Becoming the Pastor's Wife: How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman's Path to Ministry

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.



In Becoming the Pastor's Wife, Barr draws on that experience and her expertise as a historian 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 exi...