The Voice of Silenced Women

At family dinner tonight my seven-year-old son started a conversation about a story he read that he never knew the character’s names. “I read the whole thing and all they said was he and she.” As an exhausted seminary student I chimed in, “It sounds like the Bible. Half the women don’t get names.” My nine-year-old son asks “They don’t get names in the Bible?” My father-in-law chimes in “Women didn’t get much respect in the Bible. Well the women didn’t get to vote until the 1920’s in this country.” My nine-year-old says, “I thought this was supposed to be a free country.”

So much truth out of the mouth of a child and unfortunately women continue to be silenced and unnamed.

In my class, I am studying the book of Chronicles this week and we are discussing the ways in which the Chronicler retold the stories from Samuel and Kings but edited almost all of the stories with women in them out; that basically the Chronicler silenced the women.

This week a story by Melanie Curtain entitled I was Sexually Harassed. Here is How I Responded was in my inbox. She described the harassment that took place while waiting in line at CVS to get a prescription. She described how trying to keep silent and just ignoring the man felt like it was causing the incident to escalate. So she named it. She said “This is harassment.” “What is happening here is harassment.”

Yes, it is and the silencing is not just in line at CVS, it is in our churches too.

Not only have nameless women in the Bible been silenced, the issue of violence against women have been silenced in our churches. It is not common for issues of domestic violence to be addressed in the pulpit. Women and children have been told to keep quiet, even by clergy. And many denominations continue to silence women as they do not allow them in their pulpits. And even women in those particular denominations believe that they should be kept in their place because that is why God created women, to serve the man.  

Men and women were equally created in God’s image. It was men who decided that they needed to exercise power and that is why the war on woman began and is still accepted to this day. And this war on women goes beyond sexual harassment. It is rape, it is pornography and it is human trafficking.

As a religious leader it is my responsibility to give a voice to women. It is my responsibility to name harassment, to name rape and to name trafficking. It is my job to restore morals into a desensitized, obviously not free country.

And as a mother, it is my job to teach my sons about respect. It is my job to teach my sons that women are not and never will be sex objects. It is my job to teach them that clothing does not give them permission to make assumptions about anyone. It is my job to teach them about what harassment and rape is.

We can change the way men think about women. It starts with our sons.