Symbolic power
By Tracy Sorensen
The right to vote, the right to drink in public bars and join certain golf clubs, the right to continue working as an airline steward beyond the age of 20-something: in almost every area of public life, women have won formal equality. A glaring exception is in that territory inhabited by organised religion.
On December 6, the Anglican Church's Appellate Tribunal ruled against the ordination of women priests, a decision coming just three months after the Presbyterian General Council similarly retreated into the arms of reaction. (The Presbyterian National General Council overturned its 1975 ruling in favour of allowing women into the priesthood on September 11.)
"They keep telling us that women can't be priests because Eve sinned and Adam didn't", Dr Patricia Brennan, long associated with the movement for the ordination of women, told a Women's Electoral Lobby discussion in Sydney on December 4.
Brennan commented that since the struggle for justice for women in the church had "died in the bum", she had turned her attention to her other abiding passion: women and medicine. A medical doctor by trade, Brennan is now involved in the campaign against the threatened closure of the Royal Women's Hospital at Paddington.
But, she said, she would continue her association with the movement for the ordination of women because of the enormous symbolic power invested in church structures.
"I don't really believe that making women priests is the real solution that I was ever struggling for. But I went into a group called the Movement for the Ordination of Women because I understood that as long as there was a church that had priests in positions of power ritually, theological authority and symbolic presence in front of a group where there was a male god ... women had to wrest those symbolic locations out of the hands of men.
"My dream was, in the process of wresting them out, that there would be a transformation in the concept of what the priesthood should be. Now, it remains to be seen whether it happens. I don't believe that the priesting of women is the solution either to the church or to sexism within the church. But I believe it's a mechanism for transformation."
She compared the ordination of women with the symbolic power of the action of Rosa Parkes, which sparked the civil rights movement in the United States.
"Once that woman had sat on that seat that was white only, and once the civil rights movement had started, after that, when the legal position has been won, you can say, 'Up the bus, I don't even want to get on it'."
In the meantime, she said, church politics had been an excellent training ground for a move into politics in the wider society.
"There's the suspicion that women involved in the church are out with the fairies. But let me hasten to assure you, because the Labor caucus room has nothing on your average Anglican synod. Nothing whatsoever. I think the training of women who are involved in political processes where divine legitimation stands behind the legislation before the group is a pretty good training for politics."