Who decided what a “good woman” should look like?
Long before social media, paintings, sculptures, religious images, and other forms of visual culture were shaping our expectations of women. Those images did not merely reflect society. They helped define beauty, sexuality, motherhood, virtue, and even what Christians imagined a godly woman should be.
Dr. Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt is an art historian (Ph.D. from Washington University) and is a professor of art and art history at Covenant College. She’s also the author of two books: the award-winning Redeeming Vision: A Christian Guide to Looking at and Learning from Art (Baker Academic 2023) and her recent book Look Like a Lady: Five Visual Tropes of Womanhood and How to See Ourselves Differently (Brazos 2026), which forms the basis of our conversation today.
Chapters:
00:00 The Desire to Be Desirable
00:41 What Is a Woman?
03:39 Meet Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt
06:16 How Art Shapes Christian Theology
09:58 Why Medieval Jesus Looks Like a Little Man
14:22 Five Images of Womanhood
15:20 The Venus Trope and Sexual Desirability
18:10 Why Women Learn to See Themselves as Objects
23:21 Purity Culture and the Objectification of Women
28:37 Mary, Elizabeth, and a Better Way of Seeing
33:35 The Myth of the Perfect Mother
38:02 How the Reformation Changed Womanhood
43:44 Are Women Competing for God’s Love?
46:27 Infertility, Motherhood, and Female Identity
49:30 “Is Something Wrong With Me?”
52:24 Do Fathers Get More of a Free Pass?
54:45 How Women Become “Monsters”
59:47 Does the Church Still Vilify Women?
63:45 Shaped by Trauma, Not Defined by It
65:36 A Bigger Vision of Christian Womanhood
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