“WE'RE NOT HERE to seduce you,” I said.
The laughter signaled that my comment had pushed a boundary but not broken it. When the moderator at my evangelical seminary’s student orientation asked about friendships between men and women on campus, I answered honestly. I wanted to be viewed as a student, not a threat.
Women seminarians, regardless of where we study, navigate a world not made for us. Many of us study in institutions with long histories of denying our admission, read from syllabi devoid of women scholars, and study under professors who merely tolerate our presence. My own seminary first admitted women as full students in 1975 and into all degree programs in 1986.
Whether we want to or not, women in seminaries live with constant reminders of our strange position—studying in buildings named after professors who denied our inclusion, learning the history of our institutions with the knowledge we would not have been welcomed for much of it, and choosing classes to avoid professors who still begrudge our presence.
I have had incredible male classmates who intentionally sought out my perspective in class and who brought sexist comments by professors to the attention of the administration. Yet many women students struggle to articulate what our experience is really like. Our male colleagues may notice some particularly explicit inappropriate comments, but few understand the weight and drain of living like an uninvited guest in your own school.
Women and men—on a seminary campus, on a church staff, in many places in the world—are not on equal footing. And that inequality is both structural and exacerbated by the sexist suspicion of or fear of women. When women are viewed as sexual threats, we miss out on our male classmates’ study groups, mentoring by male professors, and internship and job opportunities. Few women seminary students sense a clear path forward for the calling God has placed on their lives, and much of that is due to the lack of community created by sexist assumptions about male-female relationships.
When I expressed this to a male student recently, he responded that things have shifted so drastically that I had the advantage. “They want women now,” he said.
The fact that some institutions have decided now to value the perspectives of the marginalized is a far cry from the historic structural disadvantage that impacts the experience of women seminary students. No, the tables have not yet turned.
No matter how progressive or egalitarian an evangelical seminary is, cultural assumptions about women’s intelligence and experience often prevail. Women must fight for the credibility and authority that male classmates are granted automatically. We have learned to brace ourselves when conversations about gender and women’s roles come up. We don’t have the privilege of entering conversations about gender as impersonal observers; we are deeply impacted by comments made or conclusions drawn.
During a heated conversation on a controversial biblical passage in 1 Timothy 2 about women’s roles, a fellow student began his sexist remark with the phrase, “To play devil’s advocate here ... .” The women in the room knew all too well that the devil doesn’t need one.
From our male classmates, we need more than welcome: We need fierce advocacy. We need men who believe that we bring perspectives, talents, and knowledge that are so necessary they deserve to be fought for.
We don’t want to be guests, welcome or not, in someone else’s home. We want to be co-owners with the right to rearrange the furniture.
Kaitlyn Schiess is a writer and student working on her master's in theology from Dallas Theological Seminary.
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