"... under forvandlingens lov" : en analyse av stortingsdebatten om kvinnelige prester i 1930-årene

Sammanfattning: That the Church of Norway has now adopted gender equality as its policy, is a new situation in a historical perspective, and is the result of a long process within the framework of the state church system. In this context, the way in which the Storting (the Norwegian parliament) dealt with the issue of admitting women to clerical offices in the 1930s was important. The purpose of this thesis has been to examine the argumentation of the members of the Storting, and the way in which this argumentation was related to developments within the Church and within society. The arguments for and against allowing women to be ministers in the debate in 1934 and in 1938 are expounded and systematized with the help of methodology inspired by the "pro et contra" method of Arne Næss, whilst material from the intermediate debate in 1936 is mainly included in parts of the rest of the analysis, where the arguments are accounted for within their context. The understanding of the debate in this thesis is that it was basically a battle for gender equality. The study classifies the debate in the following way: the view of women, the view of the Church, the view of the role of the parliamentarians and contemporary understanding. The contextual examination of the debate is organized in corresponding sections. The presentation is based on a more general historical background, involving a thematic analysis of the debate in the Storting in 1912 on admitting women to public offices. The thesis shows that the debate took place at a time when sharply opposing views of women were in evidence. It examines the relationship between the fight for equality and the gradual shift in the Church's view about women's service, and how the issue of formal and actucal power within the Church was made vivacious. The Labour Party was unanimously in favour of women ministers, the Christian Democratic Party of Norway was opposed, whilst the compromise proposal, which provided a provisional solution to the matter in 1938, came from the Liberal Party. The conclusion of the thesis is that the underlying reasons for the main divisions in the points of view about women ministers are to be found in the diverging views about the relationship between the sexes, understanding of Christianity, insight as a parliamentarian and the historical development. From a methodological point of view, as reflected upon in the thesis, the main pattern is that the question of how the members of the Storting argued is answered by using an analysis that has its basis in a positivistic orientation, whilst the question of how the argumentation was related to developments within the Church and within society is answered by using a more hermeneutical approach.