Abundant Life Is for Women, Too by Liz Cooledge Jenkins

I lived in East Palo Alto, CA, for two years in my mid-twenties. During the first year, a man was killed down the street from my apartment building, in the parking lot of the building where my friends lived. I walked through that parking lot often, as a shortcut back to my own place from wherever I could find street parking. I didn’t know the man, but I knew people who knew him. His death was both disturbing and tragic. The neighborhood mourned. My friends and I got together and wrote a prayer for our community. The murder changed my experience of living there.

During the second year I lived in East Palo Alto, in a different neighborhood, a woman was killed just a couple blocks from where I lived. I heard about this murder not from friends but from the local news, which I had set up to come to my email inbox with an “East Palo Alto” filter. I was initially disconcerted by the proximity of the murder to my apartment building, but then I read on and learned that it was an act of intimate partner violence. I am not proud to say this, but I want to be honest: I felt sadness, but also relief. Knowing it was domestic violence and not random violence made me feel safer, like I could not have been the one killed.

I thought about this recently, as I read Swiss journalist Mona Chollet’s brilliant book In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial. Chollet reflects:

The state no longer organizes public executions for alleged witches, but the death penalty for women who wish to be free has, in a sense, been privatized: when a woman is killed by her partner or ex-partner (which, in France, occurs every three days, on average), it is often because she has left the partner or announced her intention to do so…And the media treats these murders with the same flattening triviality used to describe the witches’ pyres…The only occasions—in France, at least—on which the murder of women is treated appropriately, and the gravity of the crime is recognized, are when the murderer is black or of Arab origin, but then it’s a case of fanning the flames of racism, not defending the cause of women” (pp. 66-8).

The state no longer directly murders women, cast as “witches,” who live independent lives—or lives otherwise different from gendered norms, stereotypes, and restrictions. But—not entirely unlike racialized violence (see civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)—this violence has not exactly ceased so much as morphed. It is still gendered. It is still punishment for asserting individuality, for exercising agency. And it impacts me more than I was initially able to see.

In my mid-twenties, I was just starting to become painfully aware that patriarchy is everywhere, that it still organizes everything. I was taking stock of all the maddening ways my thoughts were belittled, experiences deprioritized, and possibilities in life impeded because I was a young woman. I remember feeling increasingly frustrated with my church’s limitations on women preaching and its prohibition of female elders. I remember going to the office supply store with my male coworkers to look for new office chairs; none of the chairs felt quite right for my body, and it slowly dawned on me that every single one of them was made for a man.

I was becoming increasingly aware of—and angry about—these things. But I still processed the news of the woman’s murder in my neighborhood as if she and I shared little in common. As if my erasure in small ways and her erasure in a fatal way were not, as Rebecca Solnit reflects in her memoir Recollections of My Nonexistence, all part of the same continuum.

I didn’t connect the woman’s death to a broader force of misogyny. Part of me feels ashamed that it took me so long to connect these dots. But I also think: How could I, if no one taught me? If all the stories I read in the media, as Chollet points out, do not speak of women’s murders with anything remotely approaching appropriate seriousness—and do treat them as isolated incidents?

In theory, the Christian faith I was taught should have helped me make these connections. It should have helped me care about women’s lives beyond my own. In a Christian view, women are created in God’s image. We embody sacredness—infinitely treasured, valued, and loved by our Creator.

But I picked up some other messages too. I was taught that God was for human flourishing—but not that male violence intruding on women’s flourishing was a serious issue. I was taught that Jesus came so that we might have life and have it to the full (John 10:10; I have a church t-shirt with that verse on it)—but not that the ways women are excluded from abundant life call for urgent change. I was taught that God had good plans for me, plans to give me hope and a future (a popular, if somewhat problematic, use of Jeremiah 29:11)—but not that God’s good plans were being torn away from women all over the world daily, and Christians should do something about it rather than being the ones who perpetrate it.

Now, as I contend for a version of Christianity that honors women—that honors all people, and especially those who have been marginalized and deprioritized due to gender, race, or anything else—I think about these things. Honoring life means honoring untimely death as tragic. Honoring life involves working to undo all the ways human lives are not honored—working to undo patriarchy, white supremacy, ableism, classism, heterosexism.

Other women’s fates are not disconnected from my own. The misogyny that impacts them is the same as the misogyny that impacts me. I don’t want to be in denial of the ways the violence of previous generations’ witch hunts has not disappeared in our generation but simply takes different forms.

I still believe in that abundant, flourishing life that Christianity taught me. But I will no longer settle for theologies that do not care whether this abundant life includes women.