International Women's Day: Learning to 'Wholespeak'

A service for International Women’s Day offers the opportunity to celebrate women’s work, women’s ministry and women’s words. Over millennia the contribution of women has been undervalued in many societies, religions and cultures. The words 'women’s work’ has often been preceded by the pejorative ‘just’.

Women grieving at the foot of the cross in the Cathedral's Great Window by Nigel Brown.

All around the world, on a daily basis, women’s work involves caring for the young and for elderly, getting food and preparing meals, cleaning-all the many tasks that make houses into homes- often in addition to responsibilities of paid employment. In 2025 women are still under-represented in positions of political, economic and managerial power and authority. And, particularly because of social media, the voices of some extremely competent and visionary women are systematically muffled by an avalanche of disempowering anonymous misogynist abuse. Women must also confront their own internalised misogyny, their sense that they have been called out, and found out. That they should sit down and be quiet.

It is possible to find some verses in the Bible which on superficial reading seem to legitimate this kind of polarity of gender-identification and endorse the silencing of women’s voices. Some of these are found in 1 Timothy.

The Australian poet Les Murray has coined the term ‘Narrowspeak’. As it might apply to the texts of the Bible, we risk fluency in Narrowspeak when we consider verses in isolation from the broader text, from other readers, and from the ministry and words of Jesus seen as a whole. We can all too easily default into a lazily dismissive, narrow way of speaking and relating to one another. Rather than putting ourselves, in humility, at the service of all the other members of the kingdom of God, this serves merely to reinforce existing predispositions of character, circumstance and inclination. And, perniciously, these gender associations can bleed unhelpfully into our use of language as we search to express our apprehension of the mystery that is God.

The antithesis of ‘Narrowspeak' is ‘Wholespeak'. We can resolve to learn Wholespeak together, as the gloriously diverse but united body of Christ. So we undertake to read biblical texts and confronting individual phrases with communality, with our whole hearts and minds, the words illuminated by the light of the mission and ministry of love which was Jesus’ healing work of redemption in the world.

Reverend Carolin Telford

Associate Priest