Confronting 19th century mainstream thinking: a case in point
It would hardly be an exaggeration to state that, until the 19th century, throughout the Christian traditions (orthodoxy[1], Roman Catholicism[2] , Protestantism[3] ), outlooks were beholden to patriarchy[4]: A division of labour deemed founded in Scripture, and therefore willed by God Himself, allocated political and ecclesiastical roles to men, and to women the care of home and family. Yet again, it would be easy to quote numerous exceptions to this model but it is precisely their exceptional dimensions that mark out such outstanding feminine destinies. The 1837 predication of a Boston minister (quoted here by way of an example, not for any importance vested in it) is pretty representative of the generally held view: external affairs (professional life, military and political involvement, social action, Church responsibilities etc.) fall to men and internal affairs (home management, children's education, caring, etc.) to women. Women have a role to play in the devising of a happy society but essentially through the harmony they uphold in their home. Accordingly it does not come within theur purview to hold public office. Representing this division of labour as God's very own will, such ministers as this Boston man turned the traditional feminine condition into a historical immutable given and felt able to accuse dissenting women of rebellion against the natural order and against God himself. From this angle he found it perfectly normal for a working woman, say a shopkeeper, a nurse, a teacher to earn less than a man .
This type of discourse was about to meet with increasingly sharp criticism, which would gain wider and wider audiences over the 19th and 20th centuries. Short of presenting an overview of the struggle for gender equality in the context of Christianity we will focus on one text – arguably the first – to found the necessity of equality in a biblical argumentation. We owe this text to a woman as yet hardly known beyond researchers of Anglo-Saxon feminism. Sarah Grimké[5], born in Charleston (South Carolina) in an Episcopalian[6] family, fought on two fronts in the1880s: for the abolition of slavery on the one hand and for gender equality on the other. In their letter-form promptly published in an opinion periodical before coming out in book-form the following year, Grimké's Letters on the Equality of the Sexes (Boston, 1838) call for an absolute equality of rights and duties between men and women: they were created equal and, in spite the Fall[7] and, in their subsequent abasement, they remain equal. Accordingly, women should, like men, be entitled to accede superior education (universities would remain out of bounds for them in the West until the second half of the 19th century) and able to exercise all their functions and professions, including the ministry[8] . For the same work, women ought to receive the same salary as men. Grimké denounces the domination men have universally exercised over women in virtually all cultures and religions. And yet, she points out, lining up some examples through her pages, women are not less intelligent than men, less strong or less brave. Women, in one word, have nothing to be ashamed of.
Grimké's struggle arose from a specific set of circumstances: in 1837 she delivered in New England a series of talks against slavery, visiting Connecticut and Massachusetts towns, frequently speaking in Presbyterian churches (often the only public venue available to her). Whereupon she found herself chastised by ministers who rudely reminded her that, actually, women must “keep silence in the churches” (according to a verse in the New Testament: 1 Corinthians 14: 34). Grimké realized at this point that the arguments – primarily the Biblical ones – with which she defended the “blacks” against the “whites” also applied when championing women's equality to men and that she only needed implement minor adjustments in her discourse to pass from the defense of the oppressed blacks to that of excluded women.
Faced with soundly established exegetic traditions, Grimké displays a freedom of thought rare at the time of her writing: she announces that no obstacle will hinder her quest of the truth. Interpretive traditions patently posterior to the Bible can hardly be thought to have as much authority as the Bible itself. And the oft-stated assertion that the Bible established man as a creature superior to woman, she ventured, did not place the argument beyond questioning. Quite the reverse: Grimké sets about to expose the weakness inherent to the interpretive tradition and shows that if, in such and such a Biblical text, man does appear superior to woman, this should only be understood within a cultural context liable to evolve, andtin no way as the very will of God
She does not stop there. If interpretive traditions are posterior to the Bible and are not, like it, divinely inspired[9] , the same goes, thinks Gimké, for its translations. Although, much to her chagrin, she was not able to gain proper knowledge of Greek and Hebrew, Grimké met clergy who taught her the basics of the Biblical language. Enough for her to spot translation mistakes in the Authorised English Bible read at the time in pretty well all English speaking Reformed churches, the King James Bible[10] . Gimké notes – with a rigor no philologist could deny her – that in the New Testament[11] , the Greek term diakonos, an epicene[12] word meaning servant, gets translated differently when applied to a man (in which case it gives minister) or a woman (in which case it becomes servant and thus a lower order).
But an even greater advance is Grimké's attempt to illuminate the fact that the roles ascribed by this or that society to men and women often have nothing or very little to do with biological considerations. To be sure, men often have a muscular advantage over women... and Grimké states her willingness to acknowledge the superiority they claim on this particular point. But in respect of the soul, of intelligence and virtues, there is no way of distinguishing women from men. Bereft of the conceptual apparatus that will be developed in the second half of the 20th century in the West, Grimké has thus introduced the distinction between sex as a biological data (whereby e.g. women bears children and feed them), and gender (on the basis of which a society wills on or denies women such and such a function). Therefore confining women to home duties, however many women may be found to be housewives in the Bible, is imposing on them a vision that, in Grimké's view, has nothing to do with God's will but rather hangs on the shared opinion of this or that society. More than one century before Simone de Beauvoir[13] in France, Sarah Grimké would have readily stated that “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”, it being understood that “woman” is read here as a gender construct.
