Why Aren't Women Happier?

A Beth Allison Barr Roundup

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jozef_Isra%C3%ABls_(1824-1911)_-_An_Unhappy_Woman,_Domestic_Sorrows_-_NPTMG-1951.46.7_-_Newport_Museum_and_Art_Gallery.jpg

I was wandering around the interwebs this morning, trying to think what to write about, when I discovered that I myself am all over the place reviewing Beth Allison Barr’s Becoming the Pastor’s Wife. I’m in Eikon (excerpt below) and CRJ—here’s a taste:

Reprising the same breezy, colloquial style of The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth (Brazos Press, 2021),² Dr. Barr weaves together her own experiences as a pastor’s wife with her scholarship, anecdotes from the classroom, and her opinions about Dorothy Patterson, whom she is not shy to excoriate. One of the pillars supporting her case that women in the past exercised independent authority in the church rests on the Veiled Woman of the Priscilla Catacombs. On a trip to Rome with students, Barr took some time on her own to see the fresco. Buried underneath the city, the catacombs were the early gathering place of Christians. They hold a treasure trove of archeological data from the first centuries of the church. The Priscilla Catacombs, according to Barr, “contain so many images of women that, in trying to make sense of them, some scholars have postulated that the catacombs were a site of women’s worship” (p. 35). They contain one of the earliest depictions of Mary, the mother of the Lord, as well as His friends, Mary and Martha. For Barr, one of the most significant images “shows a veiled woman presiding” over “a communal meal,” the famous Fractio Panis (or Breaking of the Bread) (35).

It was another room, though, the Cubiculum of the Valeta, that ignited Barr’s imagination. This is the Room of the Veiled Woman.³ Scholars whom Barr trusts speculate that the woman is dressed in “what could be liturgical garb” and that the way she is holding her hands “would have been understood as religiously authoritative in the Greco-Roman world: the orans position” — standing with arms extended upward and palms open (36). This, for Barr, leaning on Karen Jo Torjesen, is “evidence of the earliest tradition of women preachers” (36). According to Torjesen, the order of widows commended by Paul to Timothy was, by the third century, “consistently listed with the clergy” (38).

The orans position alone, for Barr, is significant, but the figures on either side of the woman are pregnant with evocative feminist and liturgical meaning. They could be construed as that which “represents her ordination” and “her ministry” (39). Barr believes the scene shows a ceremony. “The seated man (the seat is a sign of authority) appears to wear a liturgical robe (the dalmatic) with a cloak (a pallium) around his shoulders.” He is “laying his hand on her shoulder” (38). In this scene, she holds a scroll, but in another scene, mirroring the other, she is “seated in a high-backed chair” (38). The scroll has been exchanged for a baby. What does this series of images signify? Barr’s tour guide believed they were “scenes from the deceased woman’s life — that in the center image she is shown praying in paradise, the left image is her wedding, and the right image is her as a mother” (39).⁴ Barr doesn’t think so. “It is also possible,” she writes, “that the threefold image represents an entirely different range of events from her life — that the center image portrays the woman in a religiously authoritative position, the left image depicts a consecration ceremony, and the right image depicts her fulfilling the function of her office, caring for unwanted babies” (38).

Barr believes “the Priscilla Catacombs present an abundance of depictions from the early centuries of Christianity representing women, many of whom are in authoritative positions” (40). Admitting that they do not “conclusively prove female leadership in the earliest centuries of the church,” Barr believes there is enough evidence to “undermine the claim that male-only leadership is a matter of ‘fundamental biblical authority’” (41).

Barr is wise to hedge her claims. While certainly gathering places of faithful Christians in times of persecution, the Catacombs were first and foremost funerary. They were monuments to the dead more than anything else. A quick search on the subject shows that the scholars Barr relies on fall outside mainstream opinion, which doesn’t necessarily make them wrong, but certainly increases the burden of proof for their arguments. In other words, we don’t know who she was and can only guess, which is what Barr has done.

Not being a scholar of medieval Christian history, I, of course, do not wish to tread where I have earned no hearing. Nevertheless…

Read the whole thing, and check out the podcast:

And over at Eikon:

If there is one pervasive theme running through Becoming The Pastor’s Wife: How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman’s Path To Ministry, it would be the assumption that women should live and work independently of men. Dependence, for Barr, portends the abuse and subjugation of women (160). Despite her warnings, those within complementarian ecclesial spaces, the highwater mark of female dependency, continue to use “the Bible to justify privileging male authority.” They embrace “a patriarchal system born in white evangelicalism.” They “claim to support the spiritual equality of women and men even as they argue that God ordained a gender hierarchy and assigned a permanently subordinate role to women” (1–2). But, the reader might ask, when were women ever “independent” from men, especially in the church?

Read the whole thing!

I must say, it was a bit much to spend such a long time with this book which I found provocative and yet lacking in substantive insight that might actually help women in the church or in their homes or in public life. Clearly women are not happy today, generally speaking. What is the source of this unhappiness? Is it that they don’t all get to be the “independent leaders” they know they can be?