The Women's Movement Challenges the Church

Abstract

Because woman has for centuries been “made over” by man in order to satisfy his own expectations, women in the 1970s are confronted with the task of finding out which of their attitudes are really their own and which are the products of socialization. Church women continue to be assaulted by “biblical” attacks on their dignity, making it all the harder for them to achieve the central goal of Women's Liberation: the assumption of adult responsibility and a normal degree of autonomy in one's own life. Now that women are trying to recover their own image—like men, made in the image of God—modern churches are challenged with the opportunity to atone for some of the injustices of the past by rooting out sexism within their own ranks and by opposing sexism in society as a whole.