Introduction:Changing Women, Changing Worlds
Derek Poole

Comment
Ruth Hutchinson

From the Directors
David McMillan

Changing Women, Changing Worlds: The Question of Women
Fran Porter

Review...Delightfully Subversive
Cheryl Reid

Review...Opportune
Linda McClaughlin

Faith and Practice...Christine Bell
Ruth Hutchinson

Antjie Krog
Peter Stark

Review...Thought Provoking
Myrtle Hill

Review...Smashing Clerical Complacency
Malachi O'Doherty

Weston Park Amnesty

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SMASHING CLERICAL COMPLACENCY
Changing Women, Changing Worlds - Review
I did not open this book expecting to be surprised or enlightened by it. The easy sexism of men in the churches is obvious everywhere, indeed so obvious, that I wondered why anyone had taken the trouble to analyse it. You hear it in the way clergymen use the word ‘Ladies’, as if somehow the word ‘women’ is troublesome for them. They justify it, I expect, by saying it is more respectful, but it is not respectful of womanhood; it is respectful only of an idea of femaleness as something ethereal.

Policemen, I’ve observed, shirk the word ‘women’ too and often fumble when using a sentence in which it might arise, and then settle for ‘female’. Again, womanhood is being sanitised, made fragrant. I imagine the word ‘Ladies’ to suggest some pine disinfectant spray obfuscating womanly reality, while the word ‘female’ has of it more a hint of the more practical resort to carbolic.

Are clergymen afraid of women? I believe they are. I believe I see it often when I watch them in their natural habitat. I also observe the woman of the species deferring routinely to the man, even when the man is not always fragrant with intelligence and does not impress.

The mystery for me was that anyone should want to write a book which records this conspicuous reality. Had Fran Porter phoned up a local newsroom and declared that she had unearthed a scoop, that men in the churches are disdainful of women, I doubt if the editor on the other end of the line would have shoved back the eyeshade in astonishment and barked orders to minions to clear the front page.

What Fran has done is to record the minute detail of how this sexism operates. It is in the language used by men; it is in the way they conduct meetings by addressing the other men for serious points and treating the contributions of women as a slightly bothersome intrusion. It is sometimes by sexual harassment, smuttiness in their humour which they would trust other men present to enjoy. It is not for the ears of the ‘ladies’ of course, but if they hear it and remark on it, they can have it explained to them that this is how men talk.

I did not enjoy reading this book, in that it was academically methodical with little wit, that it described the familiar and that there was so much of it. The strictly literal representation of the - you know - speech mannerisms of interviewees was distracting and seemed unnecessary. Yet perhaps the need for that degree of detail is implied in the nature of its findings.

If the woman’s voice is never properly heard, if her every complaint about the indifference of men is belittled and disregarded, dismissed as loony feminism or unladylike emotion, then perhaps what is needed is not another story but a body of evidence. This book is a brick through the stain glass window of clerical complacency about the way women are relegated within the churches and demeaned.

No one will enjoy reading this; not the common reader curious about church life, not the churches which are analysed in it, not even, I suspect, the women whose position is so well explained, but it was not written to be taken lightly. This is for women who feel demeaned to take and slam down on the desks of clergymen, the proof they can shove under their noses that women are having a hard time.
‘So you think I’m a whinging biddy, do you?’ they can say, ‘Well, recognise yourself in this.’

Still, the book reads too much like an academic thesis. Fran Porter has an invaluable resource of women’s stories and she could have marshalled it more accessibly for the non-academic reader.

It will surprise some readers that Fran even raises the question of whether men have a divinely ordained authority over women. Is there not a real world out there where such ideas are not even given house room? I suppose if you are committed to seeing truth in the Bible, then you have to contort yourself to rationalise how the Bible might mean things which to the plain reader it doesn’t.

The question for women challenging the authority of men is how far they will take this into challenging the theology that endorses it, and whether they can be happy in the churches once they have progressed along that line of reasoning. If I was a woman and thought God had given men authority over me then I would have to conclude that God was wrong.

Some women are concluding that men do have biblically ordained authority over them, and the most radical claim these women seem able to make is that men should exercise that authority with a little more civility and consideration.

The more challenging idea, that women have specific gifts - are more compassionate, for instance - is also used to demarcate areas of responsibility between men and women, and the author found people of both sexes in the evangelical churches who approved that. (I suppose when a man is being compassionate he is exercising the feminine side of his nature!) It is a rationale which serves to keep the woman in her place by paying her a compliment.

Women interviewed were often wary of being thought feminist, a word which associates in their minds with stridency and probably lesbianism. They are not about to start dressing for church in denim dungarees, but this is just another way in which they are hampered by stereotypical thinking. The problem for women and men in the churches, I think, is that they are hampered by notions of respectability, and behind respectability the real question is always sexual honesty. Feminism changed the sexual behaviour of women, and one supposes - while finding it difficult to imagine that there is another - that the nice women in the churches don’t want to take that route to freedom.

The writer clearly empathises with the evangelical perspective and seeks a solution to these problems which is consistent with evangelical faith.

Your reviewer does not, and thinks that women who are still discussing whether God wants them to obey men have a long way to go.

It is hard not to conclude from this book that it is time that women in the churches learnt some bad manners.

Malachi O’Doherty is a freelance journalist.
www.malachiodoherty.com