Review: A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband "Master"

 Rachel Evan's book A Year of Biblical Womanhood chronicles her year long exploration of the Bible through the eyes of a 21st century woman.  Each month, she chooses an area of focus- ranging from submission, to modesty, to justice, and chooses tasks for herself from passages of scripture concerning women.  Interspersed between these chapters are portraits of women from the Bible, ranging from well-known women such as Ruth, to lesser-known women such as Junia and Tabitha.  She also interviews women from various streams of Judaism about the way they seek to follow the Bible's instructions for women in their various lifestyles.  The book is similar in theme and organization to A.J. Jacob's The Year of Living Biblically.
The Bad:  Not a Hermeneutics Lesson
There are no nuances in Rachel Evan's application of various scripture texts.  Her self-assigned projects for living Biblically are taken from texts ranging from Leviticus to Proverbs to the New Testament epistles, with little regard for the overall intent of the passage or its place in the overall biblical story.  For example, she follows the Levitical purity laws with equal fervor as commands to seek justice.  The overall result of this haphazard interpretive method can be the distortion fo scripture, and as a result her writing at times is irreverent.  At times, her approach seems disrespectful of women who hold to more conservative positions about women's roles.  However, her approach needs to be understood in light of the fact that although she addresses theology at many levels, she in no way seems to intend that the way of life she adapts for her "project" should be used to interpret scripture in normal circumstances.
The Good:  Biblical Freedom
Though some may disagree with Evan's overall egalitarian position, she has many valid insights about the overall biblical perspective on women's lives and roles.  She challenges some interpretations that are viewed as "biblical", but in fact go beyond the clear teaching of the Bible about women.  Throughout the book, she challenges the reading of Proverbs 31 as a prescriptive list of tasks for the "ideal woman",  reading it instead as a poem praising a woman of valour.   She also challenges the idea that marriage and raising children is the only valid calling for a Christian woman, highlighting Paul's teaching about singleness.  She writes, "as a Christian, my highest calling is not motherhood; my highest calling is to follow Christ. And following Christ is something a woman can do whether she is married, or single, rich or poor, sick or healthy, childless or Michelle Duggar." (Kindle location 3282).  In light of her own experience, she explains,
     Growing up in the Church, I must have heard a thousand times that my highest calling as a woman was to bear and bring up children. While men could honor God in varying capacities through work, family, and ministry, a woman’s spiritual aptitude was measured primarily by her ability to procreate. Even as a child I noticed that the church deaconesses hosted dozens of wedding and baby showers each year, but never a housewarming party for a single woman or a celebration dinner for a woman who passed the bar or graduated from medical school. Subtly, the belief that I was incomplete without a husband and children crept into my subconscious. Without procreating, I believed, my contribution to the Church didn’t really count. It hasn’t always been this way. Both Jesus and Paul spoke highly of celibacy and singleness, and for centuries the Church honored the contributions of virgins and widows to the extent that their stories occupied the majority of Christian literature.  (Kindle location 3254)
    Throughout the book, Evans seeks to correct the idea that there is only one correct life model for a Christian woman.  Though she may err in taking some of the Bible's commands lightly, she does well to correct an imbalance that requires a lifestyle for women that is mandated more by cultural norms than by the Bible's teaching.  At the end of the book she concludes,
    So after twelve months of “biblical womanhood,” I’d arrived at the rather unconventional conclusion that that there is no such thing. The Bible does not present us with a single model for womanhood, and the notion that it contains a sort of one-size-fits-all formula for how to be a woman of faith is a myth. Among the women praised in Scripture are warriors, widows, slaves, sister wives, apostles, teachers, concubines, queens, foreigners, prostitutes, prophets, mothers, and martyrs. What makes these women’s stories leap from the page is not the fact that they all conform to some kind of universal ideal, but that, regardless of the culture or context in which they found themselves, they lived their lives with valor. They lived their lives with faith. As much as we may long for the simplicity of a single definition of “biblical womanhood,” there is no one right way to be a woman, no mold into which we must each cram ourselves—not if Deborah, Ruth, Rachel, Tamar, Vashti, Esther, Priscilla, Mary Magdalene, and Tabitha have anything to say about it. (Kindle location 5139)
     Though the book has its imperfect moments- and perhaps more so than some other books- her overall conclusions make the book a thought provoking and worthwhile read.  The book intersperses the lighthearted humour of some moments of Evan's quest with deeper reflection about what it means to live as a Christian woman seeking to live out the Bible's teaching.

A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband "Master"