Voice from across the century - the challenge!

"The nineteenth century witnessed such a marked advance in the social, industrial and intellectual evolution of woman that it is aptly termed the Women's Century. Though the tendency is to consider this development modern and extraordinary, it is in reality the crystalisation of a process of evolution that has advanced with that of man, though at times obscured, or temporarily checked by events. The world suffered through want of the dual influence. Only the masculine was cultivated. In all lands property, military glory, and lust for power were the highest ideals. The humanising influences - sentiment, family, love and other domestic virtues - were relegated to an inferior place.

".. Enfranchised women of Australia, rise to your responsibilities, to your potentialities; enlist the sympathies of your brothers of the Church; ask Divine guidance, and go forward, never resting, never looking back, but working on till Australia demonstrates to the world what a living force enlightened enfranchised women may become, and thus cause older nations to shake off musty, conservative traditions that fetter progress. Then, instead of being ruled by the dead hand of the past, they will emerge into the glorious light of prosperity, peace and freedom."

As Annie Golding clearly demonstrated in her 1904 paper, "The evolution of women and their possibilities", women have always been integral to the human story and significantly involved in history in the making. She showed an amazing knowledge of the history of women across the ages.

Annie was active in Australia in the women's movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This Australian women's initiative was part of an international women's movement which had emerged strongly in economically developed countries during the 19th century, especially in Britain and America.

Scholarly women in the movement in various countries made a valiant attempt to recover what they could of women's history. Publications of their work were disseminated across the international women's network and made their way to Australia.

Annie Golding was aware of the various historical movements across the centuries in relation to women's history and actually named a number of the women listed in the margins here. Unfortunately, as had happened in previous ages, the knowledge of the women who had gone before them, which these late19th century women had resurrected for their own sustenance and guidance, and their records of their own activities were soon lost to subsequent generations of Australian women. Women doing a history major at Sydney University by the 1950s had none of this history passed on to them by the scholarly community of men - it did not interest them, they did not consider it significant.

Annie Golding, however, had been aware that the Church, through convents and monasteries, had provided for women a means of maintaining a strong tradition of literacy and at times real scholarship. She was aware that the nuns of the women's monasteries, which were rarely as well endowed as the men's institutions, drew upon the scholarly resources of the latter. Alas, in the 13th century when the centres of learning moved from the monasteries to the universities, from which women were excluded, significant contributions of women, such as that of Hildegard of Bingen, were generally forgotten.

From the 16th century, however, with the Church challenged by the Reformation, women became involved increasingly in the wider educational mission of the Church. This necessitated some educational opportunities for women but generally they were limited and necessarily drew exclusively on male scholarship. Women were not admitted to the ranks of scholars, either in the Church or the wider society, though such women as the distinguished mathematician, Mary Somerville, were driven by their talent and passion for learning to acquire an education against all odds.

Sadly the women in the women's liberation movement of the 60s-70s did not know even the history of the women activists of the 1930s, let alone that across the centuries, with which Annie Golding had become familiar.

But the scholars of the 1960s-70s women's movement across the world worked to reduce the huge lacunae in their historical knowledge. The result is that not only have they recovered much lost history but they have done ground breaking work in women's history in previously ignored fields across the centuries.

They are asking new questions of conventional resource material such as demographic information and other public records to broaden our knowledge of women's history and hence the vital relationship between the sexes.

It is now well documented that across the ages there have always been some men who respected the talents of women; there have always been some fathers who fostered the education of their daughters; there have been popes, bishops and clergy, who protected the rights of women to an education and to their participation in the various developmental movements in the Church. This is a genuine, though historically minor tradition, in western civilisation, which needs to be recovered, highlighted and developed.

Encouragingly in present times there are men who recognise the importance of this tradition. The well known Australian theologian Tony Kelly in 1984 in Seasons of Hope (9) pointed out that Von Balthasar "one of the most powerful Christian thinkers of our era" had noted regretfully that male theologians had largely ignored the theological work of a whole series of women saints across the centuries. Kelly himself observed: "There seems to be a special message in the way these women hope, arising out of their experience of God. Perhaps as theology begins to hear the feminine voice, it will be liberated to 'hopes that touch upon the infinite' (Therese of Lisieux)".

Later in this collection of essays Kelly when reflecting upon sexism in the Church notes: "The unexamined traditional male ideology is, in principle, subverted by the 'non-conformism' of Jesus in his relationship with women. " It remains a gospel truth that it was the women who endured with him the tragedy of Calvary, and who were the first witnesses of his Resurrection, even though they had no standing as witnesses in Jewish law. [I] finish with expressing the hope that women will come to forgive us men our trespasses: that they will not be condemned to make all the mistakes we have made: and that what they find will be a grace for all of us.(96-7)"

In 1991 the distinguished American philosopher and psychologist Richard Tarnas declared: "Many generalisations could be made about the history of the Western mind, but today perhaps the most immediately obvious is that it has been from start to finish an overwhelmingly masculine phenomenon". The crisis of modern man is an essentially masculine crisis, and I believe that its resolution is already occurring in the tremendous emergence of the feminine in our culture ….” Tarnas includes in the feminine, apart from such developments as “ the growing empowerment of women and the widespread opening up to feminine values by both men and women” what he describes as “ the increasing sense of unity with the planet and all forms of nature on it … the increasing sense of the ecological”. (441-2)

In 1995 Pope John Paul II in his Letter to Women stated with regret: "Unfortunately, we are heirs to a history which has conditioned us to a remarkable extent. In every time and place, this conditioning has been an obstacle to the progress of women. Women's dignity has often been unacknowledged and their prerogatives misinterpreted; they have often been relegated to the margins of society and reduced to servitude. This has prevented women from truly being themselves and it has resulted in a spiritual impoverishment of humanity".(6)

Encouraged that her insight expressed in 1904 is being increasingly recognised and supported Annie Golding challenges us to action!

T. Kelly, Seasons of Hope - Christian Faith and Social Issues, Melbourne, Dove Communications, 1984.

R.Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, London, Pimlico, 1996.

Pope John Paul II, Letter to Women, Sydney, St Pauls, 1995.