Thinking with Women: the Uses of the Appeal to ‘Woman’ in Pre-Nicene Christian Propaganda Literature

Reflecting on the modes of exchange he observed in South American Indian cultures, Claude Lévi-Strauss famously declared that women (like pigs) are good to ‘think with.’1 I will here bypass the pigs, and address the issue of how the category of ‘woman’ served as a useful ‘mental tool’ in the apologetic and related literature of the first three Christian centuries.2 I will not, however, explore how ‘real women’ functioned in the spread of early Christianity. Scholars from Adolf von Harnack to Rodney Stark have often read the ancient literature pertaining to this topic as if it provided faithful snapshots of women’s activities;3 I assume, to the contrary, that the extant literature reveals more about the rhetorical and other functions that the appeal to ‘woman’ served in the early Christian (male) imagination than it does about the activities of actual women. Nor will I here address the conversion of ‘real women’ in post-Nicene Christianity, a topic that Michele Salzman has explored in her book, The Making of a Christian Aristocracy: Social and Religious Change in the Western Roman Empire.4 My own research suggests that by the later fourth century, references to women’s ‘conversion’ in the extant literature often denotes their passage from a more ordinary, socially-acceptable form of Christianity to a rigorously ascetic devotion. In Christian literature dating from the pre-Nicene era, women, in the company of children, slaves, the lower classes, the uneducated, and