I just attended a Women's Christian Conference in Hong Kong at the Vine, called Soul Sister's Unite. Having spent the formative part of my Christian growth in an intergenerational church, I've never given much thought to fellowship amongst women, much less uniting as women in a church - because I've been fortunate enough to have older women in the church that I could speak with.
Being a woman who grew up in a comfortable city, studying in an all-girls school for 10 years, and having a type-A personality, I had never suffered any form of gender discrimination. Although I had an angsty teenagehood, I never questioned what being a woman meant. In many other countries, women are not as fortunate - having lower or no social status of their own, experiencing discrimination at the workplace, or facing social injustice as a single mother...
I was never a feminine woman, and I don't regret that. (Sorry Dad) To me, being a woman had never been more than existing as I am, a simple sense of just being who I am. Only when I was getting married did I feel a need of having some image of being a bride and wearing clothes appropriate for a celebration in God's eyes. But I had never associated my womanhood with shopping, the ability to multitask, enjoying the little pleasures in life - for me, those things just existed. If I enjoyed them, it was just because I am made this way and not because I am a woman.
Some of you might recognise these as signs of denial. This may be true. There is a commonality amongst women that I cannot deny - which also includes the love of shopping, multitasking etc... those things that previously I have identified with my personhood, but not womanhood. But I sometimes also feel divorced from their commonality - such as being feminine, loving heels/make-up/handbags, or sometimes being emotional.
At the conference, a speaker said that we women define ourselves by our relationships - roles that we play. I don't agree with that fully, but I certainly discovered that I often valued myself through how valuable I am to the company or to my bosses. And that was just a plain wrong way to work on relationships - it's a barrier that does not fully let you love the other person freely with no strings attached. This is a big problem if the field we are called to is the workplace. It's about being Martha or the older prodigal son - needing to do things to gain approval, instead of choosing to live in the full security and freedom of being a daughter of God.
For many women living an urban lifestyle, we put achieving things first and relationships on par, a second, or even a third priority. That focus on achievement in a meritocratic society has led us to identify ourselves with the acknowledgment we gain - in this process of moving "upwards" in civilisation, we loose our womanhood. Who needs womanhood when what we want is a progressive career? By then, we view many other women as competitors and lose a critical advantage and gift that God has meant for us to possess.
That advantage is the fellowship of women - because we are made different from men, and experience different life trials and needs that only sisters would understand. I have been so blinkered by this urban lifestyle that I have denied a commonality of womanhood and attribute it to individualism. Because we do not face the trials of womanhood so early on nowadays - such as marriage and being a mother - we do not discover the fellowship of sisters till later in life.
By contrast, a woman growing up in a village would have a keen sense of her womanhood much earlier on - because it is characterised but what she is not able to do, and what she is expected to do. Some of it, such as the non-status of a widow, is certainly social injustice that infringes human rights. But others, such as the role of wives in a village, is not suppressive in itself - it is however, injustice, when it comes at the cost of discrimination in education opportunities or even infant genocide.
So while that doesn't mean that I will now be uber-active in my home church's women's ministry, it does mean that if my church is organising a women's conference to set women free as daughters of God, and to unite the women of God - I'll be there to help out - because I've really benefitted so much from the past two women conferences I've attended.
