Women, Religion, and Leadership: Female Saints as Unexpected Leaders
by Barbara Jones Denison
Barbara Jones Denison is an associate professor of sociology and director of the graduate program in organizational development and leadership at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania. Her earlier publications include editing History, Time, Meaning, and Memory (Brill, 2011), Social Problems in Global Perspective with Glassman and Swatos (UPA, 2004), and “Memory and Memorization” in Vocabulary for the Study of Religion (Brill, 2015). Her current research is on the intersectionality of leadership and gender in the lives of religious women, and she regularly presents at the International Leadership Association, the Association for the Sociology of Religion, the North Central Sociological Association, and the Pennsylvania Sociological Society. Her most recent book is Women, Religion, and Leadership: Female Saints as Unexpected Leaders.
As the latest addition to Routledge’s Studies in Leadership Research series, the book Women, Religion, and Leadership: Female Saints as Unexpected Leaders (Routledge, September 2017) begins with the premise that women, recorded by history as significant within their religious contexts, were often remade in the image of “saints” rather than leaders, sanctified for their piety, devotion, or martyrdom in place of the leadership actions they took for their peers, their communities, their cultures, and their peoples. What if, instead of this more traditional hagiography, we were to consider the title “saint” as a metaphor for leader? What leadership lessons in general and what points about specifically women’s leadership are there to be gleaned from the lives of these female saints? If religious sanctity is understood not as the lesson in itself, but rather as the vehicle, or the enabling environment in which these women’s leadership was developed and succeeded, then what could be learned? A second, but equally pertinent question can be asked about the ability of these women to overcome male hegemony, patriarchy, and domination within the Church by using various leadership tactics, unidentified in their own times but significant for contemporary paradigms of gender and leadership. Women, Religion, and Leadership contributes to our understanding and our responsiveness to these questions by examining the differing leaderships of women saints from the Western Catholic (Roman and Anglican) traditions.
Readers may ask, why these saints and not so many others from the Western Christian tradition? Indeed, why only women saints, and why not saints from other Christian traditions, or from the vast number of saintly examples in world religions representing enormous segments of world population? The latter is answered by the same rationale behind using convenience sampling in survey and similar forms of research. These are the saints chosen by the authors involved in writing this volume, who themselves represent diverse academic preparations from the humanities and social sciences, but who were all educated, and who developed their scholarly interests solidly within Western Christian culture. As editor, and as author of the chapter on St. Hilda of Whitby, I had a goal that this volume provoke some interest in studying leadership theory for those who typically read saints’ lives for piety and devotion. The reason to select only female saints rests in the interest we authors shared regarding the necessary development of paradigms and pedagogy to further the causes of gender equity in leadership. Nowhere is the need for recognition of female leaders greater than in religious structures that actively use gender to eliminate women from leadership positions. The final chapter examines a key female leader in a Western tradition, Anglicanism, that has officially created gender equality in leadership; but hers, too, is a life lesson of leadership actions overcoming institutional discrimination.
Why study saints as leaders when there are easily so many religious leaders of note, including women, who did not participate in groups that use such nomenclature? Are not Mother Ann Lee of the Shakers, or Aimee Semple McPherson of the Pentecostals (to name just two examples) worth careful attention for the study of leadership by women in religious contexts? Indeed, these and many others would be excellent subjects for another volume. The intent here is to learn from the intersectionality of saintliness, typically defined for women by at least the conceptual passivity of piousness and sacrificial acts, with the gender component of leadership as something learned and consciously practiced. Male saints, also often martyred or otherwise sacrificially engaged in their life’s work, seem much more likely to be recognized and canonized for their actions. Female saints, on the other hand, so often are the subject of devotion because they were raped, slaughtered, or forced into seclusion because of defiance or lack of alternative life choices, or due to other ascribed, passive situations beyond control of their own actions. The women included here were anything but passive.
This volume provides a start to understanding the categorization of “saint” for women as an active engagement with leadership rather than an idolization of submissive passivity. The demonstrations of leadership in many of these women’s lives were unexpected by the norms of their cultural milieu, their peers, and sometimes even by their followers. In most cases male authors, writing with a patriarchal agency and set of assumptions, completely or largely provide the historical accounts we have of these women. It is hoped that the employment of feminist scholarship counters this androcentric approach. Women are often overlooked in terms of their leadership value, and this volume provides some correction and elucidation in contrast.
The authors of this book address leadership using a number of the prevailing paradigms. They consider the intersectionality of gender to examine the lives of selected women leaders from the seventh through the twentieth centuries. Clare of Assisi teaches us about using acceptable religious behaviors as defiant acts in emergent leadership. Edith Stein provides a path towards deeper understanding of empathetic leadership. Kateri Terakwitha, Elizabeth Ann Seton, and Catherine McAuley educate us in the various ways servant leadership can be successful. Hilda demonstrates the effective use of power and authority to overcome traditional gender barriers. Pauli Murray and Katharine Drexel provide lessons in overcoming barriers of class and race to effectively lead organizations and movements. Catherine of Sienna shows us the leadership power of political persuasion and the intellect. Both Elizabeth Ann Seton and Clare of Assisi provide concrete lessons in early feminist revolution tactics. Every one of the women leaders examined here has more to teach than could be contained within the confines of one chapter gathered together into a single book.
In my chapter on Hilda of Whitby, for example, I identify her more worldly achievements, breaking out as she did from the gendered normative expectations assigned to her, and to female saints in general, both in life and by the socially constructed identity of saint in death. St. Hilda is known as “mother of bishops” because she led an abbey where scholarship exceled, kings and church prelates sought her advice, and her administrative leadership was highly praised by her contemporaries, at a time when abbesses were often leader in title only and real authority was wielded by male advisors. For Hilda, the word “saint” typically signifying piety or some personal act of faithfulness, recognized her transformational leadership of the abbey community even as medieval biographers and hagiographers erroneously declared her a “virgin” (she was most likely a widow) simply to denote sanctity. A focus on leader actions, follower relationships, and institutional interactions identified a pattern of leadership success as Hilda acted within the Church of her day in a legitimated authoritarian role with the power of an abbess.
Hilda was, briefly, the leader at two smaller establishments, at Monkwearmouth and slightly longer at Hartlepool. At both locations she was a “rising star” and transitioning to a more significant status. She found the culmination of her leadership growth at Whitby, where she ruled and remained until her death. Her achievement at Whitby is marked by her legacy of leader development. Of significance is the successful employment of power from her referent and expert sources. She had built up first Hartlepool and then Whitby into strong foundations. She transitioned her followers from a Celtic-style monastic rule to the increasingly popular Benedictine-style rule found in Roman monasteries across Europe. As the “mother of bishops” clearly her methods of follower development were successful; the Church would not have gone on and raised up bishops from among those without the appropriate scholastic training and the politically correct views on Church teachings and practices.
It is somewhat ironic that the recognition of Hilda as a strong woman leader among both men and women stems so heavily from an artifact that reinforces the hegemonic patriarchy of the Church: bishops, like priests, can still only be male. Yet that very fact, of a woman being the recognized source of follower development for such men speaks much to the image of Hilda as leader. Scholars, bishops, and the first-ever English poet all succeeded because of the community Hilda led. No doubt Hilda’s reputation as a holy woman included her many works of charity and service; however, it is the transformational focus on developing the organization and promoting growth among the followers that is the key to Hilda’s leadership success. Significantly, Hilda was successful in reframing the outcome of an organizational crisis, and supporting change by fostering connections to political power, social change, and cultural production. Her swift acquiescence and acceptance to the decision at the Synod of Whitby speaks to her transformational effectiveness. In contemporary times, Hilda is celebrated for unexpectedly creating a strong community, developing scholastic greatness, the formation of leaders for the church, and successful socio-economic expansion with arguably the main politico-cultural force of the day, the Roman Church, all due to her effective use of various power bases and her transformational approach to social change. Both of these strategies required Hilda to exert leadership surpassing the expectations for a woman in the Church of her time. Likewise, the lives of all the other female saints analyzed in this book provide strategic examples for women stepping outside gendered expectations in order to lead.
The intersectionality of socio-cultural upheaval in the face of religious controversy, and the success of these women leaders in re-establishing order and prosperity, provide lessons for leadership students. The intersection runs both ways: While we learn how to lead, it is also the case that leadership studies paradigms inform a deeper understanding of what it means to be a woman who challenges the status quo, defies accepted social norms, and redefines a woman’s role as leader. The strategies used by these women leaders enabled and constrained them in the context of gender norms and expectations expressed institutionally by the Church as well as in their everyday cultural surroundings. Each represents a different intersection of gender and structure within both the Church’s and the secular enabling environment. Each of these women has a legacy identity, socially constructed in museums, archives, commemorations, or surviving institutional establishments. Engaging each of these women’s leadership legacies within their modern enabling environment results collectively in taking the first steps towards constructing a typology intersecting leadership strategies with gender and institutional structures and power. More significantly, the range of women leaders across thirteen centuries and two continents brings clarity to a number of key lessons about the gendered nature of leadership in highly structured organizations overall, and in hierarchical religion specifically.
The first take-away for readers of this volume is to suggest a typology of women, religion, and leadership which intersects a female leader’s place within church-related institutional authority with personal role identity as a leader. The intersectionality of sociocultural upheaval with religious controversy, and the success of these women leaders in overcoming gender stereotypes and discrimination, and establishing order and prosperity, provides leadership lessons. This work contributes to the study of women and gender in leadership, and brings to the study of religious institutions and their leaders a focus on the place and role of women’s leadership in patriarchal religious structures. Religious leadership as an agent for sociocultural transformation cuts across core topics in the study of religion, such as new religious movements, religion as an agent for social activism, and the historical impact of religious revolutions. Intersecting religious participation (from within various social roles and positions within their respective institutional church structures) with the identity construction as a leader (seen in acceptance or rejection of an acknowledged leadership role by each of the women saints highlighted) leads to a typology of women’s leadership within religion as well as, within these saints’ leadership lives, a practical lesson for those seeking to identify and eradicate gender bias in hierarchical, formal organizational structures of any type.
It is my wish, and the goal of all the authors involved, that reading this volume will excite and encourage further study of gender and leadership in religious organizations, and in the lives of all women leaders who found themselves sidelined by gender bias within organizational hierarchies, and who broke free of traditional roles and social barriers to do the unexpected. The examples analyzed provide a varied tool-kit for women to overcome limitations enforced by gender expectations in hierarchically-structured organizations.