JAC Online

A Problem Like Maria
Part 1 of a 2 part series
by JoAnn Shade

 

In their 1959 musical, The Sound of Music, Rogers and Hammerstein story began in a convent with Maria, a young woman who didn’t quite fit the mold of what a nun should be. As the sisters talk about her, they break into song, with the key line, “Oh, how do you solve a problem like Maria?”

 

As an officer of thirty-seven years (now retired), I’ve watched as the Salvation Army has wrestled with our version of the married woman “Maria problem.” Is there a joint covenant or individual covenant? Is she a volunteer who is expected to assist her husband in his religious and charitable work (rendering little or no service or devoting full time [effort] to this work (as defined in a letter written in 1957)? Is the married woman officer (as is the case in the United States) a non-compensated worker but also an officer in her own right? And, once a couple has left the model of the shared leadership of corps officership, how can Salvation Army decision-makers appoint married women officers commensurate with their gifts and abilities? 

 

While there are a number of problems/opportunities surrounding the married woman officer role, these comments (in this article and a subsequent one in the next edition of JAC) will address the question of our Maria problem. How can the Salvation Army appropriately appoint its married women officers when they are no longer in shared ministry with their husbands on the corps level? Can/should appointments for married women officers be given as much priority and prayer as those for married men officers? Of course, the gender-inclusive question would be, how can appointments for both husband and wife be given the same priority, for a cursory glance at the current practice in the Eastern territory of the US indicates that the male officer is predominantly in the more prominent position on the leadership chart.

 

Questions like these are not new. First exposed to the Salvation Army as a teen-ager. I liked what I saw in the ministry of the married women officers in the corps, yet when I worked at camp the summer after high school graduation, I was surprised and a bit offended to recognize that one of the headquarters officer women had the responsibility of supervising the laundry for the summer. Was folding hundreds of sheets the best use of her time and talents? She was an ordained minister, an officer of many years experience, and she was watching the dryer spin around. Oh, she gave good counsel to the teen-age laundresses, but was that it? If I chose officership, was that what I had to look forward to?

 

I have in my possession an article written for The Officer in 1931 entitled “Opportunities and Responsibilities of Wives of Headquarters Officers.” In it, Mrs. General Higgins recognizes the same concern.  Unfortunately, her first conclusion (more than eighty years ago) was that it was inevitable, given the structure in place at the time.

 

Now this condition, which can hardly be avoided, produces peculiar and delicate situations. In the years that have gone it may be we held a front-rank place, and led and controlled others; people looked to us, obeyed us and in most things we had the privilege and responsibility of the last word . . . Now everything is changed. To those of us who from the beginning, in obedience to a clear and definite call, took up our cross to follow the Master in becoming Officers, and appreciated the high calling as the greatest honour of life, the experience I have described carries with it a great trial.[1]

 

Her conclusion at that time was that those married women officers needed to accept their assigned role, determining that “God shall still guide and control,” and suggesting that they look for opportunities to serve as the Home League treasurer or “just as ordinary Soldiers.” “But if in all the sweetness and gentleness of Christ we go to the Corps, showing the spirit of ‘I am among you as one that serveth,’ I am sure we shall find more open doors than we can enter, as well as an increased measure of love, sympathy, and blessing in our own spiritual life.”

 

I’m guessing that Catherine (Price) Higgins didn’t write this article in a vacuum – nor, at that time, was she serving as just an “ordinary soldier.” Even eighty years ago, it’s likely that married women officers in a variety of positions were finding those positions uncomfortable if not untenable. Apparently their concerns were known to the wife of the international leader (as she probably had experienced them herself), and her response is preserved for history through the written word. 

 

Would it have been possible for her to work towards finding some kind of solution to the appointment dilemma rather than accepting it as a condition that could hardly be avoided? Was the only answer to the dilemma found by presenting a spiritual rationale to accept it as it stood? Perhaps even then some women questioned the reasoning of her guidance, but it came from the General’s wife so had to be accepted, didn’t it?  

 

Is Higgins’ argument a theologically sound response in 2015? Are certain sacrifices expected of people because they are female and married? Or is that simply a rationalization that excuses the gender-specific selection of leadership once there is a wedding ring upon the finger of the woman? Elizabeth Janeway describes it this way: “When our mythology instructs any class of adults that it is their role to be gentler and more virtuous or humbler than the powerful, it operates as a form of social control…“[2]

 

What do we believe theologically about marriage and officership? Do we believe, as determined through the eyes of the Wesleyan quadrilateral – the primacy of the Scriptures, the tradition as found through the two millennia history of the Church (and, I’d suggest, in the one hundred fifty years of Salvation Army history), reason (rational thinking and sensible interpretation), and the experience of the Christian in their personal and communal journey [3] in Christ – that women are to be subservient to their husbands in their work? If so, then the current appointment paradigm makes sense.

 

Perhaps we, as a denomination, do believe that the woman is the weaker vessel, incapable of serving in the same way that a man does. If that truly is our theological position, backed up by solid Biblical interpretation, then folding sheets may be an acceptable assignment for a married woman officer – or perhaps she should be freed to pursue other opportunities for service outside the Army.

 

But . . . the Salvation Army has a foundational commitment to gender equality based upon the strongly-held beliefs of its founders. Christine Parkins explains that while “Catherine Booth accepted that the Fall had put women into subjection as a consequence of sin and that submission to the male was God’s judgment upon her disobedience,” Booth argued that “to leave it there is to reject the good news of the gospel.”[i]. William was in agreement: “I insist on the equality of women with men. Every officer and soldier should insist upon the truth that woman is as important, as valuable, as capable and as necessary to the progress and happiness of the world as a man.”[4]. While he may have had a theological acceptance of gender equality, Booth’s position was also a pragmatic one, as soldiers of both genders were needed for the salvation war. However, William also understood the cultural dynamics, and refused his daughter Evangeline permission to marry, as he recognized that marriage for her would limit her leadership role in the Salvation Army.

 

 “But she really doesn’t want to be in leadership. She really wants to fold sheets all summer.” There may be a bit of truth in what some say behind closed doors. There are issues of small children and elderly parents, of marital dynamics and of low expectations, and, as I’ve so happily discovered, grandmother days. But there are many married women officers who are willing to give “every passion, every skill, every dream” to the work of the Kingdom as expressed through the Salvation Army but find that the job assigned is folding sheets, even if those sheets are figurative rather than literal.

 

So how to sort it out? We can’t really look to models elsewhere in the history of the church or even in our contemporary culture because the required dual clergy role has no cultural equivalent that I’m aware of. The US military offers no help unless we are willing to have separate deployments, with one spouse in Iraq and the other in Texas. So we are left to address this ‘issue’ ourselves through prayer, theological considerations, and the hard work of talking about it from the grassroots to the appointment consultations. It is time for the Aksah’s of our day to get down off our donkeys and tell those who hold the power what we want and need (see Judges 1:12-15).

 

The nuns solved their problem of Maria by setting her free to serve outside the convent so that she could “climb every mountain.” I don’t believe that’s what the majority of married Salvation Army women want. I’ll take a stab at what we do want and how to get there in the next edition of JAC.

 

 



[1] Catherine Price Higgins. The Officer. 1931.

[2] Elizabeth Janeway, Powers of the Weak. 1980, 158-159)

[3] Christine Parkin, “A Woman’s Place,” in Catherine Booth, Her Continuing Relevance, Clifford Kews, ed., (St. Albans, VT: The Campfield Press, 1990) 11-12.

[4] William Booth. Messages to Soldiers (London; The Salvation Army, 1908) referenced on the Salvation Army international website, www.salvationarmy.org



 

 

  

 

 

   

 

 

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