I shall never forget the comment of a senior English churchman:
that he could envisage Adam and Eve sitting across the camp-fire
from each other, just as he and his wife did in their drawing room.
An image of a man and woman wearing fig leaves, but sitting in
chintz-covered armchairs, drinking sherry, immediately sprang to my
mind.
The churchman's comment exemplifies the kind of ahistorical
thinking in the new report by the Church of England's Faith and
Order Commission, Men, Women and Marriage (News, Leader Comment,
12 April). It has received almost universal condemnation, not only
for its content (or lack thereof), but also for its poor
argument.
The leader comment in this paper advised readers to ignore it,
and most will. Nevertheless, its publication opens the opportunity
for some real education on the subjects about which it purports to
inform us. As the leader said, the report "speaks of a unique
relationship between a man and a woman without ever explaining this
contention. Seldom clear, the text adopts a particular obscurity
whenever a contentious matter is touched upon, such as the
complementarity of the sexes."
The report provides no history of sexual difference, nor of its
accompanying bugbear: the "complementarity" of men and women. Under
the sweeping assumption that both sexual difference and
gender-complementarity are universal and timeless concepts, the
possibility of same-sex marriage is rejected. Yet, for the past
several decades, historians of medicine have convincingly shown
that both are modern concepts, emerging in particular political and
social circumstances in the West.
Before the modern period, scientists - still relying on ancient
sources such as Aristotle and Galen - understood woman as an
imperfect version of man. They believed that there was "one sex",
hierarchically arranged. Women and men were seen as having the same
sexual organs; it was just that women's were on the interior.
The point is illustrated by the French essayist Montaigne's
retelling of a folk tale about a woman, Marie Germain, who jumped
over a ditch while chasing pigs through fields: her genitals
dropped - and she became a man.
This "one-sex" idea was challenged in the Enlightenment, in part
through science; but that science was driven by political change.
The old hierarchies were being questioned. Universal rights were
being championed, but was everyone really equal? The answer was
sought in the supposed "facts" of biology.
The search for anatomical sexual differences was driven by an
increased sense that women were intrinsically different from men -
and, on those grounds, should not receive the same rights. The
result was the articulation of two sexes.
But, you might say, despite all this, sexual difference is
true. Yes and no: it is less clear-cut than we might
imagine, as medical cases of those who find themselves biologically
between the sexes illustrate. But the important point is that
sexual difference was imbued with political ideology from the
beginning.
Out of all this came the notion of the complementarity of the
sexes. This is the idea that women and men have distinctly
different qualities (rooted in biology), and that this suits them
for different (but "complementary") roles in life.
This suited the economic climate of newly industrialised Britain
very well. As work became separated from home, the middle and
working classes emerged. Separate spheres for work and home
developed, and home came to be seen as the special domain of women
- at least, middle-class women - whose "natural" characteristics of
gentleness and passivity made them keepers of morals and preservers
of the hearth.
Preachers took on gender complementarity with enthusiasm,
especially those of the Evangelical Revival. New ideas about the
differences between men and women were given a theological
grounding, and blended with old ideas about the subordination of
women.
Women were seen as spiritually equal, but, in practical
terms, socially subordinate. These ideas were taken around
the world by missionaries and imperialists alike, and imposed on
completely different cultural arrangements of the sexes and kinship
relations.
These ideas did not go uncontested. Women argued for their
admission to higher education and for universal suffrage, for
example.
YET such ideas continued to have an impact on theology, most
notably in the work of Karl Barth, who insisted that the
"distinctive natures" of men and women were "the command of God".
For Barth, these distinctive natures led to sex-differentiated
functions, which were absolutely rigid. As he wrote: "The sexes
might wish to exchange their special vocations, what is required of
the one or the other as such. This must not happen."
One of the great problems of all this thinking is that concepts
of sexual difference and complementarity that our ancestors would
barely have recognised 300 years ago, let alone 3000 years ago, are
regularly mapped back on to the Hebrew scriptures, especially the
creation stories in Genesis 2.
Unfortunately, the new report on marriage appeals to just this
sort of ahistorical thinking. And that does no one any favours at
all.
Many people have suggested that we need a history of
marriage, which the new report does not provide. I agree; but we
also need to understand how gender relations in the modern period
have been powerfully shaped by particular ideas about sexual
difference and gender complementarity, which are relatively new,
and have never been universally accepted.
The ideas about women and men which emerged with the notion of
sexual difference were made to fit a particular kind of
middle-class fam-ily arrangement. Some found that it suited them;
some did not. This is why Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine
Mystique 40 years ago, and this is why movements for the
liberation of women and of gay people followed.
None of this is to question the clear value of marriage as a
building-block of society. It is to suggest that, in thinking
through a distinctly Christian view of marriage, we need to
recognise that ideas about gender relations have always been
specific to context, and always will be.
The Very Revd Dr Jane Shaw is the Dean of Grace Cathedral,
San Francisco, in the United States.