Where Did All the Women Go? The Erasure of Female Leadership from Church History

Throughout its long and complex history, countless Christian women have served in prominent roles. Regrettably, most of their stories have been erased from traditional religious histories.1 From its origins, the Church has had female apostles, deacons, priests, prophets, abbesses, missionaries, bishops, and ministers. Women have also made up the majority of Church attendees. Why have they been erased?

Christianity is a tradition that focuses on the worship of what is perceived of as a male God. It could be said, therefore, that the development of patriarchy and misogyny in a religion focused on a male God is not surprising.2 Men wrote the histories of the Church and its rules. When a woman exercised leadership—seen as a male activity—that woman was “operating beyond their allotted sphere.”3 Further, these separate spheres were thought to be natural, even biological, and ordained by God. Because of cultural patriarchy, the histories of women in the Church have too often been stricken from the record. Therefore, the hard work must begin to recover the stories of these female leaders.

To examine the role of women in the early Church, one must understand women in broader Hellenistic culture. Very little information about women exists from this period, and that which does exist “represents, for the most part, the viewpoint of men writing about women.”4 Politics and public life was a sphere reserved for men in Christian antiquity. Political life reflected the hierarchy of the home, of which the father was the head. There is, therefore, an inherent and inevitable patriarchal bias to be found in the culture’s records.

The New Testament Church based its philosophy on Christ. In contrast to the Hellenistic culture in which the early Church was located, the teachings of Christ were countercultural, including their view of women. Women and men were called disciples of Jesus, they were a “discipleship of equals,” and expressed themselves as such.5 Both women and men heard the teachings of Jesus, and were called to live life by the message of the gospel. Like men, women were baptized, and encouraged to live in service to the Christian community.6

Jesus clearly saw women as important, and he paid them more regard than would have been normal in Hellenistic culture. Jesus engaged in dialogue with Mary (Luke 10:38–42) and allowed women to listen and support his ministry (Luke 8:1–3). Women supported Jesus financially, which meant they acted as patrons of the Early Church. Patronage was an essential part of Greco-Roman culture and was a high honour, socially and economically.7 Most importantly, women stayed with Jesus through his crucifixion when the men had gone (Mark 15:40–41), and in all of the Gospels it is women who find the tomb empty and to whom Christ first appears after the resurrection (Matthew 28:1–10, Mark 16:1-8, Luke 24:1–10, John 20:1–2).

Women served as leaders in at least eight of the first churches, resulting in one second-century Greek philosopher, Celsus, ridiculing Christianity as “a religion of women, children, and slaves.”8 In the Byzantine tradition, women could be ordained as deaconesses as outlined in The Byzantine Ordination Rite of the Deaconess: “Sovereign Lord, you who do not reject women offering themselves and desiring to minister in your holy houses… receive them into an order of ministers, bestow the grace of your Holy Spirit also upon this your servant...and fill her with the grace of the diaconate, just as you gave the grace of your diaconate for Phoebe, whom you called to the work of your ministry.”9

Scholars believe that Phoebe, the deaconess mentioned in the Ordination Rite, was an emissary who delivered and presented Paul’s letter to the Romans. In that letter, Paul introduces Phoebe as “sister,” demonstrating her equality with the “brothers” in the family of Christ. Paul then calls Phoebe a deaconess, or minister, at the church in Cenchreae (Romans 16:1–2). In addition to delivering the letter, scholars agree that Phoebe would have been in charge of presenting and teaching it to the church in Rome.10 Women ministers were not uncommon. Clement of Alexandria wrote in the third book of his Stromata that the apostles took women with them “not as wives but as sisters, so that they might serve as co-ministers.”11

The change came with the Council of Nicea in AD 325, which met with the intention of organizing Christianity

into a unified religion. This council decided that women could no longer be ordained or serve as leaders in the church.12 The Council of Laodicea in AD 363 further forbade women from priesthood and approaching the altar, and the Fourth Synod of Carthage in AD 397 decreed that women could not teach men or baptize others.13 Though these councils removed women from ministry and public life in the Church, their decisions are evidence that prior to their decrees women were being ordained, teaching, and baptizing others. The prescription that God intended for men to lead and women to listen began to take shape in the Church.

The rulings of these councils and the doctrine that this was “God’s design,” overshadowed the women of the early Church who did serve as spiritual and congregational leaders.14 The role of a woman was to stay in the sphere that male Church leaders contended God had created for her: to be a submissive wife and glorify God by serving men. The alternative for women who desired a spiritual life, or could not secure a husband, was to be sequestered into the convent. Female leadership in convents was accepted because these women were confined, and could be “safely kept from taking on men’s work.”15

Well into the modern era, women were seen as inferior to men in academia and religion because they were too emotional to be capable leaders. The opinion that women were designed inferior to men was and continues to be used as justification for men to colonize the Christian religion. The concept of gender equality in the Church emerged in the sixteenth century as a result of the Lutheran Reformation. Many of the first challengers emerged from Protestant denominations, such as Quaker women who became preachers.16 With the eighteenth-century democratic revolutions, feminism entered the political realm. The nineteenth-century suffragettes broadened the conversation of rights from the legal to the social, which included the Church. Writer and American suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton stated that “all religions degrade women, but the worst enemies of women are found in the Protestant churches, where the leaders

use the Bible to silence women.”The twentieth century allowed for religious expression, which in turn allowed for biblical fundamentalism to emerge as a monolithic paradigm.17 Today, one in four Americans identifies as a member of an evangelical church, which are made up mostly of women.18 Using strict fundamentalist authority and selective appeals to scripture, fundamentalist churches have prohibited women from being ordained or ministering. This has prevented a broader understanding of women in the early Church, including ignoring “the historical evidence of women functioning as deacons, priests, and bishops.”19 Fundamentalist evangelical churches are often characterized by ideology that can be traced to “the community’s literalist Bible hermeneutic whereby men’s leadership is ordained.”20

Much of the Christian church has not moved beyond the prohibitions of the fourth century. Even though many Christian churches have abandoned or drastically changed their doctrines on the role of women, traditional arguments of women’s inferiority continue to shape Christian discourse. Lessons taught from the pulpit use highly gendered language, constructing separate spheres of congregational life that “produce the gendered believer.”21

The traditional arguments against women in Church leadership are not based on the teachings of Jesus and the early Church; they must not go unchallenged. One must look closest to Jesus to find the women who led early churches. Following the example of the first century church, it becomes clear that statements that discourage women from teaching, preaching, or ministering in any way are relics from the colonization of religious spaces by men and not from Jesus.

Sydney R. Dvorak (she/her)

European Studies (history stream) major