Exploring The History Of Women In Leadership
There are plenty of legitimate reasons why Kamala Harris is unqualified to be President of the United States, but I was taken aback recently by those who disqualify her from leadership because she’s a woman.
Even more surprising was that others enthusiastically applauded that assertion. People really believe that women are disqualified from holding leadership roles, and not just the weirdos on second tier social media sites, but Christians with growing platforms. That’s a bit shocking to me. It underscores some larger problems that may be flying under the radar: one being that we don’t understand our history very well, another that we don’t study our Bibles nearly enough. But a third is also a problem: Both the church and the secular world have so convoluted male and female roles that both camps are sometimes wildly out of alignment.
These aren’t new problems, just persistent ones that the enemy is capitalizing on.
There is an ignorance of history that breeds misapplication of scripture. It runs contrary to the nature of God and also the most profound aspects of Jesus’ ministry. How did we get to a point where some Christians assert that 50% of the world’s population has no business being in charge?
Pendulums Will Swing
For the past several years we’ve been inundated with the anti-feminine “empowerment” agenda that has diminished women’s traditional roles and skewed popular perceptions of them.
The girl-boss infusion into popular culture has become a little absurd. It’s prompted a course correction among Christians that I suppose was inevitable. You can only write so many scripts with inept men taking orders from flawless women before the population starts rolling its eyes. A good example of this is the show “For All Mankind.”
“For All Mankind” is a sometimes-great series that depicts an alternate history where the Soviet Union landed on the moon first. When it sticks to the Sci-Fi space stuff, it’s a superbly acted, technically impressive show. Unfortunately as the show progresses, the unrealistic female dominance detracts from some otherwise excellent storylines and minimizes the actual forgotten history it attempts to honor.
For instance, did you know that there were in fact several female pilots who completed the same NASA training that John Glenn, Alan Shepard, and the other Mercury astronauts underwent? Known as the Mercury 13, their stories were just as impressive, and deserve a better retelling that doesn’t pigeonhole them into modernist social agendas they had no part in.
For those unfamiliar with the show, here is some of “For All Mankind’s” alternative history:
A female cosmonaut becomes the fifth person to walk on the moon. This somehow resets the entire social sexual landscape of America, with women driving the positions of power in D.C. and corporate America from 1969 onward. Women (including black women) command space missions and even Mission Control. The ERA passes, a woman becomes NASA director, and eventually [spoiler alert] a closeted lesbian becomes a Republican president.
That aspect of the show is a canvas for silly soap-opera writers to let their fantastical “what if” dreams materialize. It’s a theme that’s now dominant everywhere culturally. So much so that the internet went scorched-earth on Harrison Butker for proclaiming motherhood to be a noteworthy career choice. The audacity. So the pendulum is shoved to one side by the female empowerment crowd at the expense of the harmonious balance God designed it to have.
And why do they shove so hard? Because previous generations of men shoved that pendulum in the first place.
Completely valid arguments about equal work for equal pay and freedom of opportunity have been lost in the ping-pong accusations of current rhetoric. Building strong male spiritual leaders doesn’t mean women need to endure second-class status. Likewise, we don’t need to emasculate men to restore women to their God-ordained roles. And God made it clear in the beginning: Adam and Eve were co-equal authorities over God’s creation.
The secular assertion that women are equally qualified as men at everything is just as silly as the notion they are ill-suited for leadership in anything. There are still no women Navy SEALs, but there is one female SWCC operator. Outliers exist. Those examples are all the more impressive for their rarity, and they should be celebrated and encouraged, not worshiped or idolized.
But many Christians seeing these trends overcompensate and shove that pendulum back as hard or harder than their grandfathers did, when women made less money for the the same job and were excluded from much merely because they were women.
In 2024 it’s disguised in fear-filled assertions warning against neutered men taking orders from overbearing women. But it’s actually repackaged sexism in the name of traditionalism, and it’s not how God designed His world to operate.
Hollywood thinks men are defunct and unnecessary, that women can rule the world and should. Many Christians declare that man retains headship over woman, so the ladies need to sit quietly while men run the show in every sphere.
They assert a woman has no place in leadership merely because she’s a woman. But what does scripture have to say about it?
Triggers
In my experience there are two topics that unhinge professing Christians more than any others. One is Bill Johnson and Bethel Church, the other is the idea of women in church leadership. We’ll set aside Bill Johnson this time and focus today on women in church leadership.
You’ll find a disproportionate collection of these women-shouldn’t-lead-men types on the social media/podcast landscape and their scripture of first resort is this:
“I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.” – 1 Timothy 2:12 NIV
There are some other scriptures they’ll point to, but they always lead with 1 Timothy 2:12.
Paul’s declaration sounds a little harsh, which should immediately warrant some deeper examination. But most people don’t; they just take it at face value and form a doctrine out of it. Never mind that doing so doesn’t even square with the normal operation of most churches (including those of Paul’s time), where women routinely lead ministries and missions. There are tons of sites and teachings that explore this topic in depth; I’ve listed one series at end of this article. Here is a short insight by theologian NT Wright.
When men discuss this topic, there is a natural inclination to set ourselves as the arbiter of what is and isn’t allowed. We say things like, I’m okay with a woman preaching a sermon once in a while, just so long as she’s not a lead pastor, or I’ll allow a woman to lead a ministry when there aren’t any guys willing to do it.
The problem is that it doesn’t matter what we think. It only matters what God thinks.
This moratorium on woman leadership doesn’t square with church history or other scripture. Women have lead worldwide, and have done so since the beginning, from Eve’s autonomy in the Garden of Eden, Deborah being a judge over Israel, and Phoebe and several others’ roles in the early church. Women were not only present during Jesus’ ministry (which was revolutionary enough at the time), they were there during Pentecost, commissioned to spread the good news unencumbered, just like you and I.
Does all of that get tossed aside by a few passages divorced from their historical context?
The problem with making up doctrines (such as we’re just sinners saved by grace) is that it’s really Bible roulette. Bible roulette is when you fan out the pages of the Bible and thrust your finger onto a random page. Give it a try.
Aaaaaaand stop. I got this one:
“If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, you shall cut off her hand. Show her no pity.” – Deuteronomy 25:11-12
No way. Have you seen the news in Chicago lately? I’m gonna buy her spa weekend for taking out that dude.
In order to find out what exactly is going on with Paul’s letter to Timothy, we’re going to need a little context. And just like with Paul’s other assertions across the New Testament, there are historical and cultural elements to consider. Additionally we need to understand the language of the original Greek and Hebrew, their translations, and perhaps additional meanings.
If you want a good example of this, consider the word God uses for “woman” in Genesis, “ezer” and how it’s used in the scriptures. It isn’t a word that denotes subordination, that’s for sure.
Some pastors spend years in Bible college learning about these things, and while the Bible can be read and understood by layman at face value, there are fathoms of depth there that most of us just gloss over because we don’t read or understand nearly enough.
Any quality pastor or Bible scholar will tell you they spend hours every week (sometimes every day) in study, and that they learn new things all the time. That’s not just a scholarly principle. With any topic — auto repair, civil wars, child rearing, geopolitics, science, or anything else — understanding requires a lifetime of study, and mastery is elusive. That’s especially true with the Bible, and understanding God’s harmonious systems.
Become a student. One thing we absolutely should not do is take a few random lines of scripture and concoct a personal theology out of them. You can find a few resources at the end of this post to kick start your own research.
We can wrap up our prejudices and biblical ignorance in euphemisms like “complimentarian” all we want, but the doctrine of men-only leadership doesn’t reflect scripture, history (ancient or modern), or the daily workings of free societies. A person’s ability to effectively lead — be it a business, an army, a church, or a nation— is predicated on leadership in line with God’s principles.
Many women have done so, both in Biblical times and in the modern day, and the true stories are better than anything Hollywood is currently dishing out.
Girl Bosses
Dig through the history books and you’ll see plenty of examples of female leaders — Joan of Arc, Cleopatra, Queen Victoria, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Catherine the Great, and Margaret Thatcher, to name a few. Like history’s dynamic male leaders, they’re all flawed.
A rung or two down on that leadership ladder were thousands of women who lead in other spheres — well known women like Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, and Esther, who lead both men and women in their times, and God was right there sustaining them through those trials.
In 1930, Gladys Aylward was told she didn’t have what it takes to be a missionary, and English ministry directors refused to train her. But she felt the call of God too strongly to ignore it, so this petite Englishwoman spent her life’s savings and went anyway. Arriving in war torn China, she quickly became such an essential leader that the Chinese government implored her to help them time and time again. When WWII started, she lead over 100 orphans on a mountain trek to safety, fleeing the Japanese, and was later persecuted by the Chinese communists in the war’s aftermath.
Gladys Aylward’s story is just one of many examples of Christian leadership that need to be told. Gladys Aylward was portrayed by Ingrid Bergman in a film titled The Inn Of The Sixth Happiness, yet the filmmakers decided to insert a love story that never existed, as if the true history of female leadership wasn’t juicy enough.
Imagine if, instead of piling on unrealistic girl-boss concoctions like “For All Mankind,” Hollywood simply told it like it was? Scrap the manufactured angst about closet lesbians and curmudgeonly aging women in favor of realistic depictions of small powerhouses like Svetlana Savitskaya, Judith Resnik, Kathryn D. Sullivan, and Sally Ride. The true history is much more interesting.
Small, Undesirable Women
On July 17th, 1962, the Special Subcommittee on the Selection of Astronauts convened in Washington D.C. The committee was formed after Geraldyn “Jerrie” Cobb, “Mercury 13” trainee and one of the best pilots in the world, lobbied congress to investigate why female candidates were suddenly dropped from the space program.
Women were demonstrably better suited for the science of space exploration for dozens of reasons, including lower average weight, less oxygen/food/fuel consumption than men, less prone to heart attacks and less sensitive to radiation, and the fact that in testing women endured loneliness, monotony, heat, cold, and pain more impressively. In simulated space flights, women outperformed men in operating controls for space rendezvous.
To counter these scientific rationalizations, astronaut John Glenn — at the time the second most popular figure in America, second only to to President John F. Kennedy — was called on to testify:
“Anything I say is toward the purpose of getting the best qualified people, of whatever sex, color, creed, or anything else they might happen to be,” but he then went on to undercut his own words. “Men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes…the fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order. It may be undesirable.”
Less than a year later, the Soviet Union launched Vostok 6, and made Valentina Tereshkova the first woman in space. Following her flight, Tereshkova had this to say:
“They (American leaders) shout at every turn about their democracy and at the same time they announce they will not let a woman into space. This is open inequality.”
Hopefully we’ll get to the point where the true history is celebrated, where modern discussions of women like Gladys Aylward or Geraldyn Cobb, and Biblical histories of women like Phoebe and Lydia will stand on their own without imaginary constructs. It’s a shame that those who don’t know or refuse to study the history overcompensate for these modernist agendas by pushing unsupported doctrine. Unfortunately, what John Glenn said in 1962 continues to echo in some circles. In his day, it was socially “undesirable” to admit that women have what it takes to lead. In our day, clinging to the assertion that women can’t lead isn’t just patently sexist, it’s historically and scripturally ignorant.
You can follow me on Telegram, Substack, Truth Social, GETTR, Gab, and X.
If you’d like to explore what the Bible has to say about women in leadership, here is an excellent four-part series by Expedition 44, a YouTube channel by theologians who tackle the hard questions.
If you enjoy my work, please consider supporting us with a paid subscription in the amount of your choice. Or if you’d like to make a one time donation feel free to Buy Me A Coffee.
If you enjoyed this article, you might check out these as well:
