Dressed to Profess: Clothing, Speech, and Silence in 1 Timothy 2:9–11

In 1 Timothy 2:9–10, the Pastoral Paul instructs women on how they should dress during prayer. Scholars often interpret these commands as limiting women’s bodily display, which is seen as a disruption to orderly worship. In this article, I challenge what I refer to as the “distraction hypothesis,” or the scholarly tendency to associate clothing regulations with concerns about distraction and disorder. Rather than positing attention to dress and adornment as a moral failing with consequences for both individual and community, I consider from a feminist perspective not only why the first address to women is concerned with what they are wearing but also why this exhortation emerges at a tense intersection between prayer and teaching, speech and silence. Engaging the work of Saba Mahmood, Catherine Bell, and Judith Butler, I argue that the Pastoral Paul must simultaneously define the necessarily bodily conditions for effective ritual prayer while also limiting the possibility that women might seek to extend their ritual authority to other aspects of communal life. Shifting our attention to the ritual dynamics of the text of 1 Timothy has significant implications for feminist analysis, not only allowing movement beyond the framing of women’s bodies as sexualized distractions but also opening space to consider the surprising role of clothing practices in struggles over authority and influence in early Christ groups.