Abstract
Women were first ordained as priests in the Church of England in 1994, some years after that happened elsewhere in the Anglican Church; the first woman bishop was not consecrated in England until 2015. This chapter looks at gender roles in society at large in the period leading up to and including the time of the Church Times surveys before describing briefly the way in which women’s ordination has progressed in the Church of England. The 2001 Church Times survey fell at the midpoint between the ordination of women as priests and the ordination of women as bishops. By the time of the 2013 survey, there had been a move towards greater acceptance of both women priests and women bishops across all three church traditions. This was most apparent among those born before the 1960s, so that by 2013 there was less difference between older and younger people in the sample. The outstanding exception was for younger Evangelical men born after the 1960s who seemed, if anything, to be less accepting of women’s ministry in 2013 than they had been in 2001.
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Notes
- 1.
The figures for women priests counted all articles that contained the phrases ‘ordination of women’; ‘women’s ordination’; ‘women priests’; ‘women as priests’. The figures of women bishops counted all articles that contained the phrases ‘consecration of women’; ‘women’s consecration’; ‘women bishops’; ‘women as bishops’.
- 2.
For those born after the 1950s, 56% of Evangelical men supported women as bishops, compared with 75% of Evangelical women. The comparable figure for Anglo-catholics were 67% for men and 86% for women; for Broad church the figures were 80% for men and 93% for women.
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Village, A. (2018). Women in Leadership. In: The Church of England in the First Decade of the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04528-9_5
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