Clement of Alexandria, The Instructor 4

Let us therefore embrace this good obedience all the more and give ourselves to the Lord, seizing the surest pledge of his excellence and recognizing that virtue is the same for a man as for a woman. After all, there is one God for both, one Pedagogue for both, one Church, one sobriety, one sense of shame; their nourishment is common, their marriage is yoked together, and they share breath, sight, hearing, knowledge, hope, obedience, and love — all these things are alike. Since their life is common, their grace is common, and their salvation is common, their virtue and upbringing are common as well. As Scripture says, "In this age they marry and are given in marriage" (Luke 20:34), an age in which the female is distinguished from the male; but in the age to come that distinction no longer exists. There the rewards of this social and holy life lived in marriage are stored up not for male and female separately, but for the human being, since desire has been divided and separated. Consequently the name "human" belongs in common to men and women. It appears to me that the Attics applied the word paidarion not only to a boy but also to a girl, if the comic poet Menander in his Rhapizomene can be trusted when he says something like, "my daughter... for the child is by nature very philanthropic." Likewise, the word "lamb" is a common name of innocence for both the male and the female animal. And the Lord himself shepherds us for the ages; amen. For without a shepherd neither sheep nor anything else can live, nor children without the Pedagogue, nor slaves without the Master.