THE title of the Lambeth Palace Library exhibition “Women and the Church of England”, which runs until 29 August, is likely to be taken to imply an summary, but visitors could also be advised to expect more of a vignette. Seek in vain for a Mothers’ Union enrolling member, an accredited lady employee, or perhaps a woman Reader.
The exhibition marks the eightieth anniversary of the priesting of Florence Li Tim-Oi in Hong Kong (News, 2 February); the thirtieth anniversary of the priesting of 1200 women within the C of E (News, 15 March 2019); and the tenth anniversary of the passing of the laws allowing women to be consecrated as bishops in England (News, 20 July 2014).
It explores 200 years of girls’s ministry within the Church of England with its foremost give attention to a succession of events, from the revival of the order of deaconesses within the nineteenth century as much as the ordination of girls deacons (lots of whom were already deaconesses) and priests within the twentieth, after which bishops in the current century.
But it also offers a sidelight on the activities of lay women of substance, equivalent to the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts and the social-housing pioneer Octavia Hill, in addition to the appointment, a few years letter, of Dame Betty Ridley as a Church Estates Commissioner. The Commissioners’ relations with Hill, who urged them to take care of their very own housing to maintain its standard up, are a feature of the display.
Ridley was the primary woman to carry such a senior administrative appointment at 1 Milbank — and considered one of the primary two women to be awarded a Lambeth degree: a development that, one exhibit shows, took its time in coming after the admission of girls 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, after 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, within the Lambeth Palace Library exhibition
The material prone 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 mental Preparation” for ministry.
The Hong Kong “incident”, because the Church Times then dubbed it, is marked with a typed copy of the letter from Bishop Hall to Archbishop William Temple, during which he explained what he had done in ordaining Li Tim-Oi priest to satisfy 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 regulate its wording in 1982 to incorporate women deacons.
Also from the late Queen’s reign comes the exhibition’s impressive example of a royal licence and seal — based on custom, innocent of punctuation.
Missing, though mentioned within the timelines, is Archbishop Randall Davidson’s committee’s report of 1919, The Ministry of Women, however the exhibition touches on the widely forgotten debate about whether deaconesses were, actually, 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 query that exercised Anglican minds for a time.
It will not be the one query that can occur to visitors. During my visit, a discussion group seemed on the verge of disappearing right into a 1662 rabbit-hole in regards to the “making” of deacons and the “ordering” of priests, but had emerged before I left.
