Silencing women

Rosenstock-Huessy notes that the ancient world observed a division of labor with regard to speech: “Women are expected to contribute wild, passionate, inarticulate shouts of blind feeling. Men are expected to build on this natural stratum the structure of high and articulate speech . . . . Women and children yell, weep, shake; men act and speak.”

Against this background, Paul’s instructions for women to be silent have a different impact than is often thought:

“When Paul asked that women be silent in church he said it at a time and within a world in which the women – Jewish and Gentile alike – were expected to utter terrible wails and yells, to be Sibyls and Bacchants, to utter passionate cries at any funeral. The modern detractors of Paul usually have not the faintest idea what they attack. Paul made formal speech accessible to women by freeing them from the burden of pre-Christian ritual in which they strewed ashes on their heads, punctured their breasts and uttered long-drawn cries for days [think of contemporary Islamic funerals]. Paul was faced with passionate people who stammered and had fits under the new dispensation of freedom, who had been obsessed by spirits and by demons of their clan or family.”

Thus, Paul’s instructions “laid the foundations of a new truth that women may from now on participate in the word as well as men.” And Paul’s instructions were heeded: “We no longer fear that we should hear hysterial cries in church. Women behave as respectably in religious gatherings as though they were men.” The silence of women was a roadbloack against relapse into hysteria, and particularly the re-confinement of women to the “irrational” sphere of yells and wails. “Women keep silence,” paradoxically, frees women to speak.