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;}

Katie was enjoying her search now and went on to one of Mrs. Eddy's smaller books, called Pulpit and Press, where she had collected some newspaper clippings relating to the beginnings of Christian Science and the great new step that had just been taken—that was in 1895—in the building of the Original Mother Church. The whole city had been impressed by the wonderful new church, and even more impressed that a woman, of all people, had brought it about.

With a few outstanding exceptions, woman had been considered a homemaker only. But here was a woman who single-handedly established a church that was to reach around the world teaching Jesus' true way of healing. Among the clippings was a magazine article by a Boston reporter who had been moved to write about this new view of woman. In his article "One Point of View—The New Woman" he had a lot to say about womanhood that Katie read eagerly. There was one phrase that really stuck in her mind: "... while side by side, equal partners in all that is worth living for, shall stand the new man with the new woman."^{Pul., p. 84.}

At last Katie felt good inside. She realized that this was true; men and women were equal partners, neither one superior or dominant. She saw that women's rights as a movement was concerned with a wholly human need. But spiritually, man and woman are already one in Christ.

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YOU ARE ALWAYS SAFE?

October 27, 1973

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