Women Against Women in the Church

The book I am staying up late to read lately is _Beauty Secrets_ by Wendy Chapkis. It's twenty years old now, but I find that most of it could have been written last week.

Beauty Secrets:Women and the Politics of Appearance http://www.southendpress.org/2004/items/BeautySecrets

It pre-dates _The Beauty Myth_ (by Naomi Wolf, also on my docket) by about five years, and may have been a source work. Secrets combines brief personal testimonies of women confronting their looks compared to society's standards, along with a look at the beauty industry, class, race, ethnicity, and GLBT concerns. The GLBT discussion impressed me most for its candor. Also quite good was her exploration of how women actively put self over other women to rise in the ranks, even causing further oppression to women coming behind them, creating a basically unsustainable form of women's 'em-power-ment.' (My term, not hers).

I'm reading Beauty Secrets and the Beauty Myth because I'm thinking of doing more writing on precisely this last topic and how it has manifested in the institutional church. In my experience, it is quite widespread, to the point where I would say that the greatest obstacle to young women in church leadership is not men, but other women. In fact, with a few exceptions, I no longer seek out female professors or advisors in my seminary education. By and large, I have found I will be more encouraged to express my creative gifts or opinions, and not be treated like a threat, if I'm studying under a reasonably liberated male. The women I do go to more than once for professional advice, meanwhile, are ones I really respect.

I'm guessing a great deal of this has to do with the trauma of having broken through the glass ceiling in the last generation (you can never break a glass ceiling without bleeding, after all), and projecting a need on women of the next generation to be 'toughened up'--not realizing that they have now become the oppressors, playing a critical role in keeping alive the very system they sought to oppose. I think there is also a sentiment of why should the next generation get in any easier than they did. I think that exploring and healing the impact of trauma, and looking at healthier inter-woman dynamics and male-female organizational relations, would be quite helpful--particularly for encouraging younger women to stick with it in the church, and for offering an alternative legacy for women who have attained positions of power in thier lifetimes and are only a few years from retirement.

I don't anticipate this will be an uncontroversial thesis, but I hope that it would provoke a much-needed discussion on the future of women in the church.