Delilah Morrill and Early Flexibility in the Role

As a pastor's wife for twenty-five years, Beth Allison Barr has lived with assumptions about what she should do and who she should be. We talked with her about her book Becoming the Pastor's Wife: How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman's Path to Ministry, where she draws on that experience and her academic expertise to trace the history of the role of the pastor's wife, showing how it both helped and hurt women in conservative Protestant traditions. While they gained an important leadership role, it came at a deep cost: losing independent church leadership opportunities that existed throughout most of church history and strengthening a gender hierarchy that prioritized male careers.

Beth Allison Barr is the James Vardman Endowed Chair of History at Baylor University in Waco, TX, where she specializes in medieval history, women's history, and church history. She is the author of the USA Today bestseller, The Making of Biblical Womanhood, and her work has been featured by NPR and the New Yorker; in addition she's written for Christianity Today, the Washington Post, the Dallas Morning News, Sojourners, and Baptist News Global. Barr lives in Texas with her husband-- a Baptist pastor-- and their two children.

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