6.1 conclusion  (Page 3/8)

Women's insistence on participating in this organizing fervor gave rise to their developing new skills and power. Across the South they developed an effective "union" that underwrote the Southern Baptist missionary enterprise. They became so skilled at generating collections and statistics, in fact, that efficiency and programs become ends in themselves and they were prone to neglect intellectual or theological content in favor of procedural or numerical goals. In part they avoided "weightier matters" as a result of the unspoken compromise they accepted in order to obtain the blessing of the male leadership of the denomination and legitimate their organization. That compromise entailed their maintaining an auxiliary position—essentially, staying away from political and doctrinal controversy. While this agreement might have originally allowed Baptist women the right to their own organization, it definitely circumscribed their power.

The same configuration of change was noted in other religious activities of women. Within the local church they expanded their sphere, always leaving an exclusive province for men at the upper end of the spectrum of power—a holy of holies—in order to conform to a legalistic formula of male superiority. In local congregations, the male prerogatives were ordination to the ministry and to the diaconate and control of the managerial and monetary affairs of the church. Conforming to the same pattern used by the women's missionary organization to relate to the denomination as a whole, women in the local churches took an assisting role and did not deal directly with power or theological content. This does not mean that they did not exercise power, but that they used informal, indirect means of influence traditionally associated with females. As an operational mode, it was effective only as long as state Baptist life was limited to an intimate circle of friends and relatives.

As Mary Daly has pointed out, Christian women find it easier to plead directly for the liberation of others than for their own freedom of expression.

Mary Daly, The Church and the Second Sex (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1968; rev. ed., 1975), p. 29.