Women and Salamanders: Protected Species?

As a child, one of my favorite Saturday pastimes was catching salamanders in the field behind my parents’ house. I spent countless hours with my dad’s shovel, scooping through piles of mud to unearth the unsuspecting creatures, which I piled into a big yellow bucket and carried proudly home at the end of any given hunt, excited to showcase my discoveries to my mostly amused parents.

I never seemed to care how dirty my clothes got or how uncomfortably the bog water seeped through my shoes and into my socks before squishing between my toes. I had a singular focus: salamander collection.

I’m grateful to have grown up in the 90s, before my parents could be pressured into interpreting my affinity for playing in the dirt as proof positive that I was born in the wrong body, and I’m also glad they didn’t try to steer me toward dolls and make-up and all the interests deemed suitable for girls. They just let me be a kid and like what I liked without pressure or judgment, and in today’s world, that’s no small blessing.

But after the thrill of the day’s catch had subsided and the 20+ amphibians had been counted and recounted, my kind-hearted mother would always gently coax me toward the right conclusion: It was time for me to release my pets back into their natural habitat. They weren’t suited for life in a bucket, and, after all, I didn’t want to cause them any harm. So I would inevitably trudge back down to the field and release my slimy friends into the marsh from whence they came. And I slept peacefully at night, knowing I had done the right thing.

But one time I decided it would be alright if I kept just one of the dozens of my spoils as a pet. I would love it and care for it and protect it and feed it and keep it safe. With enough nurturing and TLC under my watchful eye, I could give it a wonderful life—maybe an even better life than it would otherwise have known. Or so I convinced myself. In the wild, a salamander was vulnerable to being eaten by snakes and birds. But with me as a guardian, he would be safe to life a long, glorious life of bug eating and mud bathing.

So I built my salamander friend a house out of rocks inside the bucket, and I piled up mud and added foliage and all the things I imagined a salamander would like to have. I caught bugs and placed them inside the creature cave, and I diligently tended to my pet day and night as my chores and other activities allowed.

You can guess, of course, what happened to the poor thing. It died. It wasn’t meant to live in captivity, luxurious as the environment I provided may have been. I figure most people have at least one childhood experience of this nature—a story that teaches them the importance of created order and function, of the danger of poorly conceived good intentions and controlling things that aren’t truly yours to control.

Why do I tell you all of this? Because this morning, while arguing with a pastor friend about his (in my opinion) severely flawed views on “biblical” gender roles, I realized that, as a woman in this paradigm, I felt very much like my pet salamander—coerced to live in an elaborate, well-furnished cage for which I was not actually designed and which, in fact, has been slowly suffocating me and women like me for literally hundreds of years under the well-intended guise of our own protection.

(To clarify, this pastor had recently offered his endorsement of another popular “Christian patriarchy” influencer who actively teaches that women have no place in polemics, no place hosting podcasts, no place teaching women’s Bible studies, etc. I cringe even sharing this influencer’s post here, but I suspect some people will need to see how awful it is with their own eyes. It was just a bit much for me.)

In order to illustrate his point that rigid gender norms are actually good for women, my friend appealed to a study about Amish women. “You see, Kaeley,” he said. “Mental illness is almost non-existent among Amish females. They report significantly less depression and anxiety than women in the rest of the population,” he reported, as though correlation and causation were one and the same thing and as though there weren’t a litany of other variables to consider in the conversation.

I’ll admit the argument was particularly poorly timed, considering the fact that I had just finished binge-watching two reality tv series about people who had chosen to leave the Amish lifestyle. I viewed the series with particular interest in the way the females in these scenarios were forced to cope. I watched in utter horror as I realized the plight of ex-Amish girls, who are routinely only educated until 8th grade, and even then, when tested in the real world in preparation for GED tests, they often really only score at about a 4th grade level. We are talking about girls who are not allowed to cultivate any basic life competency skills apart from cooking, cleaning, and having babies, again, in the name of their “protection.”

So what happens often enough is that, in the absence of any kind of training about how their bodies work or how to say “no” to male advances, these young women end up pregnant outside of wedlock. The men who impregnate them, for fear of being shunned, tuck tail, run, and hide, leaving them to fend for themselves in a world they are utterly ill equipped to navigate. They don’t know how to type a cover letter or drive a car or research anything important on the internet. Many of them don’t even know who the current President of the United States is, let alone the basic geography of states and countries. The only jobs for which they have any training at all are housecleaning and baking jobs, and those professions rarely pay enough to provide for a family.

These women are only “protected” to the degree that they’re compliant, so when I hear men who lead other men prescribing the very systems that cripple these women endorsing these systems as healthy, it kind of makes me want to bash my head into a wall.

The girls in these communities are indoctrinated from infancy to believe their literal access to heaven is contingent on their cheerful compliance with the directives of their male overlords, so even if they are unhappy, they basically gaslight themselves into performative contentedness, which, if I had to guess, would factor into a self-inventory on any kind of “study” measuring their happiness. It’s well-established fact that the Amish severely distrust the medical profession, especially anything related to counseling, so do we really expect any of them to volunteer that they’re depressed or anxious? I don’t think so.

And we could talk about the epidemic of sexual abuse in Amish communities, but to do justice to that topic would require a series of essays in and of itself. The point I am trying to make is that I am gobsmacked that men I know in real life actually believe that keeping women small, uneducated, voiceless, and compliant is any kind of true “protection” for them or that adopting similar models could be perceived as “biblical,” Christian, or healthy in any capacity. You don’t keep anything safe by clipping its wings and controlling the life out of it. A more important question than “How do I protect what I love?” is “How do I nurture it toward the fullness of God’s design for it, risks and all?”

Rather than convincing yourself that the thing or person you value was designed for your cage, you have to be open to the possibility that you’re wrong, especially when she tells you that your restrictions are suffocating her.

Could it be reasonably argued that some women thrive and are happy in these types of strictly gendered arrangements? Well sure. I know women who are genuinely content living this way. It could also be argued that some salamanders live long, healthy lives in captivity if the conditions are right. But if you kept all salamanders in captivity, you would crash entire ecosystems. And when you try to cram all women into these narrow gender cages, you inflict a similar wound, not only on the women themselves but on the world around them that’s in desperate need of their contributions both inside and outside the home.

When God made the world, He said that it was good. When He made man, He similarly concluded that man was good. But what He said was NOT good was for man to be alone. He designed women to create necessary balance in ALL areas of life, not just in the work the menfolk don’t feel like doing. Women’s voices, insights, and brilliance are as necessary in the elder meeting as they are in the children’s ministry. They’re as necessary in the workforce as they are in the kitchen. They’re necessary leading nations. (Judges 4:5) They’re necessary advising kings. (2 Kings 22:13-20) They’re necessary prophesying in the church. (Luke 2:36-38). They’re necessary in the marketplace. (Proverbs 31)

My brothers in Christ, for the love of all that is holy, please stop embracing rigid sex role stereotypes as the solution to the gender confusion around us. Soft peddled chauvinism is still chauvinism, and it, too, is an assault on our very identities as daughters of the King. If all of womankind subscribed to your systems, Ada Lovelace would never have emerged as the world’s first computer programmer. Nellie Bly would have never set the standard for the very investigative journalism so often used to pursue God’s justice in the world. Marie Curie would never have discovered radium or polonium, and most cancer might still be a death sentence. Katherine Johnson may never have made the important calculations that helped us put a man on the moon. Rosalind Franklin may never have discovered the density and molecular structure of DNA.

The list goes on and on ad infitum, and the conclusion is this: A woman’s place is wherever God calls her. Please have enough intellectual honesty and respect for our dignity to stop adding man-made roadblocks to the work we are called to do. Protect us with your prayers and encouragement, not with superficial gender cages that keep us smaller than our God-given callings.