Forgotten Women
Joan of Arc, Margery Kempe, Maude Royden, Li Tim-Oi
In WWII a priest was needed in China. “I am here, send me,” Li Tim-Oi responded, “but do I meet your requirements?” She was a woman, and the Anglican Communion had not yet ordained a woman priest. On January 25, 1944 she became the first female Anglican priest in the world. But after the conclusion of the war, the Archbishop of Canterbury forced her to renounce her priesthood. This decision is paramount to the clergy asking someone to divorce or annul the sacrament of their marriage. Her ordination was recognized four decades later and fully restored. What happened to Christ’s admonition, at the very least, that “whoever is not against us is for us?” (Mark 9:40). If Li Tim-Oi answered, in imitation of Samuel and Mary, “here I am,” why not send her?
Sister Ellen Francis Poisson wrote this icon of the Rev. Dr. Florence Li Tim-Oi for St. Martin-in-the-Fields, London. | Andy Scott/Wikipedia
I stumbled upon Rev. Tim-Oi’s story when reading about Agnes Maude Royden, England’s “first woman preacher.” Of course, Royden was not actually the first woman to preach in England, but too many of these stories about women have been lost and scattered to be remembered. “More silent and more hidden still have been the women,” Royden lamented, nearly a century ago. During Royden’s lifetime, the spiritual autobiography of a fifteenth-century woman preacher was recovered, The Book of Margery Kempe, five-hundred years after it was written (here’s Beth Allison Barr introducing Margery).
When I began to change my mind about women in the pulpit, I talked through the doubts and reasons with my pastor, friends, parents. My mother’s initial protest against women preachers was, “But there haven’t ever been any!” If the church had gone without women preachers for two thousand years, who were we in the 21st century to alter that long-standing tradition? My mother was right in her argument but wrong in her history: there was a “hidden history of women’s ordination” that only recently has been broadly exposed.
Maude Royden is fascinating because she paved the way for women after her without ever benefiting from her own activism in the church. Although remaining Anglican throughout her entire life, Royden preached to thousands in Nonconformist churches (what we might call “evangelical”) across the world. Reinhold Niebuhr brought her to Detroit to preach in 1928. She did a three-month tour that year preaching everywhere from Stanford to Boston, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, China, and Ghandi spent days with her in India.
When Royden, at fifty-years-old, preached at Liverpool Cathedral, the newly appointed Canon Charles Raven expected his congregation to protest. He was shocked, not only that the woman herself avoided “self-consciousness [and] self-display” but more so that “people who had come…prepared to scoff, saw God and were themselves transfigured.” Her ability to preach with complete transparency and self-forgetfulness regularly converted even the most staunch patriarchs toward openness to God’s liberating Spirit.
However, Royden did not persuade all her adversaries. According to her biographer Sheila Fletcher, “Maude recalled once being permitted to preach only on the condition she did not use the pulpit, did not call her address a sermon or wear a surplice—conditions so insulting, in the eyes of the vicar, that he discarded his surplice too.” The sacredness of particular places (pulpit), the semantics (sermon), and the ritualistic legalism (surplice) remind me of Jesus’ disgust with the Pharisees’ who “have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions” (Mark 7:8). When we play these litigious games in the attempt to be exclusive, we are no longer participating in kingdom ethics.
When Florence Li Tim-Oi was ordained, Royden was ecstatic, though she was quickly annoyed when, two years later, the Archbishop of Canterbury forced Rev. Tim-Oi to resign. In Royden’s biography of Joan of Arc (1918), Royden writes of the future saint, “It does not matter to her what men believe: let them look to that: what matters is the fact—'yet am I sent by God” (107). One can almost imagine that Royden writes on Joan in a way that encourages her own ministry. She acknowledges that stories such as Joans—or, for that matter, Margery’s, Tim-Oi’s, or Royden’s—occur in different times and places than our own. Yet the truth remains that we must follow God as faithfully and single-heartedly as the saints before us.
“[Joan of Arc] desired to know His will only,” Royden writes, “that she might immediately fulfill it and therefore she ‘asked with confidence,’ she ‘waited with assurance,’ she acted ‘with power.’ By the same power the great saints have again and again changed the course of history. By the same power, supremely did Christ move the world. By the same power may we, if we choose, mould the civilization of the future and build the city of God” (147).
There will always be a tension for the saints, and those of us who follow them, between Paul’s admonition to be content in all circumstances, and the requisite imitation of Christ who turned the world upside down. We must practice the contentment of quiet souls who trust that all is in our Lord’s hands, while calling out injustice and acting against the unfair dictates of men.
During the fifteenth-century, a Christian writer attempted to fill in the gaps missing in history with women’s stories; Christine de Pizan published The Book of the City of Ladies. When Joan of Arc crowned King Charles VII at Reims in 1429, Christine sung her praises, “Blessed He who created you, Joan… Maiden sent from God, into whom the Holy Spirit poured His great grace!” While Christine gloried in the feats of this woman—“What honor for the female sex!”—she more significantly magnified the God who made her: “This is God’s doing: it is He who leads her!”
I celebrate these women when I uncover their stories because they show me how to live, but they are not ends in themselves. These forgotten women are silenced John the Baptists who still point to Jesus Christ. No Christian should ever volunteer to follow God with the appending question, “Do I meet your requirements?” The absence of these women hurts the Church, but restoring their witness to our memory benefits the Church, as does passing on the mantel to all of those who say, “Here I am, send me.”
Recent News
University of Tulsa cut off a hand that was feeding them by removing Dr. Jennifer Frey from her position at Dean of the newly founded Honors College. Read Frey’s denouncement of administrators against liberal arts in The New York Times and listen to her conversation about it on CLT Podcast.
Pepperdine University Great Books program just received $393,000 from Educating Character Initiative to expand our Great Books offerings and hopefully create a cohesive narrative through our undergraduate curriculum. BIG THINGS are happening here! So grateful to Lilly, WFU, and ECI!
“What do the Great Books Teach Us About Friendship?” inspired my June Substack, and you can listen to the conversation here.
Stay Tuned….
If you’re enjoying my posts about women, be watching for an announcement on my upcoming 2026 book. Publisher’s Weekly will have all the details coming soon.