Ruby Slippers: How the Soul of a Woman Brings Her Home

ruby

slippers

endorsements

From the book's earliest moments, Jonalyn Fincher makes us laugh, grieve, search, and grow as we walk with her on a road bricked with stories and wisdom and wit (oh, my!), and throughout the journey she gives us permission to ask—as well as a framework to discover—just what it means to be created feminine, in the dazzling image of our God.

Caryn Dahlstrand Rivadeneira

Editor, GiftedForLeadership.com, Christianity Today International

This book is a breath of fresh air in the polarizing debate among evangelicals over gender complementarity. Ruby Slippers provides women (and men) with a balanced and substantive—yet entirely accessible—treatment of femininity. Fincher makes her case for a reasonable complementarity of male and female souls without attaching to this any kind of patriarchal model. By framing her discussion in terms of a flexible sense of family resemblances among women, she offers women a better self-understanding, yet successfully avoids the stereotypes so often forced upon them.

Ronald W. Pierce

Professor, Old Testament Theology and Gender Studies, Biola University

With warmth, wit, and insight, Fincher invites women to embrace an important, and sometimes counter-cultural, image of who God created us to be. May we encourage each other to accept the invitation!

Lisa Graham McMinn, Ph.D.

Author, The Contented Soul

Jonalyn Fincher’s scholarly approach combined with unflinching candor and insight from her own journey makes Ruby Slippers a compelling read that is both smart and personal and will inspire women to meaningfully consider the enormous value that lies in their own femininity.

Sarah Zacharias Davis

Author, The Friends We Keep

The most repeated and most mistaken response that evangelical hierarchical-complementarians make to egalitarian-complementarians is that the latter deny male-female differentiation. In over thirty years in this debate I have neither read nor heard any evangelical even imply this. All evangelical egalitarians insist that God has made us equal and different. Alike we bear the image of God, alike God has made us rulers of his world, alike God gives and blesses the varied ministries the Spirit non-discriminately bestows, yet we are men and women. Thank God Jonalyn Grace Fincher has given her able mind to exploring alikeness and difference in men and women. I love her vision of men and women standing side by side complementing what each is given by God. This is a well written, well researched, thought provoking book.

Kevin Giles

Author, Jesus and the Father

Young women are increasingly becoming disenfranchised from and disenchanted with the church; with Ruby Slippers, Jonalyn offers them a lifeline as she explores what it means to have the soul of a woman, and offers a fresh and fearless take on biblical femininity.

Susy Flory

Author, Fear Not Da Vinci

Finally! An alternative to popular Christian books on gender that define women only in relationship to men, as patriarchy after the Fall has always done. Instead, Fincher redefines femininity in relation to God, whose image we bear, giving women the freedom—and responsibility—to wrestle with who they are before their Maker. Along the way, Fincher takes on the icons of femininity in both our popular culture and our evangelical subculture, and brings them under the careful scrutiny of philosophical thought, recent research in the social sciences, and Scripture. The result will be a relief for women who have hidden from others their sense of homelessness, of not fitting in, and a challenge for women looking for an ideal to embrace."

Elizabeth Hall, Ph.D.

Author, Child of the Wolves

This book recounts the story of how Jonalyn came to see that femininity is truly of a woman—of every woman—living out the fullness of her God-given being and design.

Sarah Sumner

Professor, Theology and Ministry, Azusa Pacific University

Author, Men and Women in the Church

We've been told, Women are from Venus and men are from Mars.

Jonalyn Fincher has a different idea: maybe we're both from planet Earth, but we walk around in different kinds of shoes. Agree or no, this Lamott-like adventure into Gender Oz will get you thinking.

Sally Morgenthaler

Contributor, Emergent Manifesto of Hope

ZONDERVAN

ruby slippers

Copyright © 2007 by Jonalyn Grace Fincher

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Zondervan.

ePub Edition June 2009 ISBN: 0-310-86380-5

Requests for information should be addressed to:

Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fincher, Jonalyn Grace.

Ruby slippers : how the soul of a woman brings her home / Jonalyn Grace Fincher.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN-13: 978-0-310-27243-4

1.Christian women — Religious life. 2. Femininity — Religious aspects — Christianity. I. Title.

BV4527.F53 2007

248.8'43 — dc22

2007000443

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the New American Standard Bible. Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

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Scripture quotations marked NLT are taken from the Holy Bible: New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked TNIV are taken from the Holy Bible: Today’s New International Version ™. TNIV®. Copyright © 2001, 2005 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked ESV are taken from The Holy Bible: English Standard Version, copyright © 2001 by Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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Some names of individuals have been changed.

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This book is dedicated to the men who opened doors for me.

My grandfather who opened Grace.

My father who opened Truth.

My husband, Dale,

who propped both doors open

so we might run through them together.

contents

cover page

title page

copyright

introduction: femininity beyond fairy tales

one: materialism for women

two: uncorking the soul

three: the same planet

four: leaving eden

five: a natural woman

six: finding the feminine in the sacred

seven: frailty, thy name is woman

eight: far as the curse is found

epilogue

notes

recommended resources

acknowledgments

about the publisher

femininity beyond fairy tales

True emancipation begins neither at the polls nor in courts.

It begins in woman’s soul.

Emma Goldman

i grew up in a warm but strict family — one that modeled a loving mother and a capable father so convincingly that my biggest and best dream was to marry a man just like my dad and to have a large family. By fifth grade, I knew I wanted to have twelve children, a practical decision based on a formula I had created (Husband + Many Kids = Successful Christian Female) and fueled by too many readings of Cheaper by the Dozen.

At slumber parties, my friends and I whispered about our future families. We planned how we would all find our knights in shining armor and have a brood of kids and keep house. And with this brood, we would make an impact such that the world has never seen.

I smugly disavowed college. I supposed it was all right for those who found a career more meaningful than the mothering of young minds, but it was not for me. Friends who intended to go to college didn’t fool me either; they didn’t really care about the education or degrees or career, they wanted a man. College was just a larger hunting ground. At least I was honest.

But my practical plans gave way to my romantic side, especially when I visited the University of Virginia (UVA) as a junior in high school. Arriving late in the evening, I saw those brick mansions on Rugby Road lit up like enormous jack-o-lanterns, grinning a warm amber welcome. I was enchanted. Years later, when friends asked why I gave up all the excellent, affordable schools in California for UVA, I explained that I was a hopeless romantic and fell in love with the beauty, the serpentine brick walls, the history, and especially those enchanting mansions, which I quickly learned were the raucous homes of fraternity boys. But the practical reason I gave was that I went to study American history where our country’s history began.

From Virginia’s brick buildings and white-columned architecture, I headed not to the altar but to graduate school at Talbot School of Theology in Southern California, where I studied the philosophy of religion and ethics. All the students at Talbot were required to attend a formal counseling session at the university clinic. The school wanted to determine our psychological health, and since so many graduates of the school would one day be offering pastoral training to church members, the school wanted us to see what it feels like to be on the other side of therapy.

On the day of my session, I sat on a brown-and-yellow-flecked couch, noticeably lower to the ground than the straight-backed chair holding my new psychologist. He had already impressed me with two things: he was uncomfortably close to my age, and he was bald.

I started by sharing some of the things I loved to do and tried to keep the conversation casual and light. He didn’t say much, just sat there scribbling notes. After an awkward silence, in which I realized how different this was from other psychology sessions I had encountered, I grew more and more uncomfortable. The man looked down at his yellow legal pad and ventured a single comment: I notice your interests are feminine. I think it was meant as an enlightening, now-you-can-be-unshackled observation. But I felt accused and bewildered. Femininity had never been a liability before. What now? Should I apologize? He continued, You sew, knit, paint, play piano, cook, and read. You want a large family. (I still wanted twelve children.) He continued slicing apart some of my favorite activities. As I listened to him, I raised my walls of self-defense.

My eyes darted to the clock — forty-five more minutes of this. It was grueling. Relief flooded me when I finally fled the session, out the glass doors and into my little Toyota painted periwinkle. Periwinkle, is that too feminine?

That afternoon, five years ago, was where this book began. My strange encounter with the psychologist got me thinking about femininity in a way I never had before. What is femininity? Is something wrong with it? Is anything right with it? When I began to think about it, I realized I had been receiving cues about appropriate femininity from my earliest days. My family told me what appropriate women’s roles were, my church told me how girls and women should comport themselves, the magazines I read gave me pictures of femininity, even my female teachers at school offered a certain model of femininity. Of course, not all the messages I received about femininity were compatible with one another.

Five years ago, if I had closed my eyes and thought feminine, I would have imagined makeup counters (where I wasn’t permitted to dabble until high school), lingerie (definitely off limits until vows were spoken), corsets, garters, heels, perfume, and wild, wind-blown hair (a stumbling block for men, my mother would say, encouraging me to keep my tresses up and unnoticed). Being feminine meant being subtle, demure, modest, nurturing, matronly, big-breasted, slim-waisted, curvaceously hipped, and, of course, wearing lots and lots of lace. Femininity was all the outer stuff.

By high school, I was good at copying the trappings of femininity. A coworker had once told me, Never leave the house without lipstick and earrings. I duly added that rule to my list. Popular girls didn’t wear glasses, so I got contacts after going through seventh grade with bright purple frames. Sexy women always revealed some curves, so I learned to do that as well. Somewhere along the way, fashion and sex appeal, sassy skirts and dangly earrings, knit their way into my understanding of proper femininity.

To confuse matters, I learned from others that femininity was also about being understated, reserved, and gentle, and of course, producing babies. The church and well-meaning women taught me that femininity was associated with behavior. Godly, feminine women did certain things (baked casseroles, attended Bible studies, raised children, and smiled a lot) and didn’t do other things (contradict men or have sex outside of marriage). Being feminine was not just a matter of looks, but of behavior and scruples. It was as much about how a woman acted as how she should appear.

For all these people’s well-meaning messages, I have found that cosmetics, fashion, and godly behavior do not exhaust womanhood. All those ideas about being feminine are often helpful, and I still affirm many of them. I like to look beautiful. I like dressing in something lacy and modest, yet alluring. I love knowing that my husband will admire my curves. I like attending Bible studies and smiling, and of course, it’s incontrovertible that Christ-following women —and men — should reserve sex for marriage.

But this book is an exploration of womanhood that goes beyond such a view of the feminine, to a femininity that is deeper than appearance and action. A femininity that reaches into the fabric of a woman’s soul and weaves into our minds, emotions, wills, desires, and spirits. My thinking about femininity is very much informed by what I learned about philosophy and Scripture at Talbot. Under Dr. J. P. Moreland, I learned the difference between a body and a soul. From Dr. Robert L. Saucy, a professor of longstanding dignity, a man of integrity and stubbornness much like Gandalf the Grey, I first learned how the church today may not be treating women like Jesus and the apostle Paul treated them. In his class, sitting two rows back, surrounded by more men than women, I learned that Dr. Saucy thought a woman’s role in the church should be at least equal to the vital place women have in the home. This conservative professor actually thought women should speak from the pulpit, not as elders, but definitely as teachers. I walked out of that class on clouds. Could it be possible? Were there more things that women could do without guilt, without being shamed back into their proper role?

I also learned to think about femininity and gender roles in my first full-time job.¹ Three months after graduating from Talbot, I began teaching junior high at a local Christian school. Teaching is one of the few occupations where a female can experience equality.² In such an environment, I found that I had as much to offer as any of the male teachers, that I could take dominion of my classroom.

I was encouraged that if I could teach theology and philosophy to young teenagers, I could teach it to anyone, anywhere. I was regarded with respect among other male employees. I was even consulted as an intellectual and spiritual equal by my boss. That began building confidence into my soul.

But most important, my thinking about femininity has been shaped by my marriage. When asked what she thought of his new girlfriend, Dale’s mother matter-of-factly said of me, She’s your equal. That was all the praise he wanted. Dale and I met and married while we were both students at Talbot. After graduation I began my teaching job, which sapped every last ounce of emotional energy I had. At school I could unbelievably exhaust all my verbal needs and come home to a work-at-home husband who wanted to talk. All I wanted was silence. I learned how easily the typical gender roles can be reversed: Dale wanted emotional communion with his new wife, and I was the one who needed time and space to myself, to adjust to all the changes that marriage and teaching had brought.

The next year, Dale and I launched a nonprofit organization together, to minister as a husband-wife team. We longed to bring apologetics into deeper places than thoughts and beliefs, to help people follow Christ with their emotions, wills, spirits, and desires. We wanted to provide sturdy answers for better souls, and to help others become more appropriately human. We called our organization Soulation, a sort of soul celebration and soul formation all rolled into one. We speak about God’s theology for everything, using apologetics, hermeneutics, arts, and history. More recently I’ve learned how each of these disciplines contributes to the woman’s soul.

Soulation is a fledgling experiment that reminds me that Dale and I work as equals. Dale and I are partners in Soulation and partners at home. On plane trips, we hash out new ideas. After Dale speaks, he asks me for feedback: Was he poised? Was his talk well-organized? Was he humble? After I speak, Dale critiques me. Out of one of these talks, he encouraged me to do more than speak about the essence of woman. He said I should write a book about it.

Dale has been my fellow traveler through the woods and fields, the bogs and mountain peaks of understanding femininity, cheering me into these uncharted places, remapping my ideas when he thinks of counterexamples, and refusing to slow his mental energies in our debates. He has shared my confusion when, although we have identical seminary educations, a pulpit is opened to him but barred to me. We have sat together in stunned silence as I am accused of being prideful when I’ve asked to participate in teaching devotionals. His companionship reminds me of the many ways two can become one, and that I always offer something worth knowing to one man on earth. Through my husband’s eyes, I get daily reminders that a man needs a woman, not as a servant or a helper, not as a cook or a nurturer, not as a princess or a nag, but as a woman. My husband, more than that psychologist, more than my family of origin, more than my education at UVA or Talbot, got me thinking more deeply about femininity.

Prescriptions and Lists

Nazi Germany tried to engineer the proper sphere for women in an easy alliteration: Küche, Kirche, Kinder (Kitchen, Church, Children)³ It wasn’t too difficult for Adolf Hitler to propagandize these. ideas. Most people agreed with him when he said, There are two separate arenas in the life of a nation: that of men and that of women. A woman’s Nature has rightly ordained that men head the family and are burdened with the task of protecting their people, the community. The world of the woman, when she is fortunate, is her family, her husband, her children, her home.⁴

A decade later, the book Fascinating Womanhood offered the do’s and don’ts of 1950s femininity. A woman should not invade a man’s natural sphere or try to excel him in anything that requires his masculine ability. Instead she should recognize her husband’s superior strength and ability. She ought to focus on being a domestic goddess.

Whether women fulfilled these roles is not the point. They were expected to keep out of a man’s domain. Ray Charles belted out a similar idea about his woman: She knows a woman’s place is right there now in her home. Feminine guidance is abundant today; it is regularly updated into modern stuff like what the hot girls wear, what the sexy women do in bed, and what Martha Stewart does for her Halloween parties.

The church has prescriptions for femininity too — only ours are usually more dogmatic and romantic than popular culture’s versions. Modern