Around the Melbourne suburbs on Mothersā Day in 1926, worshippers wore white flowers to signify the purity of motherly love, and ministers preached special sermons for the occasion. Comprehensiveness and uplift were required; unless the girlsā club had a āchurch paradeā, it might be the one sermon of the year addressing the nature of woman and God's plan for her life. At the Northcote Presbyterian church, the sermon was titled āA Mother's Loveā; at the Church of Christ in Fitzroy, it was āGod's Greatest Blessing ā Motherā; and at Brighton Congregational Church, āThe Perfect Homeā.1 In sermons across Melbourne and around the western world, there were no half measures when it came to describing Christian womanhood and woman's place in the world. As women's emancipation made headlines and its effects were felt ā women voting in elections, sporting short hairstyles, working in professions, riding motorbikes and flying planes, women preaching in pulpits ā the churches added Mothersā Day to the liturgical calendar. In this way, they formalised a theology of womanhood and fixed it as part of the church's tradition. But the nature of women and their part in Christianity was far from settled.
The period 1920ā1960, between feminism's two waves, was not a period of stasis. After the first-wave campaigns for women's suffrage in the early decades of the 20th century, and before the second-wave social and sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, women increased their religious involvement in moral and civic affairs through Christian women's organisations and enlarged (a little) their roles in the church. In 1920, a great number of women were involved in leadership of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), Mothersā Union and other organisations, and some women were leading churches: for example, Constance Coltman in London, Sarah Janet Lancaster in Melbourne, Aimee Semple McPherson in Los Angeles, and Evangeline Booth in New York as Territorial Commander of the Salvation Army. Though there were many more women in ministry and theological education by 1960, they remained a tiny minority. Widespread change was yet to come.
Negotiating access to public and ecclesiastical space required women to engage theologically with the rhetoric of innate gender difference that had long authorised limits on women. Believing that nature was divinely ordered and unchanging, woman's physical and, it was assumed, spiritual difference from men defined her role. However, some women thinkers were careful to distinguish between nature and custom in the establishment of roles. In 1859, Catherine Booth, who later co-founded The Salvation Army, defended the preaching of American Methodist Phoebe Palmer on the basis that much of what had been deemed natural and thus unchangeable was in fact mere social custom among first-century Christians and thus no limitation to women in 19th -century society:
Many labour under a very great but common mistake, viz. that of confounding nature with custom. Use, or custom, makes things appear to us natural, which, in reality, are very unnatural; while, on the other hand, novelty and rarity make very natural things appear strange and contrary to nature.2
Despite Booth's pleas to differentiate carefully between nature and custom, women preachers remained a novelty and an exception to the perceived ideal of the Christian woman.
The idea that āwomanā shared one nature ā pious, submissive, pure and domestic ā persisted well into the mid-20th century. It was an assumption that ignored women's diverse economic, political, sexual, racial and religious realities.3 Nearly a century later, in 1952, Kathleen Bliss questioned the nexus between nature and role, appealing against ātheoretical argument about what women can, may or ought to do. Such arguments quickly lead into the quagmire of discussing what woman is, as though she were a given and finalized collection of attributes and limitations'.4 A change was underway, influenced by Simone de Beauvoir's understanding of the relationship between acting and becoming.5 The view that women's fulfilment of duties according to nature contributed to the preservation of a divinely ordered world was giving way to the view that women as individuals needed to fulfil their psychological and spiritual potentiality. By the 1950s, the question of nature began to recede, but the issue of women's part in Christianity remained.
This chapter explores the ways in which theology understood the nature of women and their place in Christianity from 1920 to 1960. It begins by examining the prevailing theological understanding that was preached and taught in the churches: woman was motherly in body and spirit, and mothering in all its forms was her calling. As agitation for women's full participation in the body of Christ increased, this definition of woman's nature did not give way but existed alongside, and in contest with, new ways of thinking about women. Women theologians were at the forefront of such thinking and accordingly the chapter considers some significant themes in their lives and work: especially Georgia Harkness, Vida Scudder, Emily Greene Balch, Maude Royden, Edith Stein and Winifred Kiek. Acknowledging that much theological work takes place in collaborative action; the work of organisations and their representatives will also inform the exploration of theology's understanding of women and their roles.
The goodness of mothers
By the 1920s, Mothersā Day was widely celebrated in western churches and incorporated into the liturgical calendar along with all its patriotic, cultural and gender assumptions. While Mothering Sunday had long been observed in England as a day on which parishioners visited their āmotherā church, the observation of Mothersā Day in Australia was widely acknowledged as instituted by Anna Jarvis in 1908 at her Methodist Episcopal church in West Virginia. In the remote industrial town of Port Pirie in South Australia where men worked at the smelter and docks, seasonal labourers lived in boarding houses, and women were in the minority, Mothersā Day 1920 promised to be ācharacter buildingā.6 The Protestant and Catholic churches ran a united campaign for people to āGo to Churchā in honour of their mothers and asked if they wear a white flower in āa tribute that was the more earnest because of the sacrifices made by the mothers during the warā.7 White flowers were provided for men at the boarding houses and ships in port.8 The local newspaper denied (and perhaps unwittingly reinforced) that Mothersā Day was āset apart for preaching at menā in this town where the behaviour of an itinerant male workforce was not moderated by the presence of their mothers. Moral, civic, religious and patriotic concerns drove the post-war celebration of Mothersā Day and reinforced the association of women with sacrifice, giving, goodness, faith and social order ā for men's sake. When Mothersā Day was preached in the churches, promoted by the YMCA and enthusiastically supported by the press, its civic and theological intents were difficult to distinguish.9 The combination of interests made Mothersā Day nigh impossible to critique theologically, for surely all agreed on the nature of woman and her exalted place in society ā her place was at home.
Mothersā Day messages of the 1920s presented the ideal woman as a loving mother and homemaker who blessed the lives of her husband and children. Her task was not only physical ā the washing, the cooking and care ā but also moral and spiritual, and, for those without children, the motherly instinct could be directed to the care of others. Woman's divine calling was explained in the women's column of a daily newspaper:
Perhaps this āspark of immortal fireā is expressed best in motherhood ā in the love of one's children, or in the love, and care for the children of the world. In the former we have the sacrifice, nobility, and patience of the good mothers of all time, whilst in the latter we have the untiring zeal of Florence Nightingale, Catherine Booth, missionaries and social workers at home and abroad.10
Preaching and popular culture agreed that women's virtue was grounded in good mothering.
Historians have noted how the association of motherhood with moral governance of the home was called on to authorise women's involvement in campaigns for a moral society, and that women were granted the vote on the understanding that they would make better moral choices than many men and thus improve society.11 Such thinking provided the rationale for women's presence on the mission fields at home and abroad and in the institutionalised care of children. Despite the popular valorisation of motherhood and its role in justifying women's move into the public square, the evidence suggests that the church did not consider women to be morally superior to men. As historian of Catholicism Sally Kennedy points out, āin the context of a patriarchal Church with definitions of morality firmly in the hands of the clergy, claims to power on the basis of moral superiority were impossible to make or sustainā.12 Prioritising domesticity inevitably limited women's authority outside of the home and inside the house of God.13
Mother of God and spiritual maternity
Within the Catholic tradition, Mother's Day was linked with the veneration of Mary, Mother of God. In Melbourne in 1941, the Catholic Women's Social Guild went so far as to propose changing the name of Mother's Day to Our Lady's Day, seeking to reorient focus toward Mary as the pinnacle of womanhood and, at the same time, preserve Mother's Day from Protestantism's ācapitalising of sentimentā.14 Nevertheless, in Catholic popular literature and devotions, a great deal of sentiment and hope was attached to Mary's divine (and humanly unattainable) example of motherhood.15 Mary provided every Catholic woman with a model for being that located religious identity in gender (and every Protestant woman too in the writing of Reformed theologian, Charlotte von Kirschbaum).16 In a sermon at the Sydney showgrounds in 1928, Bishop Whyte reminded Catholics of the long-accepted position that āMary is the model for virgins, for wives, for mothers, for widowsā. His sermon came at a time when the attention of reporters was drawn to women evangelists in Protestant churches, yet Whyte insisted that āimprovement in the status of women ā¦ is due, as history attests, to the teaching and practice of the Catholic Churchā, which has worked to āsafeguard the sacrament of matrimony, and, as a consequence, to set family life on a strong enduring foundationā.17 Family life and a woman's imitation of Mary, he maintained, was the key to women's status. In the mid-20th century, Catholic family guidance publications promoted the imitation of the holy family as a model for ordinary Catholics.18 Mary was both the perfect model and an intercessor of li...
