Idle thought

[lethargic_man]

Women priests are the Lubavitch of the Church of England.

(Insofar as that traditional priests/rabbis are in decline or ageing except in major city communities, and it's the women priests/Lubavitch rabbis who end up occupying pulpits everywhere else. One wonders whether the attitude towards women priests is the same as that towards Lubavitch rabbis, namely, that they do a good job but it would have been preferable to have had a rabbi who came from the same world as us, that we could relate to better...)

Comments

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I think you've summed it up perfectly. Also, in the church, women are a problem because traditionally any position went to, say, a 'vicar and his wife'. And the role of 'vicar's wife' was just as well-defined as that of the vicar, and it really was a two-person job, and even today, as far as I can make out, the wife is supposed to do a considerable amount of unpaid work for the community.

Get a woman, and a full-time unpaid worker is lost, because her husband is unlikely to step into that role. I think that might just be the reason behind some of the resistance. Of course she can't do the job as well as the husband-and-wife team of old - she's only one person.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

I think you've summed it up perfectly. Also, in the church, women are a problem because traditionally any position went to, say, a 'vicar and his wife'. And the role of 'vicar's wife' was just as well-defined as that of the vicar, and it really was a two-person job, and even today, as far as I can make out, the wife is supposed to do a considerable amount of unpaid work for the community.

Yeah, we've got a name for "rabbi's wife": rebbetzin. (And that's also something that vanishes when you have women rabbis—or, for that matter, women married to rabbis who want to pursue their own career path.)

Mind you, the Catholics manage without vicars wives, so the rest of us can do so too...