I’ve had some interesting encounters in the realm of gender roles in the last few days. It’s just been amusing what assumptions are being made depending on the crowd I am with.
The issue first arose last week when Emma got together to play with her pseudo-cousin Juan (he’s my sister-in-law’s half brother who is exactly Emma’s age and the closest thing she has to a cousin…). The idea was to have them splash around in the wading pool. Well Juan immediately found a toy football and started a game of trying to throw it into the pool. Emma got a baby doll and gave it a bath. I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry – so I settled for being happy that my toddler was having fun.
Then at Mike’s orientation at Austin Presbyterian Seminary we had an interesting conversation with the other students about the role of women in the school. One student had attended an all girls college and was getting used to having men in her classes again. Others went to more evangelical schools where women in bible/theology classes were rare if allowed at all. Others from mainline backgrounds were shocked at how weird our experiences of inequality were. So I think it will be very refreshing to be in a context where gender equality is assumed and not still an issue to be debated.
But on the opposite end of the equality spectrum I had some very strange conversations with some friends of my mom’s at a gathering recently. I was doing the whole chit-chat thing answering questioning about my life and mentioned that I was working on a book. In multiple separate conversations the first response to that fact was – “oh, you’re writing a women’s Bible study.” When I tried to explain that I was writing a book not just a study the follow up response was – “so what age group of women is it targeted to.” The exact same response in separate conversations. At first I was really confused. Then it hit me that in these women’s world a woman can only write things for other women. Since in their theology women can’t teach men anything a woman writes must obviously be only for women. They literally couldn’t understand how I could be writing something men would ever read. Needless to say, it made the conversation slightly awkward. But starting a theological argument while I was standing around in a party dress and heels sipping mimosas just seemed a bit too weird, so I just smiled and changed the subject.
So I’m working on figuring out where I belong down here…