Women's Struggle for Professional Work and Status in the Church of England, 1900–1930

Of all the professions none has proved more resistant to the inclusion of women than the Christian ministry; no branch of the church stemming from the Reformation has been firmer in asserting the ‘disability of sex’ for ordained ministers than has the Church of England. The contemporary struggle to open the priesthood to women is the latest phase in a long movement of church feminism which permeated the Church of England from the very last years of Victoria's reign, a movement which, by 1930, had succeeded in considerably increasing women's influence and even ministry in the English Establishment although it had failed in its more radical aims. As they battled for the right to vote for (and sit on) elective church councils, as they sought equality of ministry with male laity, as they searched for vocationally fulfilling modes of pastoral care and evangelism which respected the ban against ordination, and as they assaulted that ban itself, able and ambitious church feminists have been continually frustrated by sexist prejudice, clerical exclusiveness, and entrenched religious tradition.