God's Willing Workers: Women and religion in Australia

By Anne OBrien, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2005, 314 pages, paperback, $49.95. Reviewed by Ann Jensen in the July 2005 issue.

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It takes both courage and insight for a historian to embrace the subject women and religion, in an Australian context.

Here is a gendered perspective that recognises that the profound influence of women on children, charity, work, men, education and society, is both intensified and modified through their complex relationship with church. Within this book are the seeds for a dozen theses and deeper studies of the lives of remarkable and powerful women, who have been otherwise ignored or forgotten.

The role of religion in colonial times has also been underestimated or ignored, while the role of women in our early social milieu, has been marginalised by predictable mega narratives and worldviews. O'Brien successfully retrieves the female voices.

In Australia the popular image of the irreligious larrikin stands in contrast to the evangelical who is stereotypically a Pauline misogynist. The church is popularly regarded as powerless and irrelevant, and each time one of its crowned male heads has noisy opinions about something other than God, the press is anxious to debate his right to speak. Interestingly, the press is more successful at silencing priests and pontiffs, than the church has been at silencing women. Few powerful Christian women make a literal reading of the Apostle Paul's injunction to shut-up, with the result that any history of the church is riddled with feisty women whose stories are compelling reading. Anne O'Brien has taken all these issues and images at their intersection with Australian history, ranging over 200 years, and continually re-stated Eve's question: 'Hath God said?'

It is usually presumed that women affect religion primarily through the assumed role of moral custodian, but O'Brien's almost encyclopaedic account of women in their church relationships in Australia paints a complex picture of motivations and expectations. Frequently, Australian women who wanted to serve God were locked into oppositional relationships with male religious leaders. Their labour was needed, but their opinions, ambitions and agendas were not necessarily invited. Moreover, women were as sceptical as men of the gulf fixed between the values the church claimed to represent, and the interests which it promoted.

In colonial times there was an entrenched anti-clericalism that arose from injustice, a lack of sympathy, and the privileged status of clergy. The resentment of clerical authority did not indicate a rejection of Christ. Individual clergy who demonstrated genuine concern, easily won the hearts of a congregation. O'Brien analyses the spontaneous personal faith of people who lived in the shadow of the gallows and the flogging post. Dense in historic detail, there are painful accounts of female life in the colony. Although the cruelty, betrayal and hardships extended long beyond transportation, many women continued to find hope in a genuine Christian faith that sometimes defied cleric and church.

It would be naïve to think that a later generation of tough female ancestors who embraced the church also settled down to obey the instructions of male authority figures who populated pulpits. O'Brien retrieves women's voices from the journals, letters, diaries and an abundance of small circulation newsletters and specialist magazines, in which those commanded to be silent, spoke. O'Brien's search for the female perspective brings a new depth to many pulpit issues which had anticipated female compliance: contraception, the birth rate, 'mixed' marriages, sexuality, ordination.

If clergy hoped their religious influence on women would help rein-in more males to the congregations, they were disappointed. The preponderance of women in congregations became problematic, and there was a fear that the church would become feminised: churches needed to be regarded as manly in order to attract more men, and in the absence of men, the manpower of women was essential. It is possible that some women purposefully used the church as a vehicle for their agendas of social justice, education, morality, but it also appears that the church and its agencies empowered other women to achieve the kinds of influence that was impossible in worldly endeavours.

Another paradox overshadowed women who worked for the church: they often found themselves encouraging other women to labour within the domestic sphere they were fleeing. The philanthropic and reform organisations which valued women's labour, also applauded the concept of the nurturing woman. O'Brien contextualises these conflicted ideals in a dozen vignettes of early twentieth century religious life, describing a kind of mid-way point in women's work history, where no violent departure from traditional female values and roles was necessary. By 1970 the second wave of feminism aroused disdain for typical female roles, intensifying the clash between the domestic expectations on the Christian woman, and her desire for a place in the world.

The religious vocation is where Catholic women suffered the greatest losses and won the greatest autonomy. Teaching provided Catholic sisters with a platform to influence the leaders of the next generations. Like so much women's work, teaching school was done with scarce resources: classes were too large, the hours too long, the rewards scant. For women who had taken vows of poverty and obedience, there was no cause for complaint, but sadly many nuns had been pushed into convents by family expectations, and their frustrations were taken out on children, when the humiliation, abuse and cruelty overflowed from cloister to some classrooms.

As missionaries, protestant women often fulfilled the roles for which they were deemed unsuitable at home. The place of women in church leadership is only controversial where the church is powerful. In every new, unpopular and uncertain Christian movement -- Christian Science, Pentecostals, Quakers -- women took leadership roles, so it is not surprising that women were allowed to teach, lead and govern in the developing outposts of Christianity, such as China and India. O'Brien catalogues the Australian missionary movement, and manages to bring to life the voices of little known and long dead women who served as God's willing workers on foreign shores, and among the Australian aborigines.

I have two criticisms of this book, and a note of deep appreciation.

Firstly, I am grateful to Anne O'Brien for compiling a book that I was looking for five years ago: I needed it both as a student and a teacher, and so I imagine a whole new generation of academics working with these themes, will find the book an invaluable text and resource tool.

My first criticism is that I felt the subject matter deserved two volumes, to give greater space to some of the characters, issues and voices emerging from hundreds of sources. For a book of 300-something pages, it covered vast territory, sometimes too superficially. My second criticism concerns the format of the book: it's bulky and stiff, probably to accommodate the larger print. People who still appreciate print are very particular about how a book feels, folds, and tucks up on the bedside table. Tombs of history like those of Antonia Fraser and Alison Weir, come to us in chubby loveable volumes. In order to reach the wider audience that the book deserves, a friendlier format is needed.

Citation

• Ann Jensen. 'Review: God's Willing Workers: Women and religion in Australia by Anne OBrien' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), July 2005. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 25 May 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• God's Willing Workers examines the ways religious beliefs and institutions have shaped the lives of women in Australia over 200 years. It looks at Catholic nuns, Protestant missionaries, deaconesses and other laywomen. Importantly, it looks at women at home as they grappled with church teachings on sexuality, marriage and family, gender roles, work and education. Anne O'Brien finds that women were able to use a theology of inclusion to empower themselves, even though the institutions they were part of often depicted them as a secondary sex.
  
  This is the first book to look at women and the church over such a long period and across Australian society and culture. A history of the institutional churchm, as well as the beliefs and values that drove and at times divided it, Anne O'Brien's work shows that religious history is central to the history of women in Australia. The commitment and dedication of the women described, as well as the anger and anguish that often led to activism, make a compelling and powerful story.

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