Barbara MacHaffie ’71

Author, Her Story: Women in Christian Tradition

by Karol Crosbie

On the one hand, authors of the Bible lived in a culture that devalued women. But on the other hand, Jesus is never portrayed as treating women as though they were inferior to men.

On the one hand, medieval women were denounced as wicked and without value. On the other, they were elevated, idealized, and adored in the symbol of the Virgin Mary. On the one hand, the Protestant reformation brought a new emphasis on women as obedient wives and devoted mothers, not as seducers and corrupters. But on the other, the reformation also meant that women lost the monastery as a sphere of female power and autonomy. They were not given opportunities to teach, preach, or govern in the reformed congregations. But, on yet another hand, women found ways to expand their domestic roles, achieving new power in the areas of social reform, mission work, and women’s suffrage.

If Barbara MacHaffie were to chart a graph that reflected women’s journey through Christian tradition, it would rise and fall with as many peaks and dips as an irregular heart beat. MacHaffie, who recently retired after 20 years as professor of religion at Marietta College, wrote Her Story, Women in Christian Tradition (Fortress Press) in 1986 and released a new edition in 2006. MacHaffie embraces ambiguity. In fact, she says if there is one thing she wants her students to understand about women’s role in Christianity, it is that it is full of surprises and questions.

Ironically, the publisher that had initially commissioned Her Story failed the ambiguity-tolerance test in the early 1980s.Westminster John Knox Press wanted a “different kind of book,” remembers MacHaffie. “They thought I was too gentle with the church and with Christian traditions. I tried to present a balance between women as victims and women as agents. They wanted more of an indictment of the church.” Westminister rejected the book, but Fortress Press picked it up and has sold more than 30,000 copies, including a CD-ROM and a companion book of primary source readings.

MacHaffie, who earned a Bachelor’s of Divinity and a Ph.D. in ecclesiastical history from the University of Edinburgh, fell into her area of expertise by way of academic duty. Her first teaching job was at Cleveland State University, where she was the religion department’s only woman faculty member. “They needed a course about women in religion, and they said, ‘Oh, here’s Barbara. She’s a woman. She can teach it.’”

College classes that ask more questions than they answer and challenge long-held beliefs can be rough. But today’s students seem to have a harder time with Biblical ambiguity than her students of past decades, says MacHaffie. “I want students to realize that they have to get to know a faith community when they want to investigate views on the role and status of women. They’re complex animals, these faith communities.”

Her own understanding of the complexity of religion first came when she was a student at The College of Wooster, says MacHaffie, who was raised in a fundamentalist Presbyterian church that promoted a message about the role of women that was contrary to her own.

“Coming to Wooster and realizing that Christianity didn’t need to be this way, that there were critical ways of looking at the Bible while still remaining within the Christian community was so wonderful for me. If I hadn’t had the kind of social awareness that was represented on this campus, I could very easily have gone right out the door of the church, as a young adult.”