Patricia Gundry, an evangelical author who taught that “God was the first feminist,” died on July 31 at age 90.
She was part of a movement of women—including Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, Letha Scanzoni, and Nancy Hardesty—who reevaluated Christian teachings on gender and hierarchy in light of Scripture.
With an evangelical commitment to rejecting tradition unless it could be backed up by the ultimate authority of the Bible, they came to believe the church had been wrong about women. The limitations and strictures placed on women were cultural, they said, and the hierarchy supposedly found in “creation order” was not part of God’s good plan but a result of sin entering the world.
The evangelical feminists argued that people who loved Jesus should follow him in his proclamation to the woman “crippled by a spirit” in Luke 13, declaring, “Woman, you are set free.”
Gundry adapted Jesus’ phrase for the title of her first book, Woman Be Free! It was published by Zondervan in 1977 and sold about 9,000 copies in two years—a moderate success, but with a significant impact.
Complementarian theologians John Piper and Wayne Grudem identified Gundry’s book as one of the “new interpretations of the Bible” that had provoked a “great uncertainty among evangelicals,” leaving many men and women “not sure what their roles should be.” They coined the new term complementarianism and developed a theology of gender roles in response.
Many regular readers of Woman Be Free! said they weren’t thrown into uncertainty, though. To them, the book was validating.
“I felt seen,” one woman in Ohio wrote on Goodreads after finishing Woman Be Free! in a single day. “Knowing you’re not alone, you’re not crazy, and you’re not defective is a great feeling.”
In 1996, Christianity Today called Woman Be Free! one of the books with the greatest influence on American evangelicals since World War II.
In it, Gundry urged women to read the Bible for themselves. She said they should start at the beginning, remember to interpret each passage in light of the whole, and always keep an eye on the larger story of sin and redemption.
“There is no indication of a subordination of woman in the beginning. … No indication of man’s position of authority appears until after the Fall,” Gundry wrote. “Instead of looking to the Fall for our example, let’s look to Christ and His dealings with men and women. He dealt with them as equals whom He cared about intensely and impartially.”
Gundry’s trust in Christ and reliance on Scripture started in childhood. She was born Patricia Lee Smith in Boone County, Arkansas. Her parents, Leonard and Frances Smith, bounced back and forth between farming in the Ozarks and working in the aircraft industry in Southern California. The Smiths were Southern Baptist and raised Patricia and her brother Daniel in church and Sunday school wherever they lived.
Gundry later recalled two born-again experiences. At age six, at “some sort of after school thing for children in a woman’s home in the Los Angeles area,” she heard about Jesus standing at the door of her heart and knocking. She invited him in. Then, at 13, at a rural church in central California, she went forward at the end of a “hell fire and brimstone sermon.” She was pretty sure she was already converted, she said, but wanted “to make sure it was clear.”
She was baptized—and that also happened twice.
“Just as I was catching my breath, the pastor dipped me under again,” Gundry said. “He explained that he’d not immersed some part of me completely, and he knew there would be objections if he didn’t do it again. I don’t know what kind of Baptist that makes me, maybe a DuoBaptist.”
As a girl, Gundry bought her own Bible at a dime store and read it continuously. She became a “whiz” at trivia, memorizing the names of Job’s three daughters and the lineage of Esther’s persecutor. At the same time, she developed a deep trust of Scripture, calling the Bible “the most important book I own.”
She enrolled at Los Angeles Baptist College (now The Master’s University) in 1957. She was 23. She met Stan Gundry, a young man four years her junior who was preparing for ministry and thinking about going to grad school to study the Bible, and they got married two years later.
Stan Gundry told CT the wedding happened as soon as he turned 21 and didn’t need his father’s permission for a marriage license.
“He didn’t approve,” Stan Gundry said. “He thought she was pursuing me when, truth was, I was pursuing her. She was the most amazing woman I ever met.”
Stan Gundry admired the way his wife was fearless and so committed to getting answers from Scripture, she wouldn’t let church leaders dismiss her questions. As he became a pastor and took a ministry job at a church in Everson, Washington, about 100 miles north of Seattle, she began to have a lot of questions.
She asked her husband:
- If women are not to be the leaders and teachers of men, how does one account for Deborah, Huldah, Philip’s daughters, and Priscilla’s role in the instruction of Apollos?
- Why is it that Paul instructs women to be silent in one place and acknowledges with apparent approval that women publicly pray and prophesy in another?
- Doesn’t the prominence of women among the followers of Jesus and in Paul’s Epistles suggest something significantly more than women leading and teaching children and other women?
- How is it that in the church the benefits of Galatians 3:26–28 apply equally and in very tangible ways to men, Jews, Gentiles, slaves, and those who are free, but not to women?
- If a woman is to obey her husband, is she not responsible directly to God for her actions? Is he in effect a priest, an intermediary between her and God?
Stan Gundry didn’t know.
In 1964, Gundry tried to ask a visiting preacher. They had him to lunch at their house after church and she brought up 1 Timothy 2:12, where Paul says that women cannot teach men, and Acts 18:26, where a woman named Priscilla is described teaching a man “the way of God more adequately.” What did he make of that?
The preacher snapped at her: “Why do you want to know?”
“He was sitting at my table, eating my spaghetti, and being obviously rude to me about a simple conversational question,” Gundry later said. “That’s when the light bulb moment came to me. I thought, He doesn’t know. None of them know.But they are willing to limit all women’s lives and participation on the basis of Bible passages they know are problematic and they don’t know how to interpret.”
Gundry started researching the questions herself.
She went back to the Bible, reading the Scripture passages again. And when her husband went to graduate school at Union College in Vancouver, British Columbia, and then the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, she made use of his access to academic libraries to discover forgotten generations of evangelical feminists. She read God’s Word to Women by Katharine Bushnell and The Bible Status of Woman by Lee Anna Starr.
Gundry went back and forth with Stan Gundry about what she was learning and occasionally asked him to research a biblical text for her in the original Greek or Hebrew. She started writing Woman Be Free! in 1974. The first person persuaded by her arguments for evangelical feminism was her husband.
“The Fall turned everything topsy-turvy,” Stan Gundry later wrote. “After the Fall, the relationship between man and woman is quite different than it was before the Fall. It morphed from one of equality and complementarity to one of male domination and patriarchy, and that is the backdrop to all that follows in the Bible. … In Christ right relationships are restored and in him ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female’” (Gal. 3:28).
When Stan Gundry graduated from seminary, he took a job teaching theology at Moody Bible Institute. Before Woman Be Free! came out, he spoke to the dean about the arguments of the book and said he agreed with them. He was assured, he later said, that this wouldn’t be a problem.
At first, it wasn’t. Woman Be Free! received no significant backlash when it was published in 1977.
“The people who liked it told me so,” Patricia Gundry said. “The people who didn’t like it just plain ignored it, pretended it wasn’t there, the way they pretended feminists aren’t there.”
Then in ’79, Gundry spoke at a meeting organized by Housewives for the Equal Rights Amendment in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. She wasn’t asked to address the constitutional amendment itself but spoke on her research about what the Bible said about women’s equality.
“The reason we have the situation we have now in the church is historical and theological. It is not because of what the Bible says,” Gundry said. “God was the first feminist because he created women as fully equal. There’s nothing wrong with us. It’s only our interpretation of the Bible that’s lopsided.”
A group of conservatives opposed to the amendment started a letter-writing campaign. Moody received around 80 letters, according to reporting at the time, and the issue of whether people who believe in women’s equality could teach at Moody went to the trustees. The school decided the answer was no. Stan Gundry was told that if he resigned, he could receive a severance.
Stan Gundry couldn’t find a job teaching at a Christian college after that and had to change careers, going to work as an editor for Zondervan. He told CT he didn’t regret it, though.
“I wore it as a badge of honor,” Stan Gundry said. “It was the right thing to do and I stood by her.”
Also, it wasn’t all bad. Free from Moody’s strict lifestyle rules, he told the Chicago Tribune at the time, Stan Gundry was finally able to go and see Star Wars.
Patricia Gundry went on to write three more books about the biblical view of women: Heirs Together, published in 1980; The Complete Woman, in 1981; and Neither Slave nor Free, in 1987. She also wrote and edited The Zondervan Family Cookbook, which came out in 1988.
When she wasn’t researching and writing, Gundry raised four children, played music, taught art, and grew a garden that earned her the nickname “the flower lady” among local school children.
Later in life, Gundry developed an interest in self-publishing, started a number of blogs, and maintained several active email Listservs, including one for evangelical feminists called PHOEBE-L, named for the woman Paul entrusted to deliver the letter to the Romans.
“To those who say women cannot fill positions of leadership, the Bible says women did,” Gundry wrote. “Remember who you are. You are a child of God. He is your director. You need no pope, bishop, synod, or council to tell you what you may believe or how you may serve Him.”
Gundry is survived by her husband Stan and their children, Ann Gundry Teliczan, Daniel, David, and Jonathan.
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