Article October 27, 1973 Issue

Equal Partners

Wendy Ann Madsen (Written at age 13)

Katie clenched her hands angrily. If only there had been a little more time! The debate had been titled "Men versus Women: Who's Superior?" The boys had sat confidently behind their table, spouting statistics and comparisons, and backing them up with quotes from the Bible. The girls had quoted from medical journals, well-known authors, and philosophers but searched the Bible in vain. Orthodox religion had got the upper hand, and the boys had won the debate.

Katie left the school frustrated and angry. At home she slammed her door shut and flung her books down on the bed. Losing the debate was just another point for the boys in the battle of the sexes. "Doesn't God care anything for women?" she demanded of the thin air. Rankled, she searched under the bed for her Bible. It wasn't there, so she snitched her mother's. Impatiently she got her Bible concordance.

A citation from Galatians looked promising, and Katie read it through. Say, now she was getting somewhere. She read it over again. "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus."^{Gal. 3:28;} But still, it didn't spell things out enough for Katie. So she turned to Science and Health, after first taking out the Concordance, and looked up Mrs. Eddy's descriptions of man. One of them reads, "Man is the family name for all ideas,—the sons and daughters of God."^{Science and Health, p. 515;}