Abstract
In 1968 the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland passed a deliverance that women should become eligible for ordination to the ministry of word and sacrament on the same terms and conditions as men. To commemorate the fortieth anniversary of this ruling, the article reviews some of the debates about women's ministry and ordination as they occurred in mainstream Scottish Presbyterianism over a period of around one hundred years. It also discusses the gendered constructions of "women's ministry" as a marker of identity in the context of discursive Christianity and broader social and cultural changes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Scotland. The article analyses shifting norms and practices which shaped this gendered struggle for change, and some of the strategies used to articulate and authorize the claims of women to ministry and ordination in a traditionally masculinist community of practice.
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