Women and Clergywomen

Sociology of Religion, Winter, 2000 by Joy Charlton

Joy Charlton [*]

I am at once an old-timer and a newcomer to the sociology of religion. My connection to it began in my college days, lasted part of the way through graduate school, and then after excursions to other sub-fields, I returned, some fifteen years later, to an early topic of research, a study of clergywomen. During this time the field changed most obviously in the visibility of women as the focus of research, and in the increasing numbers of women as the researchers themselves. Less obviously, but just as importantly, research by and about women and religion has illuminated our own lives, and the lives of women outside a religious context. In my own case, a commitment to seeing the world through a sociological lens, to using particular methods of learning about the world, to maintaining a persistent curiosity about the lives people lead, and in particular the way patterns of work and patterns of meaning are connected, have infused all areas of my life, including the work I do now as a teacher and, for a time, an administrator.

I learned about the sociology of religion first as an undergraduate, when I worked part of the time as the Book Review Editorial Assistant for the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. As I logged in the new books, typed the letters to reviewers, sent the reminders, and read reviews when they arrived, I came to know the sociology of religion in an unusual way and unusually well -- and, probably, in some ways, more broadly than I have known it ever since. Meanwhile an acquaintance gave me a copy of Simone de Beauvoir's The second sex, and I took the very first course offered at my university on what we then called "sex roles." (I wrote a paper on the presence and status of women in the field of sociology: the answers then were that there weren't many women, relatively, and they weren't typically in positions of high status.) Discovering feminism changed my life. It named and illuminated circumstances I had either never seen or understood, it expanded the range of life choices I thought I had, and ulti mately it directed my intellectual and scholarly agenda. All my choices of what to study, and often what to teach, have included women at the center.

A feminist sensibility also resonated with my choices of how to study. Sociology as a discipline seemed very quantitative. I learned my statistics as required, and sometimes very much enjoyed the satisfaction of closure that equations and final answers (numerically defined) bring. But for me the methods of study resulting in numbers created too great a distance between me and the world I was trying to understand. While I believe and teach that the nature of the research question should determine the nature of the methods employed, I prefer to choose research questions that allow me to watch and to listen. In fact, far beyond being techniques limited to research, I use what I know about ethnography to inform my current work as an academic dean, and I use what I know about interviewing to be a better teacher.

I chose a graduate program that would allow me a serious focus on qualitative methods, and then for my first solo project found a way to draw together my interests in both women and in religion. I interviewed a sample of women studying toward ordination in two seminaries, one affiliated with the United Methodist Church and the other Lutheran. This was at a point in the late 1970s when a number of Protestant denominations had changed their ordination rules and women began to go to seminaries in substantial numbers. It was a moment to capture the transition, to see how women would fare in new settings, how they would transform and be transformed by new arrangements. The ministry was familiar territory to me, as I had grown up a Protestant preacher's kid, and it seemed an especially evocative occupation to choose to study, compared to other occupations whose gender ratios were changing: only ordained ministry had been understood to be declared by God to be off-limits to women. I suspect this remains a reason wh y clergywomen continue to attract sustained attention.

And sustained attention they have received. There was very little social science literature on clergywomen when I first became interested. At the 1978 annual meetings of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and the Religious Research Association, for which the theme was "Religion and Sex Roles: Challenges and Change," there were no papers on clergywomen and three on the topic of women in seminary, one of which was my own. By the 1995 SSSR/RRA meetings, for which gender had come around again as a theme ("Women and Religion"), I counted over 30 papers presented on the topic of clergywomen alone, in addition to many papers on women and leadership and related topics. That is one measure of how the presence of women, and interest in women, has changed during the last two decades.

The faculty in my graduate program responded positively to my work on clergywomen, but the parts that interested them were not the parts that had to do with religion. They were interested in gender, and in a changing occupation, and even the analytical focus on contradictions and dilemmas of status, a symbolic interactionist approach following the work of Everett Hughes. But the study of religion was not their specialty and so it was not what caught their attention, and I learned lessons about the importance of mentors. They did not stand against my continued study of religion, but I wanted to work with my faculty advisors in ways that would keep us in conversation. Besides, I believed the conventional wisdom, which was that I needed to be marketable, I needed to have broader options, and a broader focus on work and organizations would provide that. I responded to the responses to my work. The importance of mentoring is often acknowledged, in the sense of positive guiding efforts, but sometimes the shaping d ynamics of guidance are more subtle, but just as powerful.