Negotiating Sacred Roles: A Sociological Exploration of Priests who Are Mothers

Abstract

In 1992 in a historic move, the Church of England voted to allow women's ordination to priesthood and in 1994 the first women priests started to be ordained. Despite much research interest, the experiences of priests who are mothers to dependent children have been minimally investigated. Based on in-depth interviews with seventeen mothers ordained in the Church, this paper will focus on how the sacred-profane boundary is managed. Priests who are mothers have a particular insight into the Church hierarchy as they symbolically straddle the competing discourses of sacred and profane. However, instead of reifying these binaries, the experiences of these women show how such dualisms are challenged and managed in everyday life. Indeed, in terms of experience, ritual, ministry and preaching, priests who are mothers are resisting, recasting and renegotiating sacred terrain in subtle and nuanced ways.Mothers thus not only negotiate the practical and sacramental demands placed on priests, but also illuminate how the sacred domain is regulated and constructed. Key WordsMotherhood, Priesthood, Church of England, Sacred Roles Introduction: The Construction of Priesthood and Motherhood 2 The aim of this paper is to highlight how being a priest and a mother is lived out and negotiated in the sacred terrain of the Church of England, where women's ordination has been allowed only since 1992 (women's ordination in non-conformist traditions has a much longer history, with many traditions having ordained women since the early 20 th century). This article will start by highlighting the theoretical lens which informs this study, highlighting how the sacred and profane can be theorized in relation to priests who are mothers. The methodology will be discussed, followed by a consideration of some of the findings on how women negotiate priesthood and motherhood in sacred space. The article will foreground how women are experiencing their role as priests and mothers, highlighting how the experiential can change how priesthood is understood. Different spheres of priesthood (ritual engagement, pastoral activities and preaching) will then be considered, to emphasize the everyday negotiations made by priests who are mothers and how the perspective of motherhood can change the performance of these tasks, compared with the traditional masculinist enactment of priesthood. Indeed, I will argue that whilst priests who are mothers are able to make significant changes to the way these spheres are constituted, these are tempered changes. Priests who are mothers are still a numerical minority in the Church and women are still curtailed by traditional Church approaches, thus limiting the extent to which change can be effectively enacted. The article highlights how women negotiate their position in the context of a traditional organization, and is therefore relevant to those interested in gendered organizations and gendered performances in masculinist work environments more generally.Knott has defined the sacred as 'marking off or setting apart ...

Anglican Clergy Husbands Securing Middle-Class Gendered Privilege through Religion

“…8.4 Exclusionary mechanisms have also been embodied. Elsewhere I explore how Church clothing regimes disadvantage women and implicitly question women's authority as priests (Page 2014), and how pregnancy and motherhood disrupts embodied assumptions surrounding sacrality (Page 2011). Women's status in holy orders is fragile; the church leader is assumed to be male – and the male leader is assumed to be naturally more competent.…”

“…But class was not the only factor. Women's religious leadership in the Church of England is relatively recent, and women have to continually prove their legitimacy (see Page 2011, 2014). Husbands enacting spiritual leadership reaffirms traditional associations between religious authority and masculinity and could therefore subtly disrupt and undermine the ministry of their wives.…”

The Cost of a Calling? Clergywomen and Work in the Church of England

“…While many of the experiences of our interviewees would accord with those of women entering a variety of male‐dominated professions, the prevalence of the embodied male within the CofE (Page, ) exacerbates the situation for clergywomen. The patriarchal ideologies that underpin gendered organizations and processes (Acker, ), and indirectly shape ideas of authority as male, are explicit within the CofE.…”

“…Page's work provides a rare example of recent academic research on clergywomen in the UK. Her analysis highlights how ‘women are negotiating a discriminatory terrain at many different levels’ (Page, , p. 55), and she explores the negotiation of the clergywomen's sacred roles as ‘profane’ bodies within Christian theology (Page, ), the effects of motherhood on priestly identity and liturgical practice (Page, , ), and women's embodiment issues, particularly involving clerical dress as an exclusionary mechanism (Page, ). Therefore, while there is now arguably much less overt and direct sex discrimination in many organizations (Powell et al ., ), we argue that the CofE provides an example of a contemporary ‘inequality regime’ (Acker, , p. 443) involving gendered practices, processes, actions and meanings.…”

“…Academic research on CofE clergywomen outside theological studies has been limited to a couple of notable survey studies (Bagilhole, , ; Robbins, ) and the two examples of qualitative work discussed earlier, notably Peyton and Gatrell () and Page (, , ). Our study has crossovers with this body of work; but has some features which differentiate it.…”