Good morning to you all. I'm.
Sharing this with you from Geelong and Victoria, Australia,
and I look forward to talking with you and dialogue with you a
little bit later about this paper, which is about the
ambiguous legacy of Catherine Mumford, first defence of female
ministry. So I'm just going to share my screen.
There we are.
Salvation Army has long seen itself as a leader among
Christian Church bodies with regard to its willingness to
accept, train and appoint women as officers, that is, as
ministers of religion.
For example, in the 1967 examination of women's role in
the churches in Australia, the Salvation Army claimed that it
accepted women's as officers in the army on the same terms as
men, and reported that equal opportunity with men is a
definite principle of the army.
Incorporated into its foundation declaration.
The declaration referred to is a statement frequently referenced
within the Salvation Army in regard to its supposed
commitment to gender equality.
Taken from the minutes of the first meeting of the Christian
Mission Conference in June 1870, it is generally read as a clear
and unequivocal articulation of women's equal rights within the
movement.
This is what it says.
As it is manifest from the scriptures of the old and
especially the New Testament, that God has sanctioned the
labours of godly women in his church. Godly women, possessing
the necessary gifts and qualifications, shall be
employed as preachers, itinerant or otherwise, and class leaders,
and as such shall have appointments given to them on
the preachers plan, and they shall be eligible for any
office, and to speak and to vote at all.
Official meetings.
Consider for a moment, however, this historic statement and the
claim from the 1967 report just shared.
Juxtapose juxtaposed against the experiential accounts of three
contemporary Salvation Army officer women from the Australia
territory that have been drawn from a recent qualitative
research project.
Jane, not her real name, reported that she had
experienced tremendous satisfaction in her first years
of Officership, where she engaged in an incarnational
ministry in a low socioeconomic area.
However, she soon discovered that supposedly equal treatment
of her as an officer changed when she felt pregnant.
The organization took a particular attitude to her as a
potential mother that differed from their attitude to her when
childless. I felt pregnant, she said. And suddenly I was female.
I couldn't stay in my inner city appointment or quarters. That's
not good for baby. It was far better for me and baby to move
to an outer suburban core with lots of other people like me.
I couldn't hold an administrative position at THQ.
Who would look after baby?
And there was simply no need to arrange breastfeeding facilities
at THQ because I wouldn't need to be there anymore. It was also
better for all key life decisions to be run through my
husband's e-mail. I didn't need to be distracted from the baby.
And was a married woman officer who applied through the
organization to be registered as a marriage celebrant. The
response received was that as a married woman officer, she did
not require a celebrants license.
She protested the response on the basis that she had had the
same training as her husband and the request was eventually
supported.
Kathy, a single woman officer, noted how the refusal of some
men officers to meet with her one-on-one has had negative
impacts on her work and sense of self.
With certain managers, she said, this rule restricted access to
supervision or created a lack of confidentiality, limiting the
development of trusting working relationships.
All three accounts clearly illustrate that statements about
equality have not necessarily translated into experiences of
equality.
The movements aims might be to treat women and men equally, but
other factors seem to be at play.
In those examples, those factors include views about motherhood
as the primary role for women and implied acceptance of the
doctrine of male headship.
And the perception perception that single women in particular
are a sexual danger or threat to married men.
To understand what is going on in the contemporary situation,
we need to go beyond the army statements about equality to an
examination of its culture.
In organizational culture and leadership, Edgar Schein
discusses what he calls the basic taken for granted
assumptions for the cultural DNA of a group.
He shows how shared learning is an essential component of
culture and argues that the earliest shared learning
provides meaning and stability and becomes in a sense, the
cultural DNA, the beliefs, values and desired behaviors
that brought the group and made it successful.
This early level of beliefs, values and desired behaviour
becomes non-negotiable and turns into taken for granted basic
assumptions that subsequently dropped out of awareness.
An important question to ask in this context then, is what were
those early level beliefs, values and desired behaviours in
the army?
For our match of the Army, stance on equality has drawn on
its 1870 statement and defences of ministry written by Catherine
Mumford Booth are co-founder of the Movement.
It has been equally shaped by the social and cultural
environments for which it emerged and in which those
arguments were embedded.
By giving attention to these cultural beliefs and values, and
not just to the theological justifications for stated
principles, we can begin to understand the ambiguous nature
of the legacy of Mumford Booth and others.
So returning to the statement.
The conference has statement from Women's place in the
movement has often been read and quoted in a manner that it is
almost completely divorced from its context.
It's important to note that this was a provisional statement of a
small, emerging mission, not the developed policy of the more
regulated and extensive structure that the Salvation
Army became.
Its ongoing application was totally dependent on the power
of its general Superintendent, William Booth.
To interpret it and uphold it further, the mission soon moved
to a fully autocratic leadership model where no one possessed
voting power, rendering the second-half of the of the
statement meaningless.
The statement also had limits that are revealed and the
details are more fully explored.
The rules explicitly authorized for women are preaching and
class leadership.
And these are rules that women have been allowed to undertake
throughout the army's history.
However, women have really been given positions of leadership at
either the local, national or international level.
A report prepared for the Salvation Army International
Conference of Leaders in July 2012, for example, stated that
while 53% of the Army's more than 17,000 officer force were
women.
Only 9% of executive leadership roles were held by women.
And less than 2% of those were held by married men.
So 53% of the officer forces women.
Only 9% of executive leadership and less than 2% of executive
leadership roles held by married women.
This supports the widely held conclusion that the most
discriminated group within the Office of force.
Discriminated against group within the officer force have
been married women officers.
Ironically, those whose life experience most closely
resembled that of Mumford Booth.
In the light of this reality, it is helpful to consider how
statements about equality and Mumford boost defence of female
teaching and ministry were shaped and communicated through
particular cultural and social morays that have, in Chinese
language, dropped out of awareness.
The social and cultural setting of the emerging mission was once
steeped in Victorian ideas of gender and theological and
cultural ideas of male headship.
These were assumed values which the booze and the Salvation Army
challenge only in a very limited way.
Mumford Booth, for example, retained a largely unspoken but
nevertheless present commitment to non headship and work from
the position of gender essentialism, assuming the
existence of essential differences between the sexes.
As well as embracing Victorian ideas of motherhood and female
piety.
Ideas about what women could do were shaped and conditioned by
ideas of what women should be.
Ideas about what women could do were shaped and conditioned by
ideas of what women should be.
However, this inevitable conflict of theological
imperative with social and cultural realities has been
largely ignored in the dialogue around women's officership and
claims to equal status in the Salvation Army.
I need to Catherine Mumford Booth.
Mumford was a multifaceted individual. As the wife of the
charismatic founder of the Salvation Army, she shared with
Booth in shaping many aspects of the developing movement.
As a mother of their eight children and household manager,
she's simultaneously maintained a largely independent ministries
of preacher, as well as being a theologian and apologist for the
fledgling organization.
She would not have claimed to be a feminist had that word be
available to her.
Rather, she was a woman whose goal of expanding Women's Spirit
Ministry activity for the benefit of the Kingdom did not
include radical ideas of a new style of womanhood.
This is clearly illustrated in the way the life example of
Mumford birth is presented. She is not an unwomanly woman or in
any way neglectful of her primary roles of wife and
mother.
Biographer William Stead, for example, wrote of her missus
booth was a woman who graduated in all departments of
motherhood, of Womanhood, Sorry made wife, mother, and
grandmother. Her domesticity was as pronounced as her revivalism.
Paul Mumford, boost contemporary Josephine Butler, wrote Missus
Booth had a remarkable completeness of character, the
completeness of a human being of a woman. She was a most tender
wife with feelings of deep reverence towards her husband,
referring everything to his judgment, and anxiously
solicitous to please him.
It is important to note, then, that when in 1859, heavily
pregnant with their fourth child, Emma Mumford, birth wrote
the first of her two significant defences of women's rights, she
was not proposing a departure from these norms of womanly and
wifely behaviour.
It is also important to remember at this point that the Salvation
Army did not exist in imagination or reality.
And so this document is properly viewed when seen as a personal
statement rather than an organizational treatise.
The track female teaching was written in defence of the
Ministry of American Evangelists and economist teacher Phoebe
Palmer, who commenced a four year Tour of Britain in 1859.
That same year she visited Newcastle, a short distance
across the Tyne River from the Booth home in Gateshead.
Paul ostensibly defence of Palma, it is fair to argue that
month that for Mumford Booth the track was a preemptive strike in
the process of authorising and promoting her own preaching
ministry, which commenced within a few months of the tracks
publication.
However, this was not acknowledged by the Buddhist in
any public forum. Rather, the official picture painted the two
activities as only indirectly related.
In the same year, Phoebe Palmer wrote her own book left defence
promises, her father, which Mumford birth drew on later
editions of the pamphlet.
Palmer commenced a book with the Word of Reassurance for her
readers. Do not be the start, do not be start or dear reader. We
do not intend to discuss the question of women's rights or
women's preaching, technically so-called. We believe women has
a legitimate sphere of action which differs in most cases
materially from that of man, and in this legitimate sphere she is
both happy and useful.
Bob Mumford boosts argument went further than Palmers in its
claim for preaching as an equally legitimate call for
women As for men. She would have agreed with Palmer's statement
here regarding women's primary roles and spheres of actions.
As has already been indicated, Mumford Bird did not challenge
the notion that women's culture, except her place in society, was
in their role as wife and mother, nor that for most women
their fear of action would be the private and domestic rather
than the public realm. She saw her eye roll of mother as
Paramount and the training of children as a sacred obligation.
However, she also felt that fathers had a role to play. That
role however she described in terms of the father being the
head of the family. In a letter to Bush, she wrote, remember,
the father is and must be in every well regulated family, the
head of his household.
And following her correspondence with her fiance, Mumford Booth
set out clearly the view that woman was not naturally inferior
to men. She nevertheless maintained this commitment to
male headship.
A letter in 1855, for example, included several pages of Cogent
argument in which she confidently expressed her views
on the ability and status of women. She acknowledged that in
the majority of cases, the training of women has made her
man's inferior, but nevertheless argued that there was no natural
inferiority.
But she also made it clear that she was not questioning the
subjection of a woman to her husband in marriage. I would not
alter women's domestic position because God has plainly fixed
it. He has told her to obey her husband and therefore she ought
to do so.
Mumford birth accepted that subjection within marriage was a
punishment for sin based on the Genesis narrative, but asserted
I cannot believe that inferiority was the brand of it.
The same argument was repeated in her female teaching pamphlet.
Prior to the fall, she wrote, the human pair were equally
nature, position and jurisdiction over the inferior
animals. She quoted from Genesis 127 to 28 and argued here is not
the semblance of inferiority or subjection. Woman was a helpmeet
for man created to be his companion, assistant and friend
are being in all respects save that of sex like himself.
Here we should note that when Mumford birth used the term sex,
what she meant was what we would name gender for. She saw when
men and women as fundamentally different in their natures. She
does not just talking about biological sex differences.
These essentials view this. This essentialist view has obvious
implications for women in the movement. If they are
essentially different to men and have different natures and
roles, then it would be natural for them to be given roles and
responsibilities that match those characteristics. So, for
example, if men are natural leaders and rulers and women
natural supporters and helpers, it is clear who chosen for
leadership positions. And this is in fact what's happened
because this is a culturally.
But not explicitly named view. Complementary partnerships have
long been a feature of Salvation Army officers officership
service, but always based on the implicit understanding of women
as subject to men.
So in my younger days, my husband was appointed the
commanding officer I know who worked with him was called a
core officer. This is depart the fact that I had actually I was a
more senior officer in terms of years of service.
It would have been unthinkable in those days for the army to
interchange those titles. This situation, however, was made
explicit in a comment from an Australian woman officer
included in a 1975 report into women's officership discussing
how women might handle the competing roles of officer wife
and mother, homemaker wife, she addressed her fellow officers
saying.
Let us not be diluted. We cannot expect to have an equal minister
with her husband, but we can have a shared ministry if we
will accept the challenge and discipline of our role. In other
words, our role is a gendered one and women should accept that
position.
The legacy of Mumford boost acceptance of a doctrine of
wifely subjection cannot be mistaken.
It is worth noting however that this view made explicit in
female teaching was excised from the later tract female ministry.
However, it's absence from the document should not be read as a
change of mind on the part of its author, rather a more
strategic decision related to the purpose of the pamphlet.
Female Minister was intended for a different audience and had a
different purpose. It was no longer a defence of Palmer, but
a document designed to meet the most common objections to female
ministry and to present a thorough examination of the text
generally produced in support of these objections.
Given the date of the pamphlet and the context, it is
reasonable to argue that Mumford Booth was now quite consciously
writing an apologetic for the justification of women's
involvement in the Christian mission. She was making a
defence for the missions actions in relation to the broader
church and particularly the church's male hierarchy.
In this context, Mumford birth was not just championing women's
rights to preach, but arguing for them to extend their sphere
of action in other ministry roles. She was forthright in her
argument that women should have a much more upfront role in the
church and called out the supreme selfishness of men who
would argue that there is plenty of scope for women to work
behind the scenes, visiting the sick and poor and working for
the temporalities of the church.
She averred that if women carry their approach in persecution,
they should also share in the honours of ministry work.
However, as her son Bramwell made clear in a memoir,
utilizing women as evangelists and preachers was one thing, but
the consideration of women being in charge was altogether a
different idea, and was a source of significant consternation for
the leaders of the movement.
Opinion, he said, was divided amongst the most thoughtful of
our leaders and, he added, the Army mother herself had never
quite contemplated placing women in positions which would involve
their authority over men.
She had never quite contemplated placing women in positions which
would evolve their authority over them.
A further key difference in the 1870 document is found in what
is omitted rather than what is included as previously
indicated. It nowhere engages the question of subjection in
marriage and completely expunges. The passages relating
to the Genesis account the essential equality of men and
women before the fall, and the subjection of wives to husbands
afterwards.
Given the importance of the Genesis account to theological
understandings of the relationship of men and women,
this is a highly significant emission and one which to this
suggests some strategic editing and masking of underlying
cultural beliefs. Unfortunately, however, this means that readers
of the document may not grasp how much these complementarian
views are sitting alongside the arguments for greater freedom
for women in the movement.
A semi detached house.
In writing about Victorian values in relation to women's
roles in the public and private spheres and Digby suggests a
helpful word picture to describe the historical reality of an
intermediate or semi detached area between public and private.
This intermediate space was that occupied by women like Mumford
Booth and those who followed in her train.
It did not involve a jettisoning of previously held Victorian
values around women's role in the world, but an extension of
them.
It was not like a move from one detached house to another
completely separate one. Rather it was a construction of a semi
detached house built alongside and connected to the mainstream
home of Victorian gender values and conceptions. The shared wall
connecting was made-up of agreed ideas of what a woman should be,
the validity of male headship, the preeminent role of
motherhood and so on.
This semi detachment creates the ambiguous legacy.
On the one hand, the army was promoting something new and
different. On the other, it was holding on to conservative
values of gender that have largely disappeared from view.
But the fact that they are not seen or noticed because they
have dropped out of view does not mean that they are not
present and active in shaping the reality of women's lives in
the movement.
Writing in 1940, fifty years after the death of Mumford birth
Australian officer many, Carpenter said.
So much of the foundations of our movement was built upon the
character of this great woman, and so much of her beliefs,
methods, and teaching was woven into its early superstructure
that though few salvationists of the present day can claim to
have seen or heard her, the Army mother still speaks and
unconsciously brides her great family.
That assessment rings true, and perhaps there's something not
quite intended by its author. And that alongside the
theological defences Mumford Booth gifted to the movement,
and which have been seen as central to its views of women's
engagement ministry, sit other messages.
These Victorian beliefs and values are deeply embedded in
the army's cultural DNA and continue to unconsciously guide
the movements, attitudes to and utilization of women.
An ambiguous legacy of its 19th century beginnings, seemingly so
full of the promise of something new.
And that is the end of the presentation. So I'll stop
sharing the screen and we're about to have a discussion in a
moment.
Thank you.