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.
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.
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. 
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)
Click to return to the Library Entrance.