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Narrowing My Topic
As I previously mentioned faith has played a major role in my life and who am I from when I was little to the present. However, I have seen time and time again in history how religion, Christianity included, can be used to oppress minorities including women. Additionally, the Bible and other religions have been interpreted as sexist and used wrongfully. This has always been something that is of interest to me as I believe that the Christian religion was not meant to oppress minorities but instead life everyone as equals, so I wanted to find out for myself. With my research I aim to collect data and examine whether or not women are oppressed in the Bible by looking at the role they play in Biblical stories.
When I first established that I wanted to conduct my research surrounding the Bible and women I needed to find a gap in previous research as well as narrow my realm of research down significantly. Among investigating scholarly websites and journal articles I could find no peer reviewed research done on women in the Bible. There was a lot of personal columns or articles on religiously affiliated websites however, there was no actual research done on the topic. I felt as though the research I will conduct will start to fill this gap. I figured that the best way to be able to research this topic and collect my data would be to compare and contrast the way Women are Portrayed in the Old and New Testament so I can see if women are oppressed and if this changes at all between the books.
Preveious Research
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As I mentioned above, there was no scholarly research surrounding this topic so finding previous research to aid my research was difficult. I instead had to utilize personal and religious affiliated articles to me develop my topic. I used information from Valarie Walton, a church news reporter, who observed that women in the Old Testament are portrayed more as child bearers, companions of men, homemakers, etc. I compared this to information from Cheyenne Lehto who noted that the New Testament portrayed women in a more progressive way allowing them to fulfill bigger roles and have larger overall impacts. This information that I gathered from previous research allowed me to realize that I not only need to observe women's roles in the Bible, but that there may be a change between the Old Testament and the New Testament, which needs to be noted in my research to make it truly nuanced.
Methodology
In order to find my methodology I looked at literature studies comparing the changes in time periods, books, etc. I felt as though this would be the most similar to my research and would provide me with the most relevant methodology which would best fit me to conduct my research. I derived my methods from a peer reviewed journal “Representation of Women in Literature through Different Era.” This journal compared the way women were represented in literature in different time periods. The researcher used coding methods/comparative analysis along with secondary data analysis which is the methods I have decided to use for my research project. First I will use comparative analysis. Comparative analysis evaluates two or more types of data in order to determine similarities and differences between the two and draw conclusions about these similarities/differences. To apply this to my research I would take a certain number of women from the Old Testament and compare them to the same number of women in the new testament. I would code for how they are portrayed. I will code for 3 specific things; whether they hold formal or informal roles (judge/military leader vs. mother), moral example (whether they serve as a positive or negative example overall), and if they have an encounter with a divine power (Jesus, God, or Angels). I will then compare the two in order to determine if the roles of women have changed or if they remain the same.
Relevance
Women have been oppressed by various religions for years, limiting their roles and their abilities to impact the world. There is also a preconceived notion that women are oppressed and not viewed as equals in Christianity but this study may, potentially may not, be able to prove that God used women in the Bible just as much as men thus viewing them as equal. By divine powers and religion valuing/viewing men as equal to women this research can be one step towards eliminating lasting stereotypes and ideas that women are less than men.
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