By the time I was at high school, and the national Anglican Church was riven with conflict over whether to make women priests, the stranglehold on women in my conservative hometown of Sydney was tightening. Young girls brimming with hormones were warned not to tempt men with the way we dressed. We were told to marry young and submit to our husbands. We were cautioned against the distraction of social justice, about the evils of ambition, the selfishness of career, the ugliness of feminism. There was a puritanical bent to much of the controlling advice; the need for women to be modest, how just holding hands could be a gateway to sex. I was spoken to once because I had danced for several hours at a party, which was, apparently, evidence of my ‘love of the pleasures of this world’. But the worst thing a woman could be, a friendly leader told me, was opinionated.
Somehow this culture shaped me, then spat me out.
WHEN I WAS TWENTY-THREE, I joined the synod of the Anglican Diocese of Sydney to try to persuade the church to allow women to become priests. This was a spectacularly unsuccessful endeavour. The opposition I experienced was cloaked in intense paternalistic politeness. One day, over a lunch break, a priest asked me if I was angry and if he could pray for my anger. That night, a cleric from Sydney’s Hills District stood up to argue that we should not waste the time of the synod by even talking about women — yet he was trembling from head to toe.
The response from some priests to the suggestion that women’s voices be amplified and their roles expanded was peculiarly visceral, enraged and primitive. One group that opposed women priests, called the Association for Apostolic Ministry, advised members to ‘avoid contact with irregular female ministers’ — essentially, leave the room, walk out of services or turn your back and flee if such a woman approaches the pulpit. Run away from the woman, lest you be contaminated.
In 1996, I had a decent run at ramming the church door. I paired up with a judge, Justice Keith Mason, then the Solicitor General of New South Wales, and we concocted a halfway solution: that women could be made priests but not heads of parishes. We worked slavishly on submissions, community forums, synod orders and speeches for many months, all to no avail. We almost won the majority support of the laity (200 for us, 210 against), but the clergy voted solidly against us (151 against, 79 for) and proffered up a petition signed by 1300 women from conservative churches who said they were perfectly happy with things as they were. Of course.
The rub lay here: 87 per cent of synod members were men. Two of the three houses that had to pass any motion were made up only of men. This is what is known as a stacked deck: clerical, powerful, with no burden of representation. There were of course women who spoke against our bill — all of them married to ministers. They argued that male headship over women was unarguably biblical and meant women could only serve as subordinates.
It was a peculiar, parallel world. Outside the church, and especially amongst feminist friends, my quest was considered either quaint or uncool; I was told repeatedly to just turn my back on them all, but I was convinced it mattered: the debate about the soul and role of women in the church was one of the deep underpinnings of the cultural objection to, or hostility towards, women exercising any public authority. But at the same time as I was arguing with the patriarchs, I was madly in love with an actor who had four detachable front teeth, my best friend had started dating the woman who was going to be her wife, and I was spending long hours lapping in the sea, playing pool and dancing with my tribe. I was driven in a way I could not explain to free women from the destructive attitude of the church, but salt, glitter balls and the green-capped cliffs of Bondi were my life.
Sadly, all this striving amounted to less than zero: the diocese went backwards. After the rest of the church, and much of the rest of the world, decided to allow women to be priests in 1992, the men of Sydney started refusing to allow women in pulpits at alclass="underline" indeed, the widely touted rule is now that a woman should not speak if any male past puberty is present. The doctrine of headship — where a man is to be the head of the woman in the church and home, and she is to submit to him — has been taught more often, and made more rigid. Rendering the church, ultimately, increasingly irrelevant.
SO HOW TO THINK of these years of effort? Write them off as my wasted youth? Or believe that every effort counts, and that sometimes reform takes a long time? History provides some comfort. British MP William Wilberforce fought against the global slave trade for forty-six years — both inside and outside parliament — until the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which outlawed slavery in most of the British Empire. He died three days after hearing the bill would pass. Adam Hochschild points out in his book Bury the Chains that the beginnings of the Western anti-slavery campaign can be traced right back to the meeting of a dozen Quakers in London in 1787: eleven of them would be dead before slavery was ended. Wilberforce was the only MP involved, and, as Hochschild argues, it was the first time in history ‘that a large number of people became outraged, and stayed outraged for many years, over someone else’s rights.’ From 1789, Wilberforce began introducing bills to cease slave trading into parliament, but the first time one of them was debated, in 1791, he lost by 163 votes to 88. Then things deteriorated: one report estimated that more than two million whiplashes landed on the bodies of British West Indian slaves every year. Meanwhile, anti-slavery activists lobbied, drafted petitions, printed pamphlets and doubtless held thousands of often dull and dispiriting meetings during which they probably wondered if the situation would ever get better and despaired at those who placed financial self-interest and prejudice before the basic right to freedom.
Nelson Mandela spent much of his life, including his twenty-seven years in prison, fighting apartheid before becoming South Africa’s first black president in 1994. Millions of acts of unseen, undocumented dissent and protest flattened the ground on which he subsequently walked.
Likewise, think of all the scientists who have been warning of the dangers of extreme climate change since the 1960s, and all of the criticism of their work and the dismissal of anything resembling agitation or activism as the lunatic alarmism of the left. The public burying of — or attempts to discredit — the crucial findings of thousands of our finest climate scholars will prove to be one of the greatest (if not the greatest) acts of political and intellectual corruption of our age.
And what of the Indigenous peoples of Australia seeking constitutional recognition, truth-telling and a voice to parliament, those peoples who have been mistreated, stymied, rejected, ignored and discriminated against and who continue to ask non-Indigenous Australians to walk with them in a makarrata, a Yolngu word meaning peace-making, a coming-together after a struggle? The grace of this approach after more than two hundred years of suffering racism, along with their patience, strength and resilience, is astonishing.
The lesson is: you don’t walk away until the work is done.
For every great leader ushering in monumental reform, standing on stages festooned with balloons, blinking in the barrage of flashing camera lights, there are hundreds of thousands of people whose faces we will never see, who stayed up until midnight painting placards and posters, who met with ministers, drafted proposals and policy submissions, marched even when the turnout was dismal, knocked on doors, ignored ridicule, baked cakes and kept minutes of meetings that seemed to achieve nothing.