The symbolic significance of women's ordination

Journal of Religion

Volumn 77, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 87-114

  Chaves, Mark ^a  

^a DEPAUL UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0039017098     PISSN: 00224189     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/489917     Document Type: Review

References (83)

1. For representative historical work, see Virginia Lieson Brereton and Christa Ressmeyer Klein, "American Women in Ministry: A History of Protestant Beginning Points," in Women in American Religion, ed. Janet Wilson James (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980);
2. Rosemary Radford Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller, eds., Women and Religion in America, vol. 1: The Nineteenth Century, vol. 3: 1900-1968 (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981, 1986);
3. Cynthia Grant Tucker, Prophetic Sisterhood: Liberal Women Ministers of the Frontier, 1880-1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990);
4. Catherine Wessinger, ed., Religious Institutions and Women's Leadership: New Roles inside the Mainstream (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996).
5. For representative sociological work, see Jackson W Carroll, Barbara Hargrove, and Adair Lummis, Women of the Cloth: A New Opportunity for the Churches (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983);
6. Edward C. Lehman, Jr., "Patterns of Lay Resistance to Women in Ministry," Sociological Analysis 41 (1980): 317-38
7. "Organizational Resistance to Women in Ministry," Sociological Analysis 42 (1981): 101-18
8. and Gender and Work: The Case of the Clergy (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1993);
9. Sherryl Kleinman, Equals before God: Seminarians as Humanistic Professionals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984);
10. Nancy Nason-Clark, "Ordaining Women as Priests: Religious vs. Sexist Explanations for Clerical Attitudes," Sociological Analysis 48 (1987): 259-73
11. and "Are Women Changing the Image of Ministry? A Comparison of British and American Realities," Review of Religious Research 28 (1987): 330-40;
12. Paula D. Nesbitt, "Dual Ordination Tracks: Differential Benefits and Costs for Men and Women Clergy," Sociology of Religion 54 (1993): 13-30;
13. James Guth, John C. Green, Corwin E. Smidt, and Lyman A. Kellstedt, "Women Clergy and the Political Transformation of Mainline Protestantism" (paper presented at the Social Science History Association meeting, Atlanta, October 1994);
14. Joy Charlton, "What It Means to Go First: Clergywomen of the Pioneer Generation" (paper presented at the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion meeting, St. Louis, October 1995);
15. Rita J. Simon and Pamela S. Nadell, "In the Same Voice or Is It Different? Gender and the Clergy," Sociology of Religion 56 (1995): 63-70;
16. Barbara Brown Zikmund, Adair T. Lummis, and Patricia M. Y. Chang, An Uphill Calling: Ordained Women in Contemporary Protestantism (St. Louis: Westminster/John Knox, in press).
17. W. Richard Scott, John W. Meyer, and associates, Institutional Environments and Organizations: Structural Complexity and Individualism (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1994), p. 2.
18. For these and other data on seminary enrollments, see Marvin J. Taylor, ed., Fact Book on Theological Education, 1975-1976 (Vandalia, Ohio: Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada, 1976);
19. William L. Baumgaertner, ed., Fact Book on Theological Education, 1987-1988 (Vandalia, Ohio: Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada, 1988), p. 13;
20. Marvin J. Taylor, ed., Fact Book on Theological Education, 1979-1980 (Vandalia, Ohio: Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada, 1980), p. 11;
21. Baumgaertner, ed., p. 13;
22. Ruth A. Wallace, They Call Her Pastor: A New Role for Catholic Women (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1992), p. 5.
23. This phenomenon is not unique to U.S. churches. Although the Church of Norway allowed women clergy as of 1938, twenty-three years passed until the first woman was ordained in 1961 (Frances Maher, ed., "The Ordination of Women in Lutheran Churches: Analysis of an LWF Survey," Lutheran World Federation Documentation 18 [1984]: 1-36, esp. 6).
24. Jualynne E. Dodson, "Women's Ministries and the African Methodist Episcopal Tradition," in Wessinger, ed., pp. 128-29.
25. Janette Hassey, No Time for Silence: Evangelical Women in Public Ministry around the Turn of the Century (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1986), p. 30.
26. Michael S. Hamilton, "Women, Public Ministry, and American Fundamentalism, 19201950," Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 3 (1993): 171-96, quote on 180.
27. Fannie McDowell Hunter, "Women Preachers," in Holiness Tracts Defending the Ministry of Women, ed. Donald W. Dayton (1905; reprint, New York: Garland, 1985), p. 95, emphases in original.
28. For examples of loose coupling among Mennonites, Reformed Jews, Southern Baptists, Evangelical United Brethren, and Reformed, see Elaine Sommers, Mennonite Women: A Story of God's Faithfulness, 1683-1983 (Scottsdale, Pa.: Herald, 1983), p. 93;
29. Ann Braude, "The Jewish Woman's Encounter with American Culture," in Ruether and Keller, eds. (n. 1 above), 1: 183;
30. Leon McBeth, "The Ordination of Women," Review and Expositor 78 (1981): 515-30, especially 516;
31. Jonathan Cooney, "Maintaining the Tradition: Women Elders and the Ordination of Women in the Evangelical United Brethren Church," Methodist History 27 (1988): 25-35, esp. 25 and 31;
32. and Edwin G. Mulder, "Full Participation -a LongTime in Coming!" Reformed Review 42 (1989): 224-45, esp. 235.
33. Regarding women's roles in households, see Nancy Tatom Ammerman, Bible Believers: Fundamentalists in the Modern World (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), p. 136;
34. Susan D. Rose, "Women Warriors: The Negotiation of Gender in a Charismatic Community," Sociological Analysis 48 (1987): 245-58;
35. and Lynn Davidman, Tradition in a Rootless World: Women Turn to Orthodox Judaism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), p. 161.
36. Regarding women's roles in religious organizations, see Brenda Brasher, "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle? Ambiguous and Articulated Instances of Women's Authority and Women's Power in Two Christian Fundamentalist Congregations" (paper presented at the Association for the Sociology of Religion meeting, Los Angeles, August 1994);
37. and Laura Vance, "The Struggle for Ordination: Women and the Adventist Ministry" (paper presented at the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion meeting, St. Louis, October 1995).
38. Wallace.
39. Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, "Church of God in Christ," in Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, ed. Darlene Clark Hine (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson, 1993), p. 238.
40. Not incidentally, this aspect of the phenomenon-having a different label for the same activity when it is done by women than when it is done by men-can be observed elsewhere. For examples, see Sommers, p. 97;
41. and Pamela Brubaker, "Women," in Church of the Brethren: Yesterday and Today, ed. Donald F. Durabaugh (Elgin, Ill.: Brethren, 1986), p. 165.
42. R. Stephen Warner, "Woman's Place, Women's Space" (paper presented at the American Sociological Association meeting, Washington, D.C., August 1990).
43. In Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1:1848-1861 (Rochester, N.Y.: Mann, 1881), p. 784. Cynthia Tucker's research supports this claim. Although Universalists began ordaining women in 1863 and Unitarians began in 1871, Tucker reports that they "did so with little enthusiasm."
44. See Cynthia Grant Tucker, "Women and the Unitarian-Universalist Ministry," in Wessinger, ed. (n. 1 above), quote on p. 80.
45. Tucker, "Women and the Unitarian-Universalist Ministry," pp. 93 and 94, emphasis in original.
46. Barbara Brown Zikmund, "Women's Ministries within the United Church of Christ," in Wessinger, ed., pp. 68-69.
47. For examples from other denominations, see Margaret L. Bendroth, "The Search for 'Women's Role' in American Evangelicalism, 1930-1980," in Evangelicalism and Modern America, ed. George Marsden (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1984), p. 126;
48. Janet Riley, "The Ordination of Disciple Women: A Matter of Economy or Theology?" Encounter 50 (1989): 219-31;
49. and "Church Women Eye Their Status," Christian Advocate (October 29, 1953), p. 16.
50. See Philip J. Murnion, "The Potential and Anomaly of the 'Priestless Parish,'" America (January 29, 1994): 12-14.
51. See, e.g., in Wessinger, ed., Rebecca B. Prichard, "Grandes Dames, Femmes Fortes, and Matrones: Reformed Women Ministering," p. 49;
52. Janet R. Marder, "Are Women Changing the Rabbinate? A Reform Perspective," p. 272;
53. and Zikmund, p. 74.
54. Also see Edgar Mills, "Consequences of the Gender Shift in the Protestant Ministry" (paper presented at the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion meeting, St. Louis, October 1995);
55. John W Meyer, W. Richard Scott, and Terrence E. Deal, "Institutional and Technical Sources of Organizational Structure: Explaining the Structure of Educational Organizations," in Organization and the Hutnan Services: Cross-Disciplinary Reflections, ed. Herman D. Stein (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), p. 153.
56. Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper, History of Woman's Suffrage (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hollenbeck, 1902), 4:58-359.
57. Woman's Pulpit, no. 2 (September 1922), p. 1
58. and "Who Are We," in no. 4 (April 1923), p. 3.
59. Another important interdenominational organization has been the Commission on the Life and Work of Women in the Church, a World Council of Churches commission formed in 1950 and made into a permanent unit, the Department on Cooperation of Men and Women in Church and Society, in 1954. Among this department's mandates was "to encourage the churches to accept the contributions of women 'to a fuller extent and in more varied ways.'" See Constance F. Parvey, "Stir in the Ecumenical Movement: The Ordination of Women," app. 2 of The Force of Tradition: A Case Study of Women Priests in Sweden by Brita Stendahl (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), p. 143.
60. Judith Hole and Ellen Levine, Rebirth of Feminism (New York: Quadrangle, 1971), pp. 390, 375.
61. Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 228-35;
62. Hole and Levine, p. 393.
63. Tom W. Smith, "Liberal and Conservative Trends in the United States since World War II," Public Opinion Quarterly 54 (1990): 479-507;
64. James A. Davis, "Changeable Weather in a Cooling Climate atop the Liberal Plateau: Conversion and Replacement in Forty-Two General Social Survey Items, 1972-1989," Public Opinion Quarterly 56 (1992): 261-306.
65. Thomas Neville Bonner, To the Ends of the Earth: Women's Search for Education in Medicine (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 28;
66. Karen Berger Morello, The Invisible Bar: The Woman Lawyer in America, 1638 to the Present (New York: Random House, 1986), p. 44;
67. Mary Roth Walsh, "Doctors Wanted: No Women Need Apply": Sexual Barriers in the Medical Profession,'1835-1975 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977), p. xv;
68. D. Kelly Weisberg, "Barred from the Bar: Women and Legal Education in the United States, 1870-1890," Journal of Legal Education 28 (1977): 485-507.
69. Elizabeth R. McAnarney, "The Impact of Medical Women in United States Medical Schools," in Women in Medicine, ed. Carolyn Spieler (New York: Josiah Macy, Jr., Foundation, 1977), quote on p. 53.
70. The other facts in this paragraph are from McAnarney, p. 10; Morello, p. 36; and Walsh, pp. 221, 224, and 233.
71. Christian Reformed Church in North America, Agenda for Synod (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Christian Reformed Church in North America, 1991), p. 533.
72. Quoted in Jacqueline Field-Bibb, Women towards Priesthood: Ministerial Politics and Feminist Praxis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 139.
73. Reproduced in The Churches Speak On: Women's Ordination, ed. J. Gordon Melton (Detroit: Gale Research, 1991), pp. 180-81, emphasis in original.
74. David Strang and John W. Meyer, "Institutional Conditions for Diffusion," in Scott et al. (n. 3 above), pp. 100, 102, 103.
75. Mary Douglas, "The Debate on Women Priests," in her Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory (New York: Rqutledge, 1992), pp. 275-76.
76. The symbolic significance of women's ordination probably pertains for Pentecostal denominations as well, but with interesting variations. Women's ordination policies among Pentecostal denominations became increasingly restrictive between the 1920s and the 1950s (Charles H. Barfoot and Gerald T. Sheppard, "Prophetic vs. Priestly Religion: The Changing Role of Women Clergy in Pentecostal Churches," Review of Religious Research 22 [1980]: 2-17).
77. While I again do not have the space to develop the point, I would tentatively argue that this development was related to the fact that, at least until the 1940s, Pentecostal denominations, unlike either Fundamentalism or liberal Protestantism, had not constructed a stable interdenominational environment. Moreover, early Pentecostal denominations were not organizationally integrated into Fundamentalism (Edith L. Blumhofer, The Assemblies of God: A Chapter in the Story of American Pentecostalism, vol. 2: Since 1941 [Springfield, Mo.: Gospel, 1989], pp. 13, 17). Therefore, despite their biblical inerrancy, Pentecostal denominations varied quite substantially in their policies regarding female clergy, and these early policies appear to have been driven more by internal needs to staff congregations and revival campaigns. This is because, I would hypothesize, these denominations were not strongly embedded in denominational environments that would have pressured them one way or the other on this point. As these denominations constructed an interdenominational Pentecostal environment, and as they become more embedded in the broader Fundamentalist environment, their formal women's ordination policies became more restrictive. Still, however, considerable variation exists among Pentecostal denominations in their rules about female clergy.
78. See chap. 4 of Mark Chaves, Ordaining Women: The Symbolic Significance of Organizational Rules (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), for further discussion of the cultural connections between biblical inerrancy, sacramentalism, and gender inequality.
79. Reprinted in Melton, p. 303.
80. W H. T. Dau, Woman Suffrage in the Church: An Opinion Rendered (St. Louis: Concordia, 1916), p. 2.
81. Melton, p. 236.
82. For the details of this analysis, see Mark Chaves, "Ordaining Women: The Diffusion of an Organizational Innovation," American Journal of Sociology 101 (1996): 840-73.
83. John W. Meyer, John Boli, and George M. Thomas, "Ontology and Rationalization in the Western Cultural Account," in Scott et al., p. 25.