A Woman According to Oxford

Lewis, Sayers, Tolkien, and the nature and purpose of women.

Suppose one were a thing after all — a thing designed and invented by Someone Else and valued for qualities quite different from what one had decided to regard as one’s true self?…

The name me was the name of a being whose existence she had never suspected, a being that did not yet fully exist but which was demanded. It was a person (yet not the person she had thought), yet also a thing, a made thing, made to please Another and in Him to please all others, a thing being made at this very moment, without its choice, in a shape it had never dreamed of.

— C. S. Lewis, ‘That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups,’ 1945

The first task, when undertaking the study of any phenomenon, is to observe its most obvious feature; and it is here that most students fail. It is here that most students of the “Woman Question” have failed, and the Church more lamentably than most, and with less excuse. That is why it is necessary, from time to time, to speak plainly, and perhaps even brutally, to the Church.

The first thing that strikes the careless observer is that women are unlike men. They are “the opposite sex”—(though why “opposite” I do not know; what is the “neighbouring sex”?). But the fundamental thing is that women are more like men than anything else in the world. They are human beings. Vir is male and Femina is female: but Homo is male and female.

This is the equality claimed and the fact that is persistently evaded and denied. No matter what arguments are used, the discussion is vitiated from the start, because Man is always dealt with as both Homo and Vir, but Woman only as Femina.

— Dorothy L. Sayers, ‘The Human-Not-Quite-Human,’ 1947

Then the heart of Éowyn changed, or else at last she understood it. And suddenly her winter passed, and the sun shone on her.

'I stand in Minas Anor, the Tower of the Sun,' she said; 'and behold! the Shadow has departed! I will be a shieldmaiden no longer, nor vie with the great Riders, nor take joy only in the songs of slaying. I will be a healer, and love all things that grow and are not barren.'

— J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘The Return of the King,’ 1955

What is a woman?

To be clear, I don’t mean ‘Who gets to be a woman?’ This is not a post about transgenderism. I mean, what are women, in essence? Kirsten Sanders complains that this question is too often neglected by feminists. I certainly agree that this is an interesting question. And since Sanders has made this complaint in a post on Éowyn while blogging through The Lord of the Rings, I submit for discussion three quotes, each published around the middle of the 20th century, each written by an author with enduring ties to the University of Oxford.

Somerville College, Oxford, where Dorothy L. Sayers studied for her degree. Photo by John Patterson, via Wikimedia Commons

The subject of the C. S. Lewis quote is a character by the name of Jane Studdock. She begins the novel as a PhD student, slaving unsuccessfully over some lines of poetry from John Donne which would tell her to abandon the life of the mind, if only she were to properly understand them. She ends the novel a submissive wife with a destiny that consists entirely of motherhood. In order to take her from one to the other, Lewis endows her with a spiritual experience, coming directly from God, which brings her to a proper understanding of herself. Yes, she is a person, but she is also a thing. Embracing her true purpose will require her to accept this.

Writing just two years later, Dorothy L. Sayers complains that women are seen as ‘human-not-quite-human.’ A person, you might say, but also a thing. We should also note that Sayers herself found deep meaning in learning and literature. In her 1935 novel Gaudy Night, she writes of Oxford that ‘her foundations were set upon the holy hills and her spires touched heaven.’ So perhaps it is no surprise that she was insistent on not being excluded on the basis of sex from higher education and the development of the mind that goes along with it.

Finally, we have Éowyn’s beautiful character turn. Once she was a shieldmaiden who, in despair, sought an honourable death in battle. Now she will embrace life and healing. The good things that she embraces have feminine elements, it’s true; yet they are also, quite clearly, good in themselves and broad in scope. A feminist might be suspicious of the way that this character development conveniently brings Éowyn closer to gender normativity, but Éowyn is still spirited. Her desire for meaningful and honourable activity is more vibrant than ever.

Both Tolkien and Lewis write women who, at least initially, do not know what they truly are. Jane finds that she is “a being whose existence she had never suspected.” Éowyn’s heart is “changed, or else at last she understood it.” Sayers, by contrast, writes that it is the Church that refuses to comprehend the most fundamental quality of women’s essence. This observation might call into question the stories that Lewis and Tolkien are telling. The Church as an institution often does not truthfully elucidate the nature of women. Those who rely upon the Church may therefore believe that women have misjudged themselves in ways that they actually have not.

One might counter-claim that the Church does teach the humanity of women — or yet more deeply, teaches that women, like men, are ‘made in the image of God.’ Kirsten Sanders despairs that even discussion of this imago Dei is too often concerned with what people do rather than with what they are. Gender, she says, only makes this worse, as everything becomes either about enforcing gender roles or rejecting them. Could we instead use the imago Dei to understand what women are?

In the Church’s past there is actually some back-and-forth as to whether and how women bear the imago Dei at all. Augustine, in Chapters 7 to 13 of Book XII of his treatise on the Trinity, considers several possible takes on this, depending on one’s interpretation of scripture. One possibility, he suggests, is that ‘the woman together with her own husband is the image of God, so that that whole substance may be one image; but when she is referred separately to her quality of help-meet, which regards the woman herself alone, then she is not the image of God; but as regards the man alone, he is the image of God as fully and completely as when the woman too is joined with him in one.’ Yet this will not quite do, for ‘man was not made in the image of God according to the shape of his body, but according to his rational mind,’ and ‘Who is there, then, who will hold women to be alien from this fellowship, whereas they are fellow-heirs of grace with us; and whereas in another place the same apostle says, "For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus; for as many as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ: there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus?"'

In the end, Augustine leaves the proper interpretation of woman’s nature up in the air somewhat: ‘But whether that the apostle calls the man the image and glory of God, but the woman the glory of the man, is to be received in this, or that, or in any other way; yet it is clear, that when we live according to God, our mind which is intent on the invisible things of Him ought to be fashioned with proficiency from His eternity, truth, charity….’ So, what is a woman? Augustine isn’t completely sure, and after considering all the angles he will proceed without settling the matter.

It would make sense to chastise Augustine for failing to come to a conclusion that fully appreciates the human worth that women have. But as an agnostic, I find something to admire in his uncertainty. Indeed, as an answer to the question of human nature, the imago Dei contains its own element of uncertainty. For, what is God? Can you comprehend a full answer to that question? I do not think you can. Surely, an essential element of this description of human nature must therefore include the capacity to surprise us.

Many of the worst descriptions of feminine nature are bad because they preclude this element of surprise. A woman is considered to be a terribly mysterious creature, right up until she suggests purposes in life outside of the family, or menial jobs, or a narrowly-defined understanding of her role in the church. At that point, we are to learn that the true purpose of a woman is perfectly understood, and we know exactly who she is and what she truly needs. The notion that a woman is in some sense a thing cannot be far behind.

Some gender-essentialist characterisations of womanly nature are better than others, of course. When Alice von Hildebrand claims that spiritual motherhood is a universal womanly calling, she does this by calling it ‘motherhood’ whenever a female person helps somebody. An older sister helping her younger siblings, a teacher creating a bond with her students, any time you help someone who is feeling unloved, even just with a word? Yes, that’s ‘motherhood.’ So the claim that all women are called to motherhood becomes a claim that all women are called to help other people. But wait, aren’t we all called to help other people? Leah Libresco Sargeant takes this argument to its logical conclusion and claims that, yes, maternity is a universal vocation for everyone, men included! Starting from a characterisation of woman as Femina, we have found that Femina is also Homo and thus that men have something to learn from this, too.

Madonna and Child, by Artemisia Gentileschi, via Wikimedia Commons

I appreciate that the concept of “spiritual motherhood” can show us true things about women and perhaps even men. Nevertheless, I have some reservations about the notion. For one thing, there is a risk that this dilution of “motherhood” to a more general notion of helping people may obscure the specific quality of motherhood. Childbearing can force new understandings of the body, the mind, and the link between the two. The stresses and beauties of caring for an infant can be, for any parent, as mind-bending as they are physically demanding. These experiences are markedly different to other developments that a woman may have in her life, and they are certainly not the only spurs toward spiritual growth that a woman can receive.

“A mother” is not a full description of what a woman ought to be. Finding the ways in which motherhood and the broader human experience partake of one another is a worthy project, but we should not try to stretch “motherhood” to cover every laudable quality that a woman might embody.

Words matter. In the Quaker “waiting worship” that has become central to my own spiritual life, we wait silently and do not speak unless called to do so. Called by what? By “an inward principle,” say some. By the “seed of Christ” within us, say others. By the Spirit, or the Light, or by something that we might not name at all. Moreover, the art here is not only in discerning whether to speak, but in discerning what to say. “Keeping close to the divine opening,” as John Woolman put it in his journal, is a delicate confinement. In spiritual matters — perhaps, indeed, in all matters — we owe our best judgment. If “motherhood” is truly the most enlightening way to put it, then that is how it should be said. If not, then by warping our descriptions we may lose sight of the way.

Kirsten Sanders, in her post on Éowyn, does not claim that the quality of motherhood is necessary to descriptions of female spirituality. She does, however, suggest that actual motherhood may be sufficient power for a woman to have:

There is not much more irritating to me than evangelical women seeking to revive a midcentury feminism that focused largely on roles, duties, and increasing women’s participation in traditionally male spaces. Perhaps women do not need institutions, because motherhood has allotted us a legacy that will long outlive our efforts. This fiat is the loudest word in the world, that in one moment one might be made an offering that will outlast any institution building, any church growth, any marketplace mastery. Doings and tasks may yell, but quiet offerings go about remaking the world.

Sanders does not mention education as something that a woman can do without, but I nevertheless want to consider this in light of Sanders’ description of her time in graduate school:

I went to graduate school because I was smart and wanted to become smarter and I became, systematically and over time, more stupid. This atrophy took a few forms:

First, I needed to pretend to have read things I hadn’t read.

Second, I needed to pretend to understand the things I had read, even when I didn’t.

Third, I needed to see the deep significance of the theoretical point the instructors were trying to make, even when I thought it was smug or stupid.

…

Anyway, I know how to be in a room of people pretending to be smart who don’t actually know anything. I have, it must be said, an almost uncanny ability to find the hinge point of an argument and make an incisive comment even if I haven’t comprehended, or even read, the whole thing. But the older I get, the less interested I am in doing any of this. I find instead that I like to read slowly and drill down in a particular question.

It is easy to see that a person could very well do without an institution focused on sophistry and ideological parroting. On the other hand, it is less easy to dismiss the quality, or perhaps the inward principle, that drives Sanders to instead read slowly and come to her own understanding. It would be inane to say that motherhood is so powerful that it ought to be able to substitute for this, and it would be imprecise to say that motherhood is this.

What role do institutions play in developing or enabling good qualities towards which a woman might be drawn?

“Oxford has been called the home of lost causes: if the love of learning for its own sake is a lost cause everywhere else in the world, let us see to it that here at least, it finds its abiding home.” Magnificent, thought Harriet, but it is not war. And then, her imagination weaving in and out of the spoken words, she saw it as a Holy War, and that whole wildly heterogeneous, that even slightly absurd collection of chattering women fused into a corporate unity with every man and woman to whom integrity of mind meant more than material gain—defenders in the central keep of Man-soul, their personal differences forgotten in the face of a common foe. …

In the glamour of one Gaudy night, one could realise that one was a citizen of no mean city. It might be an old and an old-fashioned city, with inconvenient buildings and narrow streets where the passers-by squabbled foolishly about the right of way; but her foundations were set upon the holy hills and her spires touched heaven.

— Dorothy L. Sayers, “Gaudy Night,” 1935

In Sayers’ description, Oxford itself is an institution that can draw a person closer to their true spiritual nature. It is right and proper for a woman to value this.

We might protest, in response, that not everybody can attend Oxford; certainly, nobody can any longer attend Oxford as it was when Sayers got her degree in the 1910s¹. What of those who, like Sanders, attend graduate school in the hope of developing their minds and find that it makes their minds atrophy in some ways, instead? While we’re at it, what of those many people throughout history who have not had access to the universities? Were they all doomed in some sense to spiritual failure?

Quakers as a class could not attend Oxford, specifically, until 1854. Full admission to all university offices for Dissenters from the Church of England was not granted until 1871. The first higher educational institution open to women at Oxford opened less than a decade later, in 1878. Which is to say, the notion of a university as a place open to all who love learning and have the ability to keep up with its standards is a very new one, when measured in relation to the long expanse of history.

However, before we dismiss institutions as unnecessary, we should note that for much of history there have been other institutions besides universities that existed (and indeed still exist) to develop either the mind or the spirit or both. Monasteries and convents took in men and women who wanted to devote themselves to God. Laypeople attended church, and sometimes created institutions of their own. It is normal, and natural, to want to participate in communities and structures that support your spiritual development. In the 20th and 21st centuries it was and is entirely reasonable for a university to be one of those structures, if you are lucky enough to find one that can function as such.

I think many of us do become too attached to universities, specifically, though. One of the things I like about Quaker meeting is the way it provides me with an alternate structure in this regard. It can draw out aspects of the life of the mind, and of the spirit, that were less obvious in the university contexts that I have been accustomed to (and indeed grew up in; I was a university kid with parents in the academy). I do not think I could ever do without writing or music, but I notice that Quaker waiting worship — including when I am silent — can at its best resemble exactly those things I cherish most about each: precision in phrasing, the subconscious sense of how a musical phrase ought best to be expressed, the impulse to communicate honestly, co-ordinated participation with a group.

Quaker women have never been barred from speaking in meeting, Bible verse about keeping silent in the church notwithstanding. To deny women full participation would be to deny them the freedom to seek, express and obey what is true and good.

"What do you fear, lady?" [Aragorn] asked.
"A cage," [Éowyn] said. "To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien, “The Return of the King,” 1955

Why does Éowyn fear cages? Because she has lacked freedom for a very long time. This is deeper than it sounds, and I am going to use something else that Kirsten Sanders says, in a different Lord of the Rings post, to explain what I mean:

This, also, is Augustine!- in that any freedom is directed only toward the Good, and freedom to choose other than the good is actually bondage.

There is some truth here. As a feminist, it’s easy to read a statement like this and assume that the next statement is going to be “and the Good, for women, lies in motherhood, so just go ahead and be a mother and then you won’t need any other freedoms.” This can lead to a desire to reject such an Augustinian notion of freedom out of hand. But I’ve already argued that the Good, for women, does not just lie in motherhood and it would be absurd to claim that it does.

I also know that modern feminism does express something like this notion of freedom, albeit in an altered form. The most recent example that I’ve seen was from Jessica DeFino, a writer here on Substack who is critical of the beauty industry. In response to the idea that it is empowering to wear glittery makeup that will pollute the environment with microplastics, she quips, ‘Hot tip: If “empowerment” is what you’re after, try living according to your values!’

There’s a difference, here: empowerment by living according to your [implicitly subjective] values versus freedom directed towards the [objective] Good. But feminism frequently argues that not all values make one equally free, and beauty is one of the most common places that this argument is made. A woman may voluntarily choose to spend hours on makeup, to wear shoes that feel deeply uncomfortable, to undergo surgeries that bring her into compliance with narrow beauty norms. Some feminists would call this freedom, but many others would say that she is trapped by restrictive societal norms, and that she would be more free if her worth did not feel, to her, as if it depended so much on her appearance. So let’s take the Augustinian notion of freedom and run with it.

‘Care and dread she had, and shared with me, in the days of Wormtongue and the king's bewitchment; and she tended the king in growing fear. But that did not bring her to this pass!'

'My friend,' said Gandalf, 'you had horses, and deeds of arms, and the free fields; but she, born in the body of a maid, had a spirit and courage at least the match of yours. Yet she was doomed to wait upon an old man, whom she loved as a father, and watch him falling into a mean dishonoured dotage; and her part seemed to her more ignoble than that of the staff he leaned on.’

— J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘The Return of the King,’ 1955

As Théoden falls into despair and inaction, it is Éowyn’s duty to care for her uncle, and it is good that she does not simply give up this task. However, during this time, Théoden himself is not adequately directed towards the Good. Éowyn’s task is to serve a leader who is not leading as he ought. She can see the kingdom falling into ruin. She can see that more needs to be done. Yet she is forbidden to do anything but enable Théoden’s incapacity.

Éomer’s ‘horses, and deeds of arms’ are still able to serve a higher purpose of defending the land from Saruman; at some risk to himself, Éomer even defies the king in order to pursue that higher duty (and within the narrative this defiance is important to the plot and is portrayed as the right choice). Éowyn has no such honourable path available to her. Théoden’s sloth becomes her sloth, perforce, and it damages her all the while.

It is in reaction to this that she grasps, desperately, to ‘spend my life as I will.’ She is correct that she has been without freedom, even in the Augustinian sense. Not all of the solutions that she reaches for are good ones, but she is not wrong to think that her current state needs mending, and that re-orienting herself towards worthwhile goals may be the cure. Rohan holds courage in battle to be the highest form of honour, and Éowyn’s enforced lack of worthwhile deeds has left her with a low view of her own life. Death in battle comes to seem like the highest good she can aim for.

Éowyn never stops seeking what is good and honourable. Courageous and skilled, she succeeds spectacularly with her deeds on the battlefield. But her aim is off. She achieves something important, but she does not heal herself thereby. Instead, Éowyn eventually finds what she needs by way of not just one but several good things to which she can be oriented: a good man in Faramir, a good task in healing, and a further good to experience in “all things that grow and are not barren.” Tolkien has not simply relegated her to marriage and called it enough. He has given her a broad base of loves and purposes that include family but are not limited to it. As a reader, it is easy to imagine that Éowyn will remain spirited, active and purposeful for the rest of her life, free to seek the Good and joyful when she finds it.

Kirsten Sanders may have a point that Christian feminism can do better than just attempting to copy secular feminism in a religious context. Secular feminism sometimes struggles to articulate a positive vision, even when its wiser proponents see the need for a kind of freedom for women that is not merely permissive but good. Christian feminists have cultural riches that they can draw upon to fill this gap. Sometimes the necessary truths may be intertwined with painful falsities, and disentangling the good from the bad will require discernment. Yet it does not do to fear a lie so much that you cannot reach in and tease out the truth. Have courage, seek the Good, and may we all be healed in time.

Photograph by Jenny Thorpe of a mural by Henry Bird in Denton village church, Northamptonshire, planned and painted between 1960 and 1977. These panels honour the work that women do to care for the church. On the left is a painting of Mary and Martha that used two women who cleaned the church as models. In the middle is Dorothea, patron saint of florists and floral decorators. The ‘better part’ that Mary chose, and that shall not be taken from her, is not pictured. Then again, it may perhaps be as difficult to fully depict as it is important to allow.

1. I originally said that Sayers got her degree in the 1920s. She in fact graduated in 1915. My apologies for the error.