Women vs. Gender

A major shift began to take place in history departments in the 1980s when a scholar named Joan Scott wrote a seminal essay, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” published in The American Historical Review. In it Scott called for historians to shift from focusing on “Women’s Studies” to focusing on “Gender Studies.”

Scott used the definition of gender favored by social historians—"the social organization of the relationship between the sexes." (As an example, when our male African friend wore a pink watch in America, he discovered how gender norms may be socially organized vs. always biologically constructed.)Scott’s interest lay less in studying sex differences than in exploring relationships of power. Such a shift, she felt, would broaden the field, allowing researchers to explore how societies have assigned roles to the biological differences and attributes of both men and women. And her idea caught on in a big way.Historians have since shifted the conversation from “What did women do?” to include “How did people in the past view masculinity and femininity?” and especially, “What were the power relationships between men and women?”Recognizing that culture shapes views of masculinity and femininity has led scholars to read ancient texts differently. For example, an ancient writer might criticize a woman for being too talkative, and now instead of uncritically adopting that writer’s view of her, a researcher might ask, “What were the norms of femininity at the time?”The shift from “Women’s Studies” to “Gender Studies” has also caused scholars to do more reading between the lines. For example, since Octavian (later Caesar Augustus) passed laws allowing exemption from male supervision for women citizens who birthed three children, the contemporary historian can conclude that most women must have desired to have independent agency instead of being under male authority. Otherwise, the edict would not have worked as an incentive—which was Octavian’s desire. So seeing in ancient women a desire for independence is not necessarily a projection of our own Western and contemporary biases, after all.Some gender scholars have taken their tools of analysis and used them to look at how our Bible translations have changed over time. For example, the KJV says a woman should not “teach or usurp authority over a man,” whereas more recent translations say “teach or have authority.” Interestingly, these researchers have discovered that many translations have actually become more conservative since the rise of second-wave feminism, when we might have expected the opposite.Lynn Cohick, a New Testament scholar at Wheaton, in her book, Women in the World of the Earliest Christians, draws on gender theory as she approaches the subject of male/female relations in the New Testament. She takes, for example, what is known about the difficulty of a woman initiating divorce in ancient Palestine and re-looks at the Samaritan woman whom Jesus encountered (John 4). Only last week I heard someone teaching, again, that this woman was promiscuous for having had five husbands. (Oh, and she was living with the sixth guy.) Yet Cohick argues that the Samaritan woman was more likely abandoned and/or widowed or both and then finally given in marriage to a man with more than one wife (i.e., “the one you have now is not your own”).If such is the case, Jesus was not "confronting the woman’s sinfulness by referring to her marital status," as is commonly taught. Instead, He was empathizing with her greatest point of pain. And her response? “You must be a prophet!” Then she speaks of her hope in the coming of Messiah. And guess what? She is the only person to whom Jesus ever comes right out and says, “Ego eimi,”—“I AM. The one speaking to you!” Next thing you know, she takes off to tell the world.