How the Other Half Lives, by Johnna Fredrickson and William A. Smith

In 1995, as I was beginning a sabbatical to study older women married to clergy, a longtime seminary professor gave me a book from his library and told me about a class called "Mistress of the Manse" that had been offered for many years to seminarians' wives. The 1965 book, The Minister's Wife as a Counselor, by Wallace Denton, was based on interviews with 45 women representing five denominations. Denton declared that most pastors' wives offered informal counseling to parishioners and that they constituted an important though often invisible component of the mental health system.

Coincidentally also in 1965, William Douglas's book Ministers' Wives ap­peared. It reported on a study begun in 1959 that amassed surveys, psychological tests and interviews from 4,777 women representing 37 denominations. Douglas, a Presbyterian minister teaching at Boston University School of Theology, believed that marital relations affected clergy effectiveness and that women married to clergy suffered from constraints imposed by multiple social stereotypes. He thought that the information he gathered (thanks to a large grant from the Lilly Endowment) was crucial to the health of American Protestantism, and he expected that seminaries and judicatory bodies would use his findings to develop programs offering psychosocial support to clergy families.

When my husband entered seminary in 1970, just as the second wave of feminism was gathering force, there were no courses on how to manage the manse or counsel parishioners. I recall no discussions of the kinds of fulfillments and frustrations that Douglas identified in the women he studied. In fact, because I was busy preparing for my own career, I paid little attention to the nature of the social role bequeathed to me by virtue of my husband's call to enter the ministry. Our denomination offered retreats for clergy wives, but I never attended them. I assumed that they were for women whose identity was solely shaped around being someone's wife, an identity I was unprepared to assume.