Women’s Leadership in the Early Church: Possibilities and Pushbacks

Scholars have often explained discrepancies in evidence for women's participation in the early church by reference to the gendering of public and private spaces. Public spaces were coded male, and when churches moved into these spaces, women's leadership was disavowed. This article rejects the usefulness of the public/private dichotomy as an explanatory tool, arguing that the modern sense in which these terms are used was anachronistic to the New Testament period. The overlap between public functions and space that the modern concept of the ‘public sphere’ takes for granted did not exist in the ancient world. Public functions often occurred in household spaces, and functions considered private also took place outside homes. For these reasons, scholars should look for new language that better describes the ancient patterns.

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When Women Were Priests: Women's Leadership in the Early Church and the Scandal of their Subordination in the Rise of Christianity; By Karen J. Torjesen; San Francisco, Harper San Francisco, 1993. 240 pp. $22.00

Theology Today ◽

10.1177/004057369405100318 ◽

1994 ◽

Vol 51 (3) ◽

pp. 446-450

Author(s):

Gail Corrington Streete

Keyword(s):

San Francisco ◽

Women's Leadership ◽

Early Church

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Leadership and Gender Stereotyping of Emotions

Journal of Personnel Psychology ◽

10.1027/1866-5888/a000136 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 14 (3) ◽

pp. 153-162 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Andrea Fischbach ◽

Philipp W. Lichtenthaler ◽

Nina Horstmann

Keyword(s):

Emotion Expression ◽

Women's Leadership ◽

Gender Stereotyping ◽

Leadership Perceptions ◽

Target Groups ◽

Male And Female ◽

General Managers ◽

Leadership Success ◽

And Gender ◽

Successful Manager

Abstract. People believe women are more emotional than men but it remains unclear to what extent such emotion stereotypes affect leadership perceptions. Extending the think manager-think male paradigm ( Schein, 1973 ), we examined the similarity of emotion expression descriptions of women, men, and managers. In a field-based online experiment, 1,098 participants (male and female managers and employees) rated one of seven target groups on 17 emotions: men or women (in general, managers, or successful managers), or successful managers. Men in general are described as more similar to successful managers in emotion expression than are women in general. Only with the label manager or successful manager do women-successful manager similarities on emotion expression increase. These emotion stereotypes might hinder women’s leadership success.

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