From the WSJ Opinion Archives
HOUSES OF WORSHIP
Wifely Duties
If you're married to clergy do you have to host church teas?
Until fairly recently, hiring a minister or rabbi was a two-for-one deal: Into the bargain, churches and synagogues got A Wife, who would host teas, teach religious-education classes, sing in the choir. All this, of course, without a salary. But she did get a job title--the diminutive rebbetzin in Jewish communities and the clunkier, and somehow more ominous, minister's wife in Protestant circles.
A new academic volume, "The Rabbi's Wife" by Shuly Rubin Schwartz, traces the role of the rebbetzin in American Jewish history. Ms. Schwartz is an authority on the subject twice over: She was herself a rebbetzin, the widow of the late Conservative rabbi Gershon Schwartz, and she is a professor of American Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
"The Rabbi's Wife" argues that rebbetzins understood themselves as partners in their husbands' work, and many had, in fact, "often married what they wanted to be." Rebbetzins became real leaders in their communities, developing what Ms. Schwartz calls "hidden careers." It was rebbetzins, for example, who founded the National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods (in 1913), the National Women's League (in 1918) and the Women's Branch of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations (in 1923).
This story is not just a Jewish one, of course. Protestant wives were expected to chair the Altar Guild, but this role also launched them into all sorts of community work. In more theologically conservative denominations, especially those that don't ordain women, this is still the case. In communities that won't hire women as campus ministers, for example, the wives of college chaplains often take an active role in their husbands' ministries, mentoring female students and opening their homes to large student gatherings.
Second-wave feminism was, for clerical wives, a double-edged sword: No longer were women accorded honor and respect simply because they were married to a minister. And some clergy wives, reading "The Feminine Mystique" along with everyone else, began to rethink all those hours they had devoted to polishing the church silver. A role that had once seemed noble began to seem, well, exploitative.
The role of the clergy wife has also been transformed by the entry of women into ordained ministry. Margot Hausmann is an artist, stay-at-home mom and ordained Presbyterian minister married to the pastor at a large church in Durham, N.C. Ms. Hausmann has no interest in what she calls "ecclesial domesticity," and, for the most part, people neither put her on a spousal pedestal nor expect her to run Vacation Bible School. Still, old roles die hard. She recalls one event in the church fellowship hall: "When I dipped into the kitchen someone turned to me, with unmerited confidence, and asked where the tea cups were kept. That was about being the pastor's wife." Ms. Hausmann hadn't a clue.
Evaluating the history of clerical wives is complex for the same reasons that all 20th-century American women's history is complex: We want to honor the work of our foremothers, and yet we want to critique the structures in which they did that very work, structures they usually accepted without batting an eye. For her part, Ms. Schwartz leans to the side of honor: While acknowledging "the drawbacks that inevitably accompanied this derivative role," she underscores that being a rebbetzin was a true "vocation" and most rabbi's wives felt "fulfilled" by it.
And yet, something rankles. Why is the wife's contribution to that work somehow defined by her husband? ("I sometimes muse that if I died, my husband would remarry, and someone else would assume my role in his ministry, but that if he died, I would not only lose my husband, I would also lose my position as a colleague in campus ministry," says one of my friends, the wife of a campus minister.) Do the women students mentored by a campus minister's wife learn the lesson of those early-20th-century rebbetzins, that they have to marry what they want to be?
The problem with a facile feminist critique of the role of clergy wife is that it misses the real beauty of the collaboration sometimes found in clerical marriages. There is something wonderfully seamless about their lives--their work and their marriage is all of a piece. Husband and wife are profoundly knitted together, and their shared calling offers something of a rebuke to the hyper-individualism that characterizes so many American marriages. Indeed, they may set a nice example for the flock.
Ms. Winner is the author of "Girl Meets God" and "Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity."
