Wonder Women

Sept 15, 2020 | By Sharmaine Koh SM ‘22

When D.C.’s Wonder Woman hit the box offices in 2017, it was met with remarkable enthusiasm.  “Groundbreaking,” “Revolutionary,” “absolutely empowering!”: the first superhero movie with a female lead and a female director in more than a decade, the film revitalized an entertainment industry that has never been known for recognising female achievement. 

Gal Gadot playing Diana Prince in the titular role is the triumphant woman the world has been waiting for—for once, a woman is the main character. She is neither the side-chick, the side-kick, nor the damsel in distress. Wonder Woman is welcomed and celebrated because she rewrites the female role. As she lassos together femininity and power and saves the world with love and goodness, she demonstrates that the era of women as the second sex is over. [1]

This tide-turning momentum is more than a century in the works, and the narrative of empowered womanhood exudes radical independence and confidence like never before. Gone is the woman stuck at home and hearth; she can be anything she wants to be. The modern woman is an independent leader positioned to revolutionise the world as we know it, who redefines her role in every conceivable institution: in scholarship, arts, science, politics, war, economy, marriage and the family— and in religion. 

The most fascinating phenomenon to come out of Wonder Woman’s success might be the scores of Christian articles that proliferated in its wake, postulating and ruminating about Wonder Woman and her Christian allegory. Beautiful Christian Life writes about “6 Christian Themes to Look For in the 2017 Wonder Woman Movie” and details how the triumph of good over evil in Diana’s story points to Jesus’s salvation. Marilette Sanchez from Think Christian gushes in “Wonder Woman and Biblical Womanhood.” “God views women as strong warriors, not sidekicks or afterthoughts,” she muses, and celebrates the love and selflessness that make Wonder Woman an exemplar of Christian womanhood. Then there’s Joshan Rodrigues on Musings in Catholic Land, who places the Amazonian princess alongside the Queen of Heaven in “The Virgin Mary and Wonder Woman” and makes a case for how Diana is presented as a “Mary-like figure.” The comparisons are virtually endless. 

The solidarity with pop culture that the Christian blogosphere expresses regarding Wonder Woman might be surprising.  Christianity is often assumed to be relatively backward on the issue of female empowerment. That’s not surprising, since the Bible has been extensively quoted by bible-burners and bible-thumpers alike to both call out and perpetuate misogynistic practices. Unlike Wonder Woman’s titular role, women in the Bible often appear to make do with second place. Adam first, then Eve. Husbands at the head, wives at the heel. Fathers of nations, mothers in home and hearth and in the business of childbearing and childrearing. 

The Church Fathers did not have many good things to say about women. Augustine, inheriting the Greco-Roman tradition of superiority of spirit to body, considered women naturally inferior, and concluded that “woman was given to man, woman who was of small intelligence and who perhaps still lives more in accordance with the promptings of the inferior flesh than by the superior reason.” Aquinas accepted that women’s “condition of subjection” made them under-qualified to take on leadership positions in Church and society. In Summa Theologiae he concluded that Christ came as man in order to represent full humanity, making women insufficient to be priests, because their individual nature is “defective and misbegotten.” [2] Without sufficient historical nuance [3], Paul’s first epistle to Timothy suggests an original inequality between the sexes, even with the coming of Christ:

A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety. (1 Timothy 2:11-15) 

To some, perhaps even the “most blessed among women” in the Bible, the Virgin Mary, seems to offer unimaginative possibilities for the female sex, tying the veneration of women to either virginity or motherhood (and in her extraordinary case, both). Her autonomy lies in her consent, her Fiat! to divine authority. In pronouncing her Fiat!—Let it Be—at the Annunciation,  she is upheld as an exemplar of faithful obedience: “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” (Luke 1:38). She accepts the stigma of pregnancy out of wedlock, risks getting abandoned by her husband-to-be, bears and raises the Son of God, and then has to accept that he must die. Rather than challenge conventions, she represents them. Rather than overcome her circumstances, she is circumstanced.

The church teaches that there is goodness and beauty to be celebrated in self-sacrifice. That we don’t have to be the main characters in order to gain God’s love. That being fashioned as man’s ezer—helper—means that we should find joy in loving submission to our husbands. And in truth, Pauls’s “childbearing,” “faith,” “love,” and “holiness with propriety” are good and beautiful things. Mary’s extraordinary faith and love mirrors the ultimate self-sacrifice of Christ himself. But it reads like a painful slap to the face, if women are told—using these very words—that their only value is to bear children, and if propriety is expected of them but not simultaneously demanded of men. It doesn’t seem right that while “loving submission” is really the duty of both man and wife, it is often used to keep women “in her place.” In the end, what women got in return for their gentle and loving submission was centuries of oppression by the Christian patriarchy. 

Hence, compared to the Virgin Mary, Wonder Woman seems like a better embodiment of modern-day feminism. After all, the movement broadly advocates for cultural reformation to dismantle oppressive patriarchal power structures—virginity and motherhood might bear too much historical baggage to be intuitively acceptable to today’s self-made women seeking liberation from societal constructs. While values of purity and chastity are exhorted by the Church for both men and women, society often ends up holding females to harsher scrutiny on the matter of virginity. This double standard served to disempower women in relation to men, all while patriarchal religious institutions harboured ugly secrets of sexual abuse and slavery for generations. “The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women’s emancipation,” said Elizabeth Cady Stanton, prominent American suffragist and early women’s rights leader. “Put it down in capital letters: SELF-DEVELOPMENT IS A HIGHER DUTY THAN SELF-SACRIFICE. The thing that most retards and militates against women’s self development is self-sacrifice.” 

Who is this self-developed woman,tired of self-sacrifice and subjection, and how has she fared? Taylor Swift’s “The Man” embodies the hopeful success of the spirited struggle shared by women of our age: a woman seeking to carve out a career for herself “runs as fast as [she] can,” scales ladders and breaks glass ceilings. No longer held to only be virgins or mothers, today’s woman is seemingly free to be anything—and everything—she wants to be. New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern became the first female world leader to bring an infant, her son Neve, to the UN General Assembly in 2018. A career, a husband, a child, a life— you can have it all. We find ourselves in times of greater optimism for the whole of womanhood than ever before, and we can perhaps attribute it to the greater emphasis on women’s rights to self-development today.

But by setting up self-development in opposition to self-sacrifice, Stanton perhaps paints a false dichotomy. Hers is an optimism that sets up the unbridled pursuit of self-development as the inevitable key to emancipation. Increasingly, however, it seems as though self-development itself is still insufficient. As Jen Oshman observes of the modern day American woman:

“the ‘you can have it all’ mindset is what we grew up with and what we have pursued as adults. Now women in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s are realising, I actually can’t have it all. It turns out, I’m finite. It turns out, I’m tired. It turns out, to pursue a career, and a family, and to be able to have it all when it comes to church, and sports, and being on the sidelines of your kids, and having your own company out of your own home, and just the endless list of goals and dreams and things that we think we can have, we actually can’t have them all. And so we’re disappointed, we’re jaded, we’re cynical, we’re depressed, we’re seeking medication, and we feel very alone … So it’s true: women are more depressed now than they’ve ever been.”

To be human is to desire autonomy, and the gains made by the women’s rights movement in empowering women to be the authors of their own lives should be celebrated. But in correctly rejecting the errors of Christian patriarchy and calling out the misogyny that continues to plague Christianity in some quarters, we need remember not to conflate fallen earthly structures with the love that flows from our Heavenly Father. We need to recognise that there is in fact immense freedom to be enjoyed in not being the authors of our own lives. That we don’t have to do it on our own or take over the reigns to rediscover what we have been deprived of for centuries. In receiving our identity of womanhood from God, we accept the equal value and empowerment that he places on all human beings. That at the end of the day, it is indeed about saying Fiat! to the most crucial authority in our lives—God himself. 

God is undisputedly for women—let no one tell us otherwise. One need only look to the Bible to see how women who have said Fiat! to God have been empowered to overthrow oppressive structures—patriarchal, racial, national, environmental and circumstantial, or otherwise. Women have been leaders in extraordinary ways. The Books of Esther and Ruth demonstrate that women have been titular characters and celebrated models, and although they mostly ran their own shows, they were crucially authored and empowered by God. Queen Esther humbled herself before the Lord with fasting and prayer, and courageously used her influence and intelligence to deliver the her people from genocide. Miriam, sister of Moses and Aaron, was the first woman in the Bible to be called a prophetess, and played a prominent role as mediator between God and the Israelites, a unique position God recalls centuries later in Micah 6:4: “I sent before you Moses, Aaron, and Miriam.” Israel’s only recorded female judge, Deborah, prophesied that of Israel’s military battles that “the glory of the victory will belong to a woman.” The commander of the rival army, Sisera, was consequently brought to his knees by women of God, Deborah and Jael. 

Even more radically, the women celebrated by God are not the main characters or in titular roles. More often, they were the unnamed extras scorned by society. As a historical product that reflects the suboptimal state of a fallen world, the Bible is full of women who are indeed in positions of subordination. Many struggle against social stigma for a number of reasons. There are several unnamed, insignificant, weeping women (“The Sinful Woman who anointed Jesus’ Feet” of Luke 7:36-50, “The Widow Who Gave Two Coins” of Luke 21:1-4), as well as women shirked by society because of standards of sexual morality (“The Woman Caught in Adultery” of John 8:1-11). Ordinarily, these women were unlikely to have been a part of the narrative. Yet the longest conversation Jesus has with anyone in the Bible is with the Samaritan woman in John 4. The incredulousness of Jesus’ interaction with her is evident in her own response: “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” Although the Samaritan woman bears the burden of every possible social stigma—as a Samaritan instead of a Jew, a woman instead of a man (what’s more, a woman with a questionable reputation for having “five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband”)—Jesus chooses her to speak to her community of the Messiah’s coming. In all these cases, the unrelenting faith and love for God demonstrated by these women was met with equal love and forgiveness from Christ, who unfailingly came to their defence against judgemental Pharisees and doubtful Apostles each time, and raised them in praise and stature.

The Bible refutes Stanton’s binary of self-sacrifice or self-development. In fact, Wonder Woman herself defies Stanton’s dualism. Even as she navigates a bleak human world, the goodness she recognises in humankind pushes her to defend it in the name of love. Her popularity among observers within and without faith is a nod in the direction of ideal womanhood as encompassing both self-sacrifice and self-development. In fact, it is what a human being, regardless of gender, is called to be.

It is crucial to recognise that the Church, although rightfully representing God’s authority on Earth, has not always gotten it right. At various points in history, its doctrines have been used to attribute the role of self-sacrifice solely to women, while men use it to assert their leadership and control. But we take heart in the humility the church has begun to demonstrate in revising its teachings as it continues to heal from past error. We celebrate the incredible gains that women have made in our struggle against oppression. And yet, this story isn’t about wresting back control or autonomy, but recognising that the illusion of control has been used to harm other human beings. It is also about all people—men and women alike—learning to love one another in the spirit of self-sacrifice, and trusting that God is sovereign above all.

In the end, it is most important to remember that the achievement of these gains is still uneven. In no way has this piece encapsulated or done justice to the full complexity and variability of the female experience in different contexts and parts of the world today. If you and I are women lucky enough to believe that we can grow and thrive as individuals more than ever before in today’s world, then we belong to a privileged minority. Talking about concepts of self-determination, female leadership, success and freedom, may still remain out of reach for many women around the world. There is no doubt that the above reflections and opinions are limited, and speak more about the immediate social context (i.e. modern-day America) that I and the likely audience of this piece are privy to. While we affirm the areas of hope and progress that we’ve been blessed to witness and experience, we reflect on what God may have to say as we stand at the crossroads of the way ahead. In doing so, we do not forget that the fight continues beyond our own lived experiences, until the day justice and unity is fully restored through Christ.

1. The Second Sex is a 1949 book by the French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir, in which the author discusses the treatment of women throughout history.

2. http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1092.htm

3. Some scholars cite a movement among upper-class women in Ephesus, the “new women” movement, as a historical and cultural phenomenon that Paul was responding to. The movement was positive in some ways, and promoted womens’ roles in the public sphere, but it became widely disdained in the Roman Empire due to its associations with promiscuity and licentiousness, to the point that the Empire actually legislated against it. Paul likely wanted to avoid any associations between the church in Ephesus and the “new women” movement, for fear that it might damage the possibility of sharing the Christian faith with others in Ephesus. There are other historical arguments as to why Paul was not indeed being sexist.

---