The caricature is that the Bible is anti-women. The actual record — especially Jesus' record — is the opposite of what skeptics expect.
Old Testament dignity
Genesis 1:27 — "male and female he created them" in his image. That single line was revolutionary in the Ancient Near East, where women were routinely treated as property. The Law gave women protections unheard-of in surrounding cultures (Ex. 21; Num. 27:1–11 — daughters can inherit). Deborah judged Israel. Huldah the prophetess authenticated Scripture for the king (2 Kings 22).
Jesus broke every rule
He spoke theology with a Samaritan woman (John 4) — unthinkable. He let a woman sit at his feet as a disciple (Luke 10:39). Women financed his ministry (Luke 8:3). The first witnesses to the Resurrection — the foundation of the entire faith — were women, in a culture where women's testimony was legally suspect. If you were fabricating a religion in the 1st century, you would never write that.
The Orthodox lens
Orthodoxy gives the highest honor in creation not to any man, but to the Theotokos — Mary, more honorable than the cherubim. The Church calls women "equal-to-the-apostles": Mary Magdalene, Photini, Nina of Georgia, Helen who found the Cross. The icon corner of every Orthodox home holds a woman's face.
What about hard passages?
Paul's words on submission (Eph. 5) are bracketed by mutual submission (5:21) and a command for husbands to love sacrificially "as Christ loved the Church" — that is, to bleed for her. Different roles, equal dignity. Galatians 3:28: "There is neither male nor female; you are all one in Christ Jesus."
A pastoral word
If the Church has failed women in practice — and we have, in many times and places — that is sin, not Scripture. The Word himself was carried in a woman's body. He has not forgotten.