The Real Worlds of Clergy Women (Worldview, Religion).

Abstract

This in-depth study of seventeen clergywomen, who vary widely in personal background and situation, documents the women's self-reported perceptions of the processes through which they entered clergy status, deal with social expectations, and do their ministerial tasks. The research suggests some likely social consequences from the currently increasing proportion of women in the clergy role. Data-gathering was done in free-format interviews with informants selected for diversity (as to age, race, marital status, denomination, type of charge) and for non-marginality of institutional functioning (as judged by colleagues and /or administrative superiors). Some hypotheses generated from the data seem worthy of testing for behavioral evidence and generalizability: With regard to developmental background, clergywomen tend to (1) be oldest children or oldest daughters; (2) report a parenting combination featuring a mother who showed unusual competency and a father who showed unusual warmth and openness; (3) come from families in which religion was well integrated with the life experience during their child years. With regard to life and ministry perspectives, clergywomen (4) combine high levels of personal confidence and life satisfaction with epi-normative, and rogynous versions of female gender identity; (5) arrive at beliefs about what's ultimately true through ongoing reconciliation of traditional meanings and direct experience; (6) approach moral decisions from a stance of responsible caring; (7) regard their real authority as rooted primarily in charismatic credibility; (8) rely on personal caring, identity integrity, authentic self-disclosure, and equalitarian negotiations as the essential dynamics of administrative leadership; (9) hold a worldview that emphasizes holism, cooperative existence, and responsibility for freedom. Hypotheses 4 through 9 suggest a life orientation that coincides remarkably with major aspects of a worldview favored by many "futurist" social thinkers as appropriate to the reality of our modern age. This coincidence is noted and documented in the study. The informants appear well suited to articulate the processes and perspectives said in the current social analysis literature to be underdeveloped, undervalued, and undernoticed in public life. They also seem prepared to articulate the crucial valuing of balance itself and holism in social arrangements.