In Alice Through the Looking Glass, Alice ends up in a confusing conversation with Humpty Dumpty. Having declared that “there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents,” Humpty Dumpty concludes, “There’s glory for you!” The story continues,
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”
“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
This exchange gets to the heart of much Alice finds bewildering in Wonderland. Words there so often don’t mean what they might mean in her world. Alice does the best thing she can under the circumstances: She recognizes that she doesn’t know what Humpty Dumpty means by the word “glory.” But the remainder of their conversations shows how even when someone explains what he means by a word, we may not be willing to accept his definition—especially when (as in this case) his definition of a word is actually “a nice knock-down argument.”
When it comes to the word “feminism” and its relationship with Christianity, we’re at an equivalent impasse. When yard signs in my neighborhood proclaim “Women’s Rights Are Human Rights,” every Christian can agree. However, I know that what my neighbors mean by “women’s rights” includes the freedom to abort an unborn child.
Indeed, the nesting of abortion at the heart of many people’s definition of the word “feminism” today amounts to a “nice knock-down argument” proving that Christianity is antithetical to feminism. Ironically, this definition works both for feminists who want to argue against Christianity and also for Christians who want to argue against feminism.
But if we look at the origins of women’s rights, we’ll find that far from being founded on abortion or autonomy, they actually grew out of Christianity. If we attempt to press “eject” on Christianity, we’ll lose not only any basis for protecting the unborn but also any basis for protecting equal rights for women.
Women in the Greco-Roman Empire
Rewind the clock 2,000 years, and you’ll find yourself stuck in an ancient world that doesn’t recognize the equal value of women. Aristotle proclaimed what seemed like a self-evident truth within the Greco-Roman Empire: “Between the sexes, the male is by nature superior and the female inferior.”
Before Christianity started to affect the empire’s ethics, freeborn Roman women enjoyed two things often celebrated today as feminist goods: permissive divorce laws and access to abortion without moral censure (albeit with physical risk). But far from the Roman Empire recognizing that women’s rights are human rights, it drew a line between women who mattered and women who didn’t, relegating millions of enslaved women and women caught up in the sex industry to the latter category.
If we look at the origins of women’s rights, we will find that far from being founded on abortion or autonomy, they actually grew out of Christianity.
As historian Kyle Harper explains, “The complete, violent exploitation of women without any claim to civic protection was simply, as a problem in its own right, invisible.”
For freeborn women, Romans recognized that someone other than the woman’s husband forcing sex without consent was rape. Indeed, a freeborn woman’s sexual honor was her prized possession. But for women not born free, there was no concept of consent, because they had no honor to lose. A Roman man would no more ask if a slave or a prostitute consented to have sex with him than he would ask a chair if it consented to him sitting on it.
The free availability of sex with people whose bodies didn’t matter was seen as a necessary outlet for male libido, channeling sexual energy away from other free men’s wives and daughters. The idea of sexual consent for every woman—including slaves and prostitutes—would’ve sounded wild to ancient Greco-Roman ears.
What’s more, while many modern feminists would cheer for the ethics of the Roman Empire when it came to abortion access, few would celebrate the way in which infanticide—mostly in the form of abandonment of unwanted infants, who would either die or be picked up and raised as slaves or prostitutes—was seen as morally unproblematic. Modern Western culture draws a moral line between newborn and unborn infants. Ancient Western culture placed both in the same category: property to be disposed of if unwanted.
So where did we modern Westerners get the idea that all human beings—male and female, rich and poor, young and old—have equal and inestimable value? Historian Tom Holland explains that the origins of the idea that every human being “possessed an inherent worth” regardless of his or her status, strength, or sex “lay not in the French Revolution, nor in the Declaration of Independence, nor in the Enlightenment, but in the Bible.”
Bible’s View of Women
The Bible’s first words about human beings declare that all humans—male and female—are made “in the image of God,” and men and women together are commissioned to both fill and rule over God’s creation under him (Gen. 1:26–28). When Genesis 2 focuses on the creation of the woman, she’s described as a “helper fit for” the man (2:18).
The Hebrew word translated as “helper” is most often used of God in the Old Testament, so this isn’t a demeaning term. So the Bible starts with a vision of both men and women imaging God and sharing the call to rule over his creation under him. They’re alike. But they’re also opposite in the precise ways needed for them to reproduce.
When the first man and woman rebel against God’s rule, they feel consequences in differentiated ways: The man will experience painful toil (3:17) and the woman painful labor (v. 16). But this doesn’t mean the woman’s role is thenceforth restricted to reproduction.
The description of the ideal wife at the end of the Old Testament book of Proverbs only mentions her children once—“Her children rise up and call her blessed” (31:28)—amid a description of a woman who (in modern terms) is working both inside and outside the home, and providing from her income not only for her own household but also for the poor (v. 20).
In the Gospels, a woman is the first person to whom God reveals Jesus’s identity (Luke 1:26–38), and we see women prophesying about Jesus when he was a baby (vv. 39–56; 2:36–38). During his ministry, we see Jesus validating and protecting women, regardless of their marital status.
Some of Jesus’s itinerant disciples were women, including wealthy women who provided for the group (8:1–3). Jesus defended a woman’s right to learn from him, even if that meant neglecting what was more traditional women’s work (10:38–42). After his resurrection, Jesus revealed himself first to his female disciples (Matt. 28:1–10; John 20:1–18). In Jesus, we see a full-orbed welcome and validation of women, including those he might have been expected to reject.
In Jesus, we see a full-orbed welcome and validation of women, including those he might have been expected to reject.
In the rest of the New Testament, the apostle Paul (who’s often cast as a misogynist because of his clear differentiation of roles in Christian marriage and the church) asserted boldly for his day the countercultural notion that in Christ “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for [we] are all one” (Gal. 3:28).
In his teaching on marriage, Paul’s call to wives—“Submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church”—is often seen in isolation from Paul’s even more demanding instruction to husbands: “Love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph. 5:22–23, 25).
On women’s roles in church, Paul’s words are often heard today only as restrictive. But Paul’s instruction to Timothy begins with an imperative: “Let a woman learn” (1 Tim. 2:11). Paul grounds his understanding of the roles of men and women in the church in Genesis 1–3, not in women’s ability to teach (vv. 13–14).
Paul’s respect for women is evident in how he talks about his gospel partners. Paul’s letter to the Romans was delivered by a woman, whom Paul describes like this: “I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a servant of the church at Cenchreae, that you may welcome her in the Lord in a way worthy of the saints, and help her in whatever she may need from you, for she has been a patron of many and of myself as well” (Rom. 16:1–2).
We don’t know if Phoebe was married or whether she had children. But Paul calls her a “servant of the church,” using a Greek word also translated as “deacon” in the New Testament. Next, he sends greetings to a married couple: “Greet Prisca and Aquila, my fellow workers in Christ Jesus, who risked their necks for my life, to whom not only I give thanks but all the churches of the Gentiles give thanks as well” (vv. 3–4).
Prisca, who was also called Priscilla, is typically listed before her husband when they’re mentioned in the New Testament. Priscilla and Aquila were tentmakers, like Paul, and they accompanied him on missionary journeys. They also hosted a church in their home and helped a preacher named Apollos understand “the way of God more accurately” (Acts 18:26). Paul went on to commend five other women in Romans 16 as colaborers in ministry. Far from only valuing women as wives and mothers, Paul seemed to value them primarily as gospel workers.
In short, while Paul called men and women to different roles in marriage and within the church, he fully validated women’s discipleship and gospel work, as well as work both inside and outside the home. What’s more, rather than women’s relative physical weakness being a grounds for husbands to dominate their wives, Peter offered it as a reason for husbands to honor their wives as fellow heirs of God’s grace (1 Pet. 3:7).
Defining Feminism
In The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory, Abigail Favale explains, “Feminism as a term first began to circulate in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, making its way across the Atlantic by 1910.”
In America, the women’s rights movement had strong ties with both the abolition movement and the temperance movement, all of which wielded Christian arguments. “First-wave feminists (late 19th–early 20th century), for the most part, were not radicals or revolutionaries,” Favale explains. “Most were middle-class wives and mothers, committed Christians who opposed abortion.”
While Paul called men and women to different roles in marriage and within the church, he fully validated women’s discipleship and gospel work, as well as work both inside and outside the home.
While some conservatives today decry “feminism” as a concept, almost everyone takes for granted the goals of so-called first-wave feminists: for instance, the right to vote, own property, have custody of children, serve as jurors, and have equal access to education. When conservative women today write and speak decrying feminism, they’re trading on the gains of first-wave feminism even as they make their case.
Second-wave feminism (1960–1980), by contrast, was fed at least in part by a distinctly anti-Christian stream. In her influential book The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir acknowledged, “Without a doubt, there is a breath of charity in the Gospels that spread to women as well as to lepers; poor people, slaves, and women are the ones who adhere most passionately to the new law. In the very early days of Christianity, women who submitted to the yoke of the Church were relatively respected.”
But Beauvoir went on to write that “although marriage is considered an institution demanding mutual fidelity, it seems clear that the wife must be totally subordinate to the husband: through Saint Paul the fiercely antifeminist Jewish tradition is affirmed.” To prove this, Beauvoir quotes Paul calling wives to submit to their husbands. But she fails to quote Paul’s reciprocal command to husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her (Eph. 5:25).
When both elements of Paul’s teaching are conjoined, we see (contra Beauvoir) that he’s not presenting woman as man’s “vassal.” Rather, Paul presents marriage as a picture of Jesus’s one-flesh union with his church, based on the radical, profoundly sacrificial love that took him to the cross. Beauvoir repudiated Christian sexual ethics, affirmed abortion, and sought a basis for male-female equality outside of Christianity.
Where first-wave feminism saw the rights of women and the protection of their children—both born and unborn—going hand in hand, second-wave feminists were initially divided on abortion. But as Favale explains, this division changed when the National Organization for Women (NOW) allied with the male-led National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Law (NARAL). This alliance led to abortion being seen as central to women’s rights.
Likewise, women’s rights have come to be seen as yoked together with the belief that the sexual revolution represented an advance for women, liberating them from the expectation that sex must be confined to marriage. But in reality, the Christian restriction of sex to monogamous marriage from the start was primarily a restriction on men. Christianity’s innovation when it came to sexual ethics was to set the same expectations for husbands as had always been expected of wives.
The removal of this expectation wasn’t liberating women but rather permitting men to have sex without commitment to a woman or responsibility for any children who might be conceived.
Those who see abortion as pivotal to women’s rights argue that requiring a woman to go through with an unwanted pregnancy is limiting to her career and detrimental to her physical and mental health. They cite especially the cases of the most vulnerable women and those who became pregnant as a result of rape.
But if we remove Jesus from our ethical foundations, we lose our ultimate foundation for the wrongness of rape. If the only story we can tell about what human beings are is that we’re products of evolutionary forces, we have nothing on which to anchor our abhorrence of rape, or our belief that the abandonment of sickly or disabled babies is morally wrong. If there’s no God, the baby in a mother’s womb is just a collection of atoms and molecules. But that’s all the mother is as well.
Christianity’s innovation when it came to sexual ethics was to set the same expectations for husbands as had always been expected of wives.
Second- and third-wave (1990s) feminists claim to have a basis for equality for women aside from Christianity. But even as they advocate for women’s rights, they stand on biblical foundations.
Holland observes, “That every human being possessed an equal dignity was not remotely self-evident a truth. A Roman would have laughed at it.” Thus, “to campaign against discrimination on the grounds of gender . . . was to depend on large numbers of people sharing in a common assumption: that everyone possessed an inherent worth.” And as Holland explains, this claim was introduced and normalized across the West by Christianity.
First-wave feminists defined feminism in ways that every Christian should affirm and advocated for women and their children to have rights and protections thoroughly in line with Christian ethics. Second- and third-wave feminists repositioned feminism to align with things Christians cannot affirm, most notably, abortion. To answer the question this essay has posed, we need to clarify our terms.
What’s more, in the first quarter of the 21st century, not only has the definition of “feminism” been contested, but the definition of “woman” has also been up for grabs.
Defining Women
One of the gains of 20th-century feminism was giving women freedom not to be defined by gender stereotypes. To be a woman was to have a female body; it didn’t require showing evidence of typically feminine interests or sensibilities. As a woman who has always enjoyed debating ideas and never enjoyed shopping for clothes, this has been a win for me. It has also been a win from a Christian perspective.
While the Bible recognizes women as both like and opposite to men physically, it says almost nothing about what men and women are like psychologically. What’s more, rather than calling us to different virtues, it calls both men and women to the selfsame things: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Gal. 5:22–23). Notably, after calling husbands and wives to different roles in marriage, Paul called both men and women to be “strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might” (Eph. 6:10).
In the first quarter of the 21st century, however, gender stereotypes have been shoehorned back into the definition of a woman by the rise of the transgender movement. Rather than defining a woman as an adult human female (someone with a woman’s body), trans activists have argued that a woman is someone who feels like a woman.
Favale points out the circularity of this definition by imagining herself in Alice in Wonderland’s shoes, talking to a giant, smoking caterpillar:
“What, pray, are you?” asks the caterpillar.
“I am a woman.”
“Oh are you?”
“Yes, at least . . .” I pause, suddenly unsure. “I think so?”
“Do you feel like a woman?”
“I’m not sure,” I say. “What does it mean to feel like a woman?”
“To feel like a woman is to be a woman,” pronounces the caterpillar, taking a long drag from his hookah.
“But what is a woman?”
“Someone who feels like a woman.”
“But . . . what does it mean to feel like a woman, if being a woman is defined as feeling like a woman?”
“Transphobe,” puffs the caterpillar.
As Favale whimsically notes, interrogating what it means to feel like a woman can quickly be shut down with accusations of transphobia. But as we listen to the stories of trans celebrities like reality TV star Jazz Jennings or actor Laverne Cox, we’ll find that feeling like a woman ultimately boils down to gender stereotypes.
The trans movement has turned the clock back on feminism when it comes to recognizing that both men and women can legitimately have a range of interests and sensibilities without their maleness or femaleness being called into question. But it has also struck at the heart of feminism by removing any stable definition of what the word “woman” even means.
In the face of the trans rights movement, Christianity is not antithetical to feminism. Rather, at the most basic level, it’s feminism’s best defense.
If a biological male can identify as a woman and be treated as a woman in every respect—whether competing in women’s sports or entering women’s shelters—the claim that “women’s rights are human rights” has been evacuated of all meaning. Moreover, hard-won protections for women, who are significantly weaker and more vulnerable physically than men, are lost.
While resistance to the trans movement in the United States has been driven largely by religious conservatives, in the United Kingdom (my homeland) it has been driven largely by (often secular) feminists, who’re finding themselves—to their surprise—cobelligerents with Christians. In the face of the trans rights movement, Christianity isn’t antithetical to feminism. Rather, at the most basic level, it’s feminism’s best defense.
“Impenetrability! That’s what I say!” Humpty Dumpty exclaims later in his conversation with Alice. And many of our conversations about feminism—and even about women—have become impenetrable because we’re working with a range of meanings of those words. When Alice politely asks what he means, Humpty Dumpty replies,
“I meant by ‘impenetrability’ that we’ve had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you’d mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don’t mean to stop here all the rest of your life.”
“That’s a great deal to make one word mean,” Alice said in a thoughtful tone.
“When I make a word do a lot of work like that,” said Humpty Dumpty, “I always pay it extra.”
Second- and third-wave feminists have been making the word “feminism” do a lot of work that it wasn’t originally meant to do. Christians have a choice: abandon the term or reclaim it, even as we reclaim the word “woman” to mean “adult human female.”
In either case, Christians must advocate for women’s rights and interests in accordance with the Bible, which is the first and best foundation for the equal valuing of women and men.
