking down the gender biases prevailing in most Christian Churches. Much of the impetus for the World Council of Churches had come from ex-members of the Student Christian Movement which had early established a model of men and women consulting and theologising together rather than working in separate compartments and at different levels. The removal of barriers such as racism, sexism and classism were to be main objectives of the World Council of Churches and these objectives were incorporated into the programme for the “Ecumenical Decade of Churches in Solidarity with Women”. Not unexpectedly, the Australian Anglican Church gave more weight to the “Decade of Evangelism”.
In Australia, many of the Anglican activists of the second half of the twentieth century had been members of the Student Christian Movement, including the first Australian Anglican woman to be priested, Rev. Alison Cheek. The Australian Council of Churches’ Commission on the Status of Women did much to raise the consciousness of Anglican women, providing a model of daring to speak out, so contrary to the “nice” behaviour expected of Anglican women.
The support of women from other denominations has been invaluable to Anglican women activists. From the interdenominational group Christian Women Concerned grew the first Anglican feminist group, Anglican Women Concerned led by the young theologian Colleen O’Reilly Stewart. Anglican Women Concerned set a pattern of public protest outside important church assemblies, such as general and diocesan synods in the Sydney Chapter House, a practice which was later to be adopted by the Movement for the Ordination of Women. In Adelaide, one of the leading activists was Alison Gent, who formed the protest group Women in Holy Orders?, and in Melbourne Rhyl Currie led the most radical of the movements there, Action Group for Women’s Ordination.
While the Protestant denominations were the first to raise the consciousness of Anglican women, especially those in the Uniting Church traditions, by the nineteen seventies Catholic women in America were producing new feminist theologies which provided the academic depth which the average Anglican churchwoman needed to confront theologically-trained clergymen. Australian Catholic churchwomen in the nineteen-eighties responded by forming feminist groups such as Women and the Australian Church (WATAC). These groups linked up with the Movement for the Ordination of Women and Uniting Church activists, and also worked with more radical Christian and post-Christian feminists such as the Women/Church group, creating a women’s front which traversed denominational barriers
One of the problems facing Anglican activists was the lack of opportunities for women to preach, as in the case of the brilliant orator Maude Royden. Sermons in parishes were seldom delivered from a woman’s perspective. Women who challenged male domination of the Church became “black-listed”. Once it was recognised that the eloquent former medical mssionary, Dr. Patricia Brennan, was preaching in Sydney on behalf of women seeking ordination rather than encouraging the congregation to volunteer for the foreign mission field, her speaking engagements were curtailed. In this way the Anglican Church, both in England and Australia, controlled the protests of women.
Feminism was unnerving for churchmen because it represented women’s freedom from dependency, and so was a major threat to the male dominant power structure. Feminism exposed the injustices in the patriarchal, colonial-type church establishment. Women’s distress about their inequitable situation in the Church was particularly emotive because injustice ran counter to the teaching of Jesus Christ and so could stir up consciences, moving Anglican people to support change. Just as colonial regimes stifled voices of protest which threatened their power structures, so many Anglican Church leaders in Australia used their authority to shield the average churchwoman from becoming aware of the distorted theologies which rationalised her subordinate position. The opponents of women’s ordination argued that opening the priesthood to women was not a social justice issue, inferring that Christ had selected twelve male apostles to indicate that his Church must be led by a priestly caste in which maleness was the essential element. Thus Christ was portrayed as patriarchal rather than egalitarian. As biblical scholarship developed, the flaws in these theological arguments were revealed, laying bare a basic hypocrisy and underlying male self-interest.
Certainly in seeking to enter the priestly caste themselves, women deacons were accepting a hierarchical, exclusive structure which cut them off to some extent from the laity. But to effect change, women needed to gain access to the corridors of power. Neverthess, Anglican activists were faced with the reality that women who did not have to struggle to enter the ordained ministry showed a disturbing lack of understanding of why Christian feminism had developed as a reform process.
For Anglican feminists, the lack of a supreme authority such as the Pope in the church structures was advantageous. Because of this dispersed power, conservatism in the Mother Church in England could not prevent the liberalisation of women’s ministry in outlying provinces of the Anglican Communion. In spite of the long history of feminist activism in the English Church, it has been in overseas provinces that the status of women has been most improved.
General dissatisfaction on the part of the laity with its exclusion from top policy-making was expressed at the Toronto Conference in 1963 strengthening a trend against over-clericalisation in the Anglican Communion. Lay pressure on bishops attending the 1968 Lambeth Conference led to the formation of a clergy/lay advisory body, the Anglican Consultative Council. At its first meeting in Limuru, Kenya, in 1971, the Anglican Consultative Council gave the green light for the Diocese of Hong Kong to ordain its women deacons. While the Lambeth Bishops at the 1978 Conference expressed concern about the powers the Anglican Consultative Council had taken upon itself at the Limuru meeting, by then the Bishop of Hong Kong had ordained two women, Jane Hwang and Joyce Bennett, and women had been priested in North America and New Zealand.
Two South Australian Anglican women played a significant part outside Australia in advancing the priesthood of women in the nineteen-seventies. Irene Jeffreys strongly supported the Diocese of Hong Kong in its bid to priest women at the Limuru meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council. Alison Cheek was one of the eleven women who brought the women’s priesting issue to fruition in the United States of America by her irregular ordination in Philadelphia in 1974. Both these women later had important links with the Australian Anglican women’ movement.
In 1979, the English Anglican feminists formed a new group, the Movement for the Ordination of Women, under the leadership of the BBC religious broadcaster, journalist and writer, Monica Furlong. In October 1983, a similar group formed in Sydney under the joint leadership of Dr. Patricia Brennan, Colleen O’Reilly Stewart and Marlene Cohen. MOW was unusual in terms of Australian Anglicanism in that, although a group focussing on women’s issues, its membership was open to men, symbolic of mutuality rather than segregation. MOW was not under the patronage of the Anglican male hierarchy, for which it has often been accused of not being truly Anglican.
Freedom from church supervision allowed this group of Australian Anglican women an opportunity to step back and assess the situation in the Church from a perspective which had not been imposed from above, had not been framed in male language and which ran counter to the accepted male ideology. MOW was and still is, in terms of Anglican women, an anti-colonial freedom movement. Yet there is a paradox in MOW itself for the group is not condemning priesthood per se , but using it as an avenue to women’s full enfranchisement. Whether a “discipleship of equals” can be achieved by this method has yet to be proved.
Second wave feminism in the Australian Anglican Church has built on to the foundations laid by first wave feminism. The religious zeal of first wave feminism brought women’s organisations into being and raised the question of women’s ministry. Second wave feminism has grown out of the disillusionment which has set in over the twentieth century because of the inequitable situation for women which has developed within these organisations, and especially in the formal ministries of women.
Many of the laywomen who joined MOW or who were supporters of the feminist viewpoint were professional women who were no longer prepared to accept the domestic roles which were all the Church was willing to offer them because they were female. The “educated natives” are often the leaders of protest against colonialism. The feminist movement which emerged in Australian society generally in the nineteen-sixties opened up a new dimension on women’s issues which was ignored or heavily criticised by clergy but which seeped through to the consciousness of churchwomen.
MOW remained a minority group within Anglicanism, but surveys and voting patterns in synods have shown that two-thirds of Australian Anglicans supported its goal of the ordination of women to priesthood. Good order and conformist behaviour are so entrenched in the Anglican system that MOW had to be radical in its tactics for its message to have any impact. As Anglican pioneer May Cross pointed out in 1938, when women did not voice their dissatisfaction, churchmen assumed that they were content with their situation in the Church, thus forcing women to agitate to be taken seriously.
The concept of radicalism unnerved many Anglican women, deterring them from open support of MOW. Some remained passive because their husbands and/or rectors disapproved of their activism. Women who had gained a modicum of status through their church work were reluctant to endanger their position or to lose the friendship of the churchwomen in their group. It was uncomfortable to associate too closely with MOW. There was also the chilling fear when confronting the angry backlash from Anglican opponents, both in the clergy and laity. Religious organisations have very powerful psychological weapons to control dissent.
The women’s movement has uncovered the double standards in male attitudes to human sexuality in Australian Anglicanism. As Rev. Bruce Wilson (later Bishop of Bathurst) admitted in 1978, the Anglican Church has “done dirt on sex” in a way that combines puritanism and pornography, placing women in an invidious, no-win position. Women have been exhorted to place strong controls on their sexuality, the inference being that women are basically carnal creatures who flaunt their sexuality in an evil way. However, contained in Lambeth discussions on women are admissions that men have so little control over their libido that the sight of a woman in the sanctuary would distract them from worship. Thus women have become the scapegoats for men’s lack of sexual discipline.
Anglican feminism has opened up the Australian Anglican Church to public scrutiny in an unprecedented way. Sexist clergy statements which formerly remained within the pages of the church press were seized on by the public media, causing comment which could be unflattering to Anglican leaders. A great deal of sympathy was expressed in Australian society generally for oppressed Anglican women, with conversely criticism of clergy, especially of arch-conservatives such as Archbishop Donald Robinson of Sydney, including his preparedness to sanction the expenditure of considerable amounts of diocesan funds to finance litigation to prevent women being priested.
As in first wave feminism, there was a strong social justice element in second wave Anglican activism, but the moral outlook was noticeably different. There was a new awareness that “fallen” women should not be labelled “sinners” but rather seen to be victims of a society which has discriminated against, abused and impoverished women, a much less judgmental attitude. While sections of the Australian Anglican church continue to subordinate women, their ardent claims to be upholders of moral values lose credibility. The Church’s exemption from sexual discrimination legislation has acted as a shield, protecting patriarchy.
For the activists themselves, the strains of the conflict have been literally soul-destroying at times. Christian feminists have been compared with heretics, satanists and pagans for trying to associate divinity with the feminine gender, an indication that Anglicans are willing to retreat into a mythical dimension to retain the status quo. Fortunately, the women have not had to fight alone. Bishops, clergy and laymen have had the courage to speak out on behalf of women, the outstanding examples among the bishops being the late Archbishop Penman of Melbourne, Archbishop Carnley of Perth, Bishop Owen Dowling of Canberra/Goulburn, Archbishop Rayner of Melbourne, Bishop Wilson of Bathurst, Bishop Hearn of Rockhampton, Bishop Holland of Newcastle, Bishop Lewis of North Queensland and Archbishop Ian George of Adelaide. Bishop Cranswick of Gippsland was an early pioneer in the recognition of women’s contributions to the Church. Male theologians such as the late Rev. John Gaden, the late Canon James Warner, Bishop John Wilson and Rev. Kevin Giles have also given outstanding encouragement to women.
The feminist struggle has succeeded in a strange way in uniting churchmen formerly bitterly opposed to one another. Conservative Sydney Evangelicals such as Archbishop Robinson have been prepared to bury the churchmanship “hang-ups” which caused so much inter-diocesan ill-feeling in the past and cooperate against the women’s movement with ardent Anglo-Catholics such as the recently retired Bishop Leonard of London. One could argue that the women’s issue has been effective in breaking down the polarisation between Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics, uniting them in patriarchal solidarity in opposition to women’s ordination.
The debate on the ordination of women has brought out into the open the extent of misrepresentation of and exclusion of women in Christianity. The Australian debate has varied surprisingly little from that recorded in the Church of England, an indication that, theologically, Australian Anglicans prefer to remain in close step with their English counterparts. For Australian Evangelicals, the debate has centred around Scriptural texts which subordinate women in an effort to maintain an immutable doctrine of “male headship”. For Anglo-Catholics, the emphasis has been on “maleness” and the need for priests to image the gender of Christ and his twelve apostles. Biological determinism has been used to support opposition arguments. Anglo-Catholic opponents have also sheltered behind Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox rejection of the ordination of women. For Anglo-Catholic opponents of women priests, the word “ecumenism” has tended to exclude Protestant churches. Protestant churches set the pattern of allowing women into equal ministry with men.
Although Bishop Dowling’s aborted attempt to ordain women deacons and Archbishop Carnley’s successful ordination of women in March 1992 cleared the way for a majority of dioceses to priest women, there is still need for major change in general attitudes to churchwomen before gender equity in the Church can be said to have been achieved. Sydney Diocese, for example, in which one quarter of Australian Anglicans worship, has adamantly refused to ordain women deacons to priesthood. There is a realisation that the de-patriarchalisation of Australian Anglicanism is a momentous task, a reformation on a greater scale than that effected by men such as Luther and Calvin. As the Church is so bound to the culture, society and zeitgeist in which it finds itself, the course the Anglican Church will follow in regard to women will be influenced by trends in Australian society generally.
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