The pressures would have been enormous to romanticise women's roles into submissive stereotypes or limit their identity to pregnancy, childbirth, and child raising. Maybe this is already operating here, but across two thousand years of tradition let us take what survived the male editors and celebrate what these stories can represent. Spirituality is not men's business alone. Holiness is the companion of life, of intimacy, of pregnancy, of childbirth, of family. Holiness is at home with the unromantic and painful aspects of all of these.
Human business is holy business - and frequently messy business.
Elizabeth and Mary are not to be locked away in obscurity. Their sisters do not need male approval to matter. Their place is not back stage. In the real dramas of change throughout the world and its history they have leading roles, though often by choice or by constraint not those which govern the male syntax. It has not been easy to let them be persons.