Gender equality in Christianity: close ups on a mixed record – Michel Grandjean
A sample of medieval and modern attitudes
In seeking to assess the position granted women in Christian history, it will not do to settle for generalities. It may however be established from the outset that on the whole, in the matter of social relations between men and women, Christianity inherited the defining features of each of the societies in which it settled and adopted them. When altering these defining features, it did so in a way broadly favourable to women.
Take the example of antiquity: It is well known that in the Greek and Roman world, women were hardly ever considered as persons of equal value to men. Thus Aristote[1] thought the female (across all species, therefore including humans) a defective male (Politics I, 12). Now, a few exceptions notwithstanding, this apprehension pervades the whole of classical Christian literature (“patristics[2]”) as well as that of the Latin Middle-Ages. Thus Christian authors never miss an opportunity to remind all and sundry that Adam was created before Eve. This affords men precedence over women. One of the greatest shcolastic[3] theologians, Thomas Aquinas[4], thus quotes Aristotle's view – which he shares – of woman as an in some way defective being. This said ancient Christianity never admitted polygamy and always held that, before God, women and men were of equal worth. So, whether in Antiquity or in the Middle-Ages, no theologian or church authority can be found who asserts that women have no soul or would even venture to raise doubts on the matter. Contrary to the claims of a persistent legend attached to the 6th century second Council of Macon the echoes of which reverberate in the 21st century, the question of whether women had a soul or not was never up for discussion.
This fundamental equality in terms of divine truths did not, however, translate into social or political equality. For all that the Middle-Ages counts a good few women holding some share in power (queens, abbesses[5], for instance) it was unthinkable in mediaeval society to allow a woman to undertake studies at the university. Neither were they to access professions deemed superior because of the competences they required or the prestige they bestowed, such as priesthood, medicine or the law.
Yet it turns out some women – brought to general attention by historical research undertaken in recent decades – had no qualms in disputing the principle according to which they were supposed to submit in every respect to men's will. Thus in the12th century, the dissenting voice of distinguished abbess Hildegard of Bingen[6]: in 1179, she stood up, Antigone[7]- like, to her her ecclesial hierarchy (in the event the prelates of Mainz) who had ordered her to have a dead person's body removed from her abbey's grounds. In this however, Hildegard did not call into question the hierarchical structure of the church or the fact that membership of the secular clergy[8] was restricted to men. At the beginning of the 15th century, Christine de Pizan[9] took the matter further, the first among women to challenge the notion of an inherent superiority of man over woman: The woman, she points out was created out of the man's rib. Does not that suggest that she is to stand at his side not below him (as if, say, she had been made from his feet)? Thereafter, some isolated voices can be heard here and there championing gender equality. They are essentially ‘irregulars' like Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim[10] in the 16th century or François Poullain de La Barre[11] at the end of the 17th century. Neither should be considered as representative of their time as their undeniable significance has only been re-discovered rather belatedly (in the second half or last quarter of the 20th century).
