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3. The Generous Sideof Christian Faith
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80 3 The Generous Side of Christian Faith The Successes and Challenges of Mainline Women’s Groups R. Marie Griffith introduction Laywomen’s organizations have long played an important role in American Protestantism and in modern civic life more widely. During the nineteenth century, churchwomen within and across denominational boundaries worked together for slave emancipation, temperance, and female suffrage, to name only three of the most notable issues. Women’s mission organizations helped transmit Christianity to peoples across the world and educated Protestants back home about distant cultures, all the while influencing American policy toward native and foreign populations alike. Later in the twentieth century, women’s groups would continue to focus attention and resources on both national and global questions, interceding for victims of poverty and serving as strong advocates of such issues as international peace, women and children’s rights, accessible health care, and racial justice. In recent years, the work of mainline Protestant women’s groups has received far less public attention than that of secular groups like the National Organization for Women or the Feminist Majority. The aims and activities of the faith-based groups—Church Women United, Episcopal Church Women, Presbyterian Women, United Methodist Women, and Women of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, among others— have not been well known outside their own constituencies. Even within the churches, especially at the congregational level, there has often been only a vague sense of what the women’s groups do or did in the past. Are they support groups? Bible study fellowships? Mission and outreach organizations ? Political advocacy associations? Or some combination of these? While this essay cannot hope to cover these organizations with the The Generous Side of Christian Faith / 81 thoroughness they deserve, it attempts to illuminate their historical place within mainline Protestantism (and within the larger contours of American society) in the last third of the twentieth century, particularly the last decade. What kind of public role have such groups sought? How have their goals either succeeded or failed? How has this public role been affected by the more intimate, private role they have played in individual women’s religious lives? Most important, perhaps, where do these groups stand today? This essay derives its answers to these questions from textual as well as ethnographic research, blending information obtained from diverse printed sources and archival materials pertaining to women’s groups with insights from interviews held with national and local leaders and participants between 1999 and 2000.1 While no one familiar with these organizations would argue that they are either monolithic or identical to one another, there is enough significant overlap on their target issues, aims, strategies, and concerns to allow for an analysis that uses specific group cases to reach broader conclusions about mainline women’s public activism. Three cases have proved especially salient for this project, each chosen because of its vibrant past, central position in American church life, and history of public activism: Church Women United, the major, ecumenical, mainline women’s group of the twentieth century; United Methodist Women, directed by the Women’s Division of the General Board of Global Ministries in the United Methodist Church; and Presbyterian Women, organized at all levels of the Presbyterian Church (USA) under the auspices of the Women’s Ministry Unit of the General Assembly. A fourth group, Episcopal Church Women (ECW), has at times provided an interesting alternative example, since its recent trajectory, structure, and reason for existence are quite different from those of the other groups and have less to do with any construed “public role,” although ECW shares many of the same tensions and challenges confronting the other organizations. Mainline women in leadership perceive some of the challenges facing them and have ideas about how to increase their public role. Yet, for a variety of internal and external reasons, they are not always able to translate these ideas into successful practice in ways that would help spread their vision and maximize membership—both crucial tasks if these organizations are to thrive and have an impact on civic and political life. Adding to the perennial challenge of simply existing as activist women’s organizations within church bodies that praise them as fund-raisers and nurturers , but may balk at a more public role, are the dramatic changes in women’s roles over the past thirty years, especially the increased number [52.55.19.189] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 14:02 GMT) 82 / R. Marie Griffith...