Well, it's impossible to be both at once. No matter what we do, we can never live up to that ideal. But when you get her into the church she's been a banner for wimpiness. Some might dismiss such talk as irreverent speculation, an awkward attempt to reconcile modern feminism with a centuries-old text. The Bible, after all, is hardly a feminist manifesto.
Winter looks past such passages for a deeper meaning.
The Bible, she says, is God's word written by men who brought their own biases and beliefs to the task. We're finding much more in the Bible than the Scripture texts have let us believe. Many of the stories were recorded years, even centuries, after the events they describe occurred. It's told from different perspectives and sometimes things didn't happen exactly as people remembered them. Sometimes, tilting the facts just a little could change the whole thing.