Women's Socioeconomoic Status and Religious Leadership in Asia Minor: In the first Two Centuries C.E.

1. Gender and Status

1 Gender and Status In this chapter I review studies of texts about women’s religious status in Asia Minor in the first two centuries of the common era. While a few scholars have proposed that wealthy women held positions of leadership in antiquity, a dominant stream in scholarship maintains that women’s secondary status prevented or limited women’s leadership. Important variations among interpretations of texts arise from different approaches to the analysis of women’s history. My discussion is organized around these different approaches. Scholars have analyzed women’s status in terms of prominent cultural values, an honor/shame paradigm, households, associations, patronage, and economics. This previous scholarship has informed the approach of my study in significant ways. I will argue that investigation of women’s religious status depends on investigation of women’s status in households, slavery, and patronage. While scholarship has not ignored these socioeconomic institutions, the most widely known models have not adequately theorized gender in a framework that allows a thorough analysis of women’s status. A better understanding of women’s status in the ancient world requires a theory that situates the study of gender in the study of socioeconomic status. The discussions of methods and models in this chapter, along with the preceding introduction, provide necessary groundwork for investigating wealthy women’s status in households and patronage. Review of Scholarship A QUESTION OF STATUS Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has argued that women were leaders in ancient religious movements and suggested that “women’s actual social-religious status 39 must be determined by the degree of their economic autonomy and social roles rather than by ideological or prescriptive statements.”1 Schüssler Fiorenza addresses this point for freeborn elite women in particular, pointing to inscriptions that honor wealthy women as patrons of associations and patrons who performed leadership functions in these groups.2 Similarly, Bernadette Brooten has examined women’s titles of leadership in synagogue inscriptions.3 She argues that women held the same status as men who held the same leadership titles. Many, if not all, of these persons were wealthy donors and patrons. According to Schüssler Fiorenza and Brooten, women’s wealth mattered more than gender in determining their eligibility for leadership positions. More recently, Joan Connelly’s compelling history of priestesses in the Greek eastern Mediterranean has drawn from a wide range of sources to study women’s roles.4 Connelly links representations of women’s religious leadership with an idealized image of femininity: Engagement in cult service was what a good woman did. As with spinning, this exercise was more than just a mark of virtue. It was a signifier of social and symbolic capital, of prestige and desirability, that came together to construct a feminine ideal. Cult service was inextricably linked to social status, family fortune, health, and wholeness, and thereby set a powerful archetype for female behavior.5 In Connelly’s view, gender and wealth together determined “a feminine ideal.” Family roles determined gender. A prestigious and desirable daughter made a marriage to ensure continuation of a family’s elite status. This account leaves open the question of widowhood: once a woman’s roles as daughter and wife concluded, how did wealth and gender determine her religious roles? I explore this question in this chapter and the following one. The variable of 1. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 109. 2. Ibid., 181–82, 250, 287, 290–91. 3. Bernadette J. Brooten, Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue: Inscriptional Evidence and Background Issues (Chico, CA: Scholars, 1982). 4. Joan Breton Connelly, Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 5. Ibid., 192. 40 | Women's Socioeconomic Status and Religious Leadership in Asia Minor fortune raises a question as well. With their focus on wealthy women, Schüssler Fiorenza, Brooten, and Connelly have left unexplored the relationship between religious status and gender ideology for non-elite women. This question becomes prominent in chapter 4, on slave women. While most scholars seem to agree that gender limited women’s religious leadership, a close look reveals that we still lack a consensus on why this might be the case. In general, studies of women’s social religious status and potential for leadership have relied on an idea that women’s social status was secondary to that of...