Reconciling conservatism and feminism

Pentecostal Preacher Woman: The Faith and Feminism of Bernice Gerard
by Linda M. Ambrose

Vancouver: UBC Press, 2024
$37.95  /  9780774870245

Reviewed by Wendy Burton

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Pentecostal Preacher Woman, written by Linda Ambrose, is a classic biography, offering praise and celebration of its subject. Relying heavily on two autobiographies by Gerard, and her personal papers, Ambrose has written a book described by UBC Press thus:

Evangelical pastor, talk-show host, university chaplain, municipal politician, musician. Pentecostal Preacher Woman explores the multifaceted life of the Reverend Bernice Gerard (1923–2008), one of the most influential spiritual figures of twentieth-century British Columbia, whose complicated blend of social conservatism and social compassion has lessons for our polarized times.

Ambrose is a professor of history at Laurentian University. She is the author, with Michael Wilkinson, of After the Revival: Pentecostalism and the Making of a Canadian Church.

In order to understand Ambrose’s perspective, read the conclusion of the biography first. We hear directly from Ambrose about why she wrote the biography: “I wanted to imagine what she might have been thinking on that summer day in 1977 when she made her silent protest [on Wreck Beach].”

Pentecostal Preacher Woman is meticulous in historical detail, with 31 pages of end notes, a bibliography, and index. Each chapter begins with a summary and ends with an analysis of the chapter. Ambrose’s introduction is thorough: she provides the overview of Gerard’s trajectory from her early life in a dysfunctional (her words) family to her death as a respected and honoured Pentecostal.

This book is organized into ten chapters. The first three chapters describe Gerard’s early years, revealing the instability of her life as a child who was adopted at birth, only to be subjected to abuse and violence after the death of her adoptive mother. She had a dramatic conversion experience in her early teens and subsequent to that conversion she disclosed the abuse to the pastors.

She was removed from her adopted home and spent her teen years as a ward of the province under the guardianship of Isabel Henry, a notable figure in the early years of child welfare. Her early adult years are described in detail, including her year of teaching in Rossland and her life as an evangelist in a trio of travelling Pentecostal preachers: the McColl-Gerard Trio.  Ambrose describes Gerard’s years as a Pentecostal chaplain, an evangelical radio host, and a civic politician. Her struggle with the Pentecostal Assembly of Canada to have the role of women officially endorsed – including fully ordained preachers – is the heart of Ambrose and Gerard’s declaration that she was a feminist.

The chapter where Ambrose tiptoes delicately around the personal nature of Gerard’s life-long relationship with Velma McColl is, frankly, cringe-worthy. “Bernice Gerard lived a woman-centric life and Chapter 9 gives attention to some of the enigmatic aspects of Gerard’s interior world and her private life.” Ambrose seems to be raising the possibility that the decades-long domestic (sic) relationship with Velma Chapman (nee McColl) might have been intimate. To which, I hope, the astute reader says “who cares?” Gerard was relentlessly homophobic in her words and deeds, completely in line with her religious house, and whether or not she had sex with her life-companion is neither relevant nor evidence that she was a feminist.

Ambrose presents Gerard as a conservative religious woman negotiating the complex realities of British Columbia of the 1950s to the early 2000s.  Ambrose intends neither to defend nor endorse Gerard’s views but rather to provide her life story as a useful case with which to explore questions about relationships between conservative religious women and feminism and how they can be reconciled. Ambrose offers the biography to fill the gap in gender and feminist scholarship that ignores cases of conservative religious women in patriarchal faith organizations.

Ambrose is a biographer on the defensive. Gender scholars (sic) are asked to suspend their normative critiques of and assumptions regarding religious affiliations and instead interrogate religious cases on their own terms. Ambrose invokes critics of Western feminist scholarship by declaring it is now time to reconsider implicit biases and assumptions that privilege progressive women to the exclusion of others. Setting secular feminists against Pentecostal feminists such as Gerard, Ambrose seems to be unaware of the many feminists within other faith-based organisations, who write, and wrote during Gerard’s time, extensively about the need to be more inclusive within their faiths. 

I suggest the invocation of the argument is she/isn’t she a distraction, one perhaps intended to sell books or to rehabilitate Gerard’s position in the late 20^th century Vancouver as an evangelical Christian opposed to reproduction rights for women, homosexuality, and the relaxing of social and moral customs in the late 20^th century.

Ambrose glosses over Gerard’s activism on these fronts. Gerard is now, 50 years later, more remembered for her stoical march in silence along Wreck Beach near UBC, the only beach in Vancouver where nudity was permitted, than she is for her efforts to influence the therapeutic abortion board at Vancouver General Hospital to restrict access to abortion. Ambrose writes extensively about the early years of child welfare in British Columbia and then provides one or two sentences about Gerard’s opposition to important social movements from 1960 to 1990, namely gay liberation, the struggle for reproductive rights for women, and the ongoing efforts to separate church and state. Her research on Gerard’s protest on Wreck Beach focuses on letters written to Vancouver City Council containing stories of women encountering sexually aroused naked men on the adjacent beach.  Ambrose does not engage the actions of Gerard to oppose gay bars or the Gay Pride Parade, when she was on Vancouver city council 1977 – 81, a time, those of us who were there remember, when folks were being beaten on Davie Street if the thugs even suspected a man (or sometimes a woman) of being gay. Ambrose leaves unexamined the quandary of presenting Gerard as a feminist who was a relentless foe of human rights now enshrined in the Charter. As Ambrose says, Vancouver was her mission field, the mission to bring everyone in the city to the acceptance of Jesus as their personal saviour. Ambrose acknowledges Gerard was always looking for “the seed for conversion.”

Ambrose describes Gerard as compassionate toward the poor and especially Indigenous peoples, connecting her compassion to her love for her adoptive Stó:lō grandparent and family, but little evidence is provided. Ambrose states Gerard and Chapman supported the funding of a ‘Native Indian (sic) cultural  centre’ for Indigenous peoples in Vancouver and the establishment of Shiloh House, but omits that Shiloh House was Christian-initiated cooperative housing operated by the Broadway Tabernacle, a Pentecostal organization and her place of worship in her later years. Ambrose does not provide evidence to support her claim that Gerard was a compassionate advocate for marginalized people beyond a sentence stating she supported these two projects.

A photograph in the chapter on Gerard’s years as a chaplain on UBC campus shows Gerard walking with a ‘pro-life’ sign, but Ambrose has little to say about Gerard’s participation in a powerful Christian right campaign to restrict women’s right to choose abortion. Ambrose suggests that Gerard’s adamant opposition to abortion arose from her birth story, believing if abortion had been an option for her mother, Gerard would not have survived. Ambrose leaves her analysis there, which is in contrast to her detailed scholarship on other aspects of Gerard’s life.

This biography would have been stronger if Ambrose had omitted the defense of Gerard as a feminist and instead described – as she does – Gerard’s actions to persuade the Pentecostal Assembly of Canada to fully ordain women. She was, no doubt, all for the rights of women to be fully ordained in her denomination of Christianity. That Gerard extracted one sentence from Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch in her campaign to persuade PAOC to fully ordain women is not sufficient to support the subtitle of the biography.

What also remains unexamined is Gerard’s class. She lived all of her adult life with the wife/widow of a wealthy man; she was friends with wealthy and influential men like Phil Gaglardi, Pentecostal preacher and long-serving cabinet minister in the Social Credit government of BC, and Jimmy Pattison, a businessman with deep pockets and deeper convictions about capitalists’ rights and responsibilities.

Ambrose makes much of the cartoons that were published ridiculing Gerard, emphasizing what Ambrose refers to as her masculine demeanour and physical presence. Mockery is always reprehensible. Ambrose could have discussed the contradictions evident in Gerard’s campaigns opposing abortion, gay rights, anti-poverty activism and the celebration of her actions as a public figure entrenched in conservative Christian values. Doing so would have provided the nuance needed to achieve Ambrose’s intention to present a fully developed portrait of Gerard.

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Wendy Burton is Professor Emerita at University of the Fraser Valley, where she taught academic and work place writing, story-telling, diversity education, and Indigenous Adult Education. In 1997, she earned a doctorate for her feminist analysis of story-telling as knowledge claims. Throughout her work life, she wrote creative non-fiction, long and short form fiction, and poetry. Her debut novel Ivy’s Tree (Thistledown) was published in 2020. She writes fiction and creative non-fiction. Her most recent essay is “Meditations on the Headstand,” Folklife, Winter 2023. [Editor’s note: Wendy Burton has reviewed books by Gina Starblanket (ed.), Danny Ramadan, Jo-Ann Wallace, Chris Arnett, Susan Blacklin, and Tara Teng for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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