Wade Burleson has written an exceptionally thought-provoking post on the difference between one young woman’s journey through her pain (it appears to be a rejection of herself by a boyfriend) into the pathway of accepting a tradition that gives authoritarian license to males vs one young slave woman’s courage in standing up against authoritarian license.  I highly recommend you read Wade’s post found here especially for the account of the courageous stand of a slave girl that Wade copies at the end of his post.

Certainly one can have a “recovery” if that person is actually recovering from a bitterness towards men.  But depicting egalitarianism in the church as being based on hatred of male authority or a bitterness towards men is a false recovery.  Bitterness towards men is no different than bitterness towards women or bitterness towards another race.  When someone has hurt you and your self worth has been damaged, one will be tender and sensitive and often people go through many steps of recovery before they can get past the bitterness and intense hurt.  However identifying egalitarians (or as Courtney calls them feminists) as ones fighting against authority is a very serious mistake and one might question what she was really recovering from.  Bitterness is bitterness.  It is a sinful state of the heart that comes from our sin as a reaction to our hurt, not from our belief about the ability for men and women to serve God in the way that he has called them.

False recovery taints the recovery process.  It fails to identify where the problem lies.  Identifying a false source of the problem can replace one bondage for another.  It also can alienate another group of believers seeing them as the problem instead of identifying the heart attitude as the problem.