To Build the New Jerusalem: The Ministry and Citizenship of Protestant Women in Twentieth Century Scotland

Abstract

The question of women’s ordination to offices within churches, and in particular to the ministry of word and sacrament, gave rise to one of the major ecclesiological debates of the modern era. In common with other contested issues during this period, different approaches to biblical interpretation and the doing of theology were at stake, but while the precise chronology, arguments and outcomes differed in particular denominations and locations, comparison across a range of churches—certainly within Britain—indicates that these were related predominantly to wider social and cultural changes, more than to internal theological debates. In Scotland, extensive discursive attention was devoted to the place and role of women in the church for over a century before the Church of Scotland extended eligibility for ordination to women. Questions about the ministry and authority of women have particularly exercised ecclesiastical institutions during heightened periods of campaigning for reforms to women’s status and rights in society. The first wave of feminist activism culminated in their enfranchisement (1918 and 1928). Many Protestant churchwomen were deeply engaged in the struggle to become equal citizens. They believed that it was a profoundly Christian obligation to exercise their citizenship to build a better world. They also contended that women should not be prevented from exercising the ordained ministry of word and sacraments, as a matter of justice and as a gospel imperative. This article considers the progress of efforts to that end in some Scottish Protestant churches between 1918 and 1968, and their framing in the contemporary discourses of citizenship and equality, particularly during the interwar years. It discusses factors which impeded or facilitated that innovation, and the major societal changes from the 1950s which created a conducive context for the Church of Scotland decision.

1. Introduction

The question of women’s ordination to offices within churches, and in particular to the ministry of word and sacrament has been one of the major ecclesiological controversies of the modern era—initially within mainstream Protestant churches in the English-speaking world and continental Europe. In common with other contested issues during this period, different approaches to biblical interpretation and the doing of theology were at stake, but while the precise chronology, arguments and outcomes differed in particular denominations and locations, comparison across a range of churches—certainly within Britain—indicates that these were related predominantly to wider social and cultural changes, more than to internal theological debates (Field-Bibb 1991; Chaves 1997; Morgan and Jacqueline 2010; Thurlow 2014). Nevertheless, analysed in particular contexts of time, place and ecclesiology, the ordination of women cannot be regarded simplistically as the intrusion of secular feminist ideas and claims into monolithic patriarchal religious institutions. This article does not engage in comparative analysis of these developments across British churches, but examines how they unfolded in the distinctive Scottish context, particularly within the dominant Presbyterian tradition, which has received little scholarly attention (Levison 1992; Orr Macdonald 2000; Logan 2011; Orr 2019). In Scotland, the place and role of women in the church was subject to extensive discursive interest for over a century before the national (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland finally concluded in 1968 that women should be eligible for admission to the ministry of word and sacrament. It is no coincidence that questions about the ministry and authority of women should have exercised ecclesiastical institutions while women were campaigning for reforms to their status and rights in society, during the so-called first wave of significant and organised feminist activism (c. 1850–1930). That period culminated in the extension of suffrage, in 1918 to most women over thirty, and from 1928 to all women from the age of twenty-one. Many Protestant churchwomen were deeply engaged in the struggle for enfranchisement and equal rights of citizenship. Influenced by a ethic of social responsibility, they believed that it was a profoundly Christian obligation to exercise their citizenship to build a better world. In the aftermath of a grim global conflict prosecuted by Christian nations, and with the vote newly won, they also believed that women should not be prevented from exercising the ordained ministry of preaching the word and presiding at the sacraments—it was a matter of justice since they were now equal citizens of the state, and also an urgent gospel imperative, since women as well as men had a God-given vocation to call others into citizenship of the New Jerusalem. This article considers the unfolding story of endeavours to remove the barriers which prevented women from seeking ordination to ministry in Scottish Protestant churches (here discussing mainstream Presbyterianism, and also the Congregational Union), and its framing in the contemporary discourses of citizenship and equality, particularly during the interwar years. It outlines factors which impeded or facilitated that innovation, and the major societal changes which created a conducive context for the 1968 decision.

2. Breaking the Moulds

On Sunday 27 October 1918, a large congregation gathered in the West Parish Church of Aberdeen for a special service, led by Principal Sir George Adam Smith and Rev. Prof. Cowan. They were there to dedicate the Aberdeen Women Citizens Association (AWCA), which had been established earlier that year in anticipation of the Representation of the People Act which gave the vote to most women over thirty. At a stroke, women would now constitute 43% of the electorate, and the first opportunity to exercise their democratic right would be the General Election in December that year. Across Britain, suffrage organisations were transforming themselves into Women Citizens Associations and Societies for Equal Citizenship. Along with other organisations, including the Co-operative Women’s Guild, the Young Women’s Christian Association, and the Women’s Institute, they were now seeking to educate and engage newly enfranchised women as active citizens.

The congregation in the West Church included prominent women who were leaders in the new Association. They sang a hymn of consecration to citizenship: O Lord, in lowliness and love, we come an offering to bring. The preacher was Rev. W.H. Leathem of Holburn parish church—well known across the land as author of The Comrade in White, a popular ‘angel genre’ novel set in the trenches of the Great War. His text was Matthew 13:33: the Kingdom of God is like leaven mixed into flour by a woman. Thank God for that leaven in the hands of women, he proclaimed: they stood on the threshold of a God-given task, and they had to take their new powers, or new vocation, with the spirit of the disciple of Christ, to enlighten ignorance, to fight disease, to succor the poor and save the lost. They could help make the political conscience keener and the machine of government more effective (Aberdeen Daily Journal 1918).

This act of worship, and others held in cities and towns across Scotland, framed the citizenship of women as a Christian duty and responsibility, as leaven which had the power to transform lives, communities and the body politic. Enfranchised women now had the potential, and indeed the calling, to give rise to the promised Kingdom of God in their midst. It had not always been thus. As institutions, the churches, dominated in Scotland by those in the reformed tradition of Presbyterianism, had been notably reluctant to give formal or public support to the women’s suffrage campaign, although thousands of church members were active in the suffrage movement, and many ministers did espouse and offer encouragement to it. Nevertheless, as the war drew to its conclusion, the civic and religious establishment of Aberdeen turned out in force to bless the women citizens on their way into the brave new world of public and political service.

However, surely at least some of those newly enfranchised women, sitting silently in the pews while men conducted the service, prayed and preached, must have experienced a jarring cognitive dissonance as Christian citizens, for the equal rights they had won in the political sphere were denied in the sanctuary. It was men only who were authorised to pray, preach and preside as ordained ministers of word and sacrament. Was the church the last remaining citadel against the claims of women to full equality? If churchmen like Mr. Leathem drew upon the familiar rhetoric of vocation, ministry and service to frame the practice of citizenship, why should women continue to be excluded from ordination to Christian ministry?

3. Women’s Work in the Church c. 1850–1914—A Distinctive and Subordinate Ministry

Religion as a marker of belonging and identity was a significant factor in mediating women’s experiences of citizenship. In the post-war Scottish context, Christianity inflected some women’s understanding and practice of citizenship in important ways to structure and legitimise their claims in the public domain—particularly in the local municipal state—but also to challenge the prevailing gendered paradigms and practices of mainstream Protestantism. This is a story of ‘the city’ constructed as a symbolic and material space for the exercise of women’s expansive power, and of ‘the church’ as a space of challenge and struggle for rights not yet achieved. It highlights the endeavours of those who believed in and fought for the church as a community of equal opportunity for service and leadership by women along with men, framing the narrative in terms which they deployed, of equal citizenship in church and nation, for the sake of the Kingdom of God; How did different constructions of woman qua citizen affect their understanding and practice in relation to Christianity and the church, more particularly as aspiring or pioneer ordained ministers, in the interwar years? In order to consider this question, it is necessary to locate it within a broader historical trajectory.

In the Presbyterian system of church order and governance, authorization of a call to ordination traditionally connotes recognition of gifts; fitness to be entrusted with oversight and leadership; the responsibility of maintaining that godly order and discipline which is one of the reformers’ marks of the true church. These attributes were regarded by intention and custom as pertaining to men, and that in accordance with the will of God. Women, on the other hand, also had a God-given vocation. Their ordained and natural destiny was to be wives and mothers. The language of vocation and ordination was thus heavily gendered, associated as it was with the patriarchal norms of male headship and female subordination. The only acceptable forms of ‘women’s ministry’ thus had to be defined as distinctive, separate and exercised under male authority.

Nevertheless, the late nineteenth century developments did open up space for the beginnings of professionalization of women’s work in the church. From the 1870s, new generations of church members either led or were drawn into the reformist movements for women’s rights. Many were committed Christians strongly motivated by their beliefs.

From the end of the 19th and into the 20th century, there were two important consequences of those campaigns that had a particular influence on internal debates about the role and place of women in the church. A landmark Act of Parliament (1889) enabled admission of women to Scottish universities from 1893; and the developing discourses of equal citizenship facilitated a coherent rationale and objective for women’s claims. The former had practical implications, because women would now be entitled to fulfil the theological training, if not the regulations for ordination, previously reserved to men. In 1910, Frances Melville, a Church of Scotland member, educationalist and leading suffragist, was the pioneer, graduating with a degree in theology from St Andrews University. In 1912 a brilliant American woman, Olive Winchester, graduated Bachelor of Divinity (BD) from Glasgow University. The Pentecostal (from 1915 the Nazarene) Church in Scotland voted to ordain her to its pastorate. She became the first woman ordained to serve a Christian church in Scotland. While this significant event occurred in a tiny minority denomination on the very margins of Scottish religious life, and Winchester returned to the USA in 1914 to pursue a distinguished academic career, it was nevertheless noted by interested observers as a landmark event. As the militant campaign for female enfranchisement entered its most intense and provocative phase, there were some observers in Scotland who were ready to interpret her ordination as a significant boost for those seeking to stir up the complacent waters of patriarchal Protestant Christianity. An article in the Glasgow Weekly News commented: ‘The Revd Olive Winchester’s attainments and ordination…will prove to men that what has so long been regarded as their monopoly is no longer safe’ (The Vote 1914).

By this time the language of woman’s mission was proving increasingly ineffectual to express the hopes of educated women for opportunities to serve the church commensurate with their qualifications and experience. Indeed, because it described a subordinate and limited sphere of activity it hindered the claim of some women to professional and public authority, and their desire to appropriate the language of vocation so that it could include women as equal candidates for all offices of the church.

A reconfiguration of prevailing ideas brought ministry and citizenship into conjunction as more potent markers of aspiration, especially in the light of re-engagement with the recovered theological category of the Kingdom of God. Into the first decades of the twentieth century this biblical concept was the focus of considerable hermeneutical attention, espoused by those in Scotland and elsewhere who were exploring—and preaching—a gospel of social reform critiquing the evangelical individualism and political conformity which had dominated the landscape of Victorian Protestantism. In the context of Presbyterian Scotland, it also reworked elements of the reformation project of a covenanted nation, made manifest in the corporate expression of Scottish society as a godly commonweal. The notion of a new Christian social order had some purchase. In the pre-war years a significant and influential group of ministers, theologians and lay people were involved in a new movement: the Scottish Christian Social Union, with local branches and summer schools. Some were politically engaged as Christian socialists, while others remained within the capacious embrace of Scottish liberalism. The two mainstream Presbyterian denominations (the Church of Scotland and the United Free Church of Scotland) had commissions on national reconstruction, and were contending that the common life in the midst of material realities was the vital arena for Christian values and action. These commissions also expressed concern for the moral state of the nation, called for stabilization and improvement of family life, and exhorted women not to evade their racial and imperial duty as mothers (Paterson and David 1919; United Free Church Reports to the General Assembly 1917, 1918).

It is important also to note the strength and influence of the Student Christian Movement. By the 1920s, up to 20% of all university and college students belonged to this theologically liberal and politically progressive organization, which practiced a rudimentary form of gender equality and ran an extensive programme of political education, particularly using the study circle method (Boyd 2007, pp. 15–23).

4. Women’s Suffrage c. 1909–1919: A New Gospel for Humanity

A deep sense of spiritual yearning imbued the language, symbols and practices of the women’s suffrage movement, particularly in the years immediately preceding the Great War. It was sometimes characterised by enthusiasts and opponents alike as a kind of alternative or quasi women’s religion, and certainly it inspired profound passion, commitment, courage and solidarity among women active in militant and constitutionalist organisations alike. Suffrage campaigners (in common with socialists and members of other progressive movements of the time) frequently utilised language, metaphor and ritual which was either overtly Christian, or at least drew on its repertoire of scripture and tradition, in support of the cause and of their emancipation. For committed Christian feminists, it was a matter of some importance that vindication of their cause should ultimately come from the tenets, if not the patriarchal institutions, of their faith. Much of their literature emphasised that the struggle was not just political, but of deeper human and spiritual significance. The belief was often expressed that the old masculine order was morally bankrupt and demonstrably played out, and that a new Golden Age would be ushered in, with citizen women as the vanguard. As a 1913 Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) pamphlet declared, ‘It is not only political reform we are called to accomplish, but a moral revolution. We preach the glad tidings of a new gospel to humanity’ (Pethick-Lawrence 1913). For those who saw the vote as a prerequisite for women to fulfil their God-given mission, the struggle was indeed of religious import. Dr. Elsie Inglis was a pioneer medical doctor, a prominent and very active constitutional suffragist. She later initiated, organised and led the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, which provided field medical services on various fronts during the 1914–1918 war. Her biographer records that Dr. Inglis was heard in the vestibule of St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh, where she was a regular worshipper, to speak joyfully ‘of the time coming when we, the women of Edinburgh and of Scotland, would help build the New Jerusalem, with the weapon ready to our hand—the vote’ (Balfour 1918, p. 100). In 1913 a sympathetic Church of Scotland minister, speaking in support of the militant campaign, claimed ‘the Women’s Movement is to my mind the greatest question of the day, and the first practical attempt in this country to realise the Kingdom of God on Earth’ (Glasgow Herald 1913).

5. New Challenges for Presbyterian Women and Their Churches

In May 1918, as the industrial attrition of the Great War was drawing to a bitter conclusion, and with enfranchisement of women finally on the horizon, such hopes were given expression by the anonymous author of an article published in the United Free Church Record, entitled ‘An Edinburgh Churchwoman’s beliefs concerning her citizenship’. Organised into nine clarion declarations, they read rather like something which might have been be nailed to a door, in the style of Martin Luther’s theses, to confront readers directly with their vision and challenge. They invite, even demand, a response:

The most potent force of the future in the recasting of the moulds of civilisation, is the expansive power of woman’s idealising instinct. At the present time woman’s influence is greater than it has been at any moment in the history of the world. Every Church in Scotland should hold a solemn service of dedication to the new ideals of political privilege for the uplift of humanity and advance of the Kingdom of God. This would be as useful in giving a new vision to men, as it would be right in helping set the women’s movement into the current of God’s power. This hour is the ‘fullness of time’ to which the granting of the privileges of citizenship to women has been divinely delayed, until it could receive its maximum impetus from the conditions of the time…Organised, her gifts guided into spiritual avenues of expression through the Church, woman seems destined to be the dynamic force and new centre of gravity for the future. If the free course of her spirit be not obstructed, there is no limit to the possibilities which this power could accomplish, even in the lifetime of those who are babes among us now

(United Free Church Record 1918, p. 87).

These declarations may seem impossibly portentous and naive. The demand that the church—even the sternly patriarchal old Presbyterian kirk—could and should be the font of a progressive new social order, seems over-optimistic to say the least. The essentialising of woman and her idealising instinct is certainly problematic; but the writer is a woman of her time and location. Her woman, devoid of class or condition, but characterised by what were considered to be distinctively feminine qualities, and called to a mission freighted with moral power, reflects the cultural dominance and normalisation of gendered identities and roles which impacted not only on the positioning of women in church and society, but also on the reformist women’s movement, including the suffrage campaigns.

Although the article is anonymous, there is good reason to believe that its author belonged to the Women’s Council of United Free St George’s Church in the centre of Edinburgh. It was one of the most prominent of the post-Disruption Free Church congregations, and provided a worshipping community for many women involved in progressive reform movements, including Flora and Louisa Stevenson, who were leaders in campaigns for higher and vocational education of girls and women. The minister until 1916, Rev. Prof. Alexander Whyte (who was Principal of the UFC New College 1909–1918), was married to a singular woman who was a member of the Barbour family, which included generations of prominent ministers, theologians and laypeople of the post-Disruption Free Church. Jane (Barbour) Whyte held drawing room meetings for suffrage campaigners in the St George’s Manse at 7 Charlotte Square. Among other fascinating aspects of her biography, she is credited with introducing the Ba’hai faith to Scotland (Khursheed 1991). She planned to attend the International Woman Suffrage Association Women’s Peace Congress which took place in the Hague, 1915. (At the last minute Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, refused the British delegates permission to travel to the conference).

It was Prof. J. Y. Simpson, an elder of United Free St George’s, who introduced the 1914 overture to the UFC General Assembly, which led to the setting up of a Special Committee on Recognition of the Place of Women in the Church’s Life and Work, which met throughout the war years. In May 1918, supported by their minister Dr. John Kelman, the Women’s Council petitioned the UFC General Assembly to undertake, as a matter of urgency, the education of new electors, so that they could apprehend their new opportunities and responsibilities. The May 1918 UFC Record article was surely published to explain the intention and to encourage support for this petition.

1918 was an eventful year for St George’s. On Sunday 27 June a new assistant to the minister was dedicated at the end of the evening service. Evelyn Simson was a niece of Dr. Elsie Inglis, who also had strong family connections with Free St George’s. During the war Simson worked as charge nurse at Craigleith Hospital in the city. She had been appointed in this new role, partly due to the unexpected departure of the ordained assistant and the wartime difficulty of finding a man to take his place. However, Dr. Kelman was well aware of the symbolic as well as practical implications of the new appointment:

A step has been taken of much significance, not only for the congregation but for the church…she is the first woman who has been officially appointed to such work in the UFC. She has been associated with the movement which has included many new developments and openings for the careers of women in the land, and this office may justly be looked upon in that connection. Yet in a deeper sense this ministry is not new within the church.

(United Free St George’s Congregational Notes 1918, p. 7).

Though she was not granted authority to make any radical departure from areas traditionally understood as ‘women’s work’, Evelyn Simson’s official designation and salary were innovations which suggested a measure of openness to future developments in recognising a ministry of status and authority for women in the Church.

Meanwhile, the Women’s Council wasted no time in organising local initiatives to promote education and training for active citizenship. In 1919 the Home Mission Committee reported due diligence to the General Assembly, and recommended that Women Citizens Associations and similar organisations were well placed to provide citizenship education, with the participation of church members in local branches. The Women’s Home Mission Committee declared, ‘Women have risen marvellously to the War Work and surely now, released from that, we shall realise our duties and privileges as citizens, and will throw our energy into the work of reconstruction’ (United Free Church Reports to the General Assembly 1919).

In the established Church of Scotland, women’s leaders were likewise preparing to reckon with changes in opportunities and attitudes. The Woman’s Guild began a major reconstruction, exhorting members to get out and vote, and especially to take an active part in municipal and welfare concerns. Writing in the Church of Scotland’s Life and Work magazine, Marion Gray claimed:

“They” has become “We” and the sooner we women recognise that the better. If streets are ill-kept, if the milk is of poor quality, if there are too many pubs, if the houses of the poor are not worthy of the name, if education is not right…we can no longer content ourselves with palliating evils or trying to supply deficiencies in an amateur way…A pull altogether can do a great deal, and the courage to keep on will come if we lift our eyes to the ideal of the Kingdom of God

(Life and Work 1920, p. 73).

6. The Earthly City as Locus for Women’s Political Engagement

Gray’s article directly suggested that Christian citizenship must be exercised in the dustbin as well as in Parliament. It reads like a manifesto for the aforementioned Women Citizens Association (WCA), which had established branches across Scotland to organise newly enfranchised women into a significant political force. The WCA was in continuity with the pre-war suffrage movement, drawing membership particularly from former WSPU activists. Most of the leading members in the Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen branches were middle class Protestant churchwomen of different denominations—often related to men prominent in church life. Sue Innes describes the post-war WCA discourse of women’s citizenship as a form of social feminism, which did not question the assumption that it was gendered, and therefore different. The pursuit of equality required issues to be addressed with a view to achieving just and appropriate outcomes, which could not be achieved by treating women in the same way as men (Innes 1998). They developed a range of educational, social and welfare objectives, directly through voluntary organisations and indirectly by lobbying local and central government—sometimes mobilising broad-based alliances, for example to address child assault. The Edinburgh WCA parliamentary subcommittee worked on a range of concerns: conditions and wages for women in employment; sexual offences against children and young people; Scottish laws on solicitation, factory legislation, and the need for a universal franchise. Sue Innes describes their work as a form of liberal social feminism, emerging out of involvement in religious, philanthropic and voluntary organisations, and enabling issues to be addressed within a gendered framework for women’s citizenship, which they constructed as a politics of difference (Innes 1998). A discourse of duty, service and vision of the earthly City of God facilitated the creation of public space—a civic feminized political realm—to redefine prevailing priorities and definitions of what constituted the scope of politics, as understood by the masculinist monopoly which dominated the municipal and national political spheres. Councillor Euphemia Somerville was a very active Church of Scotland member and leader in the Edinburgh WCA. Her particular concerns were child welfare and housing. Her words resonate with scriptural cadence, and express the ethos of the WCA in religious terms:

Then pass out into to the City. Do all to it that you have done at home. Beautify it, ventilate it, drain it…educate it, amuse it, church it. Christianise capital, dignify labour, provide for the poor, the sick and the widow. So will ye serve the City

(Edinburgh Women Citizens Association Leaflet 1939).

The post-war constitution of the militant but non-violent suffrage organisation, the Women’s Freedom League (which had been particularly strong in Scotland) partially transformed it into the Society for Equal Citizenship (SEC), with city branches in Edinburgh and Glasgow (there is no evidence that branches were active in Aberdeen or Dundee). The SEC proclaimed a manifesto of equal access, pay, rights and opportunities in all aspects of life—political, industrial, professional, marital, legal and moral. Although sharing some common goals, meetings and activities with WCAs, it disavowed the politics of gendered difference and protection espoused by the WCAs, and diverged particularly on the issue of whether women workers should be treated differently from men. In practice, there was considerable networking, overlap and collaboration across branches of both of those middle class citizenship organizations in Edinburgh and Glasgow. More significant political differences and tensions were with working class women and the Women’s Co-operative Guild, which had strong connections to the socialist Labour Party (Breitenbach and Wright 2014).

The SEC was rooted in the liberal equal rights tradition of feminism, which emphasised the similarities between men and women qua persons, rather than their gendered differences. Consistent with this philosophical and strategic outlook, the SEC gave a high profile to the issue of women’s ordination to ministry, as a profession from which women continued to be excluded, and a most significant symbolic and practical example of equalities still to be won.

For Christian women inspired by the Galatian charter of radical equality, the eschatological city offered a compelling image to encompass their personal, professional, political and religious aspirations, though it was nuanced in different ways, according to these somewhat divergent feminist positions. The social feminists prominent in WCAs utilised a language of duty and service to the vision of the City of God which enabled them to carve out civic space for the ‘woman citizen’. They mobilised opinion and strategic efforts not only for the practice of citizenship, but also to expand and transform possibilities for the ministry of women. This was integral to their hope of building an equal community in church and world, recognizing (as they perceived) the different gifts and leadership qualities of women and men ordained to a ministry which would express the fullness of humankind, created in the image of God.

The SEC liberal feminists argued that to open the ministry of word and sacrament to women was a question of citizenship—a matter of justice, since they were now equal citizens of the State; and an urgent gospel imperative, since women and men alike had a vocation to call others to Christian faith, and to nurture citizens of the New Jerusalem. Their hermeneutical strategy was to maintain that Christ’s liberating words and actions overrode Pauline prohibitions specific to a social context much less advanced than their own age, which by the grace of God had finally recognised the expansive power of the gospel for women alike with men. In 1923 the redoubtable Eunice Murray, who had served as Scottish secretary of the WFL during the suffrage campaign, delivered a lecture in Govan Town Hall, under the auspices of the Glasgow Society for Equal Citizenship. Her subject was ‘Women and the Ministry’. She maintained that Christ stood against the subordination of women, upheld their dignity and worth, and called them, along with men, to labour in the Kingdom’s cause:

Are our ministers still under the influence of John Knox? Are they too conservative to march with the times, or are they too prejudiced to concede this act of justice to women? We must come to the conclusion that if ministers refuse to accept women who have a call…they do not care so much for advancing the cause of Christ, of getting earnest people to declare the good tidings, as they care to keep this one and last profession for their own sex. This profession, which should have been the first, is the last to capitulate to the demand for sex equality.

(Murray 1923)

7. Equal Service in the Church

Miss Murray concluded with a warning frequently repeated by others who longed for progress towards the ordination of women: ‘If the Church refuses to hear the message women have to give, they will find other channels through which to speak…They are organised and united, they do not lack courage or determination’ (Murray 1923).

Through the 1920s and 30s, both citizenship organisations regularly gave public airings, at meetings, conferences and study schools, to the issue of women’s ordination. The question was much discussed in 1926. That year, Edinburgh WCA’s general meeting passed a motion ‘congratulating the Edinburgh United Free Presbytery on its decision to submit an overture to the General Assembly, to initiate legislation declaring the eligibility of women for admission to the colleges of the church, who on completion of the prescribed theological studies, may be licensed to preach, and ordained to the ministry on the same terms as men’ (Edinburgh Women Citizens Association Annual Report 1926). The association planned to cooperate with other bodies which were also encouraging church gatherings to receive deputations on the subject.

The 1926 UFC overture emerged out of a particular set of circumstances. A historic first had been achieved at New College, the United Free Church’s Divinity School in Edinburgh. A woman, Elizabeth Hewat, was about to graduate in Divinity. Hewat was a brilliant scholar with an impressive CV. She had lectured in history at St Andrews University and worked on the editorial team of the International Review of Missions. From 1922–26 she was a staff member at the Women’s Missionary College (WMC) in Edinburgh—an institution with a progressive tradition in education and inclusive community—and simultaneously undertook theological studies at New College. She, like Euphemia Somerville, attended the interdenominational COPEC (Conference on Politics, Economics and Citizenship) held in Birmingham in 1924. Christian social reformers had been planning the event since 1920. It was modelled on the 1910 Edinburgh Missionary Conference and there was a major programme of commissions, preparatory and reporting meetings before and after the conference. Elizabeth Hewat and Euphemia Somerville had conducted COPEC study circIes for churches and WCA groups. The conference made a big impact on the women, and Miss Hewat reported three striking features to the WMC community:

• COPEC had named the huge social, political and economic problems which confronted the nation and world, and agreed that there was a common task which had to be tackled by the churches working together.
• It affirmed that Christ’s teaching had to be translated, for the contemporary situation, into transformation of the social order, as well as of individual lives.
• COPEC was a foretaste of the Kingdom, because responsibilities for organisation, speaking, leadership and prayers were shared between men and women; clergy and laity (UFC Women’s Missionary College Journal 1924–1927).

Intending to work as a missionary, Miss Hewat believed she should be ordained in order to equip herself fully for her task. As Prof. Simpson remarked during the 1926 General Assembly debate, she had beaten all the men in her class, and it would be difficult to have to say to her and other young women that they could not be recognised and ordained, and therefore on the same level, as the men (United Free Church General Assembly Proceedings and Debates 1926, p. 228).

Those who argued in favour of the overture drew on the vocabulary of civic feminism and pointed to recent developments which had prepared the way for the ordination of women. It was beyond contention that women were now able to fulfil the practical, pastoral and educational criteria for ministry: they had demonstrated as much in diverse situations. Other professions had allowed the entry of women. Missionaries, deaconesses and church sisters had proved their capability for the teaching, pastoral and administrative functions of ministerial office. They exercised leadership within women’s organisations. A few had even ventured into pulpits, to general acclaim and without precipitating the end of the world. Supporters suggested that ordination would simply be due recognition and consecration of God-given gifts which could, in this fullness of time, be discerned in women.

Opponents were particularly exercised about the subversion of the natural order of creation, which was male headship and female submission. They were deeply disturbed at what seemed to them the outlandish proposition that married woman might work as ministers. Who then would be head of the manse household? Was not women’s supreme vocation motherhood? A celibate ministry would never do, for that reeked of degenerate Romanism (United Free Church General Assembly Proceedings and Debates 1926, pp. 228–29).

Contributors to the 1926 debate quickly took up positions in a key site of struggle, not only for gender relations in the church, but more broadly in the conceptual and strategic development of women’s citizenship. During the interwar years, this was not so much a clearly defined set of beliefs, but rather an arena where differences and commonalities coalesced, were articulated and contested, in a range of contexts including the church, reflecting historical tension between ideas of woman as individual human being with autonomy and freedom, and woman as inextricably bound to domestic, maternal and caring functions. A major fissure in discussion about the ordination of women opened up around the perceived conflict between the ability to exercise an office of public religious leadership and oversight, and fulfilment of woman’s destiny as wife and mother. It was all very well to utilise the labour and goodwill of women in an ever-widening range of tasks, but it was something else entirely to contemplate the notion of women exercising the authority conferred by ordination as an alternative to submitting to husband and domesticity. Still less should the good Calvinist order of creation be subverted by a woman seeking to exercise the masculine prerogative of combining profession, ordination, marriage and parenthood. Heaven forfend!

The 1926 overture was overwhelmingly defeated. It was never likely to get anywhere in a year of national turmoil dominated by the General Strike. The two mainstream Presbyterian denominations—preoccupied with impending church union, prosecuting a grimly racist campaign against the Irish Catholic community in Scotland, and utterly failing to demonstrate enough prophetic courage to confront or respond to the needs of a nation riven by economic depression and social dislocation—found no difficulty in concluding that the time was not opportune for taking any action on the ordination of women.

8. Advances in Minority Protestant Denominations from 1929

Elsewhere in Britain, precisely that kind of action had already been taken. In 1917 Constance Colman—an English Presbyterian—was ordained into the Congregational Union of England and Wales (Thorpe 2017): the first woman minister in a mainstream British denomination. In May 1929, a twenty-four year old woman applied to the Congregational Union of Scotland (CUS) for recognition as a minister. Vera Findlay, a prize winner in classics at Glasgow University, had been encouraged by the Principal of the Scottish Congregational College to study there and seriously to consider ministry. A gifted preacher, she so impressed the deacons of Partick Congregational Church in Glasgow that they called her to be their pastor before she had completed her BD at Glasgow University. She was inducted and ordained to her charge on 1 November 1928, and in 1929 the CUS unanimously carried a constitutional amendment allowing ‘minister’ to apply equally to women and men. An influential contributor to the debate said: ‘We are considering a phase of the long, slow progress of women in the course of civilisation. Our Church boasts its freedom. Let us use it to give full opportunity of survival to the woman ministry’ (Scottish Congregationalist 1929).

Vera Findlay’s pastorate at Partick was innovative and fruitful. Her ministry was characterized throughout her working life by an ability to communicate with, support, and befriend people of all ages, classes and circumstances. Her preaching gifts and espousal of practical Christianity drew large crowds to the church. In 1933 she married Colin Kenmure, a member of her congregation, and the event was regarded by most members as an occasion for rejoicing. However, there was controversy the following year, after Vera gave birth to her only child. A minority group within the congregation argued that the duties of motherhood were incompatible with those of ministry, and she received many unpleasant letters. In an atmosphere of high drama, on the day of her son’s baptism Vera Kenmure announced that she would resign her charge, not because she agreed that she could not combine the roles of wife and mother with church ministry:

‘On the contrary, I am convinced that my ministry, and indeed any ministry, will only be enriched and made more useful by the added experiences which these relationships bring.’ Her sole reason for resigning was ‘my strong feeling that the deep opposition and active hostility of a section of the congregation make honest cooperation impossible, and prevent me from continuing a successful ministry among them.’

(Sunday Chronicle 1934)

Once more, Vera Kenmure became the focus of national attention and press interest. Several congregations invited her to become their minister, but she chose instead to establish a new congregation, known as Christ Church Congregational, with a large number of former Partick members. In 1936 Hillhead, the mother church of the Congregational Union of Scotland, asked Mrs. Kenmure to accept a call, and proposed that members of her congregation join Hillhead, where she ministered from 1936–1945. She took a break from pastoral service between 1945 and 1954, and in 1951–1952 was elected to serve as President of the Congregational Union. Throughout this period she continued to preach in pulpits around the country—including those of the Church of Scotland. She returned to the pastorate in 1954, becoming minister of Pollokshields Congregational Church, where she remained until her retirement in 1968. A few other women were also ordained as Congregational ministers in this period, and were active advocates for equality of opportunity in churches.

Vera Kenmure’s ministry was invested with significance far beyond the usual reach of her small denomination. She was the subject of intense interest and scrutiny, and regular press coverage, not only in relation to her conduct and practice of ministry as a married woman and mother, but also as symbol and spokeswoman for the small but resilient network of active campaigners who dared to hope that eventually the Church of Scotland would follow suit. In her educational achievements, social background, civic engagement and theological outlook, her profile was similar to that of Elizabeth Hewat, Frances Melville, Elizabeth McKerrow, Eunice Murray, Mildred Dobson and others who sought ordination for themselves or other women. Vera Kenmure spoke regularly at WCA, SEC and Fellowship of Equal Service in Church (see below) meetings, as did her female colleagues, including Rev. Helen Woods in particular. They often shared platforms with Church of Scotland sisters, alongside supportive men, on occasions when the position of women in the church was under discussion. A total of nine women had been ordained as Congregational ministers by 1969, when the first female ordination took place in the Church of Scotland.

Kenmure was a figurehead in the city for anything connected to the equality and advancement of women. She clearly understood her ministry to be a calling to share in civic responsibility and progress in housing, welfare and economic justice for Glasgow. Mrs. Kenmure was involved in the development of marriage counselling and, arguing for liberalisation of divorce legislation, spoke out about the hell and misery she had known people to experience when trapped in loveless or abusive marriages. She was a potent rejoinder and rebuke to the oft repeated claims that women were too frail, emotional or constitutionally incapable of undertaking all the demands of ministry. Her style was confident and imaginative, bold and inclusive. At Christ Church, she claimed, ‘We are the church of the open door, because we stand for no sectarianism, for no stiff elaborate form of creed, for nothing that would keep any simple person from joining our fellowship.’

As President of the CUS 1952–1953, Vera Kenmure attended the Church of Scotland General Assembly, although she was initially refused entry into that hallowed, jealously guarded male space, because of her sex. Her grudging admittance is indicative of the kirk’s constitutionally cautious and prevaricating response to the issue.

In 1930, the small minority of UFC dissenters who refused incorporation into the reunified Church of Scotland resolved almost unanimously that any member of the continuing UFC in full communion should be eligible to hold any office within the church. The leader and dynamic moving force of the new denomination was Rev. James Barr MP, a man who stood in the radical tradition of Scottish Presbyterian ministers. Opposed to any form of establishment, he was a member of the Independent Labour Party, a conscientious objector, Scottish Home Rule supporter, and enthusiastic proponent of equal rights for women (Barr 1934). His daughter Elizabeth followed in his footsteps as a minister. Very few other women did likewise, though a handful from the Church of Scotland found a welcome in the UFC while barriers to their vocation remained seemingly impenetrable in the kirk. Not self-consciously feminist, but true to her liberal evangelical heritage in the Scottish reformed tradition, as Moderator in 1960 Miss Barr spoke of her calling:

The UFC in which I was brought up as a member, opened the way in 1930 and Christ called me as surely as he called Saul of Tarsus. I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision, and for all my failings, my sins, his grace has been sufficient for me, his strength made perfect in my weakness.

(Reformed and Presbyterian World 1960, p. 185)

The pre-war intensity and high public profile of the women’s suffrage campaign (following the longer trajectory of hard -won achievements during the first phase of reformist feminism) created a context in which mainstream Protestant churches in Scotland and Britain had no choice but to consider the official position of women. During the 1920s, feminists were realigning the focus of their political engagement as newly enfranchised citizens. Smaller liberal denominations were less encumbered with the status and established position of national churches. They had more freedom to adopt a progressive stance, whereas the kirk (and the Church of England) carried the weight and caution of prevailing political and societal conservatism on the position of women, among a range of other challenges.

9. The Reunified Church of Scotland, 1931–1968

In 1931, 335 women petitioned the General Assembly of the reunified Church of Scotland that ‘the barriers which prevent women from ordination to ministry be removed so that the principle of spiritual equality for which the Church stands be embodied in its constitution’. Lady Aberdeen, who spoke at the bar, entreated the fathers and brethren not to discourage those who heard the call to high and holy vocation, noting the amazing change in position held by women in all departments of life, and she called for support ‘in our endeavours to make the Church of Scotland truly the church of the people’ (Church of Scotland General Assembly Proceedings and Debates 1931, p. 63). The assembly refused and instead set up a committee to consider the place of women in the church, which recommended in 1933 that women should be eligible for the eldership, but not ministry. The recommendation was not supported by presbyteries, but it clearly gave encouragement to those who sought full equality.

At the end of that year, to give impetus to the ‘stone on an inclined plane which was now rolling’ the Fellowship of Equal Service in the Church (FESC) was established. The moving spirits included some familiar names, including Melville and Hewat, alongside a few theologians and ministers who were strong advocates of equality in ministry. The fellowship positioned itself as responding to the perceived need of a more humanly active, living and democratic church, in which all have equal opportunity for service. It called for less churchianity and more Christianity, and framed its cause as a breaking away from the obscurantism and refusal of ecclesiastical leaders to face the upward trend of history towards the emancipation of women. They sought to authorise their claims by appealing directly to the affirming words and actions of Jesus, in contrast to the rigidity and prejudice of the church, which was described variously as excluding, fearful and alienating (Scotsman 1933).

Elizabeth McKerrow, who served both as national president of the Woman’s Guild and president of the Glasgow WCA, was also honorary secretary of the fellowship. In one of the FESC booklets she observed that women were defined by their gender as ‘woman members’ not church members, and thereby excluded from the jealously guarded privileges of the ‘men’s club’. This was putting off young women, who were not attracted to church service or employment where they must always act as subordinates. ‘It is difficult for an ordinary person to understand what spiritual equality means when for men it means determining women’s contribution and for women it means conformity or repression. Spiritual equality involves equal opportunity’ (McKerrow n.d.).

The FESC held public meetings and endeavoured to keep their claims before the church through pamphlets, letters and networking, but the rolling stone seemed to have got lodged in the long grass of the slopes toward that distant horizon of equal fellowship. Members were soon complaining of public apathy. Both political and ecclesiastical establishments took a decidedly defensive and conservative turn through the 1930s. There was no mass movement of Presbyterian women agitating for the right to become ministers. In truth, there was no ‘movement’ at all, because only a few theology graduates, missionaries and veteran first wave feminists had any direct investment in the issue. There seems to have been little sustained effort to engage in education at congregational level, where women had been channeled into separate areas of service and an organisation (the Woman’s Guild) with little power or responsibility. Neither the liberal equal rights arguments of the SECs nor the social feminism of the WCAs was adequate for a structural, systemic analysis of the church, or acknowledgement that the question was about entrenched traditional power and prejudice as well as hermeneutics. This issue remained a niche concern.

Between 1931 and 1968, a succession of commissions, committees and reports purported to deal with the place of women in the Church of Scotland (Church of Scotland Reports to the General Assembly 1931–1968) Proposals for change reflected the two predominant attitudes concerning that ‘place’: either that women might be incorporated into the existing authority and decision-making structures of the church (as ordained elders and ministers), or that special arrangements might be introduced for women qua women—either as ‘corresponding’ (non-voting) members of assembly, or by developing existing opportunities for their service. In 1944 the wartime Baillie Commission recommended that the eldership should be open to women. A majority of presbyteries agreed, which should have been sufficient to secure that innovation under the Barrier Act, but following consultation with kirk sessions and congregations the decision was reversed. Some adjustments were made to the scope of designated female roles; so, for instance from 1956 deaconesses could be licensed to preach. Scriptural and doctrinal arguments for and against women’s ordination were iterated and periodically rehashed in a kind of never-ending groundhog day. There may have been increasing acceptance of the logic of the case, but a deeply embedded essentialist complementarianism reflected prevailing social as well as religious norms. That women’s primary duty was to husband and family was the consistent theme, often expressed in portentous language:

Can Woman bear a prouder title than Mother? For the laywoman, God has already ordained a higher distinction and greater opportunity of service by making her as she is…To suggest other threatens not only the sanctity of the home, but the future of the race.

(Life and Work 1945, p. 226)

After the enormous social upheaval of war, which had profound impacts on traditional gendered delineations, consideration of the life and work of women in church (as well as wider society) was given renewed traction by the fact that it was on the agenda of the World Council of Churches, which had been founded in 1948. From the outset some pioneer women in the global ecumenical movement (many with advanced theological training, and leadership experience in missions, rescue and relief work) challenged the churches to recognise that this was not a peripheral issue, but integral to theological understandings of the church as Christ’s body. They contended that the inequality, subordination and domestic sphere into which women were being pushed back after the war were wrongly justified and perpetuated by theology. They were up against the hugely influential Protestant theologian Karl Barth, expounding his interpretation of I Cor.11, which upheld a God−man−woman hierarchy. At the first WCC Assembly in 1948, he made fun of women ‘rushing towards equality’ (May 1989).

Dr. Elizabeth Hewat was deeply involved in the ecumenical movement, and was one of several Scotswomen actively engaged in these debates. Hewat coordinated responses to a WCC questionnaire which generated much impressive and useful data, not least on the ordination of women, from fifty-eight countries. A WCC Department of Cooperation of Men and Women in Church and Society was established in 1953. It provided a forum for the ordination of women to be considered in the wider global context of major political, social and economic changes. As a WCC member, the Church of Scotland was obliged to contribute and respond to these developments, including a 1959 Conference on Women in Ministry.

In this context, and following another General Assembly overture in 1957 to open the eldership to women, yet another committee was set up to examine presbytery returns on the matter and to consult on the wider question of men and women in the church. In its 1959 report the committee discerned a desire for renewed emphasis in the corporate life of men and women together, in the light of ecumenical concern for wholeness. It noted that the place of women had become a vital issue in many countries. By 1960, it observed that there was now little attempt to provide purely theological arguments against the admission of women to ordination, but that ‘practical difficulties’ were frequently raised. In essence, these clustered around tenacious highly gendered assumptions, conventions and prejudices about women’s role as wife and mother; about headship, authority and dress. Notwithstanding slowly shifting attitudes, a binary complementarianism remained deeply embedded in public discourse and opinion.

The ordination question (whether to eldership or ministry) was one front in the regular post-war skirmishes between the theologically liberal and more conservative wings of the kirk. As the national church, the kirk claimed to authorise and embody the moral life of the nation, but from this decade its theological agenda became increasingly reactive, as it wrestled with the major changes in attitudes and social norms which were so to disturb the traditional Christian consensus. Religious and social historians mark the ‘long 1960s’ (1958–1975) as a period of profound rupture in western societies (McLeod 2007); a concentrated period of intense intellectual, popular and behavioural revolt against the cultural hegemony of institutional Christianity (Brown 2001). Global geopolitics, class structures and ideas concerning citizenship were likewise in flux. Accelerating secularization was decentering the previously stable authority and role of churches in western societies.

It was in the midst of this ferment that the question of women’s ordination was finally settled in favour of formal equality. In 1962 the kirk’s Panel on Doctrine reported that it did not expect to consider its remit concerning women in the ministry for some time. Frustrated by the impasse, Mary Lusk DCS (Deaconess of the Church of Scotland), who was assistant chaplain at the University of Edinburgh, petitioned the General Assembly to have her call to ministry tested, and if recognised, to proceed to her ordination. Her credentials were impressive. Lusk had grown up in Oxford, where her father was university chaplain to Church of Scotland students. She took a first in PPE at Oxford, and had been a prizewinning theology student at Edinburgh, Basel and Heidelberg. She was a Church of Scotland delegate at the WCC Second Assembly in 1954, and had worked as a tutor at St Colm’s College (which trained missionaries and deaconesses).

Sure of her vocation, already licensed to preach, and in a post for which the holder would normally expect to be ordained, she believed the onus was on the church to say why she could not exercise a ministry of sacrament as well as of word. In her address to the assembly she appealed both to liberal equal rights and social feminist traditions—the ‘similarity’ and ‘difference’ strands of the post-suffrage civic feminism phase of the women’s movement. However, the basic premise of her plea was as an individual, aware of a call to service for which the authority of ordination is required, and appealing to the Christlike model of servant authority, which she contended could not be the sole prerogative of the male sex (Scotsman 1963). It is a cleverly constructed appeal to modernity, rooted in scripture and the Reformation tradition and disavowing any notion that this was a women’s fight for equal rights, but nevertheless drawing on some discursive resources of feminism. The Panel on Doctrine, to which consideration of her plea was remitted, failed to consult with Lusk or other women in her position, while the convener Thomas Torrance (Professor of Dogmatics at New College) engaged in some ecclesiastical politicking by publishing his ‘seven theses on complementarian ministries’ in the internal Manse Mail, circulated to all ministers. In 1967 the panel prepared yet another report which simply presented opposing theological positions and failed to recommend any action (COS General Assembly Reports 1931–68: 1967). Frustration at the endless prevarication led to a group of six female New College alumnae (including Lusk and Elizabeth Hewat, who had been the focus of the 1926 UFC motion) writing a strongly worded open letter urging an immediate decision, which they publicized by holding a press conference. A deliverance to that effect was proposed by Rev. Raymond Bailey, who expressed an impatience and sense of urgency which chimed with the spirit of the age, and a majority of the commissioners: ‘No more exegesis, no more argument, no more discussion…unless we hurry, the Church of England will beat us to it!’ (Glasgow Herald 1967). Under the Barrier Act, the deliverance to admit women to the ministry of word and sacrament was finally passed by the General Assembly in 1968.

10. Conclusions

From the 1920s to the 1960s, the protagonists of women’s ordination sought to reconfigure the Scottish idea of ‘the Minister’, with all its gendered religious and cultural baggage, expanding it to incorporate the idea and identity of ‘woman’. The chronology and end game of that endeavour was affected by broader social and cultural changes to paradigms of ministry and church in a secularizing Scotland.

However, the boldly expressed post-war hopes of a Golden Age initiated by the power of women, and the vision of Scotland as a land where women would preach the glad tidings of a New Jerusalem, were tempered by the realities of seeking change under the weight of political conservatism, establishment complacency, religious retrenchment and class divisions. The practical paradoxes and ambiguities of the ‘equal rights’ campaign within Scottish Presbyterianism reflect its emergence from the reformist women’s movement and the constraints of a separate ‘women’s ministry’, and embeddedness in the civic feminism of the interwar period. There was creative dialogue and interchange of resources drawn from new hermeneutical approaches to scripture, and a recovered theological language of the City and Kingdom of God, to inspire the vision of women’s emancipation as comrades in that spiritual and social project, but early momentum dissipated during the interwar years. The Fellowship of Equal Service (which had around 300 members in 1959) and its pro-ordination supporters failed to develop a rigorous analysis of the paradigms and practices of institutional Presbyterianism, to which they were bound by their own privilege, affection and loyalty—and also, it must be said, by their optimistic sense that the reformed tradition had potential for enabling more expansive roles for women. They did not represent a wider desire for change, and were unable to generate anything like a mass movement at a time when the church was strongly aligned with societal norms. Latterly, the conservatism of conventional church life, offering limited and subordinate scope for women, was increasingly at odds with social trends. By the 1960s, as it was losing its central place in the life of the nation, the kirk was more inclined to orient itself towards an ethos of gender equality which was becoming normative in secular society, and thus to signal its modernity, as it sought to do on a range of issues. It is no coincidence that Lusk’s petition and the 1967 debate proved effective in levering change at a time when the women’s ordination question was just one of a cluster of contemporary challenges to traditional ideas about church, authority and ministry. Theological concern with the secular city and the importance of community generated critiques of ordained ministry—not only as an outmoded paradigm of leadership, but also reflecting anxiety about potential shortage of new (male) recruits. There was discussion about the need to develop more ‘humble and enabling’ ministries to nourish and build up the church. This suggests a reframing of ‘ministry’ in ways which are more compatible with stereotypical notions of ‘feminine’ attributes, and the opening up of a discursive space in which ‘woman and ‘minister’ become more compatible concepts for church people to imagine (Fraser 1963). From the progressive wing of the kirk, restless voices expressed dissatisfaction with the institution for being too formal, clerical, hierarchical and irrelevant. It failed to breathe life and hope into the members of Christ’s body for its mission and service in the world (Iona Community 1963).

However, most proponents of women’s ordination sought nothing more than equal opportunity for individual women to test and practice their vocation. Mary Lusk explicitly held aloof from any lobbying or campaigning, or from much subsequent engagement with Christian feminist theology and activism (Levison 1992). She and many other women who followed her into kirk ministry were less inclined to interrogate the kirk’s deeply rooted privileging of masculine authority, both in its administrative power base and in many local church communities, which has proved much more tenacious than formal restrictions on women’s ministry, surviving and in some circumstances thriving well beyond the accession of women to ordination (Logan 2011).

By comparison, through the 1970s and 1980s, the more organized campaign for women priests in the Church of England, with a substantial female diaconate at its heart, was able to draw on innovative feminist scholarship in hermeneutics, Christology and theology, ecumenical and international connections, to build a strong collective Movement for the Ordination of Women (MOW, founded in 1979). From 1994 the priesting of many women with diaconal experience and the solidarity of MOW to support them created a different dynamic in the early years of Anglican women’s ordination, compared with the Church of Scotland (Dowell and Jane 1994).

When the formal constitutional barriers to women’s ordination in the kirk were removed in 1968, those who were at the forefront of that historical moment included women whose own experience had been shaped by the equal citizenship and ministry concerns which generated the initial momentum in the first decades of the century. They stood alongside younger women whose formation was in the context of the profound social rupture of the long 1960s—the so called ‘permissive society’ which destabilised the traditional authority and status of the church, but few of the first women to seek ordination had been direct participants in that long story. Among the handful who initially felt called to test their vocation, most entered the work of ministry with little sense of belonging to a collective movement for equality, or desire for radical change in the church. With a few exceptions they were not radical in theology, ecclesiology or politics. They had not been particularly motivated by (or even aware of) those women of earlier generations whose vision of Christian citizenship included the right to equal ministry (Logan 2011). In Scotland from the mid-1970s, Christian initiatives inspired by the radical women’s liberation movement and emerging feminist theologies were largely ecumenical, and also at the interface with secular women’s activism (Orr 2019). The contexts of secular city and world were radically different from those confronting the Edinburgh churchwoman who declared her beliefs about citizenship in 1918, and the questions they posed were less about whether women could or should be ordained, but whether the language, structures and practices of the church itself could be redeemed as an equal community of women and men embodying Christ’s love for the sake of a broken world.