Women in the Church

Christ showed, through His own behavior to women and through His teaching to His disciples, that while the place for proper headship and divinely established authority remained a constant both in the home and in the Church, a significant shift had occurred in the old order of male/female relationships which had prevailed since the Fall. Christ treated women with dignity, respect, and compassion. In His teaching on marriage (Matthew 19:3-9), He restored their marital rights to what they had been "in the beginning," before allowances had to be  made for the hardness of men's hearts. 

Through the redemption accomplished by His death and Resurrection, Christ made it possible for men and women once again to strive for the ideal established in Paradise: a loving cooperation between equals with different, complementary roles.  This ideal was largely upheld in the first few centuries of  the Church. Women swelled  the ranks of the saints and  martyrs, giving their lives to God in a variety of roles, including those of prophetess, teacher, and deaconess as well as the more traditional ones of wife, mother, and performer of charitable works. When men began to seek the desert as a place to live out a more radical commitment to God, women beginning with Saint Mary of Egypt, to whose holiness even Saint Anthony the Great deferred were not far behind. 

Within the family, the position of women was better among Christians than it had ever been before. While Saint Paul exhorted wives to submit to their husbands which was nothing new he also, even more strongly, exhorted men to love their wives "as Christ also loved the church" (Ephesians 5:25) in other words, to the point of giving their lives for them. This was something new. The ancient curse was beginning to crumble. 

At the same time, however, there were teachers in the Church who held to a view of women more in keeping with the views of their Jewish forebears (succinctly expressed  in the  traditional male prayer, "Thank You, Lord, that You did not make me a woman").  Some blamed women entirely for the Fall and claimed that they were inherently evil, to  be avoided  by any man who would seek righteousness. Some insisted that  marriage and sexuality came into being only after the Fall and were nothing but a necessary evil for the propagation of the species. One cannot but suspect that these men mostly celibates were misplacing the blame for their troublesome bodily passions, assigning that blame not to their own fallen  nature and the temptation of the devil, but to the unfortunate and inadvertent object of those passions. woman. 

As the centuries went by, this distorted view began to exert a greater influence over the Church's attitude toward and treatment of women. Women gradually came to be excluded  from the diaconate and from other ministries in which they had previously taken an equal part with men. Women who achieved sanctity were praised as having "overcome" their weak and evil feminine nature and become as righteous as men. 

Women never completely lost their champions, however. In the nineteenth century in Russia, feminine spirituality began to come into its own again. Several notable elders, including Saint Seraphim of Sarov and Saint Theophan the Recluse,  made it their business to encourage women, both in the world and in the monastic life. Both of these men founded and  directed women's monasteries, and offered spiritual direction to countless lay women, in person or through correspondence. These godly men had the prophetic insight that it would be primarily through women that the Faith would be preserved in Russia during the seventy years of communist persecution, and they wanted women to be prepared.