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Anne
O’Brien
God’s Willing Workers: Women and
Religion in Australia
UNSW Press, $49.95 pb, 314 pp, 0 86840
575 2
FOR
GERMAINE GREER, the nuns at the Star of
the Sea Convent in Melbourne provided
‘a terrific education’. ‘They
really loved us,’ said Greer. Not
so Amanda Lohrey. Her experience of a
working-class convent school in Tasmania
so scarred her that still today, visiting
a church in Europe, she feels a ‘physical
revulsion’ for ‘the naked martyrs,
staked out, flayed alive, crumpled, bleeding’.
For former Catholic schoolgirls, a reunion
is a chance to laugh together over some
of the more outrageous things taught to
them by nuns. But Lohrey can look back
only with bitterness, in particular on
the nuns’ ‘intense but evasive’
preoccupation with sex. ‘Boys are
after only one thing, girls. They’ll
suck you dry like an orange,’ she
was told. She cannot laugh.
Greer’s emotional attachment to the
nuns, which persists despite her present
dislike of Catholicism, has to be seen
in the context of her feelings of being
rejected by her mother, writes Anne O’Brien,
in her timely and impressively researched
history of women and religion in Australia,
God’s Willing Workers. Many
strong feminist women — Anne Summers,
Susan Ryan, Veronica Brady — were
educated by nuns. As were some strongly
anti-feminist women, such as Babette Francis,
a founder of the group ‘Women Who
Want to Be Women’. So, were nuns
loving and caring women who taught girls
to be strong and independent, or were
they harsh and punitive upholders of the
most conservative teachings of the Catholic
Church?
The answer is that they were both, for
nuns, no more than any group, were not
a homogeneous lot. What they taught depended
to some extent on their individual characters,
the school at which they taught, and the
order to which they belonged. In the memories
of some Catholic and ex-Catholic women,
the Sisters of Mercy were ‘the sisters
of no mercy’. In any case, the experience
of being taught by nuns is not one that
will be had by many Australian girls in
the future, because there are very few
‘vocations’ these days. Either
god has stopped calling or girls have
stopped listening. Moreover, many of the
women who did become nuns have left their
orders. Since 1960 some sixty-six per
cent of women who entered the Sisters
of Mercy convent in North Sydney have
left. Yet, writes O’Brien, for a
long time ‘religious sisters living
in all-female houses taught and administered
the most extensive alternative education
in Australia’. Their influence on
generations of young Australians cannot
be overestimated. In Australia, from the
nineteenth century onwards, women were
the church’s main source of labour;
they were indeed ‘God’s willing
workers’.
Given that most of the major religions
have always been deeply misogynistic,
one might wonder why women would want
to bother with them at all. But bother
they did, and do. Indeed, women traditionally
were seen as having a natural ‘bent’
for religion. From the time of the Sermon
on the Mount, Christian discourse has
extolled the feminine — meekness,
humility, lowliness of spirit — and
women have been upheld as exemplars of
Christian values. At the same time, church
teachings have tried to curb their sexuality,
control their reproductive life, valorised
them as mothers while expecting them to
do the menial and dirty work, and cajoled
them into being good women lest they led
society astray.
O’Brien points out the intrinsic
duality in the church, in authorising
an unequal gender order while preaching
to women the radical message that all
souls are equal in the eyes of god. In
recent years, feminist history has established
the fear of women that underlies much
church teaching, the universalising of
male symbols in Christian theology and
the omission of women from the gospels.
But it has also shown that, despite these,
many women were empowered by religious
affiliation, finding it a vehicle for
autonomy and sisterhood, and for reform
movements such as temperance, votes for
women and Aboriginal rights. Many used
the radical message of equality and inclusion
to empower themselves, their children
and other women. There were, of course,
always women who resisted the attempts
of other women to make their religion
recognise women’s equal role. Just
as at the beginning of last century there
were hundreds of signatures on a petition
presented by women to prevent women getting
the vote, today there are movements opposed
to women priests, such as ‘Women
Against the Ordination of Women’.
Most women, however, have never accepted
the church’s teachings unquestioningly,
but have been guided by their own sense
of what is right and wrong. While the
Catholic Church still officially bans
contraception, the fertility of Australian
Catholic women is no greater than that
of any other women.
There is no more effective way of controlling
any group than by claiming divine authority
for their oppression. In this way, men
throughout the ages have successfully
hijacked religion, yet there have always
been women who refused to accept their
subordinate status. Despite a recent anti-feminist
backlash, today there are obvious signs
of progress, with the ordination of women
in most denominations, the adoption of
inclusive language, the curricula of religious
studies classes in schools, and the teaching
of feminist theology in universities and
theological colleges.
God’s Willing Workers is a
history of women in the Christian religion
in Australia. It is an interesting and
highly readable story, promoting an understanding
of the history of religion, feminism and
culture. It does not look at women in
non-Christian religions, for whom domination
by men is often much harsher and more
rigid, and which would require a book
on its own, or many books, to do the subject
justice. All religions preach equality,
but practise inequality. We must hope
that believing women continue to challenge
this false authority, and reclaim their
religions for themselves.
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