VOTES FOR CHURCH WOMEN.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 13651, 7 February 1910, Page 6

VOTES FOR CHURCH WOMEN.

•' Women," according to a speaker at tbe Anglican Synod in Wellington, "have now a say in everything in this "country except the Anglican Church." He evidently regarded this as a reason for permitting Anglican Church women to vote and act on vestries and to vote

for members of the Diocesan Synods, but the majority of the Synod seemed to have looked at it from an opposite point of view, and preferred that the administration of the Church should remain in the hands of men. So once more the attack on the last stronghold of man —the Anglican vestry—was repulsed. The attitude of the dissentient majority on the Synod seems curiously antiquated when it i- remembered that In England j—which is so often regarded as hopelessly behind the times—women may Let as .hurchwardens, and can be blected to j vestries. And it seems ismgulariy ijngrateful when one considers the valuable services rendered by women in all branches of Church work. The argument employed by one lay metnber of the Synod, that women do this work without looking for any temporal reward, and therefore should receive none, well, but one naturally wonders why a self-denial ordinance of this kind should be considered applicable only to women and not to men. We do not profess to understand why so many Churchmen are opposed to the movement; there was certainly nothing- in the speeches at the Synod to justify the attitudo taken. But the anachronism will not prevail for long; there will, no doubt, come a time when women who spend themselves in g<od works will be allowed some share in the management of the Church.