When Women Were Priests: Women's Leadership in the Early Church and the Scandal of Their Subordination in the Rise of Christianity Karen Toriesen (Margo Goldsmith Professor, Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, California, USA)
Vital to the current debate about women and the Church, this book discloses that women played prominent leadership roles in Jesus' own ministry and in the early Church - as prophets, heads of churches and teachers. It explains why women were marginalized and scapegoated as the Church successfully emerged as a public institution and what the reasons were for women's subordination in Christianity.