The Contemporary Woman

Can she really have it all?

Michele Guinness

• Publisher: Hodder Faith
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781529358339
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

At a time when the status of women is still being debated and challenged, how can women play a leading role in society, the workplace and the church? Michele Guinness has been there and done that - not without opposition and not without compromise. In this all-embracing, honest reflection on womanhood Michele uses her own upbringing in the Jewish community to re-examine the views and counterviews on the role of women throughout the Christian tradition and culture, drawing inspiration from scripture, history and personal experience. The Contemporary Woman celebrates a host of women through the ages - from the great biblical matriarchs to the modern-day trailblazers - who have inherited a passionate determination to pursue God's radical call. Michele will encourage women everywhere, of every age, to follow their hearts, and inspire a new generation to discover what it means to be a woman.

Part 1

The Hebrew Woman – A Matriarchal Heritage

Chapter 1

The Life-giving Woman

The book of Genesis (‘The Beginning’ in Hebrew) describes the start of history and her story. There is Adam all alone in a breathtaking, pristine, resplendent, new world. But there is no one to share his pleasure in the soft cotton wool balls that scud across the magnificent vault of a Wedgewood sky, or the diamond dew-drops that drip from the riot of multi coloured flowers nodding happily among endless acres of sweet-smelling grasses and stout, shady trees, or the foam-tipped aquamarine waters that lap gently around the borders of his garden. He tries to decide whether it’s possible to have a meaningful relationship with any of the creatures that roam freely on his land, but, strangely enough, none meet his particular requirements.

The job spec is fairly straightforward at this stage – someone who will share his heart, body, soul and mind. Only later, after the loss of his golden paradise, does he add cook, dishwasher, cleaner, childminder and general drudge to the list, someone to run the home and kids to free him to be a successful leader, to iron his shirts so that he looks the part, to fill his belly so he doesn’t suffer malnutrition on the way up, and to meet his bodily needs by metamorphosing into a sex strumpet when he returns from a difficult day at work.

For most of the twentieth century, particularly after two world wars when women showed how tough and competent they could be given the opportunity, a wife in the parlour contributed to a man’s status in society. Marriage meant upward mobility. He, in turn, kept an insurance policy in the bottom drawer, providing for the little woman in the event of her being careless enough to lose him. I remember as a child that when my mother’s friends did indeed face the trauma and ignominy of being without their breadwinner – for far less noble reasons than his unpredictable death – they often discovered that, despite their years of selfless service, when the bounder left them for a younger model they were in fact destitute and, since he hadn’t done them the favour of dying, unable to claim the benefits of that insurance.

The last century could be cruel to women. Yet this rigid middle-class division of roles – the superior male doing the work, the inferior woman seeing to his domestic needs – was regarded as a Christian principle, supported by the Church and often based on an extremely convenient misinterpretation of the creation story itself.

Woman is the image of her father

In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

(Gen. 1:27)

The first account of creation in Genesis 1 reveals an extraordinary reality. Individually and corporately, men and women are reflections of their father-creator in heaven. We have his capacity to love, laugh and form intimate relationships. ‘You want to know what I’m like?’ God asks human beings. ‘Then all you have to do is take a look in the mirror, or at the man or woman sitting next to you to see the pinnacle of my creative powers.’ And that can come as something of a shock to the system.

God is neither male nor female, and is fully reflected only in both genders. Both are given dominion over the created order and told to reproduce. Both are made from the same design, and of the same stuff – two sides of the same coin.

So how was it possible for the great early church father, Augustine, to write in the fourth century ad, ‘The woman herself alone is not the image of God, whereas the man alone is the image of God as fully and completely as when the woman is joined with him.?1 As early as the second century ad, the founder of systematic theology himself, Origen, said, ‘What is seen with the eyes of the creator is masculine, and not feminine, for God does not stoop to look at what is feminine and of the flesh.’2

How could they possibly think that God was male, wilfully ignoring the wonderful first creation account? The key is in the writings of yet another second-century Christian sage. Clement of Alexandria said, ‘Nothing for men is shameful, for man is endowed with reason; but for woman it brings shame even to reflect on what her nature is.’3 The early church fathers, conditioned by their own classical Greek culture, admired reason above all other human qualities. Being made in the image of God meant that, unlike animals, man, but not woman, had been given an intellect. It was obvious: he was eminently reasonable, while she – it was abundantly clear to every man – was irrational and incomprehensible, given to sudden mood swings and strange intuitions. And so they made an extraordinary quantum leap – that she could not have been made in the image of God. Whatever the book of Genesis said, she was intellectually inferior and therefore a lesser being spiritually.

It never seems to have occurred to the early fathers that it takes a very practical, rational person to run a home, a husband, children, a dog, a rabbit and a budgie, let alone fulfil the other jobs most women do. It never seems to have crossed their minds that men simply don’t understand woman’s logic. Instead, her so-called moods, her contrariness, her sheer illogicality, they reasoned, must have something to do with that monthly mystery that they found so distasteful. Nowhere in the Bible is there any suggestion that female hormones, whether kind or contrary, have any major effect on our ability to make decisions. Yet until recently in the West, and still in many Muslim countries, the idea that women are unsuited to certain tasks – usually ones that involve thinking – persists.

The tragedy is that the clear creation message – the innate equality of men and women – should be obvious to those who love and grasp the Genesis story, to a people entrusted with eyes to see it, not blinkered by history and culture – in other words, the Church. Equality certainly has no place in contemporary Chasidic Judaism, Islam or Hinduism, which put a far greater value on boys than girls. For instance, from a Muslim point of view:

A successful wife is one that recognises the husband’s nature. You should try and understand his temperament. If he is angry do not utter something that will increase his anger. Always watch his mood before speaking. If he responds to jokes by expressing happiness then continue doing so, otherwise not. If he is displeased with you, do not sit with a sullen face. Instead, plead with him for forgiveness and try to win him over whether it is your fault or not. This will result in his love increasing for you.4

Instead of proclaiming a radically different message, Christians, sadly, have tended to bang a very similar drum.

Even if our recent record is not quite so damning, we still do little to speak out for our sisters in a world where many women die in childbirth when the husband, who has first to give permission for a caesarian section, goes missing. After all, she’s easy to replace. For Professor Anne Garden MBE, retired Dean of Medicine at Lancaster University, working in India in the early days of her career was a rude awakening. A reluctant feminist, it was seeing how disposable women could be that changed her mind. ‘When men own women’s bodies they abuse them,’ she said to me.

In Afghanistan in the 1960s women had the vote. In the 1980s seven women were members of parliament. Before the mujahideen took power in 1992, 50 per cent of university students in Kabul were female. They were interested in fashion, wore make-up and mini-skirts and took education and a career for granted, much as women in the West. In 1996, when the Taliban filled the power vacuum created by the Russians, women were threatened with a lashing if they dared leave the home without being robed from head to toe in a heavy, scratchy burqa with its small, crocheted grille that barely allows the wearer to breathe or see. Professional women were denied any right to a career and ended up destitute, begging on the streets for food for their children. One in four women died giving birth in filthy, infested maternity hospitals. Education for girls was forbidden. Half the population became invisible. Farahnaz Nazir, founder of the Afghanistan Women’s Association, said, ‘Society is like a bird. It has two wings. And a bird cannot fly if one wing is broken.’

Today life is only slightly easier for women there and in many Muslim countries. Under Sharia law a man is entitled to have four wives, and a wife can do little without her husband’s say-so. He is entirely responsible for the family’s purse. A woman faces death by stoning for becoming pregnant after she has been raped. And men refuse to see that they are limited, earth-bound because of it.

But every now and then small signs of hope push their way through the unforgiving ground. In 2012, the Taliban shot fifteen-year-old Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai in the head three times for demanding education for girls. After her recovery she became the world’s most prominent campaigner for the right to education and was awarded Pakistan’s first National Youth Peace Prize, as well as the Nobel Peace Prize.

In May 2017 Afghanistan launched its first all-women TV channel, in an attempt to highlight the rights of Afghan women. Presenters and producers regularly receive death threats, but won’t let that stop them.

These are tiny jewels flickering in a dark world for many women, where there appears little political will or ability to act. Little girls endure enforced genital mutilation or have acid thrown in their faces as they walk to school, twelve and thirteen year olds are sold into marriage to much older men, their bodies unprepared physically to cope with rape and pregnancy. In her brilliant and carefully researched book Scars Across Humanity, which is a heart-breaking read, Elaine Storkey points out that in fact rape, domestic abuse, prostitution, honour killings and violence against women of every kind occur at all stages of life, and in all cultures and societies. And that the traditional patriarchy of the Church and the gender inequality it generated has in fact contributed to it.5

When the early church fathers countermanded the message of equality in Genesis they encouraged the reduction of women to a commodity, and the world was the darker and poorer. Throughout history, however, Christian women, largely acting alone, or in small, often despised groups, revived the radical flame and attacked basic injustices, achieved suffrage,6 improved the lot of prostitutes, offered education to the poorest and proclaimed new freedoms wherever they went.

Largely, however, the Church dropped the ball. The late twentieth-century feminist movement caught it before it touched the ground and ran with it, rising to the challenge laid down by early Christian feminists. They changed basic attitudes to divorce, women’s pay, child abuse and rape, and then went way beyond the God-given remit, claiming that women were morally superior and men dispensable.7 In today’s post-feminist era, men in the West are still struggling to redefine what it means to be a male, while the Church, always running to catch up, can, in many places, still be ambivalent about a woman’s role, and blames feminists for creating the problem in the first place, rather than reclaiming the trophy that should have been ours.

Man’s little helper?

It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitabl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface from the First Editor
• Preamble: Sometimes it’s Hard to Be a Woman
• Part 1: The Hebrew Woman – A Matriarchal Heritage
• 1 The Life-giving Woman
• 2 The Manipulative Woman
• 3 The Assertive Woman
• Part 2: The Christ-following Woman – A Liberating Inheritance?
• 4 A Woman of Little Status?
• 5 The Silent Woman?
• 6 The Submissive Woman?
• Part 3: The Contemporary Woman – Living with the Legacy
• 7 The Sexual Woman
• 8 The Mothering Woman
• 9 The Working Woman
• 10 A Woman of Experience and Maturity
• Acknowledgements
• Endnotes
• Imprint Page