“Blessed Art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who
has not made me a woman,” Hebrew males are taught to pray every day.
“When Eve was created, Satan rejoiced,” Mohammed said.
As the Hebrew creation myth, along with many of the other
writings of the Old Testament, was later adopted into Christian sacred
literature, the writers and religious leaders who followed Christ adopted the
same attitude toward women, continuing to use religion to further lock women
into the role of passive and inferior beings, and hence the more easily
controlled property of a woman. As women's rights and status deteriorated over
time, the Church remained committed to its aims of establishing and sustaining
a male-dominated society. Wasn't it one of the god's first decrees when he
created the earth and all life? Women were to be viewed as senseless, carnal
beings, with the Paradise myth justifying and "proving" all views.
“Wives, subject yourself to your own husbands as unto the
Lord,” Paul writes to the Ephesians. For, just as Christ is the head of the
Church and the savior of the flesh, the husband is the head of the woman. Like
the Church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be subject to their own
husbands in all things” (Eph. 5:22 24).
This reminds me of a Hosea quotation in which the husband
became so completely associated with the male god that his words became
Yahweh's words. Not just priests, but all men were to be called immediate
messengers of the Lord in the modern faith, not only in Church, but even in the
solitude of a woman's kitchen or even in her room. Paul said that this was the
reason that women would be obedient, refusing themselves even the faculty of
their vocal cords, let alone their brains, using the now-familiar Eden myth.
“Let the woman study in silence for all subjection,” we read in I Timothy
2:11–14. But I will not allow a woman to lecture or usurp power over a man;
instead, I will allow her to remain silent. For Adam was created first,
followed by Eve, and Adam was not deceived, but the woman who was deceived was
in the sin.”
And the word of the origin legend was taken home once more
in Corinthians. “Christ is the head of every man; the man is the head of the
woman; and Christ is the head of God. Since, while a man is the image and glory
of God, the woman is the glory of the man, he does not cover his head. For the
woman is of the guy, not the other way around. Man was not made for the woman,
but the woman was created for the man” (I Cor. 11:3, 7, 9).
The story of Adam and Eve was repeatedly portrayed as divine
evidence that man could possess supreme power in statements carefully crafted
to suppress the earlier social order. The male god had the same rank as a male
human, so it was no surprise that the Levite priests of Yahweh battled so
fiercely for his right. Paul was so bent on proclaiming maleness to be first
that he was able to ignore the biological reality of birth— “For the man is not
of the flesh, nor the woman of the man.” The suffering is borne by the woman,
but the credit is given to the man. As the apostle Peter visited Anatolia,
where the Goddess was still worshipped, he denounced the "pagans" for
their "love of defiling passion," just as the prophets of the Old
Testament did as they violently condemned those who "reveled in the
daytime." He bemoaned the fact that these heathens continued to worship
Baalim. “Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands,” Peter
solemnly advised, “for after this way, the holy women too, who believed in God,
adorned themselves, being in subjection to their own husbands in the old time”
(I Pet. 3:1).
In the name of the Lord, St. Clement, the patriarch of the
Roman Church, refused women the fun and wellbeing and strength-building
benefits of such athletic sports as grappling and running, arguing that women's
practices should be limited to spinning, sewing, and cooking. “The woman taught
once and destroyed everything,” said St. John Chrysostom, a fifth-century
Christian teacher. Let her not teach on this account.” In the same time, St.
Augustine believed that man, but not woman, was created in God's image, and
that woman is incomplete without man, while he is complete alone.
Martin Luther said in his writings that it was common for
women to be second best to men, based on this same biblical idea. He wrote in
his “Vindication of Married Life” that men must preserve their control over women
because “the regiment and dominion belong to the man as the head and master of
the house,” “for the regiment and dominion belong to the man as the head and
master of the house.” John Calvin, a sixteenth-century Swiss reformer, also
opposed constitutional freedom for women, calling it a "deviation from the
original and correct order of nature." He also advocated for polygamy,
claiming that it would help women from being unmarried and childless.
The reason that the fall of the spirit is partly reparable and
not irreversible, except here on earth, but the fall of the flesh is to a
certain degree irreparable and dangerous, as Christian theologian Hubmaier
wrote in a treatise on the independence of will in 1527, is that Adam as a kind
of the soul (as is Eve, of the flesh) would have chosen not to eat of the
forbidden tree. The serpent did not trick him, but Eve was (I Timothy 2:14).
Adam understood the serpent's teachings were diametrically opposed to God's
words. Nonetheless, he willed to eat the fruit against his will to avoid vexing
or angering his rib, his flesh, Eve. He would rather not have done so. In some
of her novels, Dr. Margaret Murray argues that the western world's witch trials
are a result of the persecution of ancient "pagan" faiths. This is a
distinct possibility, given that women were the prime targets and casualties of
those heinous shootings, and so many of the allegations were in some way
related to sex. The worship named as the witch cult may have been based on the
Goddess Danu, the Divine Ancestress of the Tuatha de Danaan of Ireland, who is
perhaps similar to the Goddess Diana of the Romans, Dione of the Greeks, and
even Danu of India.
We know that Isis was worshipped in England during the Roman
era; a Thames-side Isis temple in London and an altar to Isis in Chester all
testify to Her religion's presence in the British Isles at the time. Diana was
listed as the chief of witches in a ninth-century declaration about them,
according to Murray. “Some evil women, reverting to Satan and diminished by
demons' dreams and phantasms, believe and profess that they travel at night
with Diana on certain beasts, with an innumerable multitude of women, passing
over enormous distances, obeying her orders as their mistress, and evoked by her
on certain nights.” Clifford Alderman writes in A Cauldron of Witches that the
tale of Eve was once again used to justify the death of those women who opposed
the Church. “Woman is more carnal than man: there was a flaw in the conception
of the first woman, for she was shaped with a bent rib,” according to a
sixteenth-century Church report. She is flawed, and as a result, she is still
deceiving. Carnal desire is the source of witchcraft. Women are to be virginal
and submissive to men.” Women had gradually been maneuvered into a situation
well away from the ancient rank they once enjoyed in the lands where the Queen
of Heaven reigned, thanks to the brutal imposition and subsequent forced
adoption of male religions. The absolute quality of the decrees attributed to
the omnipotent male god was particularly concerning. With the passage of time,
the Church's long, strong arm extended everywhere, bringing with its
unquestionable "religious" attitudes and the guilt-ridden,
subservient position attributed to women. The laws and behaviors initially
intended to exclude female religions, personal autonomy, and matrilineal
succession, are embedded in the very foundation of contemporary male religions.
These are the precepts that many of our ancestors and
parents embraced as the holy and spiritual word of God, making them such an
inseparable part of family life that they now influence all some of us who have
never been exposed to organized religion's masses or sacraments. It's beyond
time to investigate and challenge how profoundly these attitudes have pervaded
in the most liberal realms of society today, stubbornly surviving as
patriarchal vestiges of a civilization once thoroughly pervaded and dominated
by the Church's term. We might wonder to what extent the repression of women's
rituals has resulted in the suppression of women's rights.
Despite the holy word of the omnipotent male god, the story
of the first woman in the Hebrew creation myth rang in the ears, minds, and
spirits of people who resented being lorded over by men. Many of the first
women who dared to speak out about the ways in which women were marginalized
and the blatant injustice in their status in society had to deal squarely with
the Bible tale of the woman who had originally brought about male rule by
listening to the serpent's voice. The Church's strength and authority was a far
greater impediment to the search for female emancipation in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries than it is today. Nonetheless, the foremothers of the
fight for women's liberation bravely spoke out against that force, defying the
Church and its teachings. In certain ways, the vindication of women's rights
was a vindication of Eve herself. Women who dared to seek equitable justice
were always symbolically hounded by thoughts and reminders of Eve's unjust
punishment. The characters in the Garden of Eden were once again the subject of
discussion in Mary Wollstonecraft's writings in 1792.
Wollstonecraft wrote in A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman, one of the first efforts to highlight the shameful treatment of half the
world's population: The prevalent belief that woman was made for man may have
derived from Moses' poetical story; however, because very few people, it is
assumed, who have given any serious thought to the issue, have ever considered
Eve to be one of Adam's ribs, the deduction must be permitted to fall to the
earth. Except to the extent that it demonstrates that man has found it
convenient to use his power to subjugate his partner, and his ingenuity to show
that she should be yoked with her neck bent, because she, like the brute
construct, was made to do his pleasure.
She continued by publicly declaring, "Though the cry of
irreligion, or even atheism, be raised against me, I would declare, that were
an angel from heaven to tell me that Moses' beautiful, poetical cosmogony, and
the account of the fall of man, were literally true, I might believe it."
An examination of Jean Rousseau's Emilius (Emile), a 1761 plan for children's
schooling in a "open society." This treatise, along with Rousseau's
Social Contract, influenced both the American and French revolutions
significantly. She cited Rousseau's recommended guidelines for the religious
education of females in the free Utopia of which he conceived, along with many
other male-oriented passages from his writings. Rousseau said, "Because a
woman's behavior is subject to public opinion, her trust in matters of religion
should be subject to authority for the same reason." Every daughter should
be of the same religion as her mother, and every wife should be of the same
religion as her husband: for, even if such religion is false, the docility that
induces the mother and daughter to submit to the order of nature removes the
criminality of their error in God's eyes... they are not capable of judging for
themselves, they should abide by the decency.
“The interests of society have thus been restricted to the
male line from Adam downwards,” Mary Wollstonecraft observed. Though the French
and American revolutions had yet to be fought at the time of Rousseau's
writing, this man, who most ardently advocated freedom and independence and
whose ideas deeply influenced revolutionaries in each of these countries,
proposed (presumably with clear conscience) that women should always "be
subject to authority" and "abide by the decisions of their
fathoms" even in a "free society." Her mother's religious views
were to be decided by her mother's husband, but a daughter was to adopt her
mother's faith. Women, supposedly deprived of the "power to judge for
themselves," were to merely represent the religious teachings of men,
unless they came from a long line of fatherless households, which was a rare phenomenon.
The dramatic first line of Rousseau's Social Contract, "He is born free,
and he is chained everywhere," a cry for liberty and equality, still rings
in our ears, maybe especially in 1976. Yet, according to this same scholar,
religious structures and practices that insisted on male dominance over females
as divinely ordained (religion being predominantly Christian in France and the
North American colonies) were to be embraced without question by women. In
1838, sixty-two years after the American revolution, another stalwart advocate
for women's equality wrote of Eve, the mythological ancestor of both Jewish and
Christian women, as men's right to oppress and subjugate women was unanimously
explained by Eve's sin and retribution.
Sarah Grimke argued, as if in a court of galactic justice,
that even if the initial account was valid, hadn't women already completed
their sentences? I am aware that woman is still held responsible for bringing
sin into the world today. I would not respond to the charges with any counter arguments,
though, as previously said, Adam's eager acceptance of his wife's proposal does
not savor much of man's supremacy in mental ability. Even if Eve was the
greater sinner, it seems to me that man should be content with the dominion he
has asserted and exerted for nearly 6,000 years, and that more real nobility
will be manifested by attempting to lift the fallen and enliven the poor,
rather than holding women in subjection. I don't expect much in return for my
sex. I would not relinquish our right to freedom. What I ask is that our
brothers and sisters remove their feet from around our heads.
In her insightful research The New Feminism, Lucy Komisar,
former vice-president of the National Organization of Women (NOW) in America,
outlined the early phase of women's movement for emancipation and opposition.
She states that women first became conscious of their injustice when they
attempted to speak out in favor of the abolition of black slaves, and that
their effort to participate in politics enraged the Church, the official
members of the male deity's title. When Sarah and Angelina Grimke went on a
tour of New England to speak out against slavery in 1836, the Massachusetts
Council of Congregational Ministers issued a statement criticizing them,
claiming that "the power of a woman is her dependency flowing from the
consciousness of that weakness which God has given her for her protection when
she assumes the place and tone of man as a public reformer, she yields."
Sarah Grimke, on the other hand, was not afraid to strike
back, even though the Church had just ended its tradition of burning people at
the stake for far less. “As they have decided that Jehovah has set women on a
lower platform than man, they of course want to hold her there; and henceforth
the noble senses of our minds are smashed, and the noble thinking forces are
almost entirely uncultivated,” she retorted angrily. Several women concerned
about the abolition of slavery decided to attend an international conference in
London to discuss the issue, only to discover that a group of American
clergymen had gone ahead of them to London to alert the English clergymen that
they were coming and that they planned to talk. This sparked a prolonged
discussion among the men over women's entry, with the result that women who
visited were able to attend—but only if they stood quietly behind a curtained
enclosure. The shock of this ruling prompted the first women's rights meeting,
which took place in Seneca Falls, New York. A Women's Declaration of
Independence was drafted at that convention in 1848, and once again, women
spoke out against the Church's treatment of them.
It was written into the Declaration some fifteen centuries
after the major obliteration of the Queen of Heaven's and Her priestesses'
worship.
“He [man] allows her to participate in Church and State, but
only in a subordinate position, citing Apostolic authority for her exclusion
from the Ministry and, with certain exceptions, from all public involvement in
Church affairs... He has usurped Jehovah's prerogative by citing it as his right
to grant a realm of conduct to her while it belongs to her conscience and god.”
Many men in 1848, using the power of those same ideas, allied themselves with
the male god, and by this authority determined, declared, and imposed their
decisions upon women, self-righteously telling them what they should do, much
as Hosea had done before.
The Bible was repeatedly brought up to “prove” that their
status was unquestionable. Emily Collins, a feminist, wrote in 1848 about a man
who whipped his wife, the hardworking mother of his seven children, on a
regular basis. This woman not only looked after all of the children and her
husband, but she also milked the animals, spun and wove the cloth for all of
the family's clothes, which she then sewed, and did all of the family's
cooking, sweeping, washing, and mending. Her offence, according to her husband,
was that she "scolded," which he described as "nagging," or
speaking up and saying what was on her mind. This was recognized as a
justification for a Christian man to beat his child. “Then hope, why could he
not have chastised her?” Emily Collins enquired, her voice bitter and enraged.
It was his privilege—and it was his responsibility, according to how the Bible
was read. True, women grumbled over their bad luck; yet the fact that ‘The man
shall rule over thee' and ‘Wives subordinate yourselves unto your husbands as
unto the Lord,' were considered to be divine decrees forced them to accept
their destiny as inevitable.”
Those ancient words once again justified male dominance and
power. “It is quite surprising that young Hebrews should be told to honor their
mothers while the whole drift of the instruction so far has been to cast scorn
on the whole sex,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote in The Woman's Bible. What
should they do to honor their mothers? It is against all rules and customs.” Religion,
as it was known in the nineteenth century in the Western world, was a male
religion. Though they may have disagreed over which sacrament to receive
whether or which day was the true Sabbath, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
were all in agreement on one thing: the status of women. Females were to be
considered as inferior beings created by God to serve as obedient and quiet
vessels for the creation of children and the enjoyment and convenience of men. These
behaviors not only thrived in the Church, but also made their way beyond those
great arched doorways, into the emotions, feelings, and values of every Jewish,
Christian, and Mohammedan family. Duncan Crow explains some of the laws of the
time and their influence on women in his book The Victorian Woman.
He states that until 1857, a woman did not sue for divorce
(except by an Act of Parliament, which was usually reserved for the
aristocracy); that until 1881, a husband's legal right to physically restrain
his wife from leaving home had never been questioned; and that until 1884, a
wife could be jailed for violating her husband "conjugal rights." “The
Christian church, too, was a dominant influence in proclaiming and upholding
women's subordinate position,” he writes, in addition to these statutes. It had
constructed the idea that women's subordination was a retribution for Eve's
original sin, based on its Judaic heritage. It revered Paul's words, "Man
is not of the sex, but the woman of the man." Crow points out that during
the Victorian era, men and women were not only required to attend church every
Sunday, but that Bible readings in the house, organized prayer meetings,
listening to and hearing sermons, and very strict Sabbath observance were all
commonplace in many homes."
As Annie Besant defended a pamphlet about the use of
contraceptives in 1876, she encountered strong opposition from both the
government and the Church. “Physical preventives at all period were viewed as
against the will of God; few people appeared to see any inconsistency in
intervening with the path of nature by avoiding or curing illness, or
constructing houses against the elements, and still refusing to intervene with
the mechanism of procreation,” writes her biographer, Arthur Nethercot. Annie
Besant, a brave lady, also wrote of child custody rules, implying that much of
the views of the day were not dissimilar to those of the Hebrews "because
woman was already treated as a chattel." She delivered several speeches in
England, crusading against the influence of the Christian Church from the
standpoints of secularism and feminism, and wrote several papers and pamphlets,
including one titled Woman's Position. According to the Bible, she exposed
herself to a great deal of hostility and anger, which was often reflected in
physical attack attacks.
Many extracts of early women's movement speeches and essays
feature in the compilation of papers and quotations entitled Voices From
Women's Liberation, many of which are included in a little-known book called
The History of Woman Suffrage, published in 1881. According to a quote from a
speech given in 1853 by a woman named Abby Foster, the Church had a strong
impact on the teaching and molding of young minds at the time. All of this, she
said, was accomplished by the Church's control over the mother, since the
infant ultimately obtained the Church's teachings and attitudes. “You will tell
me that a woman shapes the mind of a girl, but I charge back that it is the
minister who shapes the mind of the woman,” she said. Since he is the one that
makes the mother who she is, her education of the infant is just a second-hand
transmission of the pulpit's instructions.”
Despite the allegations, organized Church men had no
intention of re-examining or revising the lowly status that women had been
assigned. Clergymen maintained that males were supposed to rule over females,
who were spiritually inferior and intellectually defective by birth, according
to the divine ancient word. So it was that, in 1860, Susan B. Anthony was
inspired to say, “By statute, general opinion, and faith, from the time of Moses
down to the present day, woman has never been conceived of as anything more
than a piece of land, to be disposed of at the will and leisure of man.”
As the fight for fair opportunities for women grew in
intensity, the Church began to wield its strength and authority with
conviction, fervently defending the sacred and holy principle of male
dominance. Despite the ignorance of male remarks, which were frequently nothing
more than obvious admissions of the dominant class's insecurity in fear of
becoming deposed, scantily dressed in what they sought to pass off as easy jest
or satire, the antagonism sometimes erupted into vicious physical aggression
when humor collapsed. “The clergy were at the frontline of the anti-suffrage
movement, dredging up the Bible to show that the proper order of things was
feminine submission to man,” Komisar says.
Though women finally gained the freedom to vote, which was
merely a part of their overarching aspirations, they nevertheless found
themselves living in a completely male-controlled society, where women had been
well-conditioned to assume that the male maker had somehow created men smarter
than women: women were now able to vote—for men. Those in power sometimes used
the terms "State" and "God" interchangeably. The Church's
word was still strong, and decades of religious terror, fanatic and frightening
crusades, inquisitions, and witch hunts loomed large in the minds of anyone who
dared to challenge the Church's authority. Fear and fear had brought the male
religions' precepts into every part of life. And the organization that had
worked so hard to eradicate the Queen of Heaven's worship now presented the
guilty, immoral, painful, and obedient role of Eve in her place.
“Our society remains impregnated with the mythology of the
ancient Hebrews,” writes Pat Whiting in The Body Politic, a new compilation of
essays from the latest women's liberation movement in Britain. Eve's initial
sin also affects us.” In her analysis of women in today's culture, Barbara
Cartland refers to women as "the everlasting Eve." Spare Rib is the
name chosen for an English magazine dealing with the role of women in
contemporary culture, with a witty sarcasm. The Bible and those who believe in
the Bible as the holy word of God have suggested, declared, proved,
demonstrated, revealed, proclaimed, affirmed, validated, and reaffirmed male
dominance for thousands of years. Cartland reflected on the ego-building, heady
influence of the Paradise story—for the male—as recently as 1965: Man will find
immense comfort in learning that he is truly, as he has always believed, the
most magnificent of all God's creations in the succinct record contained in the
book of Genesis... It's also reassuring because it confirms man's exclusive,
singular role of supreme perfection in the universe.
The foundation of the Genesis narrative, with its indictment
of woman's wickedness, has found an echo in the hearts of men in nine-tenths of
the earth. Simone de Beauvoir, in her classic analysis of women's inequality,
The Second Sex, pointed out the male religion's convenience—for males—with a
sensitive sarcasm. “He has the great privilege of making a god approve the code
he writes,” writes de Beauvoir, “and as man has sovereign power over women, it
is particularly lucky that this authority has been vested in him by the Supreme
Being.” Man is master by divine right, according to Jews, Mohammedans, and
Christians, among others, and the fear of God will stifle any desire for
rebellion in the oppressed female.” In Patriarchal Attitudes, Eva Figes
recorded the not-so-surprising reaction of an English archbishop in 1968, who
said bluntly, “If the church be thrown open to women, it would be the death
knell of the Church for men,” in response to the ordination of women in the
priesthood of the English church. When confronted with the issue of women's
ordination in the Church in 1971, an Episcopal bishop in San Francisco gave the
following response: "The sexuality of Christ is no mistake, nor is his masculinity
incidental." This is a spiritual decision.” Komisar described several
activities that have occurred since the women's movement gained traction in
recent years, events that show a strong questioning of the Church's attitudes
toward women. She cited Catholic sisters who have publicly accused the Church
of being a male church, claiming that it treats women in the same way it treats
girls, who are then labelled as imbeciles.
The Church's influence on individuals and societies may have
waned, especially among those who reside in large cities with little community
life or strain. Nonetheless, male dominance continues to be emphasized
throughout the Church. It is enshrined in the canons and religious literature
that the male sects were founded on. “The church may be dying on its feet, but
it will cling to the last vestige of the male exclusivity that was its raison
d'être in the first place,” Eva Figes writes. Particularly now, the image of
the ancient female religion—the Queen of Heaven, the priestesses, the holy
sexual customs—remains in the minds of certain of the Church's leaders. On May
23, 1973, The Times (London) published an article titled "Priestesses, a
Return to Pagan Creeds." The ordination of women in the male-dominated
church sparked outrage once more. According to The Times religious affairs
correspondent, the Bishop of Exeter, Dr. Mortimer, warned the convocation of Canterbury
yesterday that admitting women to the priesthood in the Church of England would
be a tacit change into old pagan sects. Priestesses were popular in ancient
nature religions, he claimed, and “we all know the kinds of religions they were
and are.” In the past, the church has been so quick to adjust to changing
circumstances, and it has had to be extra cautious “in a sex driven culture.”
Whatever the state of the Church at this stage in history,
we cannot afford to overlook or underestimate the far-reaching impact that
millennia of Church influence have on any of us today, no matter how far away
we might be from the pulpit or altar. It's a remarkable family that can go for
more than two to three centuries without discovering that their forefathers
were heavily influenced by one of the male-oriented religions' beliefs and
values. As a result, religious pressures are not as far away from us as we
would want to believe. For there are almost invisibly embraced social practices
and living habits that represent the one-time rigid conformity to the biblical
scriptures within the very framework of family life, in communities that do or did
follow male religions. Women's sexual rights, illegitimacy, abortion,
abortions, incest, fertility, the value of marriage and children to women, the
roles and position of women in marriage, women as sex objects, and the sexual
identity of passivity and aggression.
Women's and men's roles in the workplace and in social
situations, women who express their ideas, female leadership, women's
intellectual activities, women's economic activities and needs, and the
automatic assumption of the male as breadwinner and protector have all been so
deeply ingrained that feelings and values on these subjects are often regarded
as natural by both women and men. Many contemporary women and men can no longer
see biblical behaviors as critical or unconditional that the Lord has decreed
them to be so, but millennia of religiously based precepts have given the next
argument—people have "still" embraced them as correct; thus, they
must be the usual, standard way of being. Early female religions are almost
completely ignored or overlooked, exposing human behavior and attitudes that
were frequently the polar opposite of these so-called "normal" human
tendencies, and which, as we have observed, were the root cause of many later
religious reactions and attitudes.
The censorship of general education and popular literature,
whether by mistake or design, ignores the fact of their relevance, if not their
presence. In 1971, one highly well-informed and learned feminist started a book
on modern-day women's political issues with three lines on ancient female
faith. She wrote that pagan traditions used to worship women, but that gods
replaced goddesses and male dominance in religion was founded in an age we
don't know anything about. Another book on the role of women in history begins
with Greece, with the introduction implying that Crete's civilization was the
only significant community that existed before Greece, and that nothing is
known about Crete or any of the other early civilizations. At a women's studies
conference in 1971, a woman anthropology professor from a well-known university
in the United States told a group of women that all goddesses were fat, nude
fertility figures created and worshipped by men. It's past time to reveal the
truth about early feminist faiths.
They've been kept secret for far too long. We would be able
to comprehend the early history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as
their responses to the female religions and practices that followed them, using
these statistics. We would be able to explain how these responses contributed
to the political attitudes and historical events that happened when these
male-oriented religions were emerging—attitudes and events that played such a
significant role in forming the portrayal of women during and after those times—if
we have these facts. With these facts, we will be able to clear away centuries
of ignorance, misinformation, and suppression of information, allowing us to
examine the picture, rank, and roles still attributed to women today. We will
develop the historical and political insight necessary to reject the notions of
"natural or divinely ordained positions," paving the way for a more
rational understanding of the capacities and potential of children and adults,
male and female, as separate human beings. The story of the Garden of Eden will
no longer be able to haunt us until the ancient origins of today's gender
stereotyping are well known. Killing a rebellious consort was not the solution,
and neither was silencing and economically crippling women. We will continue to
say we have become a fully decent species when women and men bite the apple—or
fig—at the same time, learn to value each other's ideas and views, and treat
the earth and its wealth as a space that belongs to every living person in it.
~ Kiran Atma
