Fearful Women

I came to the Episcopal Church, which I have since left, from the pastorate of a Congregational church in an association dominated and controlled by older women. They did not identify themselves as feminists, since that movement came along after their time. Rather, they wanted the churches run as clubs in which the Christian faith blessed their interests, many of which appeared to be parallel with those of the Daughters of the American Revolution. This was no church, and I was happy to leave it. 

When I came from there to the Episcopal Church, I was surprised and dismayed to discover how many of the bishops, including some of the better ones, were what I would call Mama's boys, and how much the spirit of the church was defined by the connection between these bishops and the women, the older women in particular. I had learned to hate the government of women as a Congregationalist, but found it amplified by the episcopacy among the Episcopalians. This system was in place long before women's ordination.

It appears to me that, perhaps paradoxically, women's ordination is a threat to this form of church life, for it introduces something new and incompatible—women directly in pastoral charge of women. In the former arrangement the male bishop, like the male pastor in degenerated Congregationalism, even if he was a twinkie, was useful as a buffer between them. If my experience in the pre-women's ordination Womanchurch is any indicator, women, even those who revel in "empowerment," do not like having other women in power over them—and the exercise of what feminists scornfully identify as "male" forms of power is as unavoidable in churches as it is in any organization, despite all their talk about equality, mutuality, community, and whatnot.

The fear among women of other women's power is one of the factors behind the ordained women's complaint about the unwillingness of the churches to appoint them as rectors until they are desperate, and why there isn't a much larger number of women bishops, even though it has been perfectly legal for a generation or so. It is also why as internal pressures eventually proliferate priestesses and bishopesses to numerical domination, attendance will fall off radically, first among the men, but finally even among the women who thought they wanted power in the churches.