Southern Baptist Russell Moore posted an article last week that, on its face, sets forth an idea I would applaud. In Women, Stop Submitting to Men, Moore argues the hierarchy many Christians pratice in the marriage context has been improperly applied to all relationships between women and men.
Initially, I was encouraged by Moore's clarification. However, something problematic is going on in this article. The overall tone and reasoning for women to stop submitting to men in general strikes me as paternalistic and condescending to women.
Pastor Todd, after reading my thoughts about news outlets' bias toward white women, sent me an op-ed by Leonard Pitts Jr.: America's obsession with missing white women. Pitts writes that this bias reflects a paternalistic, property-like view, depicting white women as "damsels in perpetual distress, helpless little things under constant threat from the harsh vicissitudes of a big, mean world:"
To imply it is somehow more important, more heart-rending, when a young white woman is in danger is, at best, a backhanded compliment. The implication is laced with a certain condescending paternalism that finds echoes throughout history, from assurances that women ought not trouble their pretty little heads with voting to debates over whether they belong in the workplace.
When we recall how white men once routinely lynched black ones who were thought to have cast so much as a stray glance at white women, our attention rivets, rightly, on the victims of the violence. But no one ever notes the corollary injustice: the fact that those white men felt they had an absolute, unquestioned right to police the sexuality of “their” women.
This obsession portrays women as "communal property, hothouse flowers in need of constant, vigilant protection," which results in their "competence, independence and self-sufficiency [...] being tacitly demeaned." Pitts ends his article with this:
Somebody should tell them: a backhanded compliment is just an insult by another name.
Moore's article struck me as a backhanded compliment. Yes, it's encouraging to see a Southern Baptist leader point out we are all to submit. It's promising when a conservative evangelical man acknowledges patriarchy's harmful effects. But, as Dianna puts it, my feminist spidey-senses started tingling as I continued reading:
[T]oo many predatory men have crept in among us, all too willing to exploit young women by pretending to be “spiritual leaders” (2 Tim. 3:1-9; 2 Pet. 2). Do not be deceived: a man who will use spiritual categories for carnal purposes is a man who cannot be trusted with fidelity, with provision, with protection, with the fatherhood of children. The same is true for a man who will not guard the moral sanctity of a woman not, or not yet, his wife.
[...]
Women, sexual and emotional purity means a refusal to submit to “men,” in order to submit to your own husband, even one whose name and face you do not yet know. Your closeness with your husband, present or future, means a distance from every man who isn’t, or who possibly might not be, him.
A good (white) Christian woman must keep herself pure for her husband or future husband. Benevolent fathers, husbands, and husbands-to-be must protect women from predatory, exploitative men, and Moore is doing his part by reminding women they have no duty to submit to a man who is not her husband. Not only does Moore render invisible women who do not have fathers in their lives or who are single, he also sets forth a troubling paternalism under the guise of honoring women.
This dependence on men is common in romantic paternalism, a concept in critical race feminism. Under romantic paternalism, white women need white men to survive educationally, politically, and economically. Once white women obtained the right to vote in the 1920's, white men could say, at surface level, that women's rights had achieved a victory. But, hidden paternalism still lurking under the surface keeps white women dependent on men, regardless of voting rights or other advances.
In the church, when a woman's worth is tied solely to her role as a daughter and wife, she is still dependent on men. My intent is not to demean stay-at-home mothers or women who have not pursued a career - the competency and complexity of all women are at stake here. Paternalism, under the guise of keeping women pure and in-waiting, puts women on a pedestal while locking them in a cage. When viewed solely in relation to their submission to fathers and husbands, women are prevented from being the full persons God intended them to be. Women are restricted from full intellectual participation, whether we're wrestling with theological ideas or ministering to others.
Some Christian men might find it an honor to put women on a pedestal, protecting them from deceptive men. Some men might find it an advancement to remind women we are only to submit to our husbands or to the men we'll marry someday, rather than all men. But I find it a backhanded compliment and an insult.
I am not a helpless little thing who needs my sexual and emotional purity policed and my sanctity guarded (Jamie the Very Worst Missionary recently pointed out that all this purity talk is usually aimed at women and girls only, not men and boys - why's that?). I, and other women in the church, am a complex, multi-dimensional, capable human being, who also wants to wrestle with theological insights, to be a mom, a wife, and a full participant in the Body of Christ. At the foot of the cross, there is neither male nor female, so please don't tell me you've put me on a pedestal, when you've really locked me in a cage.
The concept of pedestal and cage, as well as the definition of romantic paternalism, is drawn from critical race feminist and law professor Patricia J. Smith's article, PART I--ROMANTIC PATERNALISM--THE TIES THAT BIND ALSO FREE: REVEALING THE CONTOURS OF JUDICIAL AFFINITY FOR WHITE WOMEN, 3 J. Gender Race & Just. 107, Fall 1999.
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