Breaking Glass Slippers and Glass Ceilings - Part 1

Breaking the Glass Slipper Myth

Part 1 of a 2-part series

Glass slippers and glass ceilings – these two terms have each been a way of defining and confining women’s lives. While these terms aren’t used much in church the ideas behind them are something every woman is familiar with, and their practice is still very much alive in the church today.

When we were children, the fairy tale Cinderella introduced many of us to the glass slipper ideal of a prince searching us out, falling in love with us, marrying us, and turning us into princesses who never had to work another day in our life, living happily ever after. And, particularly in the years when I was growing from child to adult, the ideas presented to us in these fairy stories were reinforced by our parents, teachers, and society in general. Many young girls back then dreamed of nothing more for their lives than growing up, getting married, and becoming a mother. Why? Because that was the preeminent idea presented to us by our fairy stories, our parents, society, and the church.

 Women everywhere were prepared for a life of service to men – either as their wives or as employees. Jobs were seen and promoted in many cases as a fill-in between school and marriage. You only really made a career of your job if you weren’t one of the “more fortunate”, the women who got married. Unmarried women were looked down on as being somehow deficient in some way. And, and if you deliberately chose a career above marriage and motherhood you were seen as odd, out of the norm, or even as an aberration in some cases. People often didn’t quite know how to treat these women, so they lived a life pushed to the side-lines and humoured – accommodated but not really accepted, in both society and church.  

Most advertising showed one of two extremes, a housewife longing for labour-saving devices or a scantily dressed woman waiting to entice men and lead them astray. Both were a blatant statement about the place of women in life – women should be found either in the kitchen or the bedroom. And not much has changed today. Women are still often objectified and categorized as “just a housewife” or a temptress.  

“A woman’s place is in the home” and “Women should be kept barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen” were two sayings that were often heard when I was growing up.  This ethos was echoed in many places and was certainly the ruling belief about women in the church at that time.

The idea that women belong in the home is centuries old. It’s an idea first heard from the Greeks before Jesus came on the scene. Here are some of the ideas the Greeks had about women.

Xenophon was amongst the first to be recorded as saying that a woman’s place is in the home, 370 yrs before Christ came on the scene. Plato believed and taught that men were the superior sex, and warned that sinful men would be reincarnated as women. Aristotle said that women are “a monstrosity”, “a deformed male,” and also said, “The female sex has a more evil disposition than the male. The male is by nature superior and the woman inferior, the male ruler, and the female subject.” Hesiod said, “Women are a deadly race of guile and evil, a shameless mind and a deceitful nature.” “The gods declared man’s punishment for sin was women!”

The Jews likewise believed that women were inferior to men and that God had commanded that. They also believed that women were the possession of men, based on certain Pharisee’s interpretation of the 7th commandment which says, “You shall not covet your neighbour’s house. You shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbour.” The Pharisees taught that women should be kept to the home, not educated and that their role was to serve men. The rabbis openly taught that “Teaching a girl is the same as starting her on the road to depravity.” Rabbi Eliezer is quoted as saying, “It would be better to burn the words of the law than teach them to women.”

That’s why Jesus’s acceptance of Mary sitting at His feet in the traditional learning posture of a disciple was radical (Luke 10:38-40). It was a defining moment in history and an act that signified that women’s liberation was to be found in Christ. Here we see Jesus’s acceptance of her as a disciple and His bringing women out of their traditional role in the kitchen to that of being equal to men. Up until then, women were not allowed to learn anything except things relating to their household duties. Only men had the right to learn and be trained by a rabbi in Jewish society. Yet here was Jesus, openly defying all that society believed, accepting a woman as His disciple, and liberating women from being confined to the kitchen.

It is generally understood by historians and theologians that students who learnt at the feet of their Rabbi would go on, in most cases, to become Rabbi’s themselves - so Jesus acceptance of Mary sitting at his feet as a disciple meant not only could she learn, but she could go on to later to be a leader herself and to teach others. Wow, in this one short scripture passage we see Jesus setting women free from being tied just to domestic duties, to being able to be a disciple and possible leader or teacher.

Jesus was radical in His treatment of women. They traveled with Him as part of His ministry (Luke 8:1-2a) and He revealed some of His most important revelations to them. He revealed to the Samaritan woman the meaning of true worship. This encounter with Jesus, and the word of knowledge He had about her life, changed her so radically that she went on to become one of the greatest evangelists of the early church. Photini was her name and you can read more about her amazing life in my book “Daughters of Eve”. To Martha Jesus revealed that He was the resurrection and life. To the Jewish woman caught in adultery, Jesus revealed that He did not come to condemn people who have sinned but to set them free and empower them to live free. And He revealed His resurrection first to a woman, Mary Magdalene, and commissioned her with an apostolic assignment – to go and tell the other disciples that He had risen. She later became recognized by the early church as “The Apostle to the Apostles”.

Jesus came as the redeemer of all mankind, and redeeming women back to God’s original intention for them was part of His redemption plan. Jesus, and later Paul, were both openly outspoken on behalf of women and believed that they were created equal with men by God – equal in worth and value, but also equal in leadership abilities, and with the same right to freely follow the call of God on their lives.

Unfortunately, a couple of centuries after Jesus and Paul the idea that a woman’s place was in the home was reintroduced into the newly institutionalized church by some church leaders who were openly against women holding any form of leadership or power. It quickly gained acceptance and became the prominent belief, supported by some mistranslated accounts of what Paul taught.

We lost so much because the church didn’t continue the work of setting women free that Jesus started, and Paul carried on with. The world would be in a much different place today if we had done so.

In the second part of this two-part series I’ll look at how these re-introduced beliefs caused a false ceiling to be set in place in the church to prevent women from being leaders and how Scripture became weaponised and used to discriminate against, and oppress, women in the church.

To purchase “Daughters of Eve” click here

You can read part 2 of this series - Breaking Glass Ceilings here