Transforming the Faiths of Our Fathers: Women Who Changed American Religion
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Transforming the Faiths of Our Fathers: Women Who Changed American Religion
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| ISBN-13: | 9781250083128 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 06/04/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 334 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Transforming the Faiths of Our Fathers
Women Who Changed American Religion
By Ann Braude
Palgrave Macmillan
Copyright © 2004 Ann BraudeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-08312-8
CHAPTER 1
Lois Miriam Wilson
1965 Ordained, United Church of Canada
1976 First woman moderator, United Church of Canada
1983 President, World Council of Churches
I first came to see feminism as relevant to my own life in 1965 when Faith Joynson, a young girl in our church group, gave me the book The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. I could hardly believe what I was reading because it reflected so much of my own experience. My oldest daughter, Ruth, who was thirteen at the time, tells me that as I read, I would spontaneously cry out, "That's right!" I understood that feminism didn't necessarily demand that I abdicate my role as wife and mother of four, but it assumed that I had additional contributions to make to society and a unique perspective forged out of experience. This insight was consonant with my understanding of the gospel at that time. So begins my story of how religion and feminism intersect in my life and in my attempts to change the world.
Many experiences, individuals, groups, and events contributed to this epiphany. My mother was a very independent woman. She was short in stature, so she cut off the legs of any chairs in the house that were too high for her legs to reach the floor. My father prided himself in being a critical thinker and a nonconformist. He was distributing birth control information to couples he married long before that was legal. Yet later, when it came to the question of my ordination, my father underlined his favorite theme, "The home is older than the church." So I received mixed messages from my home.
A significant contribution to my preparedness of seeing religion and feminism as relevant to each other was my participation in the Student Christian Movement on university campus in the late 1940s. Unusually for that time, the national staff was a team of one man and one woman, which gave both my husband-to-be and me the model for team ministry we later practiced. We hosted a number of international visitors, the Reverend K. H. Ting, currently Anglican bishop in China, being among them. In 1947, when he asked me what I was going to do with my life, I answered, "Get married." He then repeated the question, claiming I had not answered his question. Heavens, I thought, does he mean that I have to do something else with my life besides getting married? Apparently his question paid off, because the sequel is that in 1987, on a visit to Nanjing, K. H. invited me to give a lecture on feminist theology to the candidates for ministry at that seminary.
And then there was Suzanne de Deitrich, whose life and work taught me that it was possible for women to be serious biblical scholars. I began to understand the importance of the biblical text as foundational for my life, as a few of us took our brown bag lunches at noon for study together. Having read that God so loved the world (John 3:16), we began to understand that the gospel priority was for the poor, the widows, the orphans, and the marginalized. It was an ecumenical movement in the broadest sense of that term, oikoumene, meaning "the whole inhabited world." International visitors provoked my lifelong interest in public policy. It was in the Student Christian Movement that I was among those who protested the internment of the Japanese Canadians by the Canadian government during World War II. It was my first glimmer that Christian faith sometimes was best expressed by resisting injustice—a lesson remembered as I grew into feminist understandings.
I decided to study theology and found myself among an all-male faculty and student body. I had my first experience of exclusion when one of the male students was invited to preach weekends at an appointment I had hoped to be given, and the word came back that they "didn't want a woman."
In 1945 I told my parents that I was thinking of becoming an ordained minister. My mother responded by posing the question as to whether a woman could combine marriage and a career short of dropping her professional life and becoming a valuable volunteer, as she had done. My father asked me what man would marry an ordained woman? But when they understood I was serious, they both swung all support behind me.
In 1950 I married a newly minted ordained minister. I returned from our honeymoon to attend the ordination of my male classmates, and when my husband, Roy, looked at me, he said, "You look as if you would rather have been ordained than marry me." I responded, "You are both ordained and married. Why can't I be?" We inherited the tradition of ordaining women from the Congregationalists, one of the three uniting churches that formed the United Church of Canada, but in practice, that meant single women only.
In 1928 the General Council of the United Church declared that "there was no bar in religion or reason to the ordination of women to the ministry." But there were plenty of other obstacles, not the least of which were cultural assumptions about the proper place of women. For women, it had to be a choice between ordination and marriage because of the church's policy of settling new ordinands for a two-year period wherever in Canada they were needed. In 1962 the General Council adopted only one recommendation of the Commission on Ordination. It declared that ordination would be contemplated for women only if a suitable ministry could be arranged that would not interfere "with the stability of the marriage and their position as wives, so that they would be able to fulfill the vows of ordination." My husband Roy was one of 62 men and women out of 377 delegates who insisted that their negative votes be recorded.
That same year, First United Church congregation proposed that I should pursue ordination. By that time I had four children ten and under, and no day care. I waited until the youngest was four and then set the wheels in motion. Almost all of the men I consulted counseled me against ordination. The current moderator of the day, the Reverend J. Mutchmor, asked me, "Who would wear the pants in the family? Who would have priority use of the car? Would not a husband-and-wife team constitute a power bloc in the congregation?" However, the congregation strongly supported my candidacy. I was not perceived as a woman demanding her "rights" but as one in whom the local congregation wished to invest more responsibility and spiritual leadership.
I was finally ordained in 1965, on our fifteenth wedding anniversary, and settled in team ministry as pastoral minister in the congregation then pastored by my husband, even though I insisted on part-time ministry only—which broke several well established church policies! All the people participating in the "laying on of hands" for me were men—it simply never occurred to me to ask any women. But later on I was shocked when reviewing my records to discover that my application for my ordination in 1965 had been signed Mrs. R. F. Wilson simply because no other signature occurred to me.
I ministered in team ministry with my husband for seventeen years. We covered both the private and public places of our congregation: he did the "in-house" work, and I did the "out-house" work. This meant he did most of the weddings and funerals, and I did the support of laity in the community work with refugees, the people on welfare, and women prisoners. We shared the preaching.
In the mid-1960s, I tried for months to get a male to initiate and direct a citywide program called "Town Talk" that I had learned about in Duluth, Minnesota. I felt a male, rather than I, would be better received by citizens. But having failed to locate such a male, I finally stepped in. We invited everyone and all organizations in a city of 100,00 people (Thunder Bay) to coordinate programs and identify the priorities for the future of that city. It was an invitation to look at the ethical and moral questions implicit in City Hall's agenda. It was successful beyond all expectations and launched me nationally into some prominence. It was supported and facilitated by people drawn from the ecumenical religious community and was my first significant interaction with Vatican II Roman Catholics and the public. A Catholic sister told me, "Now you know that the whole city is your parish!"
In 1969 our church building burned to the ground, and that enabled the congregation to replace it with a multipurpose building that included 450 units of housing for single people, handicapped folk, and a number of Muslim students; stores and offices that enabled us to apply the profits to keeping a lid on the rental costs of housing units; recreational space; a media center; and a church sanctuary on the second floor. Although it had no steeple, we thought it looked like what a church should be—a slice of life with a believing community at its center. It grew out of our theological understandings garnered through Town Talk and our understanding that the gospel has primarily to do with the oikoumene—the whole inhabited world.
My life as a congregational minister provided several events where the intersection of religion and feminism came to the fore. In 1974, when my congregation was in joint worship with a nearby Anglican congregation after we had experienced the destruction of our building by fire, a woman approached the altar rail for communion, took one look at me, and said, "I'll have mine from the other minister." At that time, there were no ordained women priests in the Canadian Anglican Communion. I must have been advancing quickly in my feminist understandings by that time, because I turned to my Anglican priest colleague and said, "She needs counseling." Some brides thought they would not be properly married if by a woman. The same held true of funerals; "Do you do funerals?" I was frequently asked, followed by a skeptical but admiring nod of the head. And after a sermon the comment might be "That was very good, my dear" in a surprised tone of voice. Or worse still, "Big things come in short packages." In a discussion with an Orthodox priest, he told me quite seriously that I could never be ordained because I couldn't grow a beard. I thanked him for that insight.
I experienced exclusion outside the church also. I was asked to give the blessing at a political party fundraising dinner. I happened to glance at the agenda in the male chairman's hand, and it read "Ask Lois Wilson to ask the blessing unless another clergyman is present"! I was barred from berthing my small sailboat at the Yacht Club because it had to be done in my husband's name, and I refused, because my husband wasn't interested in sailing—I was! Up to that point I had no idea that it was perfectly acceptable for a woman to "crew" but not to handle the tiller. I was also barred from using the main entrance to a prestigious club and had to use the "women's" side entrance.
These were familiar experiences of exclusion, but this time they fueled my passion as a feminist. They encouraged my efforts to integrate religion and feminism, both of which I now understood as having to do with birthing a community that would transform things as they are, both personal and societal.
Two women in particular contributed to my awakening consciousness. In 1976, after I had preached what I thought was a stunning sermon at prestigious Timothy Eaton United Church, Toronto, a friend, Shelley Finson, caught me and expressed dismay at my language. "I never used any four letter word," I responded. "No," she said, "but your language was all-male. You preached as though you are a man." I had to change my style of preaching, consonant with my new feminist understandings. My young friend Jane, a victim of incest, poked me in the ribs one Sunday when we were singing "This Is My Father's World." "That's the trouble," she said, "it is my father's world!" After I had become sensitive to the nuances of language in the 1970s, I was at a conference at which several Roman Catholic sisters were present. We had an argument about whether the word "man" meant everyone, or was only for the males. I took the latter view. To illustrate my point I asked the sisters to follow me, and I led them into a washroom clearly marked "men." I think they won't ever again give anyone that argument about "man" including everyone. And speaking of language, I fervently hope that chancellors of universities will cease making women "fellows," as I had to do for ten years as Chancellor of Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario.
My growth as a Christian feminist has not been in a straight line. I would take one step forward and then two back. The grassroots Friends of Hagar was a case in point. In 1975 there was the first gathering of Christian feminists in Saskatchewan, pulling women from the five western provinces. They were funded by the federal government's Status of Women Committee. In Ontario Shelley Finson had formed the Friends of Hagar, which at the time struck me as a grumpy group of church workers who complained about their experience in the church. All kinds of women moved in and out of this group—Jewish, pagan, Ba'hai, Christian denominations—and it served as a consciousness-raising group. Gradually groups sprung up across Canada. The numerous gatherings were always ecumenical, and theological leadership and intellectual frameworks from Rosemary Reuther and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza were extraordinarily helpful. I remember feeling uncomfortable with what was transpiring, until one sensitive soul kindly advised me to absent myself if I really wasn't enjoying the group. I left, only to return a few years later when I became aware of the privileged position of my own life and the ugly scarring experiences of some other women.
I have always understood Christian faith as having to do with the world we live in and the situation of people in that world. In 1972, when our new multipurpose complex was being built, I left the church's employ for a year to work as an officer of the Ontario Human Rights Commission. After a year of it, I was delighted to return to the church's employ! I experienced the subtle racism that Canadians are so fond of, when we inevitably assure ourselves that we at least are better than our neighbors to the south. I got very tired of middle-class male managers telling me they couldn't hire any women in their company because there were no washroom facilities on premises. I learned the law can be a great teacher, as I politely but firmly insisted that they build a washroom and hire females. I began to see the crossover of gender issues with race as I explored the case of a Black Jamaican woman who was denied a job as nurse in a health care facility because, as the administrator explained to me, "Did you not know that black hands are colder than white hands, and our nurses have to give back rubs?"
The moderator of the United Church of Canada is its chief executive officer, and in 1980, when I was the first woman in history to have been elected, the term was two years. How did I fare in a man's world? "A little girl like you in charge of the United Church of Canada," quipped a former chancellor of Queens University. "Can you handle the job?" one of my female colleagues asked me doubtfully. I became aware that my staff had a file marked "Anonymous Letters" that they were not sharing with me. When I finally got access, it was to discover such beauties as "Can't you do anything with your hair?" and "Why don't you go home and look after your kids?" Shortly after my election was announced I was prepared to adjourn the meeting of the General Council with a feminist benediction that made my perspectives clear. It became clear to the United Church that we were on a new road.
I tried to resist the temptation to repeat male models of leadership that I knew so well. My ears rang with "We always do it this way." My challenge as a woman who had grown up in a male-dominated world but who had finally accepted the insights of feminism was to forge a creative tension that would lead the church in new directions. The key question for me was whether a woman's leadership would make any difference. Would I use my leadership to empower rather than control others? Would I cut myself a piece of the pie or try to bake a whole new cake?
A few weeks after my election I had an interesting exchange with a Roman Catholic theologian in the women's washroom at Toronto School of Theology. "Our Protestant institutions have ordained women to ministry but have hired few women as professors at our theological colleges," I commented. "Our Catholic institutions have hired six women as professors in our seminaries, but won't ordain women to the priesthood," she responded. By way of contrast, there were women theologians in the United States already in theological schools—Mary Daly, Rosemary Reuther, and Letty Russell, to name a few. Canada did not have such leadership in our national churches or in theological schools. Our movement was very much grassroots from its beginning. The Royal Committee on the Status of Women that took place thirty years ago prompted the United Church of Canada to form a Committee on the Relationship of Men and Women in the Church and Society. But it took many years before the church began to use the language of sexism.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Transforming the Faiths of Our Fathers by Ann Braude. Copyright © 2004 Ann Braude. Excerpted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Acknowledgments,
Introduction, Ann Braude,
1. Lois Miriam Wilson,
2. Letty Cottin Pogrebin,
3. Azizah al-Hibri,
4. Virginia Ramey Mollenkott,
5. Rosemary Radford Ruether,
6. Ada María Isasi-Diaz,
7. Carol P. Christ,
8. Delores S. Williams,
9. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza,
10. Margaret M. Toscano,
11. Riffat Hassan,
12. Vicki Noble,
13. Charlotte Bunch,
14. Judith Plaskow,
15. Nadine Foley,
16. Blu Greenberg,
Notes,
Index,
Copyright,