Presbyterian Women

Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak ... --I Corinthians XIV, 34.

In Philadelphia last week Presbyterian women stoutly let it be known that they didn't want to keep silence. Hitherto in Presbyterian councils and assemblies only male voices had been heard. Why not the mellifluence of female voices? Hitherto from Presbyterian pulpits only male voices had preached the Gospel, pointed the moral. Why not have female ministers? Prim reactionary Presbyterians shuddered at the thought that the Princeton or Auburn Theological Seminary might become coeducational. Advanced non-alarmist thinkers like Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin, President of Union Theological Seminary, Manhattan, said: "I welcome the proposal . . . that women be given an equal standing with men in the church." The Proposal. In Philadelphia, 140 years ago, met the first general assembly of the Presbyterian church. The women kept their silence. Nearly 100 years later the first woman's executive committee of Home Missions was appointed. Since then women have become increasingly vocal in the church, but in the direction of the church they have had no voice. When the various boards of the church were reorganized in 1922 several women were given important positions but outside of their own individual organizations their advice and votes were not requested. So great was feminine indignation that three years later the General Assembly took notice of "general unrest" among women, appointed a committee (of men) to investigate this and other problems. The culmination of the rights-for-Presbyterian-women movement came last week at the General Council in Philadelphia. Twelve men voted for the women's emancipation, six voted against it. In St. Paul, Minn., next May the General Assembly must either ratify or veto this direct departure from Saint Paul who said "Let your women keep silence. ..." The Women. The chief Lydia Pankhursts of the Presbyterian church are two, Mrs. Fred Smith Bennett and Miss Margaret E. Hodge. Mrs. Bennett has long been a cheerful gracious opponent of "silly conventions" and she has long presided over the Presbyterian Council of Women. "Why," she asks, "do women think they must wash on Mondays? In the same way why are people prejudiced against the equality of women in the church since they have it in the state?" Better than anything else, though she once was a golf enthusiast at Englewood, N. ]., she loves motoring. To many a church meeting she drives with cautious but considerable speed in her Franklin automobile. Miss Margaret Hodge has the patrician quietude often associated with the aristocracy of her native city, Philadelphia. She, too, drives, but, instead of a Franklin, she steers a Ford, and "not a new-fangled geared Ford." Two years ago she slipped on some ice, broke her hip. It was during her convalescence in a Chestnut Hill hospital that she and Mrs. Bennett wrote their report, Causes of Unrest Among Women of the Church. They first formally uttered the cry heard last week in Philadelphia: "Woman asks to be considered in the light of her ability and not of her sex. . . ."