Public Service Announcement: A single woman does not strictly “need” a man’s leadership

Image from Pixabay

[EDIT: Fri 19th Dec 2025, as I am retrospectively adding images to this blog post, it occurs to me to write this: having said right at the beginning of the post that I am not going to contradict the Bible, here I am…contradicting the Bible. The truth is that I am too much of a Christian, it forms too big a part of my identity for me to publicly contradict the Bible. However, the fact is, that if I were to be perfectly sincere, I think that the concept of automatic male leadership in marriage and female submission is – ahem – can be possibly construed as somewhat outdated. And I will explain why here:
One of the big problems with the Bible, or one of the unavoidable things about it which cause problems for us reading it,  is that on one hand, it contains timeless truths and principles. On the other hand, it was all the same given into a specific context.  As a man, Jesus was a real person. He existed at a specific historical time. As did also the apostles and writers of the New Testament. Certain things were true and could be taken for granted in the times that Jesus and the apostles lived on earth, which cannot automatically be taken for granted in our times. So the problem for us who live in a different time period from Jesus, Paul and their contemporaries, is to work out what in the Bible represents a timeless truth, versus what can be considered contextually relevant. I usually hate it when people play the “context” card as I feel that it can too easily be used as a “get out of jail free card” to get out of doing things that we dislike in the Bible. And yet my observation is that insisting on automatic male leadership and female submission in marriage just does not work in our times.

So this is the way I look at it: back in the times when the Bible was written, automatic male leadership and female submission in marriage made sense. Furthermore, it was such obvious common-sense as to be non-controversial.  This was for a few reasons:

Firstly men tended to be a lot older than their wives. In the story of Mary and Joseph which we are all remembering now as it is the season of Christmas, I have heard it said a number of times that Mary was likely to be a teenager, perhaps 15 years old. Whereas her husband Joseph was likely to be in his 30s.  We as citizens of the 21st Century might look at that a little askance.  However that was how things were back then. And this would have likely been the case not just in the Jewish context but across different cultures back then.

Secondly, men also tended to be more educated in certain matters, and they were brought up to be leaders of society. Women were certainly educated too, but not always in the academic sense that we would think of.  They would have been brought up to be good wives, to maintain clean and orderly homes, perhaps to manage servants. Coming from a traditional community myself, I have no doubt that women (and men too) would have been thoroughly trained in various skills.

On the whole though, women were not considered to be the equal of men. Unlike in our times, a woman would not have considered herself to be the equal of her husband. That was the accepted status quo across civilisations back then.

If a husband was predictably older and more experienced than his wife, AND also simply more knowledgeable by virtue of his education, then I think it makes basic sense that she would expect to submit to him, and it would not be considered controversial, or a big deal.

In our times however, things are different. Husbands and wives tend to be a lot closer in age than they were back then. In our times, women can often be older than their husbands, even if only by a few years.  I’m sure that that did happen in Bible terms, but rarely – perhaps the woman at the well who had had 5 husbands may have had one or two husbands who were younger than she was!  Additionally women are also highly educated, sometimes more so than their husbands. Practically speaking, marriage represents a largely different thing in our times than it did back then.  And in our days, the idea of automatic female submission and male leadership just doesn’t make sense. In fact, it rankles somewhat!

That said, I expect that most men have been eagerly looking forward to asserting their Biblical role of leadership.  This idea of marital submission causes so many arguments in the church, and unsurprisingly, my argumentative self has found herself at the centre of many an argument both in person and online. Based on my personal experience of these endless discussions and arguments, I think I can safely say that most men, even feminist-leaning men like members of my family, would defend the idea of male leadership and female submission as their God-given birthright. So personally I have decided not to fight a losing battle.  So instead of trying to promote  an argument that it just does not make sense in our days, I have decided to go the other route. And that is to confirm that I will be submitting to my husband (and I will)  – however, I will make sure that he is someone I can wholeheartedly submit to. That in practice looks like someone whose common-sense, character, wisdom and maturity I respect so highly that I can readily submit to his ideas, even when I completely disagree with any particular one, or more, of his ideas. ]

Please hear me out! I promise I am not contradicting the Bible.

In the Bible, God has granted leadership in marriage to men. However, I have seen or personally experienced it a number of times that men (especially, but often women too) tend to develop erroneous mindsets, sometimes painfully erroneous mindsets because of that.

So because men have granted leadership in marriage to men, does that then mean that every woman then needs a man to lead her? No, no it doesn’t. This is one of those tricky issues where thinking easily falls into error so I will try to explain what I mean.

When a man exercises leadership over the marriage, it is not the woman that he is leading per se, rather it is the marriage itself, that is, the union. That might sound like semantics, so I will try to give an illustrative example.

In a company where there is a boss/leader/manager and there are employees, the boss can be considered the leader of the company. Yet being the boss only gives authority to that boss to lead the employees within the context of the company, within the set hours of company work and only on matters related to the company work. Because the boss is the leader, does that then give them authority to instruct the employee on personal matters that are outside the scope of the company altogether and completely irrelevant to the company? No. Now to be fair, the employee can make decisions about their private life and time which do impinge on company life, and depending on the decision the boss might be rightly entitled to be upset at the decision made by the employee or even to end the employee’s employment. However, it is still the employee’s right to make their decision.

I know that work is not a perfect analogue for marriage as marriage truly does touch every scope of your life. But please stick with me!

Here’s the question then: if you as a boss saw a previous employee of your company who was now unemployed, or self-employed, would you then insist that that person needs a boss over their life? Or would you then start directing them as to how to live their life? No, because being a boss was only relevant to the/a company. There is a leadership structure in a company because when human beings are trying to collectively achieve things, then practically speaking there needs to be a leader. However when you are self-employed or trying to achieve things on your own then you automatically exercise leadership over your own life, make your own decisions.

So yeah, this is the analogy that immediately springs to mind. So it is with marriage. A man is not the head of the marriage because every woman inherently needs a man to lead her, but rather because every union of people working together needs a leader. If the woman remains a single unit, then just as a self-employed employee she remains under her own leadership. If she is a Christian woman then she has access to the Holy Spirit for guidance as surely as a man does.

Some men apparently do not understand this though. It would appear that for some of them their thinking goes like this:
“Men are to be the leader in marriage. If you married me then I would be the leader over you. Since any (single) man might potentially marry any (single) woman then it follows that every woman should respect the authority of any man (as any man could be a potential husband) or any woman should respect any man. ”
So it is basically as if they infer from the instruction that wives are to submit to husbands that women generally are to submit to men. Or they deduce from the fact that God has called wives to submit to husbands that men are inherently superior to women, and from that they conclude that all of their ideas, their opinions and everything else are automatically superior. If you believe that a man is inherently superior, then that easily lends itself to the idea that an inherently inferior woman needs an inherently superior man to “lead” her in life. Many women also believe that men are inherently superior to women. I’ll concede that men are physically stronger than us women! But as far as I am concerned that is as far as the inherent superiority goes!

Additionally, I have heard many people say, or pray regarding a particular single woman, (eg myself) or sometimes a group of single women, that God would bring the man/men to lead her/them in life. As far as I am concerned that is wrong. It is subtly wrong, but it is still wrong.

I definitely do not believe that any man could marry any woman. Clearly there are going to be different levels of maturity that different people have attained regardless of gender, different levels of wisdom and different ages too. Are you suggesting that someone of the stature of, say Angela Merkel (I’ve been watching videos about Germany!) could marry, ie realistically submit herself to someone like Donald Trump, for instance? Even though they are both politicians, and he is even more powerful than she ever was, there is clearly not a compatibility there.

OK, now let’s talk about assumptions in church/among Christian people!
Now everyone knows, of course, that husbands are to be the leaders in marriage. Everyone knows that, and that is the one aspect of this topic that is incontrovertible. However, as I write this, I realise that not only do people make false inferences from that, but then they also assume that other people (ie I myself) believe the same way that they do! This is a related example, and apologies it is highly controversial but it is also very true: some Christians apparently believe that (and I’m going to be blunt here) White people are inherently superior to Black people. And then when I as a Black person innocently wander into their predominantly White church, they apparently take that as a tacit agreement from me about their inherent superiority. If it needs to be stated, I definitely do not believe that any ethnicity or skin colour is inherently superior to any other, and as it happens I am very proud of my cultural background. Furthermore I am all too aware of the atrocities that certain ethnicities have committed around the world. So I have not exactly been the queen of grace whenever I have found myself colliding with this assumption.

So in the same way I definitely do not think that men are inherently superior to women.
Now the unfortunate thing about when people make this assumption, is that they apparently do not realise that people could even think differently. So whenever they are interacting with you, it is almost like they take it as an absolute given that this is the only way to think. Thinking now about a particular individual, it is clear that this person does not expose themselves (oh whom am I trying to kid? Yes it’s a man, of course it is a man) – so it seems obvious to me that this man has different time priorities to my own, where I literally spend the whole day devouring and synthesising information on a wide variety of subjects from a wide range of sources. I can’t help it, that’s literally who I am. But that is clearly not who he is. He’s clearly a smart person but it is already clear to me that this is not the kind of person I would naturally submit to, or whose opinion I would seek out on any matter of substance. This is not a dig against this man by any means. I am not saying that I am better than him. I am just saying that this is a glaring incompatibility.
So firstly it is such a false premise to suggest that theoretically he and I could get married so I would have to submit to him anyway.

Furthermore imagine the scenario then when there is someone as outspoken as I am and someone starts trying to subtly assert their inherent superiority that I don’t actually believe in? “Surely Tosin by now you have realised that between you and me I am the man?” And some people apparently think that because they are male, their thinking, their ideas are automatically superior in everything and in every way. (I’m not saying that this is true of this particular man). So simply by offering their male opinion on the matter, they expect that opinion to be accepted as the conclusive answer. I have even experienced it in the past that some men act like they are magnanimously giving women a chance to talk first, to express the sweet little ideas in our sweet little heads, before they offer their powerful and conclusive male opinions.

To go back to the title of this post, I have subtly perceived an impression that as a single woman, a certain person or people think that I am bereft of necessary male leadership, so even though they are not my husband, they unconsciously assert their own male leadership, to make up for the male leadership I am missing out on by being single.

A younger version of myself would have been sassy about all these things, and I would have gone out of my way to make my point, and to fly high my feminist credentials.
However, thankfully I am a little wiser now, and I realise that all I need to do is to create firm boundaries around my time. If anyone wants to make assumptions, then let them! As long as it does not affect what I need to do and the decisions I need to make, they can think what they like!