THE VOICE OF WOMEN

This last week a couple of days before Mother’s Day I received a note from one of my FaceBook friends. To be honest he was a friend long before my FaceBook days. Anyway he asked me if I had any materials he might use for a Mother’s Day talk. I off-handedly sent him a note about using the women mentioned in the Bible to draw examples of qualities of motherhood and why we should honor them along with all mothers. Sometimes I have found in life that those remarks I say most casually are the ones which haunt me the most. For the rest of that day and during the ensuing days until this writing I have been drawn back to think about the historical view of women and their mostly unrecorded thoughts.

Since I have had the privilege to spend a lot of my days in the Scriptures and have also been blessed with the time to read extensively it would take me a long time to write a comprehensive review of all the women which have been mentioned in those readings, but I would like to at least take a moment to express my thoughts on that which has been passing through my mind the last few days.

First, let me acknowledge that the Scriptures as well as most of the writings we historically encounter concerning women were written for and about them by men. As I started my personal study program after retirement to read through the Great Books of the Western World it wasn’t long before I realized the great majority of the writers were male. It seems to me that the forward to that series needs to be changed from declaring that the writers represented the foundation of all Western thought, to say something like the writings found in these books represent the thoughts which have been developed though the male population of the Western world.

It took great tragedy in the life of Mark Twain before he would have the sensitivity to even approach the writing of the Diary of Eve. I suspect that even in his tragedy-induced sensitive later life when he wrote this charming little book, he was only able to begin to understand and to approach what Eve herself might have written about the events of the Garden and the events after this first couple’s expulsion. How would it change our thoughts of the jealousy-induced relationship between Cain and Able if their mother had written her feelings and probable overwhelming sorrows concerning the conflict of her elder sons?

I was several books into my Taylor Caldwell period before I became aware that the author was a woman. Once having made this discovery I returned to review her books which I had already read so that I could fully appreciate that as I read about Luke and his ministering to the ills of his patients I was reading the sentiments of one who was far more attuned to the nurturing and caring of the sick and needy. One has to wonder if it would have altered the way conflicts have been resolved over the centuries if the thoughts of the women of the New Testament had been preserved and made part of the foundation of our Western philosophy. I can't help but think that foundations of thought would be altered if not shaken if we were privy to the Diary of Mary as she was nurturing and raising the Son of God. How would it change my understanding if Mary Magdalene and the ‘other’ Mary had been able to tell the stories of their involvements with the Savior of Mankind?

As I have waded through the historical novels of James Michener I was once again exposed to the male adventurers, explorers, founders, rulers and criminals of cultures and societies, with only periodic attempts of an introduction to the female view. The irony of Michener’s writing is that even when the culture he was writing about was oft times matriarchal he wrote predominantly about men from a man’s point of view. I would have loved to have known what the women in his book The Covenant thought during the times of conquering and being conquered as they clung to life on the trade route between Egypt and the Fertile Crescent. I'm sure the history of the Islands of the Pacific would have had a different slant if somehow Hawaii contained the thoughts and feelings of the Monarchs of that developing society as well as the wars and the warriors.

As I have a tendency to exhaust a point I am trying to make, let me make a few concluding remarks about the accumulation of historical and other writings and the glaring absence of the contributions of women to that library.

Although I know that by using the word woman in this writing I run the danger of having brought about negative feelings in some who might read these words, I want to let you know that I chose the word deliberately because I wanted to express the belief that females add to males, that women add to men and vice versa. I strongly believe that our history would have been much more about meaningful relationships and less about conflicts if we had been exposed to a library complimented by the voices of ‘FE’ and ‘WO’ liberally inundated over the shelves and collections.

I earnestly pray that now that we live in an era when women’s voices are no longer censured by culture, they will make a synergistic contribution and not fall into the trap of making their voices sound as if they were but echoes of the baser tones which have for too long fallen upon our ears. One of the dangers of gaining equality is that we might take on the grosser parts of another rather than adding our goodness to the whole.

I can't help but think we might have had a kinder and gentler history if the voice of women had been recorded and distributed over the millennia. My hope is that as freedom of expression and the power of the pen, (I guess we can still use that phrase in this age of computers) have been won for the minds and hands of that part of our society far too long kept silent, that the generations of their posterity will shout with joy that their thoughts and words helped turn swords into plowshares and enabled the lamb to once again lay down with the lion.