Wednesday, October 03, 2007

A Gendered Society

This past week I have been reading Julie Ingersoll’s Evangelical Christian Women: War Stories in the Gender Battles. The title betrays Ingersoll’s bias… one I probably share a bit more than I’d like to admit. I have my own war stories to tell. Much of the sociological information was familiar to me, but the analysis was interesting… and challenging. Ingersoll explores how gender is constructed in the evangelical world. Now before you start arguing about gender, creation, and biological differences between men and women, let me state that I agree that there are differences. I also believe that gender is more than our biological differences. It is also a social construction… the way we live out and interpret those differences. The values we place on them. How we structure economies and societies around them.

Ingersoll describes the gendered nature of the evangelical world… the segregated small groups, the men’s and women’s ministries, the gender-specific social events. She goes into great detail describing a Christian bookstore with its Victorian knick-knacks designed to harken back to an imaginary time when gender roles were so much clearer. With its “Jesus loves Me” plaques with sports figures for the boys and angels for the girls. The books for women that deal with relationships, healing the pasts, building friendships. The books for men that talk about leadership and servanthood. Ingersoll argues that within the evangelical culture, the gendered body has become something symbolic. And the pressure to conform to gender roles, both explicit and subtle, can been extremely powerful and at times extremely wounding.

How does this gendered-society impact women clergy? We can see from other studies (ie. Clergy Women by Zikmund. Lummis and Chang) the pressure clergy women are under to be good Christians by fulfilling traditional roles as a wife and mother as well as fulfilling their duties as a pastor. And that these expectations are significantly different than that of clergy men. We also see differences in how congregations expect women to lead and how they interpret the ways they leave. While a majority of male and female clergy feel that they are democratic rather than directive leaders, congregations feel that their male clergy are more directive and female clergy are more democratic.

I am raising questions that I don’t have answers to. One’s I’ll probably continue to explore in this blog in the next few months. But for now, that will have to wait. You can anticipate the next blogs to take a turn in another direction… reflections on my upcoming trip to Peru. Maybe when I return you’ll have some additional insights into all of this to help guide my way.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi there,

I enjoyed your comments/analysis of the book.

Julie Ingersoll