Lydia's Impatient Sisters

What did it mean for women to become Christians during the formative years of Christianity? What implications did this conversion have for women in their relationships, in everyday life, and in their view of the future? This book looks at the immeasurable influence that women had on the common life of the first Christian communities despite the struggles they endured under patriarchal domination.

This book represents a significant step forward in the understanding of women in the New Testament and the early church.

Excerpt From the Forward

"In Lydia's Impatient Sisters, Luise Schottroff develops a social history of the everyday life of women and relates this history to the central theological topics of the New Testament, such as the revelation of God, the daily life of the church, and eschatology. Schottroff sets common experience of labor, money, illness, and resistance in the context of the Roman imperial society. After some decades of feminist biblical research, it is now well known that women too exercised leadership roles in early Christianity. But Schottroff's work demonstrates for the first time how these women were embedded in their social world. We can see how they submitted to ancient legal norms and to the economic systems of the Roman Empire."

by Dorothee Soelle