A Unique and Glorious Mission: Women and Presbyterianism in Scotland, 1830-1930 (review)

In A Unique and Glorious Mission: Women and Presbyterianism in Scotland, 1830-1930, Lesley A. Orr Macdonald sets out to explore the opportunities offered to women and the limitations imposed upon them by Scottish presbyterianism, and the extent to which female activity and influence expanded in the Scottish presbyterian churches between 1830 and 1930. Her book investigates the changing nineteenth-century presbyterian understanding of women's role in the church and society, and the manifestation of this in the church at home, on the mission field abroad, and in various campaigns for the reform of British society. For a country whose church was known for being socially influential, Scotland's ecclesiastical history remains a rich and yet relatively underresearched field. This analysis of the impact on women by the dominant form of church government in the modern period will therefore be welcomed by church historians, gender historians, and social historians alike.

Macdonald's investigation focuses on middle-class, Lowland urban women. Her work does not explore the impact of the churches on the unchurched or on passive attenders, but rather its influence on activists. It is therefore not an extension, for example, of Leah Leneman's and Rosalind Mitchison's studies of working-class promiscuity and their dealings with Kirk Sessions in the eighteenth century (Girls in Trouble: Sexuality and Social Control in Rural Scotland 1660-1780 [1998] and Sin in the City: Sexuality and Social Control in Urban Scotland 1660-1780 [1998]). Macdonald is chiefly interested in women who tried to change the attitudes and structures of their churches in order to expand the status and responsibilities of women within them. These activists tended to be middle-class, and the sources Macdonald uses (autobiographies, memoirs, and contemporary books, pamphlets, and tracts as well as church minutes and records), though voluminous, reflect an urban and largely central-belt bias.

Macdonald's conclusions are perhaps not surprising for an explicitly feminist study, though no less valid for that: while the churches often limited women sorely, women nonetheless showed that they could pioneer significant work and, together with sympathetic men, forced the churches to accept an expansion of their roles. The book is particularly interesting in three areas. The first is its analysis of the effect on the Scottish presbyterian churches of the nineteenth-century Evangelical notion of "woman's mission," an offshoot of the domestic ideology widely accepted by those churches. Women were to be in the vanguard of the spiritual and moral regeneration of British society, but working from within their "natural" realm of the home and in a private capacity, rather than from any public platform. The nineteenth-century belief that women had this particular responsibility resulted, according to Macdonald, in "a significant feminisation of patriarchal Scottish presbyterianism," although this was achieved "in terms of service rendered, rather than of status bestowed" (93).

Secondly, Macdonald is enlightening on women's use of Christian doctrine and ethics in order to legitimise their agency within the church and their demands for institutional and ideological change. Some stressed John Calvin's admission of the legitimacy of change in church order to justify their demands for reform. Later, similar use was made of biblical criticism (which encouraged the prioritisation of certain parts of the Bible over others), a renewed focus on the historical Jesus (alongside the Pauline, doctrinal representation of him, and stressing his respect for women and their ability to have a direct relationship with him as disciples in their own right), and an emphasis on progress towards the kingdom of God (which implied the imperfection of the status quo).

Finally, Macdonald's recognition of the ambiguities of the positions of female missionaries, deaconesses, and other full-time female church workers is sensitive and nuanced. Women missionaries abroad, though often frustrated by the limitations imposed upon them by their churches...