Forgotten Women Leaders

While once essential agents in early Christian communities, in centuries to come women hosts were forgotten. Kaisa-Maria Pihlava, Th.D., sets out to trace literary representations of women hosts in early Christian sources. She also discusses what we know of early Christian communities, women property owners, and heads of households in antiquity. She argues that women hosts had authority in their early Christian communities because of the domestic setting of these communities and the authority that hosts had irrespective of their gender. The authority that women hosts gained was not countercultural. Instead, socioeconomic hierarchy resulted in the authority positions of women hosts of early Christian gatherings. In Pihlava’s study Forgotten Women Leaders: The authority of Women Hosts of Early Christian Gatherings in the First and Second Centuries C.E., women hosts are written into the narratives of early Christian beginnings.