Talk:Mothers' Union

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I have a book called The Church of England by Paul Ferris, published by The MacMillan Company, copyright by the author, 1962 and 1963. I excerpt some text, starting at the top of page 52:


 * Shortly after Stephens's visit, though, the Provost was involved in another of the little disagreements that have cropped up through his career, when a red paper-backed book he had written, called Marriage, was published by the Mothers' Union. Boulton had not been over-keen when the Mothers' Union asked him, a year or two before, to write the book.  He was busy, and before starting it, took pains to ensure that they would want to publish what he would want to write.  For the Mothers' Union has uncompromising views on divorce.  At Mary Sumner House, the headquarters in Westminster, where parties of women from the provinces troop round the offices, women officials in sensible costumes tell inquirers that "the Mothers' Union has stood in its whole eighty years for the family, based on marriage as a permanent relationship".  There are 11,000 branches in Britain, with nearly half a million members, who, as an official said with a sweet smile, "range from the dimmest of mums up to the professional woman".  Most parishes have a Mothers' Union branch; the vicar can close it if he wishes, but this rarely happens, and if it does, the members can affiliate to the diocesan or the central organisation.  The official object of the Mothers' Union is to "strengthen, to safeguard and promote Christian family life", and it does this chiefly by, as the phrase goes, the "witness", that is the good example, of its members.  Its magazine, Home and Family, a not very exciting production, has such typical covers as a group of children playing around a table, and the Royal Family looking down at Prince Andrew in his cot.  It issues posters, like the one entitled "The Church's Home Guard", showing husband, wife and four children sitting idyllically under a tree, with a church across the meadows.  Divorce, to the Mothers' Union,  is unthinkable for true Christians.  It was founded in 1876, after the first Matrimonial Causes Bill had made divorce generally available, and no woman who has been divorced, whether or not she was the guilty party, may be a member.  For years, when divorce was comparatively rare, this was an unexceptionable condition&mdash;so much so that, as the Mothers' Union points out rather plaintively, it's only in recent years that the original aims have been rediscovered.  Instead of being seen as a jolly gathering of churchwomen, usually the middle-aged and older women, in the parish, headed by the vicar's wife and able to make its presence felt by the weight of

transition to page 53


 * its approval or disapproval, it now insists how specialised it is: a society to "emphasise the lifelong nature of marriage". Inevitably the Mothers' Union has a dated air, and seems on the defensive.  Bishops are no longer so ready to spring to its aid, and like most organisations with unsensational aims, it receives a bad Press because when nothing is going wrong there is nothing to report.  Now and then vicars quarrel with branches and it gets into the papers&mdash;there was the North Country parish where in 1961 the vicar discovered he had 200 Mothers' Union members, of whom only a few, he said, were regular churchgoers; some hadn't been confirmed; no more than 40 attended the monthly Communion service for members.  The vicar's attempts to change this state of affairs led to disagreements, he dismissed the committee, the branch complained to the parochial church council, and the P.C.C. took sides with the women and told the vicar that unless he reinstated the committee, the council's contribution to his stipend&mdash;between £4 and £5 a week&mdash;would be withheld.  The vicar held out, they stopped the contribution and his telephone expenses, and the bishop had to come to the rescue with a grant from diocesan funds.  "On looking back", the vicar said later (in a letter to me), "it seems to me to be quite appalling that any Christian body should use financial blackmail of its priest to get its way, that a body of professing Christian women should calmly contemplate depriving a married man with a child of financial support to force him to do something that according to the constitution of the organisation accepted by all of them is a matter entirely within his discretion."  Other vicars have been known to complain of "dictatorial women" and pharisaism', and that joke that the "Mothers' Union runs the Church" is, according to the clergyman who had the quarrel, "a joke with more than a grain of truth in it."

This material is, obviously, about fifty years old. Is it still relevant?

J S Ayer (talk) 21:41, 30 September 2010 (UTC)


 * You are right to be cautious. While this might be a useful reference against which to contrast current practice, without the appropriate modern coverage it would be wrong to include it. WP has strong rules about unsupported information in BLP articles (Biographies of Living Persons) but I would suggest that similar standards need to be applied to current organisations and businesses where those parties might be damaged in some way through the addition of material to an article.
 * -- EdJogg (talk) 09:10, 1 October 2010 (UTC) (not a MU member, but my Mum is!)

General comment
This article is short of references (there is just one) and it does read rather like an advert, as has been suggested. However, this is hardly surprising, as such articles are likely to be written by insiders. Unfortunately, the external link most relevant to the history (the archives) is inoperative. Is there no serious printed history which could be cited?

One paragraph stands out as not by the principal author(s):


 * The Union has a very functionalist ideology,[citation needed] and for many years divorced and separated mothers were banned from membership.[citation needed] The self-contained, caring, internalising nuclear family, with women accepting community-imposed social duties, remains an ideal.[citation needed]

While this may very well be true, it reads like a personal opinion and strikes me as unencyclopedic. Moreover, it is unreferenced. It fits in so poorly with the rest of the article that I am inclined to delete it, but I have not done so yet. Is there an MU insider out there with an opinion about this?

LynwoodF (talk) 17:36, 16 March 2013 (UTC)


 * As I have had no comment on the contentious material, I have now removed it. LynwoodF (talk) 16:38, 22 April 2013 (UTC)

I am an 'insider' i would like to help but i dont know how to navigate these pages and to message you. i am a current trustee of the Canterbury Diocese Mothers' Union Marianna2 (talk) 09:34, 24 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Thank you for this message. I watch this page, so found it quickly. Since the edit you made in March somebody has set up a new link to the archives, so the content of the article is not now totally unsupported. As you will have seen, I have now removed the contentious material. An encyclopedia is not the place for unsupported comments such as these. If you click on my username, you get to my personal page and if you click on (talk), you will get to my talk page. However, I shall see anything you put up right here. LynwoodF (talk) 13:24, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

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