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CURRENTLY IN CULTURE
Remembering the 70s

Dora Dueck

Recently I watched the television movie When Billie Beat Bobby, about the 1973 Battle of the Sexes tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, which Billie Jean won to score a point or two for women’s equality with men.

My 17-year-old daughter was watching the movie too and kept giggling over it. Her amusement was not surprising. The piece had a giddy, exaggerated feel that made it seem comedy rather than a serious representation of social history. “But this really happened,” I muttered a few times, obliged to remind myself as well as her. “It really was like that then” – pastel leisure suits for men, the expression “women’s lib” and sharp gender inequalities not just in sports but in many aspects of life.

When the earth is altered in some way, say by cutting trees or planting them, bulldozing in a road or excavating for a new housing development, we soon forget the contours of the earlier terrain; we soon imagine that this is the way this particular space has always looked. An awareness of how things once were involves the effort of memory, which is often short or lazy. But if we are given a picture, we are helped to remember.

So this amusing television drama has shown me the 1970s again. And it has taken me back to an event in Mennonite Brethren life that had some of the same excitement, conflict, change and even irony as the Billie versus Bobby story. It was the July 1975 Canadian MB Conference convention.


The convention was held in Saskatchewan that year, on the relatively new University of Regina campus. I recall the modern intimacy of the large auditorium, with its tiered seating, where most sessions were held. But mostly I remember the intense discussion over the role of women in the church, and the sense that we were in the midst of something quite momentous.

Going back to the MB Herald of that summer for the details, I see that the resolution we accepted, 339 to 20, declared women “eligible to be selected as delegates to conferences and to church and conference boards and committees other than boards [whose work is of the nature of eldership]”.

This hardly seems a sea change now, nor was it then. Women had already begun attending conferences as delegates. Over the previous three years, in fact, participation of women had increased from 10% of the delegation to nearly 25%. Nevertheless, 25% participation and formal permission were a considerable change from the virtually zero percent which had existed for the first century of our denominational life.

Involvement on boards was also quite new. The only woman nominated for a Conference board in 1975 withdrew her name from the slate during the convention. She felt that as long as the issue remained unresolved, her nomination would become a personal thing.

The debate was long and vigorous. It had actually begun a year earlier, with a paper by David Ewert on “The Christian Woman in the Church and Conference” presented at the Canadian Conference convention in Vancouver. After a review of relevant Scriptures, Ewert suggested the steps that were brought as a recommendation to the Regina convention.

At the first Regina session, delegates spent nearly an-hour-and-a-half discussing whether opening the door for women to play a greater role within the church represented a yielding to contemporary culture in violation of the prohibition of the Bible. The recommendation was then sent back to the Board of Spiritual and Social Concerns (as it was called then), and brought back later, in a slightly revised form, for more discussion and the vote.

One of the oddest features of the convention, I recall, was that a full day’s meeting was scheduled for female guests who were non-delegates. It was a “Fascinating Womanhood” seminar, a course that was controversial in its own right for its rigid views on the roles of men and women. (For context, Marabel Morgan’s Total Woman was a best-seller in those years.) The seminar seemed, as Neoma Jantz wrote, “contradictory . . . (and) no match for the interesting interaction on the conference floor”. I confess I was relieved to be “on assignment” (as assistant editor of the Herald) at the main session. (Even as a child, I’d preferred eavesdropping on conversations about the church to those about domestic concerns.)

Men were divided on the issue, and clearly so were women. But this is part of what makes the event memorable to me. There was that crackle of tension that underlies difficult deliberations, the manifestation of various personalities, the practical testing of what we claim about ourselves. Would our commitment to one another, to searching the Scriptures calling upon the Spirit and then moving together, hold?

As I listened in the sessions and in the corridors, I sensed integrity, fear, reluctance but also the willingness to stretch and venture a little. There was also a great deal of emotion stirring just under the generally civil surface of things. I recall a brief exchange in the women’s washroom with an old woman, a missionary I admired in the way we had grown up to admire all our missionaries, seeing them as greatly advanced in their spiritual attainments. I no longer know what I said or what she replied, but I remember that her words seemed a rebuke. I must have been entirely too eager about the proceedings; whatever her view, I was reminded that this was sober stuff.

I was young, lacking due proportion or sobriety, I suppose. Of course, I was excited! It was a good time to be young, to be a woman, even in the church, where we felt doors were open to our fuller participation. We loved the church, and believed that it was good to be involved, and surely it was time. “We are not demanding anything, merely asking that the trend toward women as fellow labourers be continued,” Esther Wiens had said the year before in Vancouver, in response to David Ewert’s paper. “We are not looking for power but for a truer brotherhood.”

The theme of the Regina convention was the family of God, expressed in dynamic sermons by speaker Louis Lehman and sung over and over again in our theme song, “I’m so glad I’m a part of the family of God . . . joint heirs with Jesus, as we travel this sod.” We were reaching for that in 1975, for a contemporary expression of the concept of “brothers and sisters” which the German word Geschwister had conveyed to earlier generations of Mennonite Brethren.

Looking back now, it seems a long while ago, and one chuckles a little over fashions and language, even over how earnestly we all took ourselves sometimes. What happened on the “women’s issue” later is not my topic here. I’m in the 1970s at the moment, remembering. What we did then still makes me happy.

Dora Dueck is a writer from Winnipeg and a member of Jubilee Mennonite Church.

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Last modified August 2, 2001.

© 2001 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
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