Let Women Be Women

Let Women Be Women (1990) by Peter Toon
Fowler Wright Books
ISBN: 0952441916
Condition: Good

Let Women Be Women is one of those books whose title arrives in the room before the author does.

Published in 1990, Peter Toon’s book examines questions of womanhood, family, church, social roles and Christian teaching from a firmly traditional perspective. It belongs very much to a particular strand of late-twentieth-century religious writing, when debates about feminism, gender roles and changing social expectations were being conducted with considerable seriousness and, occasionally, the sort of confidence normally associated with people rearranging everybody else’s furniture.

Toon approaches the subject from an explicitly Christian standpoint, asking what it means for women to live within a biblical framework at a time when social attitudes were changing rapidly.

The answer, unsurprisingly, is not “whatever everyone happens to feel like on Tuesday.”

Instead, the book argues for distinctions between male and female roles, traditional understandings of family life and a view of Christian discipleship shaped by scripture rather than by contemporary fashion.

Whether readers find that reassuring, challenging, provocative or several decades out of step will depend very much on the reader.

And that, in truth, is part of the interest.

Books like this are often revealing precisely because they preserve the assumptions, arguments and anxieties of their period. The late 1980s and early 1990s were years in which older ideas about marriage, work, authority and family were being questioned on almost every front.

Some writers welcomed the changes.

Others dug in.

Peter Toon brought a shovel.

The book is therefore useful not only as a work of Christian thought but also as a small piece of social history. It shows how some conservative religious thinkers responded to feminism and to the reshaping of expectations around women’s lives.

There is plenty here about vocation, domestic life, church participation and the perceived differences between the sexes, all treated with the seriousness of a writer who plainly believes modern society has taken several wrong turns and could benefit from consulting the map.

Modern readers may disagree strongly with parts of the argument.

That is hardly surprising.

Ideas about gender have changed enormously since 1990, and what once appeared to some readers as a defence of tradition may now strike others as restrictive, dated or simply belonging to a very different cultural moment.

But old books are not always interesting because they agree with us.

Sometimes they are interesting because they show us exactly what people were arguing about.

And why.

This is especially true of religious books, where debates about authority, scripture and social change rarely remain politely theoretical for long. They spill into family life, church organisation and questions about how people ought to live.

Which is where things tend to become lively.

Toon writes from within a clear theological tradition rather than attempting detached social commentary. Readers should therefore expect conviction, not neutrality.

There is no mistaking the book for a focus-group report.

For collectors of Christian literature, students of gender debates, readers interested in conservative theology or anyone exploring the cultural arguments of the late twentieth century, Let Women Be Women offers a distinctly period voice from one side of a debate that has certainly not disappeared.

It may prompt agreement.

It may prompt disagreement.

It may prompt someone to place the book face-down on a table and stare thoughtfully out of the window for a while.

All are legitimate reading outcomes.

This copy is in Good condition, which is more than can safely be said for the state of the gender debate after several thousand years of discussion.

Available from Crappy Old Books, where books are allowed to be old, controversial and occasionally rather certain of themselves.

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