One hundred years ago, universal suffrage was in the process of being enacted. The Free State granted women the right to vote and be elected to rule in 1922; Northern Ireland granted this in 1928. In 1926, the Presbyterian General Assembly agreed to women having the right to vote and to be elected to an ordained office in the church as ruling elders. This looks like the church merely accepting the validity of the universal suffrage movement.
However, while the “votes for women” campaign may have created a cultural and social context in which the decision of the Presbyterian General Assembly was made, there were numerous other factors at play that brought the church to decide to allow women to vote and to hold an ordained office in the church.
At the end of the 19th century, there was an extraordinary commitment in the Protestant Churches to world mission. Women were to the forefront of this. In fact, for every 10 missionaries going abroad, on average seven of them were women.
So many women applied to work in mission abroad that Hudson Taylor, the founder of the China Inland Mission, wrote to his supporters: “We are manning our mission stations with ladies.” These women were doing what they could not do at home. They were preaching, pastoring and in some cases overseeing congregations.
Presbyterian women were demonstrating their gifts in leadership by helping form and develop various social and political movements at that time. The Christian Temperance movement is an example in which they became successful, not only in challenging the excessive consumption of alcohol, but in seeking a change of attitude in society to domestic abuse.
Some Presbyterian women in Ireland followed the example of Elizabeth Fry, the English Quaker, in demanding prison reform. Mary Ann McCracken was one of the main advocates for the abolitionist cause against slavery and helped stop Belfast port from being a stop-off point for slave ships leaving Liverpool. One of the suffragette movement’s key leaders in Ireland was Isabella Tod.
In the Presbyterian church at the beginning of the 20th century, women comprised the majority of churchgoers. They took the primary responsibility for nurturing the faith of their families and were often the prayer base of a congregation. They had also become more educated and were invited to sit on the committees and boards of the General Assembly. They were not there just as consultants, but rather had been invited to participate in the process of overseeing and ruling the church. They had become, at this point, de facto ruling elders.
It was the church solicitor who saw this clearly and informed the General Assembly that this was contrary to ecclesiastical law. This was the trigger that caused a fresh examination of how women should minister and lead in the Presbyterian church.
Over the next number of years, there was a process of biblical and theological reflection. At the heart of these deliberations was the awareness that the Catholic Church historically excluded women from leadership. Under the influence of the Greco-Roman world, the church had held that women were inferior to men in that they were so driven by sentiment, feeling and their emotions that it made them incapable of being leaders. Men were therefore to lead, and women were to be supportive and subordinate in the church and civil society.
In the various overtures presented to the Presbyterian General Assembly, the thesis was that if there are no biblical and theological reasons to prevent women from voting and being elected to office in the state, similarly there are none to prevent them from voting and being elected to office in the church, in that both are based on the same perceived creation principle and natural law.
In 1926, the assembly agreed: “That women shall be eligible ... as ruling elders on the same conditions as men.”
This is an important centenary. It is significant that in the Bible, full equality and mutuality between men and women is only present at creation, before humanity acted in moral rebellion, and in the restoration of paradise lost when they will be monarchs giving leadership together as a “Kingdom of priests”.
Patriarchy is part of the broken world we live in. By recognising and ordaining women as presbyters/elders, the Presbyterian church is a community of hope, a sign of the age which is to come when patriarchy will be no more.