What makes a strong woman? (Theology, Oxford)

Everyone has their own idea of what a strong woman is. For Forbes business magazine, which publishes an annual list of ‘the world’s most powerful women’, it’s top politicians and CEOs, activist billionaires and celebrities who ‘matter,’ like German chancellor Angela Merkel, Spanx CEO Sara Blakely and model Gisele Bündchen. For many pop followers, strong women are stars like Lady Gaga and Lorde who seem to take control of their own image. For community activists, it’s those mothers who hold the family together. For religious believers, a strong woman is one whose faith and purity endures against the odds. For movie moguls, it’s often feisty, sharp-witted girls who cut it with the lads, or wield a mean gun, or get their man before he gets them.

All these women have their own strengths. But asking the question about ‘strong’ women has encapsulated a problem. If you talked about a strong man, you’d be talking about a circus entertainer, maybe, or a brutal, unsophisticated leader. A strong man is a freak, a dunderhead, a thug, mostly. So why would we talk about a strong woman as if that’s a good thing? In a way, it’s just another way of saying it’s a woman’s fault if she is not treated with respect. If only she’d been stronger, then she could have overcome all the obstacles placed in her path!

Around the world today, countless women and girls are denied basic human needs. Countless woman and girls are subjected to difficult living conditions, abuse, child labour, sex trafficking, early and forced marriages, lack of education and income opportunity and other offences because they are born into cultures in which they are poorly valued. And millions of girls even in more enlightened cultures face continual problems with finding their place in the world, in being properly treated and valued in the workplace, in achieving the equality of status which should be their right as human beings.

By asking about ‘strong women’ as the question does, it’s echoing that continual praise and focus on strong women, which implies that strong women are the shining examples, fighters who stand up for their gender. Stoical wives taming the prairies, kickass princesses with martial arts skills, femmes fatales outgunning any man with their cutting put-downs … All of these are figures of admiration. But they are the odd-girls, the rare exceptions who seem to prove the rule – that if women are undervalued, it’s their own fault because they’re just too weak. Forbes identifies the women who matter. And so don’t the other billions of women matter, then?

There are few more appalling examples of how misplaced this image of the strong woman can be than in a story I saw portrayed recently on stage in London. The story is of the Birangona of Bangladesh. The Birangona are the hundreds of thousands of women and girls who were systematically raped, tortured and abused during Bangladesh’s war of independence. The original crimes against them were indeed horrific, but what is tragic, too, is the way they have been marginalised ever since. The word ‘Birangona’ means ‘brave women’ – and yes, many have indeed been brave, and the film footage in the stage production of some of them moved you almost to tears with their courage. But bravery seems entirely beside the point, when the real and physical abuse of the war has been followed by four decades of vilification in an independent Bangladesh because they are ‘fallen women’. No amount of bravery, no amount of ‘strength’ makes up for the abuse of their situation. Why should they need to be brave, after all they’ve been through? And what of those women who are not ‘brave’, who are not so strong, those like the Birangona woman on the film who longed for death to end her humiliation?

The idea of the strong woman, in some ways, weakens women. It’s often condescending in the mouths of men, like the sleazebag who says, ‘I love strong women.’ It’s often denial in the case of women who claim they are strong. Like embracing Jean-Paul Sartre’s image of the person who denies who she is, and so cannot change. Or like the man who announces to the world that he’s so cool – and immediately shows he isn’t.

Pop culture seems to love songs about strong girls who kick metaphorical sand in the face of the man who treated them bad. But for many girls listening and trying to identify, it’s a quick high before feeling even worse because they aren’t sand-kickers themselves. Constantly praising strong women, however good the intention, only serves to remind women of what fragile flowers they really seem to be. They’ll only be genuinely strong when no one needs to praise their strength.

Of course, this question was posed for theology, and the attitude of religions to women has been much under scrutiny in recent decades, with issues over everything from the wearing of the veil for Islamic women to the controversy over whether women should be allowed to be bishops in the Church of England.

Some conservative Christians are deeply opposed to women being given any strength or authority in the church. Many cite Paul’s directive to apostles in 1 Timothy 2:11–12: ‘I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.’¹ This passage, for them, effectively prohibits women from occupying any position of authority within the church. For them, the church should not be making women strong.

But Paul’s directive was written 2,000 years ago, and there are many things in the Bible that have needed to be reinterpreted and developed with the passage of time. Indeed, Paul himself appointed many women in roles of authority in the early church, and women have proved themselves again and again through history to be some of the most formidable and doughty champions of the church, and strong women have often proved the bedrock of the faith in difficult times.

It’s not just Christianity that had, in the past, attitudes against the idea of strong women, which should surely be put firmly behind us. Even Buddhism, one of the more egalitarian religions, insisted that ‘A nun, even if she has been ordained for 100 years, must respect, greet and bow in reverence to the feet of a monk, even if he has just been ordained that day’.

It’s pretty clear, though, that much of the religious effort to prevent women ever being strong came not from the founders of the religion but has been layered on through the centuries for various reasons that have very little to with theological constraints. Some of the most rampant attacks on women in positions of strength came from the Scottish Protestant reformer John Knox, who claimed that a curse would fall on any nation that was governed by a woman in his ferociously titled tract of 1558, The First Blast Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. But he was writing when Britain fell under the rule of two Catholic Queen Marys – England’s Mary Tudor and Scotland’s Mary of Guise. So perhaps he felt rather threatened.

Fortunately, the world and religious attitudes have moved on. In spring 2014, the Church of England at last agreed to the idea of women bishops, and while the Arab Spring did little to improve attitudes to women in Egypt, in Tunisia it brought women into positions of authority for the first time as they took up seats in the newly elected parliament.

What makes a woman strong, then? I would say strength is physical and mental health in the broadest sense, not bogus toughness. And that comes from confidence – the confidence and sense of self to be entirely as you wish to be. To be brash and bold, or to be meek and gentle, to be wild, to be mild, to be funny, to be serious, to be graceful, to be awkward, to be quick, to be slow. Or all of these. To be the person you are. The strong woman is a stereotype as trapping in some ways as the fragile flower, but we should want all women to be strong – and for that strength they need, just like men, proper sustenance and nurturing, in everything from basic human needs to access to education or community support.

Footnote

1 The full passage is: ‘Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing – if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control.’