CS Lewis and Women - Again

Listening yet again to another podcast or written discussion between female academics fond of CS Lewis about his sexism, I was struck by what I felt were a few points that invariably got missed. I resolved to pick up the topic again. I was about a thousand words in with several thousand more, stretching out to the cracks of doom in front of me, and I already had six back-links to previous posts of mine, and twice that many to arguments made - often well-made - by others and I wondered what was the point. 

The points have been made, search-page after search-page's worth of them. Quite repetitive. I saw myself adding nothing to this. The same blind spots recur. Noting that Lewis was the product of his era and his peculiar placement in life, while the author ignores that they are equally beholden to their own era and responding almost viscerally to certain wordings as they refer others. Chronocentrism brought forward from the 1900s to the 2000s. That people might have a general view about women (or Frenchmen, or cabbies) yet make frequent exceptions for it - often neglected. I have to expect that people want to hear some things and don't want to hear others.

So I looked for leftovers, eying a possible escape. Had I mentioned Edith Stein, the woman born a Jew in Germany who became a Catholic saint in the 1900s? I had not, and now I have. Among many other things she wrote about overlooked aspects of God's possible intentions for female spirituality contributing to the overall in a powerful way. Had I mentioned Chesterton's contention that the success of women in the male-dominated world was in fact their final defeat? (A very GKC reversal of the expected.) I had not, and now I have. Had I mentioned Dorothy Sayers's dislike of Lewis's complementarianism, which I believe is strongly biased by her own conviction that her personal calling overruled more general expectations of Christian women? She may have been absolutely right in this, but it does undermine her claim to speak for women in general, at least a bit.  I had not, and now I have.

And I can't think of anything else you can't easily find a hundred other places.