The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

Beth Allison Barr is a historian specializing in medieval and early modern church history and a longtime pastor's wife in the Southern Baptist tradition. In this work, part memoir and part historical argument, she contends that "biblical womanhood," the teaching that God designed women to be submissive wives and mothers under male authority, is not rooted in Scripture but was constructed over centuries through patriarchal culture's influence on Christian theology. She traces this construction from the ancient world through the present, weaving personal experience with evidence from her scholarship.

Barr grew up in small-town Texas absorbing the complementarian worldview, the theological position that women are divinely created as helpers and men as leaders. Influences like radio host James Dobson, Bible study notes, and sermons reinforced that a woman's highest calling was to be a submissive wife and homemaker. The crisis that shattered this framework began in September 2016, when her husband, Jeb, a youth pastor of more than 20 years, was fired after challenging church leadership over the issue of women in ministry. Three months later, Barr walked out of the church after seeing a farewell table she perceived as controlling the narrative of their departure. She drove home and began writing, realizing that by staying silent for years despite knowing complementarian theology was historically and biblically flawed, she had been complicit in a system that harmed women.

The book's central argument begins with the origins of patriarchy. Barr defines patriarchy, drawing on historian Judith Bennett, as a system promoting male authority and female submission. Complementarian leaders cite the historical continuity of male leadership as evidence that patriarchy is God's design. Barr flips this argument, tracing patriarchy's emergence to the development of agricultural civilizations and aligning it with Genesis 3:16, where God tells Eve after the fall that her husband will rule over her. Drawing on theologian Alice Mathews, she contends that patriarchy was not God's intention but a consequence of human sin. What is truly radical in the Bible, she argues, is not its patriarchal elements but the passages that subvert patriarchy, such as Galatians 3:28, which declares that in Christ "there is no longer male and female."

Barr then turns to the apostle Paul, whose letters form the foundation of complementarian teachings about women. She argues that evangelicals have misread Paul by interpreting him through modern culture rather than his first-century Roman context. A medieval marriage sermon by the priest John Mirk emphasizes mutual love and omits the household codes (New Testament passages calling wives, children, and slaves to submit to authority), challenging the complementarian claim of an unbroken tradition of male headship. Barr contends the New Testament household codes should be read as resistance narratives to Roman patriarchy, highlighting Ephesians 5:21's call for mutual submission. She argues that 1 Corinthians 14:34–35, commanding women to be silent, may quote Corinthian cultural practice that Paul then refutes. In Romans 16, Paul names 10 women, seven recognized for their ministry, including Phoebe as a deacon and Junia as prominent among the apostles. Barr traces how English translations obscured these roles, rendering Phoebe as a "servant" and changing Junia's name to the masculine "Junias" in 20th-century editions. After teaching this material in her women's history class, Barr tells her husband she no longer believes in male headship.

Barr argues that medieval Christians remembered women's leadership in ways modern evangelicals have forgotten. She recounts the story of Margery Kempe, a 15th-century Englishwoman arrested in York who defended her right to teach before the archbishop by distinguishing between preaching from a pulpit and teaching through conversation. Kempe drew strength from revered female saints, including Mary Magdalene, Margaret of Antioch, and Saint Katherine. In medieval tradition, Mary Magdalene was the "apostle of the apostles" who preached and converted new lands. Medieval theologians could not deny she preached, so they made her an exception rather than a model for ordinary women. Barr examines popular modern church history textbooks and finds they minimize women's medieval leadership, describing Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th-century German Benedictine abbess and mystic, as a writer but not a preacher despite historical evidence to the contrary.

The Protestant Reformation, Barr contends, further narrowed women's options. Before the Reformation, women could gain spiritual authority through virginity and religious vows; afterward, wifehood and motherhood became the primary markers of female holiness. Drawing on historian Lyndal Roper, she argues that Reformation theology supported a hardened "theology of gender" confining women to domestic work. Early Reformation women like Argula von Grumbach and Anne Askew believed the new theology gave them the right to preach but were silenced; Askew was burned at the stake. Barr presents evidence from 120 late medieval English sermon manuscripts showing that the Pauline texts now used to restrict women rarely appeared and seldom concerned female roles. A medieval sermon interprets 1 Timothy 2:15 as an allegory for all Christians, while a 1657 sermon by English clergyman Lancelot Andrewes uses the same verse as evidence for women's divinely ordained domesticity.

A chapter on English Bible translation argues that early modern Bibles were shaped by patriarchal contexts. The 1997 controversy over gender-inclusive language in the NIV led Dobson and theologian Wayne Grudem to convene a meeting producing guidelines against such language. The English Standard Version (ESV) emerged in 2001 as a direct response, designed to preserve readings upholding male headship. Barr counters that gender-inclusive translation is not a modern innovation: Medieval English preachers routinely used inclusive language when rendering Scripture. She draws on historian Naomi Tadmor's research showing that early English translators imported monogamous marital norms into the Hebrew Bible, where the word "marriage" never appears but shows up 50 times in the Geneva Bible.

Barr then traces the "cult of domesticity," an ideology born from Enlightenment philosophy, early modern science, and the Industrial Revolution that elevated piety, purity, submission, and domesticity as the defining traits of ideal womanhood. She argues that what evangelicals call biblical womanhood is essentially a "nineteenth-century construct," as historian Randall Balmer describes it (171), sanctified with religious language.

The book's climactic chapter argues that biblical womanhood became "gospel truth" through three developments. First, evangelicals forgot their own history of women in public ministry; historian Timothy Larsen argues that such ministry is a "historic distinctive of evangelicalism" (175). Second, the championing of biblical inerrancy, the belief that the Bible is completely without error, made it impossible to question a literal reading of Paul's words about women without appearing to doubt Scripture itself. Third, complementarian leaders revived the heresy of Arianism through the doctrine of the "eternal subordination of the Son," teaching that Jesus is eternally subordinate to God the Father and that this hierarchy models the husband-wife relationship. Barr identifies this as the heresy condemned at the Council of Nicaea in 325, which declared the Son to be of the same substance as the Father. The Gospel Coalition, a prominent evangelical organization, includes biblical womanhood in its statement of faith, and pastor Tim Keller argues that complementarianism is necessary to protect the gospel. Author Lynne Hybels confessed at a 2007 conference that following a script of biblical womanhood had left her so miserable at 39 that she wanted to die.

In the final chapter, Barr shares her most painful personal story: an abusive relationship with a boyfriend who internalized complementarian teachings about male authority. She argues there is a demonstrable link between complementarianism and abuse, citing allegations against conservative speaker Bill Gothard, a class-action suit alleging child sexual abuse within Sovereign Grace Ministries, and hundreds of victims of sexual abuse in Southern Baptist churches. She draws on historical models of resistance, including 15th-century French writer Christine de Pizan and English author Dorothy L. Sayers, who in 1948 refused Christian author and apologist C. S. Lewis's request to oppose women's ordination. Barr connects patriarchy to racism, arguing they are interlocking structures of oppression. She closes by calling on evangelical Christians to stop supporting biblical womanhood, remember women's long history of public ministry, and follow the example of Jesus, who consistently listened to women and set them free.