Women Are Persons -- By: Hugh A. McNally

Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 08:2 (Spring 1994)
Article: Women Are Persons
Author: Hugh A. McNally


Women Are Persons

Hugh A. McNally

The Reverend Hugh A. McNally is pastor of the Bridgewater United Baptist Church, Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, Canada. This article first appeared in the Atlantic Baptist, October 1989, and is reprinted by permission.

Some years ago I listened to a group of five-year-old children being interviewed on CBC radio. The interviewer was asking them what they appreciated about their mothers. Their answers were revealing. “I like my mother because she lets me have two cookies before breakfast.” “I like my mother because she serves me breakfast in bed.” All the answers were self-centered. They were all related to what the mother did to serve her child. None of the children expressed appreciation for mother as a person.

This is symptomatic of our society. Even in the Christian church, women are often valued for what they do rather than for who they are. This is why the women’s liberation movement has struck a responsive chord in the hearts of many Christian women. They do not share the extreme views radical feminists espouse, but they do have a deep desire to be treated as persons of value and worth, not because of what they do but because of who they are as persons.

In a report to the Canadian House of Commons on May 6,1982, the Standing Committee on Health, Welfare and Social affairs concluded:

We have found that wife battering is not a matter of slaps and flying crockery. Battered women are choked, kicked, bitten, punched, subjected to sexual assault, threatened and assailed with weapons. Their assailants are not simply men who have had a bad day, or who drink and become temporarily belligerent; they are men who, for whatever reason, behave violently towards the women they live with. We have found that such behavior is far too common...We have been given good reason to believe that every year in Canada one-tenth of the women who live with men as a couple are battered. Society should not expect or tolerate such behaviour.1

In a handbook for pastoral care workers published in 1988, Roberta Morris wrote:

Research into the sexual abuse of children in Canada indicates that as many as one out of every two females and one in three males have been victims of one or more unwanted sexual acts, and that jour in five of these sexual acts have been first committed against the person when they were children or youths. Three in five sexually abused children have been threatened or physically coerced by their assailants. The child usually knows the assailant About one in four of the assailants is a family member or a person in a position of trust and about half are friends or acquaintances. One in six is a stranger...

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