it's all in how you say it

[cellio]

A fellow congregant called and asked me to be on the steering committee (read: board) of the sisterhood.

What I thought: Having a sisterhood (and brotherhood) is anathema to an egalitarian congregation. If we say that men and women don't have assigned roles, why on earth would I want to help perpetrate an organization that tries to go backwards by (re-)assigning those roles? It's not like our sisterhood and brotherhood are trying to move past conventional gender roles -- the women handle babysitting during services and serve cookies and coffee afterwards, and the men hold barbeques and talks by investment bankers. Feh! I want none of it! And not just because babysitting and serving coffee aren't my thing! There's a higher principle here. How can I help you see this?

What I said: I'm flattered, but no.

Comments

[goljerp]

Hmm... I guess my current shul doesn't really have a sisterhood/brotherhood. At least, not that I'm aware of. So we have staff people who arrange the childcare/childrens services; kiddush is organized by different people (men and women) each week, and speakers (investment bankers and otherwise) are organized by the adult ed or orther committees at the shul. No great loss, as far as I can tell...

[cellio]

I guess my current shul doesn't really have a sisterhood/brotherhood.

Neat! That's nice to hear. I wish there were more like yours. :-)

What strikes me as odd, now that you bring it up, is that at least in my congregation, most of the stuff done by the sisterhood and brotherhood would easily migrate elsewhere if those organizations didn't exist. We have adult ed, we have custodial staff who clean up after the oneg/kiddush and who could easily also put the cookies out in the first place, congregants are perfectly capable of operating the coffee pot themselves... I guess the babysitting would be temporarily stranded, but I expect that either it would become an added staff responsibility or a coalition of parents and interested others would pull together and make it happen. (I bet there would also be an effort to draft the youth group, but I expect that would fail.)

In our congregation the sisterhood also manages the gift shop. But, again, it would be perfectly reasonable for that to spin off elsewhere; who says men don't want to be involved in that anyway? In a sisterhood-less world the gift shop would ultimately be accountable to the treasurer, I would imagine, so the treasurer could just appoint someone to run it (like, say, the person who's doing it now) and let that person staff it, which is pretty much how it gets staffed now anyway.