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"The Unique Role of Women in a Church"

The distinguished psychoanalyst, Eric Erikson, whose work has inspired some of my own conclusions, as you shall see later, has warned that there is a certain “feminist suspicion (which) watches over any Man’s attempt to help define the uniqueness of womanhood.”

Apparently there has been good reason for some of this suspicion, for (even though he is a man) Ashley Montagu’s statement appears to have the ring of truth when he says:

“To listen to most men dilating ‘learnedly’ on the subject of women is to suffer a positive increase in one’s ignorance. When men speak about women, they usually utter prejudice under the impression that it is the truth.”

When you add to this the fact that the speaker is a preacher as well as a man, one might wonder why such a person has been asked to speak of the uniqueness of women at all – ever to the subject, “The Unique Role of Women in the Church.”

Here are some of the pitfalls before me, a male minister, in this particular “ministerial” role:

First, a minister may tend to think of himself as “preacher authoritarian,” or a few may think of him that way. In our churches, of course, this is not or should not be true. A Unitarian Universalist minister declares, in effect, this is the way I see it. I try to be objective, but I also have a commitment and a point of view. Take what I say, weigh it, and come to your own conclusions.

Close to the authoritarian pitfall is the Solomon pit. The minister may think of himself or be thought of as a Solomon. Here he tells others (or people may wish him to tell them) who is right and who is wrong. What is right? What is wrong? What is the diagnosis and prescription for the malady? Solomon is supposed to have “the” answer.

But again, as I see it, a minister or counselor may have his own ideas, may even suggest solutions and may attempt to persuade, but, when it comes to someone else’s decisions, they must be made, ultimately, by and for oneself.

In addition to these pitfalls, there are a couple of mazes that any investigator, male or female, would do well to be aware of. Use them, criticize them, pick the germ of truth from them, but do not get lost in them.

One is the maze of statistics. Researchers, advertising people, psychologists, church denominations, all kinds of people use statistics to prove all kinds of things.

Let us beware of accepting correlations too readily. Let me give a ridiculous example. This example was used by Clark Vincent’s interpretation in a minister counseling course at Starr King School for the Ministry as a warning sign when dealing with the statistics:

The attempt is made to find the relationships or correlations between geography, tides, and sexual expression.

It is found that:

        WC + HT = HSE
   West Coast plus High Tide equals High Sexual Expression.
        Whereas: EC + LT = LSE
   East Coast plus Low Tide equals Low Sexual Expression.
        While: MW + NT = ND
   Midwest plus No Tide equals No Data.
   

Looking to these “facts,” we might correlate our data to show that there is more sexual expression on the west coast at high tide.

Of course this just happened to be at night

The investigation forgot the nighttime variable, rather important when measuring sexual expression. So you see, correlations and figures do not necessarily demonstrate cause; they simply describe a relationship.

The other maze to be careful of is that of generalizations. Generalizations are useful and often contain a large measure of truth, but while we use them, let us remember that they are not necessarily the whole truth, and, when applied to individual cases, they may not be true at all.

Now, then, having said all of that, I shall indulge in some generalizations, possibly in some statistics, and will, undoubtedly, bring some personal, prejudices to what I have to say as well as drawing on my reading and personal and counseling experience.

The goal, as Channing once suggested, is not to stamp one’s mind on others, but to stir up their own.

First, in order to talk about the unique role of women in the church, I feel I must talk about being unique women as persons – independently. Then about the uniqueness of women as women, psycho-biologically different from men (not inferior – not superior, as Montagu once suggested – but unique: more fitted than men for some things, less so for others, without implying inequality). Then I shall get to the uniqueness of women in a church as I see it.

What is a woman? I start with a generalization from Ashley Montagu … "… what the American woman stands most in need of is not blame but understanding … Women are no longer clear as to what is or should be a woman, and while men tend to have pretty definite ideas on that subject, they are not altogether clear as to what their own role is or ought to be."

Now let me make some more generalizations which may help to point up the problem of the role of the modern American woman. The requirements are, of course, frustrating and impossible to meet, but as indicated by advertisements, fiction, some women’s magazines, even some of the theories of the sociologists, she, if she is a homemaker, is expected to be a companion, confidante, and ever youthful mistress to her husband.

She is mother, sports companion, intellectual partner, chauffeur, mechanic, house painter, decorator, child psychologist, entertainer, local politician, economist, chef, social secretary, and cub scout den mother or little league scorekeeper.

If she is a business or professional woman she is expected to be efficient, well-groomed, tactful, decisive, imaginative, charming, neither too forward, not too reticent, and supportive of men.

As a widow or lady in retirement, she is expected to be a shrewd manager of money, active in civic affairs, well-read, cultured, generally helpful, invariably cheerful and forward-looking and careful, particularly if we add the divorcee to this category, careful to avoid any but the most circumspect and public contacts with men.

The American frontier is gone and with it the pioneer woman who could be proud of her great resourcefulness, her tremendous competence, and who could turn to the male to seek and receive approval for her accomplishments.

She felt free to be made to feel like a woman and to make him feel like a man.

The modern woman cooks, cleans, earns a living, bears and raises children, handles complicated budgets, drives a car, repairs home fixtures, paints, wallpapers, fulfills her church and civil obligations, strives for her party, club, PTA or the League of Women Voters, and still has energy left over to carry on an active social life – MAYBE!

But, in an age of competition and the fear on the part of males that they have been robbed of their masculinity, she often gets not the support that the pioneer woman received from the man but rather an emotional brush off.

What is wrong? Has she forgotten how to be a woman? Are the men at fault? Is the society sick?

Diane Trilling, in an article entitled The Case for the American Woman, agrees that “her sex has lost its way and that modern woman no longer knows how to behave like a woman. But she also realizes that her confusions are not her own fault. While she may join in the chorus of accusations against her own sex, in her heart she knows that men are just as lost as women and that if either sex is to blame – which is highly questionable – the male sex is as guilty as the female."

Now, if any substantial portion of the demands and expectations I have maintained as part of the modern woman’s role are true or are accepted as true for her, then they are impossible and she, having moved along with the culture, is likely to find herself suffering acutely, discouraged about her plight and feeling degraded, even in her motherhood.

If she is a young housewife, feeling trapped at home, she turns on a radio or the TV for the companionship of an adult voice. Pretty empty. Diapers, dishes, brooms, mops, and the state of the baby’s bowels exact their share of her energy, and there is scarcely any strength left over for sharing emotions and experiences with her husband when these must be left to the late hours of the evening. Even then, he or she is likely to be out attending meetings (not excepting this one).

Before you all get up and go home, however, let me say that my argument will be that the meetings we attend and the activities we engage in should be determined by the commitment we have made to our existence and the meaning of our lives. And some meetings are important.

I think people should not cut out all meetings but rather participate because they, as individuals, wish to do so, and because their outside activities and obligations are in line with what they wish to give and receive from life.

Thus, a meeting like this one may be highly desirable for some people, perhaps unnecessary for others, and a matter of indifference to others, but there is usually something we can get out of the things we do if they fit into the larger framework of our ideals and attempts to serve. If there is no giving in life – there is not much life.

Meetings, it seems to me, are placed in perspective with our overall desires, aspirations, values, and needs. All right –

I have generalized about woman’s role. Now a brief generalization with regard to the male. Caught up in mass society, the American male who succumbs, and it is difficult not to do so, to the world’s smothering of his uniqueness and individuality, is finding it harder and harder to offer the reassurance women need (and I do think it's his job to offer it).

Let me talk briefly about man-woman relationship, husband-wife relationships in particular, as examples of the need for understanding and cooperation. This need applies to relationships generally.

First, take the case of a man who is protecting his decisions – his masculinity, he thinks – and who has outlined to his wife her areas of responsibility. He told her!

Before long, the wife is complaining, to someone else, because she cannot talk to her husband or he is too defensive to listen – “I am frustrated by him – or angry with him. Unhappy.

If I do not have his dinner ready when he wants it – if the children are not clean or quiet – if I do not entertain properly – he blows up and we have a fight – or I blow up! After all, he hasn’t been stuck home with the kids all day. How does he expect me to, etc, etc, etc.”

Perhaps the problem is not so much who is right or wrong, but what can be done to help each recognize and give to the other his or her dignity and the right to have highly individualistic ideas, modes, and practices.

I shall be saying women are unique, as are men, but, first, each person is unique, and that uniqueness is basic and important.

Becoming older, or wiser, or both, many women and men resolve these difficulties they have and find a pattern of life acceptable (or more of less so) to both.

But some never make it. Some never grow up, and this is one of the tragedies which seem to be growing as a problem in our time.

I have spoken of it in church and in smaller groups before, and will not speak at length of it tonight, but I seem to be observing more and more the weak male and dominant female often enough in our society to make me think it has reached alarming proportions .

I mean the girls become women who dominate the family directly or by use of the emotions and the passive or dominated smothered male, husband or sons. In the case of the husband, he has abdicated many of his home responsibilities, created a vacuum in the marriage, tried to make of his wife a mother, and remained himself a child – just one of the kids.

So often, where this has happened – where it continues – the wife gets fed up. I do not believe she really wants to dominate but has stepped into the vacuum and then begins to resent it. So, sooner or later, she either becomes resigned to it and finds her adult satisfactions and recognition outside of the home or she kicks her husband in the teeth – or he does – or both.

How to solve this? Get help if need be. But maybe such a husband will not agree to be helped. Then get help yourself. At least, pull back out of the vacuum. Do not allow him to be one of the kids. Do not allow the over-dependency to continue for over-dependency is an illness.

The thing to be desired for both husband and wife – male and female – first of all is that each be encouraged to be (each encourages the other to be) a person – to be unique – each to fulfill his or her destiny and the potential open to him or her.

To do this, a person must give up the notion, if he or she has it, that everybody must love him or her. If our sense of personal worth depends entirely on the desire always to be liked, then the chances are large that we will suffer great anxiety.

We may wish to be liked, to receive recognition, to win the respect of others, and this is all right. But if this becomes the “end-all” of life, we lose ourselves in trying to find ourselves in the mirror of all the people around us. We lose our own identity.

I have permission to use a statement taken from a letter from a woman on the west coast to a woman back east which may sum up the idea of a women being unique as individuals. She said:

“My basic theme is that women should be individuals and stop worrying about their role – or belonging to certain groups if they have no interest in them. I think there is too much unhealthy introspection too, and a lot of it feeds on doing things we feel we ought to be doing but have no interest in. If we are interested in a group, fine – let’s be active, but let’s be ourselves.”

Let’s be ourselves. I guess that is what I have been trying to say on the first point – let each woman – and each man for that matter – let each woman be herself as an individual.

Now, on to the uniqueness of women as a sex – women as women are psycho-biologically different from men. I believe there is a difference and more than merely an anatomical one (as splendid as that is). Again, to suggest difference is not to suggest inferiority or superiority – only difference – and I think the discussion is necessary if we are to have some idea of what ought to be uniquely feminine or womanly about the contribution of women to the life of a church.

First, let me say that I am relying heavily on the writings of Erick Erikson because I happen to agree with him. To the extent that what he believes represents a bias rather then science, I confess I share the bias. Obviously, you are free to differ with it, but I never made an agreement to be uncommitted or lacking in a point of view.

For just a glimpse at the rationale behind these views of the difference between men and women I shall mention a study by Erikson with 10, 11, and 12 year olds – boys and girls – who were asked to construct on a table with some common toys an exciting movie scene and then to tell about it.

The interesting thing observed was that there was definitely a difference in the way girls as a group and boys as a group tended to arrange the toys.

There were things like blocks, figures like a family, some uniformed figures (like policemen, aviators, an Indian, a monk, etc.) cars, pianos, furniture, etc.

The boys paid more attention to outer space, while the girls concentrated on inner space.

That is, the girls arranged, by and large, inner scenes with furniture enclosed by a low wall, if any wall at all, of blocks – sometimes with an elaborate entrance. The people and animals were placed mostly within the scene – they often were seated – sometimes with one playing the piano. The scenes were peaceful for the most part with an occasional intruder in the form of a dangerous man or animal, but usually the instructions were constructed more with humor than fright or excitement. Walls were not constructed to keep such intruders out.

Boys, on the other hand, tended to construct elaborate walls or facades, ornaments and cannons, high walls and towers and the people or animals tended to be placed more outside the scene or enclosure. There were so many more automotive objects, elaborate auto accidents too, but with police either directing traffic or making arrests. There was usually danger of collapse or downfall, and ruins were exclusively boys’ constructions.

The girls, displaying ‘goodness' indoors might – just might – indicate that the girls wanted the tranquility of a home, albeit with occasional humor or excitement, even though some of these same girls were passionate horseback riders and all would become automobilists.

Again, it may be taking things too far, but is there something suggestive in human animal behavior similar to baboon behavior where the groups of baboons roam the countryside with the pregnant females and new mothers at the center of the circle where they would be protected and the strongest of the males at the fringes of the circle for battle or protection.

Erickson asks when referring to the way boys arranged the toys, “Do we see the themes of the toy microcosm dominating an expanding human space; height; penetration, and speed; collision, explosion and cosmic super-police?”

Is that what is happening with men running nations and international relationships?

And does the toy play of the girls suggest something about “girlness” or womanhood to the effect that “women have found their identities in the care suggested in their bodies and in the needs of their issue, and seem to have taken it for granted that the outer world space belongs to the men?”

It may be that these speculations go too far, but I do feel and agree with Erikson that woman has an inner space for the creation of the newborn and that her body affects the way she has related to the world and continues to affect the way she looks at the world.

There are, I think, psychological differences between men and women. They are not always clear cut (and there is masculinity and femininity to be found in both sexes without which perhaps we would never understand each other).

Furthermore, I accept Erikson’s observations of women as demonstrable and reasonable – that “the girl as the bearer of the ova survives birth more sure, is a tougher creature, more resistant to some killing diseases (as heart), has a longer life expectancy, is better able than boys to concentrate on details immediate in space and time, has finer discrimination for things seen, touched, and heard, and reacts more vividly, more personally, and with greater compassion."

The “little girl” is “more content with a limited circle of activities than a boy and shows less resistance to control and less impulsivity of the type leading to delinquency in boys and men.”

I realize that some of these statements are generalizations – that there are exceptions – that some men of special giftedness (and others of particular weakness) may display some of these characteristics.

Also, life offers, through time, successive stages of growing and maturing and variation from any definite stereotype.

Generally, though I would say that women have a great deal to teach men – and it will be best taught if women concentrate on developing this uniqueness of theirs to the utmost while bringing it to bear on the life of the family, the church, the community, and the world.

So I am quite willing to make generalizations and to say that they are good and proper and we are better off because of them.

Some men have developed the quality of tenderness – and it does not take away from their masculinity.

Some men have become sensitive to the inner life and have grown to greatness.

Some men understand and respond to deep feelings – to the great tranquility which comes through conquered unhappiness.

Some men love poetry, art, and music.

Some men exhibit all of these fine qualities and yet remain men – this depends on the man and his way of doing things – and this is good.

But it does not threaten me to realize that woman understand and stand pain better than man, and that it has been her nature to take pains to alleviate suffering and understand it – more so than men.

A lady told me the other day, “Women are so petty. They can be vicious.”

I suppose so, but that does not mean that it is their nature to be unkind. I think it is much nearer their nature, unless it is educated out of them in the family or frightened out of them, to be kind and caring.

Or, as Ashley Montagu said, “Women have learned ‘being kind’ better than men.” It may not be man’s nature to be unkind (either) but women seem to retain a sympathy for others that men often lose.

I do not think it too far out then to suggest that women have been more “people-centered” than “thing-centered” and more people-centered than men.

I do not think it wrong to suggest that, where families have children, women must be free to give their children the love they require. How they do this will have to vary.

I think Montagu was right when he said women know more about love than most men because they experience mother love – which, at its best, is the most freely given love that can be experienced and which broadens the whole idea of love in other human relationships. She must be aware of how mother love becomes smother love, of course.

And I believe he was right when he said something to the effect that it is not “thing-making” but “human-making” that is most important to the world.

How do we make human beings? How does one join the human race?

Erikson has said it may take a “mother variable” to bring into the affairs of men to teach us that the man’s way of getting things settled by more and bigger and better wars is no good anymore – if it ever was.

What I want to say is that we need more real cooperation between men and women – more working and planning and playing together in families, communities, governments, and churches because there are unique contributions one can make to the other.

At the moment it looks like the women have much more to contribute than the men.

A man will be more of a man to the extent that he can make or help or allow a woman to be more of woman, recognizing her differences from him in mutuality and cooperation.

And a woman will be more of a woman to the extent that she makes a man more of a man, teaching him, by her example, the worth of her femininity and its insights.

Hopefully, he will come to learn that he can be tender and that it is still manly to be so.

Hopefully, he can learn that it is alright to show his emotions – for it has always been manly to do so, at least it was until he began to doubt himself.

And hopefully, he can grow up so he is no longer a little boy playing with toys that explode and instruments of death that collide, but can be solidly male, confident in his powers and his protective capabilities.

And the woman can be woman, glad in her creativity, truly joyful in her children, and, with her husband’s support, loving, caring, and faithful.

This begins to sound like sermonizing and churchliness. It if does, I do not apologize. I think the church is here as a repository of our highest values and it may well be the women who are capable, because of their unique powers and tendencies, to make these values become more nearly true or actualize them by living by them.

Finally, I come then to the unique role of women in the church, and I shall not spend too long on it, even though it is the subject I was given, because everything I have been saying leads up to and affects what women can do for themselves, for others, and for the church.

Erikson has said that women have been granted equality of most rights, political rights for example, and are granted a certain sameness in mental and moral equipment, but, he says, “What they have not yet begun to earn, partially because they have not cared to asked for it, is the equal right to be effectively unique, and to use hard won rights in the service of what they uniquely represent in human evolution.”

In the church is it not possible for women to develop that uniqueness, to serve in the alliance but also in any other groups or positions of leadership and bring to their tasks the best of a women’s point of view.

Some men are afraid of this. They are afraid (occasionally with good reason) that a woman will come in swinging a battle ax and destroy them and all they have worked for.

Isn’t this ridiculous? What is a woman leader? Surely they vary as do men, but there is no reason to think that only some old stereotype of leader must be true of a woman leader.

Certainly we do not think that a female leader must be masculine or odd or a hard driving woman in order to be a leader or that she must be a matriarch – covering others with matronizing smother love. I think you can educate the males to the facts and demonstrate to us that a woman is a reasonable creature (as we men would like to think we are) and that to be a woman is not to be too volatile or moralistic or sharp of tongue or manner. A woman is a woman – feminine – and fully capable of leadership without having to act masculine or hard or explosive.

I don’t need to tell you this, but you do need to tell, or better yet, to show many men this. Again, I repeat, a woman is more of a woman to the extent that she makes a man more of a man, and vice versa. She is more of leader to the extent that she is truly interested in, assumes responsibility for, feel enthusiasm about her tasks. She leads without pushing. She, being a woman, does not have to be a woman at all times, except when she conducts a meeting,which she then does like a man. Why not be woman then too and happily so? I mentioned values and the church. Certainly men should be as concerned as women, but sometimes they are not. In any case the women can teach the church in this.

And if it sounds too sticky to talk about values or too moralistic, coming from a preacher, let me again quote Erik Erickson:

“The mental and emotional ability to receive and to give fidelity marks the conclusion of adolescence, while adulthood begins with the ability to receive and give love and care.

"If the terms here (Fidelity, Love and Care) sound shockingly virtuous in a way reminiscent of moralistic values, I offer no apology: to me, they represent human strengths which are not a matter of moral or aesthetic choice, but of stark necessity in individual development and social evolution.”

Why?

For “the strength of the generations depends on the process by which the youths of the two sexes find their respective identities, fuse them in love and marriage, revitalize their respective transitions and together create and ‘bring’ up the next generation.”

Fidelity, love, and care – three things churches have usually been very much concerned about – and the women of the church have a uniquely creative and natural part to play in seeing that these qualities or values pervade the atmosphere of the church.

Again, whether the woman realizes the fact in actual motherhood or not, there is something about her make-up, says Erikson, that gives her a particular and feminine point of view.

As he says, “… her somatic design harbors an ‘inner space’ destined to bear the offspring of chosen men and with it, a biological, psychological, and ethical commitment to take care of human infancy.”

Apply that insight to the work of women in the church and you will think of projects for the good of life and human values, love, and care that will be way out ahead of the ability to formulate them for you.

The male identity tends to be based upon “what works” and on what man can make (be it constructive or destructive). Hence, men have made and have allowed poison to fall out of the skies and enter the marrow of bones in the wombs of women.

The atomic age calls for women’s uniqueness to come forth with a solution for, again, the old male solution of war will no longer work.

What we need everywhere, and certainly in the church, is a woman’s touch – the touch that teaches the whole institution once again and forever, that care of human beings is important, and mercy is to be added to justice, and that a woman’s way of looking at problems will tend to keep the solutions “people-oriented” rather than a “thing-oriented.”

Women have always stood for “realism of house holding, responsibility of upbringing, resourcefulness in peacekeeping, and devotion to healing.

I would say let the women of the church mobilize this force not to mother the church in the corrosive sense of an emasculating mom-ism, but mobilize the force to bring a feminine variable into the dealings of the church and the way it solves its problem.

Let women be peacekeepers and instruct the men in how it’s done, if need be.

Let the women be the homemakers of the church in the finest and most creative sense of the word homemaker.

Let the women take on additional positions of leadership but bring to know them not what they think a man would do in such a position. Let them bring their womanhood to bear on money problems, care of special groups, and the philosophy of programming attention to the elderly, the creation of worship, the production of music, the solution of race conflict, and concern for world peace. In other words, let the women of the church be involved in every aspect of the church’s life and leadership, and let them – let you, if you will – bring the aspiration of your femaleness to the life of the church.

The church is a community of all ages and both sexes – a kind of family. Be a woman at home and at work – a woman in the family and church. But be a woman.

The rest of the family will be very glad and so will you, and the church family and the world family very definitely need your help.

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jake wrote

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