Strange Ideas about Women - Theoretical
Justification for Sexism
By Jani Roberts - >
I could not help drink in Christianity as
a child. It was the water in which I swam. As a child, there was
nothing negative for me about being a woman. I took a lump of chalk
from the hills and carved it into a head of a woman, the mother of
life. My own family was dominated by a powerful woman of the Irish
tradition , my mother. But in other ways my childhood was a lesson in
suppression. I have told elsewhere on this website how it took me
years to find myself as a woman, years during which I tried to find
myself in studying christian theology, finishing with a masters
degree in it.
It took time before I realised with some
horror that women were seen by many males, including famous Christian
teachers of the past, practically as creatures that exist to service
them, as inferiors - and that this dreadful state of affairs had been
justified with a pseudo-scienfic theory the purpose of which was both
to make women accept such a status as natural and to excuse males
from feeling guilty about suppressing their sisters' rights.
A whole ideology was evolved very early in
European history to justify the suppression of women. Later simular
neo-Darwinist theories were used to justify the dispossession and
murder of Australian Aborigines by labelling them as less than human. The renowned Greek scholar Aristotle believed that the
biological norm was the male and that the female was a defective
version of the male. A thousand years after Aristotle's death, the
very influential Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas adopted
Aristotle's theory. He wrote: 'As regards the individual nature,
woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male
seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine
sex; while the production of women comes from a defect in the active
force or from some material indisposition, or even from some external
influence." (Summa Theologica IV, QXCII art 1,2)
The men of the church liked his views
evidently. Thomas Aquinas was canonized as a Saint and came to
dominate Roman Catholic theology for over 500 years.
Christianity was
germinated in part of Europe where some men had already evolved
theories to put women "into their place". Petrarch wrote: "Woman is a
real devil, an enemy of the peace, a source of provocation." But some
of the early "Christian Fathers" showed far greater hatred of women.
Tertullian, a well known Christian, in the 3rd century AD wrote: "Do
you not know you are each an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of
yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You
are the devil's gateway: you are the unsealer of that forbidden tree:
you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who
persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You
destroyed so easily God's image,
man. On account of your desert - that is
death - even the Son of God had to die And do you think of adorning
yourself over and above your tunics of skins." (On Female Dress
1i)
He believed women should dress so as to
hide their charms so men like him would not be tempted into sex.
"even the grace and beauty you naturally enjoy must be obliterated by
concealment and negligence.... it is to be feared, beause of the
injury and violence it inflicts on the men who admire you." The
female priesthood in some parts of Europe was suppressed early in the
Christian epoch.
Men found the power of women to attract
them fearsome. They blamed women for their own lack of self
control.
This fear of women among men lasted
centuries. Pope Innocent VIII issued an astonishing Bull, or official
statement, in 1448 called 'Summa Desiderantes' in which he blamed on
women the supposed increasing impotence among German men. He said
some women had abandoned themselves to devils, become witches that
could use magic to make men impotent. Many men loved this theory
because it meant they never needed to acknowledge any woman as more
talented or spiritually powerful than they. If they did feel a woman
was superior, she must be literally bewitching them.
This justified and helped start a pogrom
against strong women that was to last over 200 years. Women were
forced into accepting an inferior status to men - and it got worse.
Men killed and tortured by the hundred the women they most feared. A
guideline laid down in the Catholic Church for this persecution was
again justified by mock science: 'there was a defect in the formation
of the first woman, since she was formed from a bent rib, that is a
rib of the breast, which is bent as it were in the contrary direction
to a man. And since through this defect she is an imperfect animal,
she always deceives.... All witchcraft comes from carnel lust which
in women is insatiable" This quotation is from a book that went
through 19 editions, was written by a Catholic priest under authority
from the Pope and was a principle text for the Inquisition. (Malleus
Maleficarum)
Behind all these theories were male sexual
anxieties and insecurites. Men created a myth to explain their
neurosis away... and, rather than sort out their own hang-ups,
blamed, tortured and killed women - in the name of religion, of all
that is holy. Karen Armstrong in her seminal work "The Gospel
according to Women" wrote that if the Nazi Holocaust has caused long
lasting traumas within the western world, then the centuries of
persecution of women must also have left deep scars.
I sometimes forget quite how recent and
how dramatic is the change of ideology in the West. Women are today
equal - in theory. They have their own late night television shows in
which they can openly tease men as sexual equals. The earlier
'scientific' theories for male supremacy are debunked as fraudulent.
The witchery words of 'charm' and 'enchant' no longer entail the
devil. Since this change, we have gone through a period of saying
that it is solely conditioning that makes a woman mentally different
from a male. We now know that our very brains are different, that we
are differently talented but not definately not inferior.
But despite these changes, the structures
society evolved in the centuries of male domination still keep women
at bay. The Catholic Church will not admit women priests. Men ares
till paid more than women. It is mostly men that make both the laws
and wars, and sit in judgement.
The right-wing women's groups have a
point, women must be proud to be women. But I do not see this as
entailing that women will go back into the home, be wives servicing
husbands. The proud woman must be canny. Together with other women
she now needs to find her way to reform the very structures of
society, the legislature, the armed forces, the churches, business
from the top down so that they no longer reflect only traditional
male values but rather embody the high female values of nurturing and
co-operative action. Adding a few women to male dominated bodies will
not do this. Our institutions have been totally shaped by
presumptions made during the centuries that males have repressed and
used women.
What must be done -
de-masculinise the West.
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