In most job interviews, asking candidates’ wives if they will prioritize their husband’s career, contribute unpaid labor to the organization, and have children would be downright absurd, but for some evangelical churches, it’s the norm. Baylor University historian Beth Allison Barr is a pastor’s wife whose latest book, Becoming the Pastor’s Wife (Brazos, 2025), unpacks how modern expectations of the role have deviated from earlier church history and damned female ordination. We talked in March. This interview has been condensed and edited.
Meagan Saliashvili: Can you paint a picture of who was a typical pastor’s wife in the sixteenth century and then who is that woman in the twenty-first century?
Beth Allison Barr: When we think about the pastor’s-wife role in the sixteenth century, it’s with the Protestant Reformation that we begin to see the association between being a clergyman and being married. This is a new thing, this idea that marriage is part of being a pastor. And before this time, of course, clergy were defined by not being married.
And so we have this new symbol of that new theology, and it’s a married pastor. The pastor’s wife becomes a symbol of Protestant resistance, a heroic figure, because it’s against the law to marry clergy at this point. Some women lost their lives for doing this.
Of course, the quintessential pastor’s wife is Katie Luther. She’s the ex-nun who marries the ex-monk Martin Luther. And she embraces this role of the early modern housewife, yet at the same time she is not what you would consider to be a cookie-cutter pastor’s wife. While she is in charge of the domestic sphere, she is also very theologically engaged in everything that Martin Luther is doing. His attitudes about women changed during his marriage to Katie, because he realized that women actually are intellectually engaged, and they don’t always do what you tell them to do.
Throughout the early part of Reformation history, really up through the nineteenth and even early twentieth century, a pastor’s wife is simply a wife. It doesn’t come with the same types of job expectations as what has happened to the pastor’s-wife role today.
A good contrast is a letter that Dorothy Patterson [author, theology professor, and wife of Paige Patterson, former president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary] wrote in support of a woman named Carol Ann Draper, whose husband [Jimmy Draper] served as president of the Southern Baptist Convention between 1982 and 1984. After his presidency of the SBC, he went on to become the president of Lifeway, which is the publishing branch of the Southern Baptist Convention. And in 2006 Dorothy Patterson wrote a letter of recommendation for Carol Ann to be named the pastor’s wife of the year for the Southern Baptist Convention because she always supported her husband’s ministry from the home and embodied these ideals of complementarian theology. And in fact, on Carol Ann Draper’s resume, under her education, one of the lines was “Ph.T.,” which was explained as “put hubby through.” So while her husband got the Ph.D., she got the Ph.T., exemplifying that this wife of a pastor—that her job, as ordained by God—is to support her husband in every aspect. And so I don’t think Katie Luther would recognize what the pastor’s wife’s role had become by the early 2000s.
MS: Why have so many evangelicals, steeped in the church, not heard about Katie Luther?
BAB: One of my goals in writing this book is I want to introduce people to a wider swath of women in church history, women that people have not heard of as much. In what we are taught in church history, especially through the church and even in seminary education, women are mostly excluded from that narrative. That exclusion is not just ignorance.
In the book I talk about this medieval abbess in the seventh century, a woman named Milburga. She is a woman who carried pastoral authority, was ordained by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and in her monastic establishment had both male and female clergy, so she had spiritual authority over men. She was also a very powerful political figure.
But in the way that women like her have often been taught in church history courses, and then Sunday school classes, an abbess is often code for doing women’s work. You know that she’s only over other women. She doesn’t get out of the abbey very much. They’ve been taught about in a way that minimizes their leadership.
If you can always argue that a woman in leadership is either exceptional or simply not doing the same type of work as men, then you can maintain the fiction that women don’t do leadership like men. And so I do think that there is this deliberate writing out of women from the church history narrative, just to minimize the reality that women were in leadership.
MS: How does the rise of the single female missionary in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries fit into this context, when most of these churches didn’t ordain women to be pastors, but they did recognize a calling for women to travel across the world solo, dangerously, and preach the gospel?
BAB: On the one hand, I think this shows that even in Southern Baptist history, we see women serving in leadership roles. I mean, you can’t write them out of it, but what you can do is hold them up as, almost, saints. Lottie Moon [a Southern Baptist missionary to China who lived from 1840 to 1912] is a good example of that, because a surefire way to get into an argument with Baptists is to point out imperfections about Lottie Moon’s life or challenge the traditional narrative about her in some sort of way. It’s almost like ordinary women can’t do this, so therefore she doesn’t challenge gender norms.
Also, these single women were able to maintain authority because they didn’t have a husband. The narrative was that the best thing is to get married, but if you can’t get married, or something else happens, then the next best thing is to dedicate your life to serving God as a missionary. It gave some single women a tremendous amount of authority, but the catch was that they could only exercise it when they weren’t at home.
This is where we see the racism that’s been built into this evangelical imperialism, that teaching people of other colors and other places is not the same as teaching white men, and so a white woman can teach men of color, but she can’t teach white men. This is part of how they were able to get away with it.
One of my goals in writing this book is I want to introduce people to a wider swath of women in church history, women that people have not heard of as much.
And the other part is just definitions. I talk about this in the book with a woman named Bertha Smith. Even today, she’s coded as a “prayer warrior sharing her testimony,” when the reality is that she went around preaching hour-long sermons in Baptist pulpits between the 1970s and the 1990s. If she was a man, we would be describing her as a preacher, as a spiritual leader.
It’s a semantic sort of issue that has been used to maintain this fiction that God only calls men to leadership positions, even though church history shows us that women are always doing the same type of leadership jobs as men. We’re just calling it something different.
MS: What are the motivations of women who have pushed to uphold their version of the pastor’s-wife ideal?
BAB: So this is part of why the pastor’s-wife role changes, because in these conservative evangelical spaces, she becomes a way to maintain women serving in leadership positions without calling it that. The role of the pastor’s wife began to be used to push out ordained women.
Dorothy Patterson became very well known for wearing hats as a symbol of her submission so she could preach. She would say she was just speaking or giving her testimony, but she always wore her hat, so she argued she was always under her husband’s authority. She became the symbol of how the pastor’s-wife role created the fiction of women being able to be active in ministry, while also arguing against women’s ordination. And this is what caught my attention from the very beginning about this book, was when I realized that some of the most vocal speakers against women’s ordination in the 1970s and 80s were pastors’ wives. And that’s when I began to sort of investigate that correlation. Their motivation was absolutely fascinating.
Dorothy Patterson is complicated. I think she’s a very smart person. I think that she realized that this role could be extremely powerful, a role that could give women a lot of authority in churches as well as increase the authority of their husbands, by playing into this complementarian theology.
I also think most of these women honestly believe this. It’s what they’ve been taught, that God calls women into this subordinate role, and that it is sinful for them to seek leadership positions. They’ve been taught that the appropriate way to use their gifts is to play by the rules, to stay within the bounds of male leadership, and that the highest kind of calling is to be a pastor’s wife.
This is where we see the racism that’s been built into this evangelical imperialism, that teaching people of other colors and other places is not the same as teaching white men.
MS: Where do Pentecostal female pastors like Paula White-Cain fit into this context of interpreting the Bible as universalizing conservative gender norms? White-Cain has a pretty traditional view of gender roles, but she was until recently not just a televangelist but a senior pastor at a megachurch. She married the guitarist from Journey, Jonathan Cain, and now leads the White House Faith Office.
BAB: There’s a part of my book where I actually talk about this shift in leadership. And I talk about medieval understandings of leadership roles, especially ordination. Preaching is actually not something we find in the Bible very much. There’s a couple of examples of what we would call sermons today, but the source of authority that we find in the Bible, quite a bit, is prophecy, which is also linked to prayer. And we see women in the Bible doing this. And we see women throughout history have this type of prophetic role, and especially when rooted in contemplative prayer, it’s a way for women to access authority in the Christian tradition.
And this carries into the Pentecostal space, which is a fascinating space to me, because, on the one hand, it does still support traditional gender roles, but because of the emphasis on prophecy, it also offers women leadership preaching positions. It’s almost like it’s the loophole, where women outwardly still conform to traditional gender roles, submitting to their husbands at home, etc. But God allows women to prophesy just like men, and so therefore I can move into these types of preaching positions.
Now the catch is that a lot of men in these conservative spaces don’t accept that, especially ones that are more in Reformed circles and Baptist circles that aren’t in Pentecostal theology, and they actually are pushing against Paula White for the role that she has. So I think she actually shows the division within conservative evangelicalism.
MS: Speaking of division, how did the Southern Baptist Convention do such an about-face on women from 1983 to 1984?
BAB: We have to put this growing conservative gender ideology within evangelical spaces in the broader context of what’s going on in the U.S., and that involves these questions about equal pay for women in the workforce, women’s access to credit and birth control and abortion and all of these things. This is all in the water in the seventies, and then we begin to see this religious teaching that says, “Whoa, whoa, women aren’t supposed to do these things.”
There are a whole lot of Southern Baptists who said this rigid gender theology is actually not something that we’re supposed to emulate. In 1983, they’re like, “The church should be about justice and should care how women are treated in broader society.” But you also have this growing group within the Southern Baptists that are increasingly wary of this. So in 1984, this is when the conservative resurgence within the SBC is actively recruiting people to come to these conferences, to participate in these votes, and to simply have more numbers.