God's Willing Workers: Women and Religion in Australia (review)

To extend the frontiers of history we need up-to-date maps of the past, that is, works of synthesis pulling together recent research and giving it coherent shape. This Anne O'Brien has done triumphantly in her survey of women and religion in Australia. God's Willing Workers is rich, fertile historical writing opening the way to new endeavors in this line of country. More than that, the indefatigable author has done her own exploring in novel sources such as nuns' manuscript memoirs and taped interviews, so that her book is not just old material in a fresh form but new discoveries.

Protestants and Catholics share the pages of this book. It is too early to expect to find Islamic women here since their history has not yet been written; but there is a body of work on Jewish women on the shelves that is ignored here, perhaps for reasons of space. The Christian women who appear here tend to be what sociologists would call "religious professionals": Catholic nuns, Protestant missionaries, deaconesses, and lay leaders in bodies like the Grail and St. Joan's Alliance. Women in the pews, ordinary parishioners, have yet to tell their stories, although a start has been made in the Commission for Australian Catholic Women's And the Dance Goes on (2005) and Professor Greg Dening's Church Alive! (2006).

Christian women's experiences of church, whatever the denomination, are similar. Powerful males disregard their wishes, try to impose controls on them, and ignore their rights. In spite of this the women survive in their vocations by perseverance and subtlety. Theirs is a hard road to holiness. Thus in Sydney, Cardinal Norman Gilroy's frosty relations with the women of St. Joan's Alliance can be seen as a parallel to his contemporary Anglican Archbishop Howard Mowll's heavy-handed control of deaconesses, which got heavier in the episcopate of Mowll's successor, Hugh Rowland Gough.

In O'Brien's view, the turning point for modern Catholic women was the anti-contraceptive encyclical of 1968, Humanae Vitae. Where Vatican Council II had seemed to promise a more open, freer model of church than the old pay-pray-obey one, the enforcers of Humanae Vitae wanted a return to blind obedience. There is some evidence to suggest that Catholic women of this time contracepted at about the same rate as the general Australian community; and that after three or four children they resorted to abortion at the same rate. So began their long estrangement from the Church. O'Brien thinks that this is the reason why no specifically Catholic feminist groups appeared in these years. Instead, Catholic women joined mainstream feminist bodies or found congenials in broad Christian groupings. It was noticeable how many Catholic (or ex-Catholic) women became prominent in the women's movement—training in public speaking and apologetics in Catholic girls' schools had given them the formation to be leaders.

One of the delights of this book is its gallery of portraits of Christian women who might otherwise be unknown. In Bruce Kaye's collection, Anglicanism in Australia: A History (2002), Anne O'Brien has an essay on women which carries a snapshot of Narelle Bullard, an Anglican missionary in Africa for nearly four decades; now she expands this to give a fuller picture of Bullard, with her hopes and disappointments and tested faith. She stands alongside admirable Catholic nuns whose lives are here recovered from congregational archives. O'Brien's book will surely encourage other historians to tell the stories of women who barely appear here, such as the wives of clergy and the nuns who founded and ran those big Catholic hospitals, significant elements in the Australian story, but who rarely attract the attention of historians.