Who Stands in the Square: Part II

Today, in Canterbury Cathedral, I watched a woman take one of the most symbolically powerful seats in British public life, and I felt something I did not want to rush past in the cleverness of analysis or the caution of commentary.

I felt joy.

Real joy. The kind that catches you slightly off guard because it arrives before the critique, before the caveats, before the instinct to protect yourself from disappointment by staying one step removed. I thought of the new Archbishop’s words, that as a teenager she could never have imagined this for herself, and I felt that in my bones. Not because women of faith have lacked ambition, but because so many of us grew up in worlds that were quietly and relentlessly clear about what authority was supposed to look like, and it did not look like us.

Today, for a moment, it did.

That matters because public religious authority in Britain has been male for so long that people mistake it for neutrality. A man in the chair is tradition. A woman in the chair is still treated as a moment. Still treated, however warmly, as a departure from the norm. And yet for those of us who are women in religious leadership, today was not only moving. It was clarifying.

This year, Progressive Judaism marks fifty years since the ordination of women rabbis in Britain. Fifty years. Half a century of women preaching, teaching, burying, blessing, leading communities, shaping theology, carrying institutions, and making Jewish life possible. That is not a novelty. It is not an experiment. It is not some recent accommodation to modernity. It is a long and serious tradition of women exercising religious authority with depth, intellect, pastoral courage, and spiritual seriousness.

And still, anyone who has actually lived this knows that visibility and equality are not the same thing.

The Church of England has had women bishops for years. Progressive Judaism has had women rabbis for decades. Women have done the work, held the communities, carried the emotional and institutional weight, and still the deeper instincts about power remain remarkably intact. Women are still more likely to be judged for tone than substance, still more likely to be described as “too much” for exactly the qualities that are admired in men, and still more likely to be welcomed symbolically before we are trusted structurally.

That is the part people often want to skip over when history is being made.

They want the photograph. They want the symbolism. They want the uplifting language of progress. What they are less interested in is the slower, harder, less photogenic truth that institutions can learn to celebrate women without ever fully surrendering the habits of mind that made women seem implausible there in the first place.

So yes, today was a celebration, and it should be. Seeing a woman there matters. It changes the picture. It stretches the imagination. It says something profound to every girl, every young woman, every future faith leader who has absorbed, consciously or unconsciously, the message that sacred authority belongs more naturally to men.

But if we stop there, we miss the point.

Because the real question is not only whether a woman can get there. It is what actually changes once she does. What changes in the institution? What changes in the culture around it? What changes for the women who come next? And what changes for those of us in other faith communities, still doing serious, senior, public religious leadership without always being granted the same automatic legitimacy?

I was there today not simply as a guest, but as a senior Jewish faith leader, and I was acutely aware of what it meant to be in that room, visible in that space, carrying not only my own presence but the presence of a movement and a tradition that has long insisted religious leadership can look different. I was aware, too, of how much these moments are about more than the person at the centre. They are about the ecosystem around them. About who is named properly. Who is brought near. Who is assumed to belong in the room without needing to justify their presence.

And that is where politics enters, whether people like it or not.

Because this is not only about women. It is about whose authority Britain is prepared to recognise in public at all.

Can authority look female?

Can it look Jewish?

Can it look Muslim?

Can it look plural, morally serious, intellectually rigorous, and entirely at home in public life without being treated as niche, sectional, or faintly embarrassing?

Those are political questions as much as religious ones, because they go to the heart of who gets to shape the moral imagination of this country.

Too often, women of faith are still expected to be visible but not too visible, confident but not too confident, principled but never disruptive. We are welcomed most easily when we are making institutions look generous, and less easily when we are asking them to change. We are often invited to the room, but not always to the centre of the conversation. And for those of us outside the dominant tradition, legitimacy is still too often conditional. We are asked to represent “our communities” rather than understood as people helping to shape the moral and civic life of Britain itself.

That is why the front row mattered.

Not because seating plans are everything, but because they tell the truth. They reveal who is understood to belong near power and who is expected to orbit around it. Today, faith leaders were visible, deliberately so, not tucked away as decorative evidence of diversity, but brought close to the centre of the national religious picture. And for someone like me, who has spent enough years in enough rooms to know how often those details tell the real story, that did not feel incidental. It felt meaningful.

Which is why I left Canterbury feeling both uplifted and challenged.

Uplifted because there was something genuinely moving in seeing a woman in that chair and allowing myself, for once, not to dilute the significance of it. Challenged because moments like this do not absolve the rest of us of responsibility. They intensify it.

If women in faith have already spent decades proving that we can lead, preach, think, build, hold, and transform, then what do we do now with moments like this? How do we ally across traditions not only to celebrate one another’s breakthroughs, but to make one another’s leadership more possible? How do we use access not only personally, but structurally? How do we notice who is still missing, who is still unnamed, who is still being asked to stand politely at the edge of the square, and refuse to let that remain normal?

That, for me, is the work now.

Not simply to celebrate firsts, but to make sure they are not left standing alone. Not simply to admire symbolic breakthroughs, but to ask what they demand of the rest of us. Not simply to be grateful that the frame has widened, but to keep widening it until the sight of women exercising religious authority in public no longer feels exceptional, but entirely, unquestionably part of the fabric of this country.

And perhaps that is what I carried away most strongly from Canterbury today: not only the joy of seeing a woman in that chair, but the quiet, insistent sense that moments like this are not an ending. They are a call. A call to build institutions, relationships, and a public religious life that are brave enough to recognise women of faith not as anomalies, not as symbols, not as occasional breakthroughs, but as leaders whose authority was never the problem. The problem was whether the rest of the world was ready to see it.