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Women in power, was Re: Ezra-Neh
On Fri, 2 Aug 1996 PWEGNER@BROWNVM.brown.edu wrote:
> >one cannot argue from a general view of women to the _absolute_
> inability of women to take part in the creation of the canon. As you note
> itself, the "general view" did not prevent Hulda....<
>
> Even if we charitably assume that Huldah had a hand in the writing of "D"
> (though I doubt it), it's worth contrasting the enormous number of named
> and unnamed male prophets in the bible with the handful of women named:
> Miriam, Deborah, Huldah, and I suppose No'adiah, for whatever she was worth.
>
> There's a word for this: tokenism.
Actually, tokenism is a complete anachronism. "Tokenism" is a term for a
situation in which a culture agrees in principle that equality is good,
but, not being able to maintain this in practice, resorts to putting few
simbolic representatives of the Great Unrepresented in power. This
clearly _was not_ the biblical position. Rather, the understanding that
made Hulda possible despite the general view of women was that some women
are exeptional enough to reach such positions. This in some sense would
be true for men too - not every body got to be a Moses.
To recap - though from the existance of shauvinistic assumptions one can
clearly deduce something about the statistical likelyhood of a woman to
reach power, one cannot deduce their absolute inability to do so, as
historical examples show.
Best, Asia