Gender Inequality in the Song of Songs

Gender Inequality in the Song of Songs

INTRODUCTION

Postcolonial Feminist Theory has taught us to look beyond the confines of narrow cultural lenses as we seek to understand the diversity of gendered experience. I believe it is even more empowering to go one step further and to look not only cross-culturally but also cross-temporally. In America, when the general population tries to articulate what traditional female gender roles were, it seems they often describe those prescriptions for being lady-like from the Victorian Era, 1950s post-war America, or maybe limited snapshots of the Middle Ages, like chivalry codes and chastity belts. Accordingly women were, supposedly and stereotypically, traditionally passive and acquiescent. Proper women spoke when spoken to, and then played merely a support role in conversation. They were to express virtue through chastity until marriage, and sexual reserve even within marriage. They were not supposed to ask for the date, lest they seem too forward. They found true fulfillment only in motherhood. They were physically delicate and timid. They were sexual objects instead of active subjects. They were more often written about than authors. They were defined in opposition to men.

Places such as the ancient Near East, for example, provide a wealth of information about gendered experience that blatantly contradicts the stereotypical gender-associated behaviors that we in the contemporary West tend to call traditional. Much of it is written by women themselves, such as Egyptian love poetry and Sumerian temple priestesses' administrative records. Because many arguments about the nature of the feminine versus the socialization of femininity look only to relatively recent stereotypes to ass...

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