Women in the Bible...some new stuff

At clergy conference with colleagues from the Diocese of Michigan...topic is "Bible Women", led by The Rev. Lindsay Hardin Freeman. She points out out that 93 women speak 14,056 words in the Bible. A small fraction of the air time given to men, but still greater than what appears in the source books of other most other world religions, and what women do contribute is essential to the development of Judeo-Christian tradition.
     Here are some of her conclusions:
1. When woman in the Bible do speak, it is with a startling boldness;
2. Biblical women push against patriarchal restraints (a consistent pattern, which I find remarkable given the patriarchal bias prevailing in both Jewish and Christian scriptures...why were these proto-feminist voices not edited out of the tradition by vigilant male scribes? True, they may have been blind to the implications of what they were transcribing...but I see the hand of God at work nonetheless.)
3. Biblical women "climb out over the transom" to serve as God's agents, subverting social norms and outsmarting the duly constituted authorities charged with keeping them in line.
4. Many are unmarried, widows, or in some way outside the structures of social control.
5. They suffer horrible loss and are treated like pawns on a chessboard yet appear in scripture as bright lights in sacred history;
6. Are occasionally found in scripture as occupying positions of power ordinarily assigned to men, without any note of explanation or acknowledgment within the text that this represents anything unusual. What's up with that?
 Lindsay Hardin Freeman and her husband, The Rev. Len Freeman, assert that, as a group, the outspoken women of the Bible functioned as the "social media" of their day, which I take to mean that they carried on a sort of unofficial, grassroots counter-narrative to what the "mainstream" media has passed on to us. In any case, this presentation has demonstrated, once again, that you are never too old to learn something new about the Bible. A fine day.