What is the nature of women at the close of the twentieth century? Underpaid in wage work, unpaid for domestic work – of which they do the most – making progress in education but usually regarded as less intelligent than men. A 1998 study of male and female intelligence found that men reported themselves as ‘significantly brighter than they are’ while women’s estimates were ‘far more modest’.165

  In 1994, there was one outstanding barrier to female equality – it was in the national church of England. Did women have souls?

  Spiritual Equality

  In 1950, Pope Pius XII ruled that Mary, mother of Jesus, was incorruptible, and that at death she went directly to heaven. ‘She, by an entirely unique privilege, completely overcame sin by her Immaculate Conception, and as a result she was not subject to the law of remaining in the corruption of the grave, and she did not have to wait until the end of time for the redemption of her body.’166 This made no difference to the priesthood, which continued to be men-only, but it was an extraordinary acknowledgement of the elevation of a woman.

  It also made no difference to the other Christian churches, including the national church of England, where there were no figures of women to equal God the father or God the son, or God the Holy Ghost – though the Holy Ghost was sometimes offered, rather grudgingly, as a model for women, though always referred to as ‘he’. The Church of England remained resolutely masculine, with only the lowest possible post of deaconess available for women who wanted to serve as priests.

  In 1966, the Church of England made a full report on the possibility of women becoming priests – and discovered that it was not possible. The document is a thoughtful, considered repetition of all the reasons that women have not been admitted to profitable or interesting work. It could have been written in previous centuries by any physicians, tailors, weavers or mechanics who decided that a trade was so valuable, or so interesting or of such high status, that only a man should get a shot at it. Being a vicar, concluded the report, is simply too good a job for anyone but a man. The report is an extraordinary document for the 1960s, working patiently through the many reasons that women have not in the past, cannot now, and should not in the future, do well-trained, well-paid high-status work.

  First, the report pointed out that women priests went against tradition. If Jesus had wanted a woman apostle, he would have called one. But the Bible tells us he only summoned men. This, the report tells us, is ‘just part of the nature of things, in this case of the nature of the Christian Church’.167

  But Jesus did not just call exclusively men, he had a huge bias towards fishermen. Of his 12 disciples, seven were called to follow him from their fishing. Andrew, Peter, James and John were professional fishermen. Philip, Nathaniel and Thomas were called while fishing. Matthew was a tax collector, Simon was a zealot – probably a revolutionary – and Judas was a thief. The occupations of James, Jesus’ cousin, and Nathaniel/Bartholomew are not described.168 On this basis, the ‘nature of things’ would indicate that the ministry should be mostly fishermen, and one twelfth revolutionary, one twelfth clerical and one twelfth criminal.

  The report points out that earlier religions tended to have women priests, but later religions that developed monotheism, with a single God, tend to have male priests. To change this would be ‘more disruptive of the Christian Church than any heresy or moral deviation’.

  The familiar sleight of hand of praising women to justify excluding them is neatly performed by the church report’s claims that there is too much maleness in the modern world and that women entering the ‘characteristic masculine way of handling life’ have made things worse. The solution for society is to maintain the polarity of the sexes. There are only two sexes – and they are completely different: ‘There is in fact a masculine and a feminine human nature with some complication from the shadow of the opposite sex in each.’ With too much masculinity in society, women should avoid masculine work – and keep out of the church.

  Amazingly, in 1966, the church invoked the old concept that a man can represent men and women, but a woman can only represent herself: ‘A male priest represents both sexes in a way which a woman does not in organised society and in the Church.’

  The report rounds up with a chivalric reason for excluding women from work – the task of being a parish priest is too much for a married woman. A wife might be distracted by pregnancy, a mother by the care of her children. A father presumably need waste little time on the children he has conceived and the woman he has married. A man who found that he was married to a woman who was a priest would face ‘considerable complications’ in the relationships between husband and wife.

  Women, concluded the 1966 report sorrowfully, don’t necessarily know what would be best for them. Women have so many opportunities in society that they don’t need to enter the church. Regardless of what women say, despite the fact that women felt they were called by God, the church report knew better. The time had passed, the question of women priests was already obsolete. According to the church, no modern women wanted to become a priest – it was an old wish that had been raised and fell unanswered, a generation or more ago.

  And finally – a resounding shout-out to the ancient doctrine of separate spheres: ‘Women have their own kind of ministry in offering the specific gifts of the feminine sex to the furthering of Christ’s work on earth. These opportunities should be extended. Much of their value would be lost if women were drawn into the ordained priesthood.’169

  It’s an extraordinarily complete summary of the reasons men have given over nine centuries of English history (and longer) to keep women from authority, from wealth and from interesting work. It was the last stand of patriarchy on the last hill. Women were not the spiritual equals of men in the eyes of God nor in the view of his church. They could not be priests. They never had been priests – it was not natural. It would ruin the priest business if women were to do it. Women and men are the opposite of each other and cannot do the same work. Women could not be both priest and mother and wife – it would ruin the home, and not even women want this. And finally, women do their own feminine work so beautifully that this work should be improved and extended, and they should do nothing else.

  As part of allowing women to extend their role of reading at services, women were allowed to be ‘lay readers’ in 1969, ten years after it had first been proposed. A bishop assured the debate that it was safe to open the lay readership to women as none would volunteer – young women were too busy with their families to undertake the work. In fact, 44 women found the time in the first year.170

  In 1975, the Church of England reversed the policy (and presumably ‘nature’ itself) to announce that, actually, there were no fundamental objections to women being ordained as priests. The motion was promptly rejected the next year – the same year that the Sex Discrimination Act made it illegal to close posts to women. The church gained exemption from the requirement to open posts to men and women and is still (at the time of writing) exempt from sex equality legislation.

  Betty Ridley took the chair for the Movement for the Ordination of Women in 1979.171 Daughter of a bishop, a widow with four children, she had spent her life working for the church in various posts and on committees, and her enthusiasm and that of fellow deaconesses and lay readers won a motion to permit the ordination of women in 1984, which then went into eight years of debate – mainly concerned with how to compensate the male priests who refused to work with women vicars. It was the old problem of opening up a closed shop and paying off disgruntled tradesmen who did not want women in the club. A total of 430 priests resigned from the Church of England rather than see a woman represent God in their church and claimed that their wages should be paid and they compensated for loss of their job and, in many cases, houses. The church estimated that it would cost £24 million to compensate the priests who left. The church paid compensation to priests – even those who stepped straight into a job in the Roman Catholic Church.172

  Finally, in 1994, the first 32 women priests were ordained in Bristol Cathedral. Twenty years later, in 2014, women were allowed to become bishops, with a simultaneous law to continue allowing churches to refuse female priests and including an amendment to the Equality Act so that it does not apply to the church. This led to some surprising convolutions of logic. For the purposes of the Equality Act, bishops – even archbishops – even those who make the law of the land, sitting in the House of Lords, are said not to ‘hold public office’, as that would put them under the act.

  Despite the rearguard action, despite the closed shop, despite compensating men who will not work beside a woman, the Church of England now ordains women priests. Women have a right to speak as themselves anywhere in England, to anyone in England, even in the national church, even to God. For the first time in the English church, a woman represented God to the congregation, claiming to be made in the image of God, interceding for the congregation to God and telling the word of God to the congregation.

  For the first time in England, women were spiritual equals of men in the Christian church, and can claim as part of their ‘nature’ that normal women are divine.

  Afterword

  There is no grand conclusion to this book because it is a report of selected real events of 900 years in England, not a condemnation of the past, nor a call to action. There is too much material for a grand conclusion – also, I don’t know what you, the reader, will want to take or reject from it, for yourself. But one of the standout ideas for me is the compulsive habit of men, through history, to define the ‘Nature of Women’. This completely imaginary label has served as the starting point for laws about women, ways to control women, provide for women, define appropriate work for women, set standards for permitted treatment of women, and even define those who may call themselves a woman. Virginia Woolf tried to kill this imaginary ideal woman: ‘Whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her.’1

  Like a poltergeist summoned by men’s imagination, sometimes a warning banshee, sometimes an angel in the corner, this creature calls women to either live up to an unrealistic ideal or rebel against it. Most women queasily worry why, if it is the ‘nature’ of women, does it feel so unnatural to me? Millions of us have had that sinking feeling of not fitting the mould; in my own life experiences – as a tomboy, an apprentice to a trade, a professional, a scholar, a mother and a feminist – I have often felt completely out of step.

  The definition of ‘women’s nature’ has put generations of sportswomen in the stands with the spectators, scientists in the kitchen, scholars in the primary school and politicians in flowery hats behind their husbands: the MPs. Even today, thousands of young girls are so uncomfortable with the nature of adult women looming towards them, like Roberta the T-Rex, that – determined to never grow into that – they choose many, sometimes fatal ways to avoid being Her. There has been a ‘startling’ rise in the number of young women suicides,2 a trebling of young women reporting self-harming between 2000 and 2014,3 and increased anorexia in girls under 15.4 The numbers of young women wanting to transition to men doubled in one year alone, 2022, to 5,000.5 There are many individual reasons why young women cannot face future life as adult women, and many ways of trying to escape that fate; young women demand another way of being a normal woman than ‘that’.

  An artificial distinction of women from men formed part of Pythagoras’ dualistic view of the world. The ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher defined a set of ten opposites, which include ‘male : female’:

  Limited : Unlimited

  Odd : Even

  Unity : Plurality

  Right : Left

  Male : Female

  At Rest : In Motion

  Straight : Curved

  Light : Darkness

  Good : Evil

  Square : Oblong6

  Pythagorean philosophers will tell us (if we let them), how helpful this is in understanding women as the opposite of men; but it was not shared or even agreed by all the ancient Greeks. Aristotle and Plato observed a spectrum of sexuality, from hyper-masculine to hyper-feminine, with hermaphrodites in the middle. Galen (second century CE) believed sexuality to be a spectrum and that an individual’s sexuality was determined by many characteristics which could be altered; there was the possibility of biological change from (mostly) female to male, and a third sex of hermaphrodites. The Bible (from about 700 BCE) and early Christian thinkers added yet more characteristics to the definition of women, largely based on Eve: indiscreet, easily tempted, man’s only companion but clearly his inferior, her body made from his, her spirit easily tempted and her advice unreliable. The medieval churchmen developed Eve’s ‘nature’ as the prototype for all women: sexual, talkative, argumentative, mistaken. As one commentator says: ‘Like all dominant groups, men seek to promote an image of their subordinates’ nature that contributes to the preservation of the status quo. For thousands of years, males have seen women not as women could be, but only as males want them to be.’7

  The twelfth-century stories of courtly love described a new characteristic in men – an overwhelming sex drive that could overcome all obstacles: castle walls, locked doors and even female refusal. A ‘perfect knight’ would die of desire if he could not get sexual satisfaction. His opposite was the lady – cool to the point of frigidity, the story not her adventure but his. Readers watched him climb the tower, enter the bedroom, pluck the rose. Readers wanted the heroine to resist, but a stand-off is not a satisfactory ending to a narrative – they wanted her to resist, but only for a while. From The Romance of the Rose, a courtly love poem, to Sleeping Beauty, the happy ending of stories became the hero taking his prize whether or not the woman consented, whether or not she was even awake.

  Ideas of what women were, and what they should be, changed again in the fifteenth century, when men pushed back against the rise of women who had taken the opportunities caused by the Great Pestilence. The word ‘feminine’ in the sense of appropriate for a woman, or typical of a woman, is first used then, as the king’s court and the all-male parliament made new laws to set women’s pay below that of men and confined women to their home parishes. Guilds and trade associations across the country started to limit entry to men, who might introduce their female dependants.

  The Romantic movement from the late 1700s supported the idea that it was ‘natural’ for men to desire and for women to be cool. Courtly love stories were retold in a new form of novels in which the heroines’ ‘nature’ was to be in a constant state of high arousal (over everything but sex). Women in the novels had faints, nosebleeds and hysterics, and starved themselves to death overstimulated by love of Nature, love of God, maternal love, sisterly love, despair for lack of love or guilt for love. In the real world, qualified doctors assured families that ladies were completely uninterested in sexual intercourse and untroubled by desire, while racked by all other emotions. When women behaved as sexual beings with desires, they faced condemnation and medical and surgical treatments to cure them of sexual arousal, including genital mutilation, hysterectomies and ovariectomies – removal of the ovaries and the womb. Sexual desire was defined as an exclusively male characteristic and since masturbation was said to be as damaging for men as self-restraint, someone had to be found to satisfy elite male lust: ‘Every normally constituted man would be a born rapist if the sexual appetite could find no other means of satisfaction.’8

  Who was going to give elite men the satisfaction they could not be denied? Of course – poor women. Brothels had been allowed since medieval times – in some towns licensed by the local authorities. In the eighteenth century, brothels, clubs and prostitutes were tolerated, only prosecuted if they were disorderly or inconvenient to the elite. Specialist prison hospitals were set up for women with venereal diseases, foundling hospitals provided for bastards, Magdalen houses rescued seduced innocents – aiming not to save sinners, care for fatherless children or cure infected women, but to make it safer and easier for upper-class men to enjoy unprotected sex with women too poor or powerless to refuse. The exploitation of working-class women for sex boomed at the same time as working women found themselves exploited for industrial labour. Both could be justified by the theory of the ‘nature’ of working-class women: robust, resilient, bawdy, vulgar, venal.

  The Victorians revived Aristotle’s idea of ‘separate spheres’ – the home and the public space – and it fitted the two new imaginary ‘natures of women’. Elite women were frigid, delicate ladies suited for home and leisure; common women were tough, sexual women suited for assault and overwork in public spaces. The separate sphere was the upper-class home that ladies could develop as a spiritual sanctuary for themselves and as a haven for men returning from exploiting the outer world for profit and working-class women for work and sex. Separate spheres enabled the agonisingly cruel work of women in factories, mines and the streets to take place out of the sight of upper-class women, who also turned a blind eye to their husbands’ behaviour. Ladies could be blind, too, to slavery and servitude in England and in invaded lands overseas – where only the resistance of enslaved and persecuted people limited the profits and appetites of colonising men.

  As the artificial ladylike standards became more complex, training became more rigorous for both boys and girls. In the medieval world, with a high infant death rate, and no culture of childhood, babies were not defined by sex but swaddled alike and dressed in cut-down adult clothing until the age of around seven, when they would put on adult clothing and enter the adult world. But as the world for men and women became more distinct, children had to be trained up for their future roles. The sex of a baby – and now this was a choice of one of only two options – had to be registered at birth in 1837. Doctors made snap decisions based on the appearance of infant genitals, almost always naming a baby with a small penis as a girl, since it was thought better to be a girl with what looked like a large clitoris than to be a boy with what looked like a small penis.9 On this simple male vanity, many lives were wrecked. Then, as now, as much as 2 per cent of the population were born ‘intersex’ and their sex cannot be decided by one of a choice of two by a doctor’s quick look at newborn genitals.10