What is a Woman?

A while ago, when I was first starting to blog, I wrote this post on my experience with femininity. I said I was still figuring out what it meant to be a strong Christian woman, that I wasn’t ready to explain it yet. But I think the time has come to talk about it. Because we need strong Christian women in this world, and we don’t seem to know what they look like.

Thus, in the coming year, look for more posts on what it means to be a strong Christian woman, because I’ll be writing down my thoughts from time to time as I try to figure this out. To start off, I have a few general observations to share.

Strong is Strong

Honestly, in my mind, it’s not that complicated. Strong is strong, male or female. Think about physical strength. In weightlifting, we tailor workouts for males and females, because they’re built different, and the healthier they are, the more it shows. And the average man is physically stronger than the average woman. On the other hand, some women are stronger than some men, and most workouts work for anyone, provided they’re at the right fitness level. The basics are the same. Strong is strong.

Mental and emotional strength are the same way. Males and females are different, and our minds and spirits work different ways. To deny that is to give up a unique and priceless part of who we are, to smash the kaleidoscope and fill the world with gray, drab sameness. On the other hand, we cannot make sweeping judgements about all men versus all women, and whoever you are, the basics are the same.

However, I have found that this apparently simple topic has given rise to a lot of oversimplification and misconception, so we need to weed through some errors before we’ll be able to see the full truth.

Secular misconceptions

In general, on this blog, I’ll be talking more about conservative misconceptions than secular ones. Why? Because while we do a pretty good job of rejecting secular myths about what it means to be a strong woman, we rarely offer a solid alternative. I would much rather move past what we are fighting against and concentrate on what we are fighting for.

However, to clear up confusion, let me put down a few immature ideas of what it means to be a strong female. It doesn’t mean never asking for help. It doesn’t mean eschewing all the traditional trappings of femininity. It doesn’t mean giving up on a family or vulnerability. It doesn’t mean being bossy and never taking guidance from anyone. It doesn’t mean trying to pretend there’s no difference between male and female, because the scientific evidence is pretty darn clear.

Christian Misconceptions

But putting those aside, there is another set of misconceptions I want to give more attention to, because no one has really offered a good response to them. And these are the Christian, conservative misconceptions about what it means to be a strong female. I’ll talk about the specific issues later; for now, I want to focus on two key wrong assumptions that underlie a lot of these arguments.

First, just because something is true of the relationship between a husband and a wife in no way means it is true for every man and every woman. There are multiple things I can think of – one in particular – that happen between a husband and wife that should definitely not happen between a man and any woman he comes across. So we can’t say, for instance, that because a husband should defend his wife, any man is obligated to defend any woman. The world is more complicated than that.

Second, just because the average man is more suited to something than the average woman does not mean he has a duty to do that something. We cannot make inclinations into obligations. For example, we cannot say that because the average man is more inclined to violence than the average woman, all men are obligated to fight before any women join the military. This is also oversimplified. But again, we will explore these assumptions in much more depth later on.

Moving Forward

I want to emphasize that while I intend to write a good bit about femininity and feminism, this is not my main concern. My main concern is fighting to bring truth into lies, hope into despair, light into darkness, and life into death. But misconceptions about gender relations are proving an obstacle to that goal. They are hurting our witness, and they are holding back would-be strong Christian leaders because they are female.

It’s time to figure this out, so that we can move forward in a spirit of power and love and a sound mind, as we were intended to do.“

“Qiqi Oriental Martial Arts Center June 26, 20112” by Steven Depolo is licensed under CC BY 2.0 CC BY 2.0