Valerie Saiving Goldstein was born in 1921, and received her BA from Bates College, Maine, United States in 1943, studying both theology and psychology.
Her University of Chicago Divinity School PhD thesis, The Concepts of Individuality in Whitehead’s Metaphysics, was published in 1966.
Mary Daly, for example, cited her in her work The Church and the Second Sex, while Judith Plaskow both published a dissertation on Saiving's essay (entitled Sex, Sin and Grace: Women's Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich) and reproduced the 1960 article in her 1979 anthology Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion.
[3] The crux of Saiving's argument in the article is that the focus on pride characteristic of traditional Christian interpretations of sin reflects male experience in a way that is inappropriate to the experience of most, if not all, women, who are much more likely to be prone to "triviality, distractibility, and diffuseness; lack of an organizing center or focus; dependence on others for one's self-definition; tolerance at the expense of standards of excellence ... in short, underdevelopment or negation of the Self."
Christianity's view of salvation as a result of selflessness is seen as potentially proscriptive of women who need, in Saiving's opinion, to be encouraged rather than discouraged from asserting themselves as individuals.