Post Gender Binary Women's Group at Church

At my suburban church, we used to have a more traditional women's group, the kind that most younger women would never dreamed of attending.  For one thing, most younger women couldn't--the traditional women's group met during daytime hours, when most younger women were at work.  And the traditional women's group was made up of older women, primarily widows, who talked a lot about their grandchildren.

Many of those women have died, and the group fell apart.  And now, we're thinking about pulling a group together again.  We will meet after church, which is the only time most of us can make it to a women's group.

We still haven't solved the age issue.  Although we're younger than the traditional group that came before us, a college student in her 20's would still feel out of place, I imagine.  The youngest one at our meeting yesterday was in her 40's.

As we gathered yesterday, a few men joked, "Do you have to be a woman to join."  We said, "No--join us."  Nobody did, but it made me wonder about having a woman's group in this age where we're exploding the idea of a gender binary in all sorts of ways.

Does a women's group in church even make sense anymore?

I can make the argument that it does--just look at the statistics of how women's lives are still different from the lives of men, from everything from earning power, to caretaking pressures, to homemaking expectations--the list could go on.  I understand wanting a group where we don't have to explain so much--or worse, to have a man "explain" things to us.

But I could also make the argument that to segregate by gender is to perpetuate these differences.

I also think that being part of a small church gives us a different perspective--we have so few members, and it's so hard to know where we should put our energies.  When we looked at the organizing ideas from the national membership, it's clear that other groups don't have the same pressures.  The literature assumes lots and lots of women are there to take on a variety of responsibilities.

Sigh.

But we will continue to forge a way with the people that we do have.  Right now, most of them are women (the way we've traditionally defined women)  over the age of 45.  Two years from now, it will be interesting to see what's different.