Although Paul may create a hierarchy of man over woman in terms of their place in church, many women found not marrying at all, as advocated by Paul, as a source of liberation from the social strictures of marriage. Paul's emphasis on staying 'as you are' in a state of chastity enabled some women to cast off their supposedly innately sinful bodies and Eve's curse of childbirth: Why did women turn their backs on their households in favor of the risks of poverty and the hostilities of their families...Rosemary Radford Ruether...according to her analysis, asceticism was a liberating choice for women in the fourth century, for not only did it allow women to throw off the traditional female roles, but it offered female-directed communities where they could pursue the highest self-development as autonomous persons...[Even] some men of the period...recognized the importance of celibacy for freeing women from domestic restrictions and applauded them.

Within the Bible, there is no singular interpretation of the relationships of women and men, and the nature of marriage, given that it is a snapshot of attitudes of multiple sources and multiple eras of history. Within some books, there is a stress upon the positive benefits of marriage in a God-created world that can give birth to a new nation. Other books stress the sinful nature of humanity, and the damage that procreation...

Church fathers and female radicals alike could reinterpret scripture in different ways. "When a text is regarded as absolutely cut off from its original situation, the 'world of the text' becomes, if it was not so already, multivalent."
Bibliography

Bible Gateway. [October 7, 2011]

Clark, Elizabeth. Women and the Early Church. Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press,

1983.

Collins, Adela Yarbro. Crisis and Catharsis: The Power of the Apocalypse. Philadelphia:

Westminster Press, 1983).

McDonald, Dennis Ronald. The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for Paul in Story and Canon.

Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983.

Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Religion and Sexism: Images of Woman in the Jewish and Christian

Tradition. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974.

Elizabeth Clark, Women and the Early Church, (Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1983), p.41.

Dennis Ronald MacDonald, The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for Paul in Story and Canon, (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983, pp.51-52.

Adela Yarbro Collins, Crisis and Catharsis: The Power of the Apocalypse, (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983), p.19.