Women in the Church

What you'll notice

Look up first. Above the altar, in most Orthodox churches, a woman fills the apse: the Theotokos, arms raised, with Christ before her. On the icon screen and the walls you'll find more women, martyrs in red, nuns in black, a queen or two.

Then look around. The choir director is very likely a woman. So are many of the people teaching church school, running coffee hour, sitting on the parish council and counting the collection. The priest's wife has a title of her own. Some women have scarves over their hair and some don't. The clergy at the altar are all men.

What it's called

The Theotokos (God-bearer) is Mary. The women who brought spices to Christ's tomb are the Myrrhbearers, in Greek the myrophoroi (myrrh-bearers). A woman ordained to the ancient diaconate was a deaconess. The priest's wife is Presbytera in Greek use, Matushka in Slavic use, and Khouria in Antiochian use.

What's actually happening

The saints

The first human being the Church honors is a woman (Mary and the Saints explains why). The first witnesses of the Resurrection were women too. "Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, that they might come and anoint Him" (Mark 16:1), found the tomb empty, and heard "He is risen! He is not here" (Mark 16:6). The Church gives them a Sunday of their own, the second Sunday after Pascha.¹ Before every Liturgy, at the preparation table, the priest names the saints, and in Hapgood's text the list includes "Thekla, Barbara, Euphemia, Kyriaka, Paraskeva, Katherine; and of all other holy martyred women," and the holy mothers, Mary of Egypt among them.²

Parish life

Plain observation: in most American parishes, women sing and direct choirs, teach, serve on parish councils, organize the parish's charity, and keep the place running. In Greek parishes the women's philanthropic society is the Philoptochos (the "friend of the poor" society). Women lead women's monasteries as abbesses (Monks and Nuns). The priest's wife and her title are in Ordination and the Clergy Family.

The priesthood

The Orthodox Church ordains only men as bishops, priests and deacons. That's the practice everywhere in the Orthodox world, and this guide states it plainly.

The deaconess

The Church once had an ordained order of women. Saint Paul commends "Phoebe our sister, who is a servant of the church in Cenchrea" (Romans 16:1), using the word later used for deacons. By the late fourth century the Apostolic Constitutions has the bishop "lay thy hands upon her in the presence of the presbytery, and of the deacons and deaconesses," with a prayer recalling God's gift of the Spirit to "Miriam, and Deborah, and Anna, and Huldah."³ The same book draws the limits: "A deaconess does not bless, nor perform anything belonging to the office of presbyters or deacons," but keeps the doors and ministers "to the presbyters in the baptizing of women, on account of decency."⁴ The Council of Chalcedon in 451 says a woman "shall not receive the laying on of hands as a deaconess under forty years of age, and then only after searching examination."⁵ The order later lapsed; the Rudder's commentary blames the purity rules for it.⁶

Head coverings

Head coverings are most common in Slavic and Romanian parishes and less common in Greek and Antiochian ones; some women cover anywhere. Nobody will hand you a scarf. What to Wear has the details and Saint Paul's passage behind them (1 Corinthians 11:2–16).

Communion and menstruation

This is the question people ask quietly, and the honest answer is that two early strands run side by side.

The Apostolic Constitutions rebukes Christians who keep "Jewish customs" and in those days "observe not to pray, or to touch a Bible, or to partake of the Eucharist," and says that "neither lawful mixture, nor child-bearing, nor the menstrual purgation, nor nocturnal pollution, can defile the nature of a man, or separate the Holy Spirit from him."⁷

Saint Dionysius of Alexandria, in the third century, thought the question hardly needed asking: believing women "in the time of their separation" wouldn't dare "approach the holy table or to touch the body and blood of the Lord," though "to pray, however a person may be situated" is always blameless.⁸ His answer became a canon, along with a similar one from Timothy of Alexandria.⁹ The Rudder's commentary argues that the Eucharist phrase in the Apostolic Constitutions is a marginal reading with little force.¹⁰

Today the range is wide. The Russian Church's 2015 document on Communion restates the canons, "The canons prohibit receiving communion in the state of female impurity," with exceptions for danger of death and for long illness.¹¹ In many other parishes, especially in America, nobody raises the question at all. Some women refrain from Communion in those days; some also refrain from kissing icons; many do neither. The fortieth-day prayers after childbirth (Family Life) belong to the same conversation. This guide lays out the positions and leaves the verdict where it belongs, with the Church.

Why it matters

When the men had run, the women went to the tomb. The Church has never forgotten that, and it sings about them every year. The faith was carried through persecutions, empires and immigrations by grandmothers who taught the prayers, kept the fasts, and baked the bread for the altar. Any account of Orthodox life that leaves them out is an account of somewhere else.

Where it came from

The Myrrhbearers are in all four Gospels. Phoebe is in Romans. The deaconess is attested in the fourth and fifth centuries and regulated by an ecumenical council. The purity questions go back to the third century, and the canons that answered them were gathered into the Church's canon law, where the commentators have argued over them ever since.

What you do

If you're Orthodox: your parish's custom on head coverings is the one that matters, and you already know it. On the question of Communion during menstruation, follow the practice you've been taught and the rule you keep with your confessor.

If you're visiting: dress modestly, cover your head if you'd like to, and expect to be welcomed by women at every door. If you want to know what's going on in the service, ask the nearest grandmother. She knows.

Go deeper

• Mark 16:1–8; Luke 24:1–11; Romans 16:1–2.
• Apostolic Constitutions VIII.19–28 (ANF 7), on the deaconess.
• Mary and the Saints and Ordination and the Clergy Family.

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