God's Design for Women by Sharon James

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Katie Stringer has gone into more detail for us on one of the picks she really enjoyed, God’s Design for Women.

In post one we looked at how Jesus treats women. If we had to give him a score card he would be off the charts. Five stars simply wouldn’t be enough for someone who can bring total forgiveness, complete healing and such satisfying teaching to women’s lives. Someone like that would need a new rating system, dare I say, they deserve to be worshipped. In this post I want to focus on the second part of Sharon James’ claim that Jesus’ followers also sought to bring good news to the lives of women. And this will lead us to the beginning of the feminist movement. 

Many people binge-watched the television series The Handmaid’s Tale, based on the book by Margaret Atwood (1985). Elizabeth Moss plays the character of Offred, a young woman transported to a dystopian nightmare of sexual slavery, the product of religious fundamentalism. The storytelling is powerful, but the subject matter feels deeply uncomfortable, especially if you’re a Christian. Is this really where Christianity leads? James writes, “ [The Handmaid’s Tale] portrays the enemy as ‘patriarchy’, and seems to confirm the radical feminist notion that Christianity is bad news for women. However the reality is that the sexual slavery endemic in the ancient world was dispelled  by the advance of Christianity. Sexual slavery is advancing again today, not because of Christianity, but fuelled by the global pornography industry, which Christians oppose.” (25-26) While The Handmaid’s Tale is fascinating viewing, it’s pure fiction when it comes to laying all the blame at the feet of Christianity. It does, however, neatly encapsulate the radical feminist challenge to the moral teaching of the Bible. And it’s a challenge James urges and equips her readers to answer.

James’ book takes us on a sweeping tour of Christian history with a magnifying glass over the lives of women. The Apostle Paul writing in the 1st Century taught a single standard of morality for men and women (1 Corinthians 7:1-6), and called for husbands to love their wives sacrificially (Ephesians 5:25-33).  Because of the controversy that often surrounds the teaching of Paul today we can miss the fact that the parts of the Bible he penned actually elevated the status of women in a society that regarded them (along with children and slaves) at the time as inferior. James writes, “These values were liberating and life giving compared with the exploitation and abuse suffered by so many at the time.” (18) . 

James traces the expansion of Christianity all the way up to the Reformation in the 16th Century and early female missionaries, crossing cultures and seeking to bring God’s good news to the ends of the earth. As we seek to make sense of the lives of women today and whether the Bible is good news for women, knowing our feminist history is vitally important. Here then, is a quick sketch of the different waves of feminism that I gleaned from James’ book:

The First Wave

In the late 18th century, 19th century and early 20th century, the first wave of feminism grew from a desire to end legal discrimination against women. Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her now famous manifesto, A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792, arguing for the education of girls and women based on the logic that women have been created by God as rational beings just like men. James points out that Christians did the heavy lifting of turning Wollstonecraft’s ideas into action. The Christian reformer, Hannah More (1745-1833), as well as writing, “gave generously of her own time and resources to establish schools for poor girls  as well as boys.” (33) Many were rallied to support the rights of women, which overlapped with other issues of importance to Christians such as abolishing slavery and prohibiting or limiting alcohol consumption. This first wave brought about the right to vote for women in Britain and this trickled slowly around the globe. (More slowly than you might imagine in some places. Women did not receive the right to vote until 1971 in Switzerland and 2015 in Saudi Arabia.)

The Second Wave

If the first wave was on about equal opportunities for women, the second wave looked very different. James writes that the second wave wanted ‘equal outcomes’ for women, for example 50% of each profession should be women. During the period of 1960-1990, to strive for this goal, second wave feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan sought to liberate women from their homes and families. Their writing called for a dismantling of patriarchal structures in an attempt to bring about equality between the sexes. Germaine Greer, writing in 1970, dismissed the first wave as ‘genteel middle-class women calling for reform.’ James ripostes,  “By contrast the second wave was about ungenteel middle-class women demanding revolution.” (36) It’s a great line because it picks up on some of the criticism second wave feminists face about lack of inclusion extending to women of colour, women from lower socio-economic backgrounds and gender identity politics.

The Third Wave

Third wave feminism (1990-2010) brought about a new permission to behave badly. “The second wave had been characterised by academics expressing anger by writing books. By contrast, third wave feminism began with a grass-roots explosion of rage.” (46) Increasing attention was given to racial discriminitation and aggression, both overt and subtle. “The notion of ‘intersectionality’ became central: the idea that women may experience layers of oppression, caused, for example, by class and race, as well as by gender.” (47-48) This emergence of ‘identity politics’, brought to the fore the idea that the most oppressed will have access to deeper knowledge about society (knowledge that the powerful are blind to).

The Fourth Wave

Fourth Wave #MeToo feminism (2010- present) is characterised by an exposure of and challenge to abuse. You’d have to be living under a rock to miss the Harvey Weinstein case and cascade of abuse stories that spread across the globe. An eruption of stories, investigations and lawsuits of abuse and harassment by women at the hands of men spilled out across the West as well as parts of Asia and Latin America. I reflected in this section that I too sat at my computer and wrote a #MeToo. I cried reading my friends’ #MeToo posts as they were shared on social media. Reading this section suddenly felt a lot less distant and a lot more relevant to my life.

What I didn’t know so well before reading this book is how the different waves of feminism morphed and how inconsistent latter waves became with their former goals. There are things to be grateful for and things that have made female lives a lot more exposed and complicated. In next week’s post I want to tease this out some more, particularly the wreckage from the second wave around so-called sexual freedom and how this impacts lives today.

Reading through this compressed history of feminism I keep hearing Jesus’ words inside my head, “I came that they may have life and have it to the full!” (John 10:10) Jesus longs to give us a rich and satisfying life, if we will we turn to him.  Reading through this history gives some very clear insights into how change can be affected for good and for worse. Much good was achieved by first wave feminists who sought to promote a Biblical view of women and their innate dignity and worth. And much wreckage has been left by those who didn’t know their creator.  That desire for things to be better, for things that are not working to be radically destroyed and remade, is so human, and God knows all about it. He knows that change for the better is only really possible in knowing Christ. If we turn to him and trust him, that means this body of decay is thrown down and born again, to a life of living hope. (1 Peter 1:3)

Meet Katie Stringer

Katie has found new things to love in this tricky year! Covid 19 has caused her to fall in love with winter swimming and online Bible Study.  She is really looking forward to being back in the classroom in Term 3 teaching SRE at two Inner West high schools. She is studying at Moore College.