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By Root 798 0

of women saints. I had few female images of holiness, except for the silent Mary of the crèche, and “girls of the Bible” stories sanitized for middle-class consumption. It was a far less textured and ambiguous world than that of a Benedictine sister I know who recalls two virgin martyrs among the many images of women in the windows of her childhood church. “There was Barbara, and Catherine, my namesake,” she says, “which made me enormously proud. I found it inspiring that women could be saints. I also remember that my mother used to pray to Saint Barbara ‘for a happy death,’ which seemed a powerful thing.” Like many girls of the 1950s, she was also invigorated by Ingrid Bergman in the film Joan of Arc. “After I saw that movie,” she said, “I had my hair cut short, and walked around being Joan. I had no armor, of course. My uniform, all that summer, was a faded blue sweatshirt.”

But for all their power to inspire a young girl, the virgin martyrs convey an uneasy message of power and powerlessness. They die, horribly, at the hands of imperial authorities. They are sanctified by church authorities, who eventually betray them by turning their struggle and witness into pious cliché, fudging the causes of their martyrdom to such an extent that many contemporary Catholics, if they’re aware of the virgin martyrs at all, consider them an embarrassment, a throwback to nineteenth-century piety; the less said, the better. It’s enough to make one wonder if the virgin martyrs merely witness to a sad truth: that whatever they do, or don’t do, girls can’t win. A book published in the early 1960s, My Nameday—Come for Dessert, is a perfect expression of this heady ambiguity. Offering both recipes and religious folklore, the book defines virgin martyrs as young women “who battled to maintain their integrity and faith.” But the radical nature of this assertion—that girls could have such integrity as to suffer and be canonized for it—is lost in Betty Crocker land: “St. Dorothy was racked, scourged, and beheaded in Cappadocia. Her symbols are a basket of fruit and flowers, which may be incorporated in a copper mold for her nameday dessert.”

A girl named Dorothy, reading such prose, might conclude that the world (or a part of it called Cappadocia) is a very dangerous place. At least until dessert. Eventually she might discover that, more than most saints, the virgin martyrs expose a nerve, a central paradox of Christian history: that while the religion has often justified the restricting of women to subservient roles, it has also inspired women to break through such restrictions, often in astonishingly radical ways. And the church, typically, has emphasized the former at the expense of the latter.

Dorothy’s story is that of a young Roman noblewoman who has refused a lawyer’s proposal of marriage and is mocked by him as she is being led away to her execution. Her crime, as with most of the virgin martyrs, was being a committed Christian who refused to marry or to worship idols as required under Roman law. The young man calls out to Dorothy from a crowd of his friends and asks her to be sure to send him fruits from the garden of paradise. This she agrees to do. When, after her death, an angel delivers three apples and three roses, the young man converts to Christianity and is also martyred. Dorothy, then, is a dangerous young rebel, a holy woman with the power to change a man and to subvert the Roman state, in which, as Gilbert Marcus has noted in The Radical Tradition, “marriage and the family were the basis of imperium . . . the guarantee of the gods that Rome would continue.”

While the names of many of the young women martyrs of the early church are known to us (Agatha, Agnes, Barbara, Catherine, Cecilia, Dorothy, Lucy, Margaret), the political nature of their martyrdom has been obscured by the passage of time and by church teaching that glorifies only their virginity, which we erroneously conceive of as a passive and merely physical condition. For them, virginity was anything but passive; it was a state of being, of powerful potential, a