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Book Review
| Anne O'Brien, God's Willing Workers: Women and Religion in Australia, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2005. pp. 314. $49.95 paper.
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| 'How can the history of women's engagement with religion enlarge our understandings of Australian culture?' With this question, Anne O'Brien opens her concluding chapter to this path-breaking study of women and religion in Australia. Her book provides an articulate, ambitious and nuanced response to it and to those who have, with some justification, criticised Australian religious history for failing to articulate the significance of religion for the broader Australian society. |
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O'Brien tackles a broad canvas in this study. The chronological span extends from first settlement with the convict women whose ribald resistance to religion is exemplified by the inmates of the Cascades Factory in Hobart who attacked the Rev. William Bedford, took off his trousers and attempted to unman him. It extends to the end of the twentieth century, reviewing the Christian feminist movement in Australia, the struggle for women's ordination in the major Christian denominations, the challenges facing religious Sisters following the collapse of vocations, and the achievement of church-based Indigenous women in ministry, political and social activism and spirituality. It is less comprehensive in its geographical scope. Although there are numerous examples drawn from all over Australia, the bulk of the narrative concerns women in New South Wales reflecting the richness of the sources available to a Sydney-based researcher. Neither O'Brien nor any other historians would be able to construct a coherent story which covered all the hundreds of religions to which Australian women have professed adherence. So she is mostly concerned with those who were active in the major Christian denominations, divided into the shorthand dichotomy of 'Protestants' (these are 'willing Protestant workers') and 'Catholics' (nuns), with a final section examining women, religion and feminism. But this is remarkable enough. |
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In order to appreciate O'Brien's achievement in writing the first academic survey of the role of women and religion in Australian history it is worth reflecting that US, British, and Irish historians produced multi-volume accounts of the field in their own societies from the 1970s. Historians whose special focus is women's religious experience have been at the forefront of the profession: but not in Australia. While historians have tackled some particular topics within the field: Catholic nuns by Rosa MacGinley, women's ordination by Muriel Porter, some Catholic lay organisations by Sally Kennedy, for much else O'Brien has now supplied the first, path-breaking scholarly synthesis. She provides a particularly important account of Protestant home and foreign missionaries, the overwhelming majority of whom were single and among whom O'Brien includes Anglican deaconesses and sisters. Australian women began to work in foreign missions in the Pacific, India and China from the 1890s, and among the Australian Aborigines from even earlier, yet there have been almost no accounts of this important project. |
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How effectively does O'Brien manage to bind her vast material together? The answer to this is 'very well indeed'. One way this is achieved is by focussing on particular women, using diaries, letters and personal material for women from the earliest period of settlement, and drawing on interviews, autobiography and family reminiscences for those within living memory. In the chapter on the women's missionary movement, for example, O'Brien takes three case studies rather than tackling it all. These are Methodist women in the Pacific in the 1890s, the Aborigines Inland Mission, a 'faith mission' founded by the extraordinary Retta Long, and women in the Anglican Church Missionary Society, especially in Africa in the interwar period. While O'Brien is aware of the extensive scholarly literature problematising the mission project in colonial and post-colonial societies, she focuses on individuals and their own writings in an attempt to get 'inside' women missionaries. The effect of this technique is to give great immediacy to O'Brien's analysis. While sustaining appropriate distance, she does not seek to begrudge or blame missionaries for their chosen work, but rather to understand it. |
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This approach does have its limitations. For readers of Labour History, one obvious level of analysis that might have been pursued is that of the economic value of women's religious work. This is a book, after all, about women workers most of whom were granted some level of professional status and who were essential to production within Australia's cultural industries. I was also hesitant about O'Brien's tendency to give a positive spin to almost any activity undertaken by women in their churches. While it is heartening to hear of the intellectual achievements of religious feminists, the ongoing survival and contribution of Catholic nuns, and inspirational Indigenous Christian leaders, some tougher questions might have been pursued about the historical indifference, exploitation and denigration of women within and by their churches in Australia. But these are not substantial criticisms. This is a landmark book which will remain fundamental to the ongoing study of religious, cultural and labour history in Australia for generations. |
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| University College Dublin |
HILARY M. CAREY | |
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