Real Women or Objects of Discourse? The Search for Early Christian Women

Abstract

AbstractScholarly interest in gender and sexuality in early Christianity, which has typically been tied to an interest in women and women's roles, experiences, and influences, is a relatively new addition to the study of early church history. Women and women's issues entered the academy through the women's movement of the 1970s. Early on this scholarship was driven, in part, by a political or theological agenda that sought to empower women of the twentieth century by reconstructing the lives of their foremothers. Often the early studies of women in the church were optimistic that real, historical women could be found within our sources. Soon, however, scholars became more suspicious of the male‐authored texts and turned, instead, to study the social effect of discourses about women. Many scholars, however, are not yet ready to give up investigations of ancient women's lives. Thus the field of early Christian studies is developing a variety of methodologies that offer sophisticated readings of ancient male‐authored texts while still acknowledging the inherent difficulties involved in reconstructing women's lives in early Christian history.