THE title of the Lambeth Palace Library exhibition “Women and the Church of England”, which runs until 29 August, might be taken to imply an overview, but visitors may be advised to expect more of a vignette. Seek in vain for a Mothers’ Union enrolling member, an accredited lady worker, or even a woman Reader.
The exhibition marks the 80th anniversary of the priesting of Florence Li Tim-Oi in Hong Kong (News, 2 February); the 30th anniversary of the priesting of 1200 women in the C of E (News, 15 March 2019); and the tenth anniversary of the passing of the legislation allowing women to be consecrated as bishops in England (News, 20 July 2014).
It explores 200 years of women’s ministry in the Church of England with its main focus on a succession of events, from the revival of the order of deaconesses in the 19th century up to the ordination of women deacons (many of whom were already deaconesses) and priests in the 20th, and then bishops in the present century.
But it also offers a sidelight on the activities of lay women of substance, such as the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts and the social-housing pioneer Octavia Hill, as well as the appointment, many years letter, of Dame Betty Ridley as a Church Estates Commissioner. The Commissioners’ relations with Hill, who urged them to maintain their own housing to keep its standard up, are a feature of the display.
Ridley was the first woman to hold such a senior administrative appointment at 1 Milbank — and one of the first two women to be awarded a Lambeth degree: a development that, one exhibit shows, took its time in coming after the admission of women to degrees at Oxford in 1920, and Cambridge in 1948.
Ridley, not yet a Dame but a member of the Church Assembly’s House of Laity, is pictured with Mother Clare, head of the Deaconess Community of St Andrew, in 1958, when they received their MAs from the Archbishop of Canterbury of the day, Dr Geoffrey Fisher. (Fisher’s university was Oxford.)
Lambeth Palace LibraryElizabeth Ferard (1885-23), pioneer Church of England deaconess, in the Lambeth Palace Library exhibition
The material likely to be least familiar to visitors is the documents and photos concerning Elizabeth Ferard, Isabella Gilmore, and the history of the C of E’s deaconesses and their “Devotional and intellectual Preparation” for ministry.
The Hong Kong “incident”, as the Church Times then dubbed it, is marked with a typed copy of the letter from Bishop Hall to Archbishop William Temple, in which he explained what he had done in ordaining Li Tim-Oi priest to meet pastoral need under the emergency conditions created by the Japanese occupation.
Among the ephemera of the past 50 years are campaigning leaflets from the Movement for the Ordination of Women and its opposite number, Women Against the Ordination of Women. Visitors may wonder whose annotations in ballpoint pen are on the displayed copy of the 1961 Clergy Pensions Measure to adjust its wording in 1982 to include women deacons.
Also from the late Queen’s reign comes the exhibition’s impressive example of a royal licence and seal — according to custom, innocent of punctuation.
Missing, though mentioned in the timelines, is Archbishop Randall Davidson’s committee’s report of 1919, The Ministry of Women, but the exhibition touches on the widely forgotten debate about whether deaconesses were, in fact, in Holy Orders. The caption to a black-and-white photo of the “ordination” of a deaconess in her veil, pictured kneeling before a bishop in his pontificals, suggests one possible answer to that question that exercised Anglican minds for a time.
It is not the only question that will occur to visitors. During my visit, a discussion group seemed on the verge of disappearing into a 1662 rabbit-hole about the “making” of deacons and the “ordering” of priests, but had emerged before I left.
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