‘What is a woman?’ It’s a question which might have been met with guffaws of laughter just twenty years ago, but (as the popularity of the eponymous Matt Walsh documentary attests) it is now one Christians need to answer. At the same time, scores of books on womanhood have been written by and for Christians since the sexual revolution. From Elizabeth Elliot’s well-known Let Me Be a Woman (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1976), to Rachel Held Evans’s more controversial A Year of Biblical Womanhood (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2012), there are a plethora of options to choose from. So why do we need another one?

Without subjecting all the current offerings to cross examination, it would be impossible to argue that the Christian world needs another book on womanhood, but it must be said that anyone grappling with what womanhood means today will certainly have their thoughts significantly enriched by Dodds’s guide. A very small book, designed to be read in an hour or so, A Student’s Guide to Womanhood manages to address key aspects of womanhood without quoting Proverbs 31 on every page (an impressive accomplishment if one compares it to many popular-level books on womanhood). The language is concise, easy to understand and imbued with warmth, each chapter beginning with a scene from the author’s own life. Dodds handles Scripture adroitly, exegeting it with a clarity that never side-steps serious questions, but she refuses to let her readers become overwhelmed by current debates (p. 13). Her examples and applications are specific without being overly culturally bound, and each chapter concludes with a take-away statement and three questions for further reflection.

Dodds begins by addressing our cultural zeitgeist head on. She acknowledges that while second wave feminism and the transgender movement have made defining womanhood ‘as complicated and extraordinary as to be almost impossible’, it is equally true that ‘being a woman is simultaneously simple and complex by God’s design’ (p. 9, emphasis added). It is this emphasis on God’s hand in creating womanhood which (rightly) occupies the initial chapters. For ‘Womanhood matters the way the walls of the house matter…. It matters the way flowers in the garden matter. It matters because God wanted it to matter—He made it consequential’ (p. 10). When humans attempt to define or create womanhood themselves apart from God, they are re-performing and participating in the ignoble sin of Genesis 3, she argues. At the same time, when Jesus came to redeem and recreate us, he provided women with an identity which is ‘stuffed full of meaning and purpose and design’ (p. 24). This identity is a witness to the world of God’s goodness (p. 94).

A Guide to Womanhood then addresses how physical differences between men and women function to fulfil the original commission God gave humanity. Yet in a fallen world the fact that men have greater strength and speed and only women can nurture children in their womb are at best reasons for jealousy, and at worst realities to be obscured and altered. Dodds notes that women have the choice to rebel against their womanhood (maiming and damaging their bodies or cultivating them for the purpose of power and control), or to resent their womanhood (becoming bitter over singleness, infertility or disability), or to agree with what Scripture evinces and, ‘despite difficulties and trials’, to ‘entrust ourselves by faith in Jesus to our Sovereign God’ (p. 39). Furthermore, the hope and life God brought to creation in the incarnation of his Son extends to womanhood. Life under the new covenant

does not make the Genesis commission obsolete, but it does make it incomplete. We still need men and women to marry and have children. But more than that, we need their children to be born again through faith in Jesus Christ. And we need both the married and unmarried alike to participate in the Great Commission given by Jesus. (pp. 40–41, emphasis original)

Thus all women, regardless of physical or intellectual ability, are able to live fruitful lives in Christ, making disciples and becoming spiritual mothers. At the same time, physicality is not eschewed, for Jesus came to die for sins done in the body, and the Holy Spirit gifts women with the self-control and power to present their bodies as ‘instruments for righteousness’ (Rom 6:14) in ways equal but distinct from men (p. 43). And all this, not through special women’s rites or rituals, but by the ordinary means of grace.

Nevertheless, God does not ignore the male-female distinction when it comes to growth in godliness. In chapter 7, Dodds offers refreshing wisdom as she discusses biblical instruction addressed specifically to women. She points out that while the gospel is able and effective in saving both sexes, this does not preclude that each sex will have its own particular challenges and temptations. Specific instructions give women much to think over. Additionally, God in his kindness also provides examples of faithful female believers in the pages of Scripture and in the church.

Dodds also provides an engaging and much needed analysis of the current cultural inclination to automatically equate womanhood with victimhood and then to make victimhood an irrefutable currency for obtaining social sympathy and status. I did struggle, however, with the summary of her own experience. She notes, ‘I knew I wasn’t a victim—I knew that whatever minor injustices I’d experienced from others were paltry when I contemplated my own assault on God’s holiness’ (pp. 76–77). It is important to note that the first half of her sentence is particular to her, the latter is true for us all. Our personal transgressions against a faultless God will always be of a totally different magnitude to sins committed against us. Nevertheless, some women’s experiences will still include acts of gross injustice, even if Dodds’s did not. As the chapter progresses, she does differentiate more obviously between the experience of being victimized and claiming victimhood as identity, and goes on to speak helpfully of God’s ability to see both sins committed against us and sins committed by us; the way in which victimhood as identity robs women of agency; and Jesus as the ultimate Victim-who-is-not-a-victim (p. 80).

A Student’s Guide to Womanhood finishes as it began, with a cogent appraisal of the costs of claiming that God and God alone has the right to define womanhood. Yet there is joy to be found, even as Christians battle the cultural tide of gender self-creation. The God who creates and defines also redeems and restores us in Christ. He therefore gives us a better word (Christ) to speak to our neighbours. So Dodds encourages women,

Your life, as a woman who embraces being made a woman, helps to speak this better word. Your steadfast acceptance and reception of the gift of womanhood is a testimony in our broken culture. Your being unashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ and unashamed to be called his daughter, is a witness to the world that God is good and He does good. (p. 94, emphasis original)

In case it’s not obvious by now, Dodds’s book is not only for students but for everyone who needs a short scriptural primer on what has become a focus point of our current political and cultural milieu: womanhood.

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