Man's Dominion

The Rise of Religion and the Eclipse of Women's Rights

Sheila Jeffreys

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415596749
• eBook ISBN: 9781136626463
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this feminist critique of the politics of religion, Sheila Jeffreys argues that the renewed rise of religion is harmful to women's human rights. The book seeks to rekindle the criticism of religion as the founding ideology of patriarchy.

Focusing on the three monotheistic religions; Judaism, Christianity and Islam, this book examines common anti-women attitudes such as 'male-headship', impurity of women, the need to control women's bodies, and their modern manifestations in multicultural Western states. It points to the incorporation of religious law into legal systems, faith schools, and campaigns led by Christian and Islamic organisations against women's rights at the U.N., and explains how religious rights threaten to subvert women's rights. Including highly-topical chapters on the burka and the covering of women, and polygamy, this text questions the ideology of multiculturalism which shields religion from criticism by demanding respect for culture and faith, whilst ignoring the harm that women suffer from religion.

Man's Dominion is an incisive and polemic text that will be of interest to students of gender studies, religion, and politics.

1

THE DEVIL'S GATEWAY

Religion and the subordination of women

This chapter will introduce the main ways in which feminist theorists have criticised religion. The rejection of all religions, as womanhating ideologies that provided a foundation and justification for the subordination of women, was a central issue for 1970s feminism, as it had been for other influential twentieth-century feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir (Beauvoir, 1972, first published 1949). All of the important feminist texts of the second wave, such as Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1972), Eva Figes’ Patriarchal Attitudes (1970), Andrea Dworkin's Right-Wing Women (1982, first published 1978), recognised the importance of religion as an anti-woman force and the importance of opposing it. This was so much a given at that time, that the idea that it would ever become difficult for feminists to criticise religion would have been unconscionable. These feminist theorists did not spend much time in their work on detailed analysis of the harms of religion, but took it for granted that religious ideas were the foundation stones of the way that patriarchal culture regards women, and that womanhating religious nostrums underlay the sciences and literatures that men created. As Merlin Stone expressed it in her book on the suppression of Goddess religion by the patriarchal monotheists, ‘to many of us today religion appears to be an archaic relic of the past’ (Stone, 1977, p. 4). Mary Daly, the American radical feminist philosopher, did take on the task of unpacking religion in detail, and her very influential and groundbreaking work will be considered here as a good representation of the central points of the feminist critique (Daly, 1985a; 1985b). Other feminist theorists engaged in historical research to show how patriarchal religions took over from a more woman-friendly alternative (Sjoo, 1987; Gimbutas,1991). This chapter will draw together from the different feminist critiques the main tenets of the three main monotheistic religions in relation to women and show their considerable similarities.

Feminist critique of Christian religion

Feminist critique of religion has a long history. It was understood by those who wrote key feminist texts as the foundation of the subordination of women. Simone de Beauvoir argued in The Second Sex in the 1940s that religion is necessary to the subordination of women as a social group because it provides women with a ‘supreme compensation’ (Beauvoir, 1972, first published 1949). Following the Marxist understanding that religion serves to resign the masses to their subordination and prevent revolt, she says, ‘When a sex or a class is condemned to immanence, it is necessary to offer it the mirage of some form of transcendence’ (Beauvoir, 1972, p. 632). Religion causes woman to take, ‘an attitude of respect and faith towards the masculine universe’. Religion founds men's authority over women and makes resistance difficult, because fear of divine punishment keeps women in their place.

Man enjoys the great advantage of having a god endorse the code he writes: and since man exercises a sovereign authority over women it is especially fortunate that this authority has been vested in him by the Supreme Being. For the Jews, Mohamedans and Christians among others, man is master by divine right; the fear of God will therefore repress any impulse towards revolt in the downtrodden female.

(Beauvoir, 1972, p. 632)

Religion, she argues, offers woman a refuge from the abuse she suffers at men's hands precisely in the system of belief they have created to keep her down. She finds in ‘God’ a refuge from the very law of men, delegated from ‘God’, which subordinates her. Woman is then able to take comfort from the fact that men's faults are sinful but unchangeable, ‘Masculine logic is confuted by holy mysteries; men's pride become a sin, their agitation for this and that is more than absurd, it is blameworthy: why remodel this world which God Himself created? The passivity enforced upon woman is sanctified’ (Beauvoir, 1972, p. 633). Beauvoir's insights help to explain why women may support religion. It can help them, for instance, to hold back the violence they might otherwise suffer, ‘As a human person she has little influence, but once she acts in the name of divine inspiration, her wishes become sacred’ (Beauvoir, 1972, p. 634).

Kate Millett argued similarly in Sexual Politics (1972), the book that provided a rallying text for second-wave feminism, that religion was the justification that men used for their rule over women, and ensured that male power was beyond criticism.

Religion is also universal in human society and slavery was once nearly so; advocates of each were fond of arguing in terms of fatality, or irrevocable human “instinct” – even “biological origins”. When a system of power is thoroughly in command, it has scarcely need to speak itself aloud; when its workings are exposed and questioned, it becomes not only subject to discussion, but even to change.

(Millett, 1972, p. 58)

The rejection of religion was the solid ground from which these writers embarked on their work. They saw no need to justify such rejection or criticise religion at length.

Mary Daly: shrewd prudes laughing out loud

It was different for Mary Daly, the American feminist philosopher who has made the most significant contribution to the critique of Christianity in second-wave feminism. She started out as a committed Christian, and ended up rejecting religion altogether. Her first two books chart that course. Daly has a considerable profile as a radical feminist philosopher on many issues but her work started with her response to religion. She was brought up Catholic and gained two doctorates in divinity schools. Her first book, The Church and the Second Sex, was published in 1968 and written in the wave of excitement that engulfed Catholic women intellectuals after the momentous events of Vatican II, when it appeared that the Catholic Church was opening up to new ideas and abandoning medieval practices, such as that nuns must wear habits. Daly still considered herself a Christian at this time. She was fired, because of the book, from her teaching job at Boston College in 1969, but reinstated and given tenure following protests from her students.

In her first book, Daly delivers a thorough critique of the evolution of Christianity in an age when women were totally subordinate to men and ‘a man could sell his daughter as well as his slave’, and the messages about women that still appertained from that time. She rejects the maleness of god, which she calls, ‘the absurd idea that God is male’ (Daly, 1985a, p. 180). She details how the Christian divines throughout history have been antifeminist, antisexuality, and have seen woman's flesh as a temptation, through criticism of the work of Tertullian, Aquinas, Jerome and Pope Leo. But she does not reject Christianity or religion in general. The book contains a section on how Jesus was positive towards women, and explains Paul's prescription that women should not go out unveiled as his not wanting to offend surrounding cultural mores, rather than as misogyny. Interestingly, she makes an argument that would prove central to those feminists who would, in the twenty-first century, seek to both criticise but also protect Islam. She says that Christianity's central message is good, and can be disinterred from the cultural components that have distorted it historically, ‘Those who have benefited from the insights of a later age have the task of distinguishing elements which are sociological in origin from the life-fostering, personalist elements which pertain essentially to the Christian message’ (Daly, 1985a, p. 84). She abandoned the idea that the essence of Christianity is positive within a few years.

The book was extremely controversial at the time and had a considerable impact on the thinking of feminists and women within the church, but by the early 1970s Daly had moved on and rejected Christianity entirely. The extent of her journey is revealed in the self-mocking preface to the 1985 edition of her first book. The preface is written about the author in the third person, and questions how this author could possibly have believed what she wrote. By the time the preface was written she had developed the delightful and influential wordplay of her later works, which poke fun at patriarchal and religious language. Mary Daly signals a ‘tremendous event’ in the offing, ‘This event is the Self-Realizing of women who have broken free from the strangehold of patriarchal religion, with its deadly symbols, its ill logic, its gynocidal laws and other poisonous paraphernalia’. She speaks of religion as emanating from ‘phallocracy's great prophets’ (Daly, 1985a, p. xii) and of the need for ‘exorcision of the poisonous patriarchal god and his attendant pathologies’, which ‘has required and continues to require Courage – the Courage to Leave and, more than this, the Courage to Live beyond the godfathers’ gruesome grasp’ (Daly, 1985a, p. xii). Of women who cleave to religion she writes:

Women under patriarchal religious control become grateful to the paternal predators for their priestly ministrations, believing their dogmas, little suspecting that what these fathers, sons, and holy ghosts bestow upon their faithful followers, who are victims of mass hypnosis, is a bag of illusions.

(Daly, 1985a, p. xiv)

She talks of ‘sadospiritual churchmen’ and calls the church an ‘inherently womanhating, gynocidal institution’ in which there is no point in women seeking to be equal (Daly, 1985a, p. xiv). Religious women are described as, ‘hooked by churchly love-hysteria’ and ‘victims of necrophilic love that loves to see women possessed, marching zombie-like in the ranks of the living dead’ (Daly, 1985a, p. xv). In an exemplary and powerful passage she calls upon women to show their disgust for religion.

I suggest that it is Time to let Disgust out of its closet, to celebrate its public Emergence – not disgust for bamboozled women but Disgust for the sacred set-up, the subliminal pornographic seduction, the hidden hard-ons of the holy fathers who induce such grotesque Self-abasement. It is Time to proclaim that the Disgust of a Wholly Disgusted Woman is Holy. This is Her Holinesss, refusing to kneel before his nothingness, calling to other women to rise from their knees, laugh at his lies, acknowledge their own Powers – the Powers of Holy Crones who throw off the chains of hypocrisy, who refuse to allow our strength to be turned against us.

(Daly, 1985, p. xx)

The ‘hidden hard-ons’ of the holy fathers have been revealed in recent decades as the enormity of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church has become clear (BBC, 2010a). Daly was prescient in this respect. The abuse is not limited to the Catholic Church; similar cases of child sexual abuse of boys and girls, by Qur'anic teachers and others, have occurred in mosques in the UK (Mackay, 2007). Daly did not consider that women should seek formal equality within the church through campaigns for the ordination of women. This would be a mistake because, ‘One of the most devastating things the catholic church could do, I think, would be to ordain women, thereby masking its deep-rooted misogyny and further promoting fallacious faith, false hope, and dead love’ (Daly, 1985a, p. xx).

The invention of patriarchal religion

Daly's work shows both the approach of accommodation to patriarchal religion and subsequently its rejection. Another important approach for early second-wave feminists was to seek to discredit the monotheistic religions by examining their origins. Feminist theorists pointed to the work of anthropologists and historians to argue that the establishment of monotheistic religions in the ancient Near East constituted a defeat by patriarchs of a matriarchal system (Stone, 1977). The notion that a historical matriarchy existed was supported by evidence suggesting a religion based upon female gods, particularly fertility goddesses, and matrilineal kinship systems in which men followed women into their families, and kinship was established through the female line. Other feminist scholars have disagreed with this account and thrown doubt on the historical existence of matriarchy, pointing out, for instance, that worship of fertility goddesses does not necessarily indicate that real, live women had positions of power and influence, and that matrilineal systems could mean that women were under the control of their brothers and uncles rather their husband and his kin (Bamberger, 1974). Nonetheless there is much evidence that there was considerable conflict as the proponents of the new, vigorously patriarchal religion, sought to suppress believers in the old, more female-focused one. There is evidence, too, that patriarchal monotheism was both established by conquest and instituted a much more severe form of male domination, as women were taken into the control of their husbands, who could imprison them in conditions of purdah and remove them from public life (Lerner, 1987; Plaskow, 1990).

Merlin Stone's The Paradise Papers (1977), is a classic example of this literature. Her book opens with the question, ‘How did it actually happen? How did men initially gain the control that now allows them to regulate the world in matters as vastly diverse as deciding which wars will be fought when – to what time dinner should be served?’ (Stone, 1977, p. 1). She describes the religions that existed before the patriarchal takeover when, in prehistoric and early historic periods:

. . . religions existed in which people revered their supreme creator as female. The Great Goddess – the divine Ancestress – had been worshipped from the beginnings of the Neolithic periods of 7000 BC until the closing of the last Goddess temples, about AD 500. Maybe Goddess worship goes back to 25,000 BC . . .

(Stone, 1977, p. 2)

The advent of the Abrahamic religion she puts at between 1800 and 1500 BC, encapsulated in the ‘Eve myth’ after which the ‘female religion’ ‘was the victim of centuries of continual persecution and suppression by the advocates of the newer religions which held male deities as supreme’ (Stone, 1977, p. 3). Stone argues that ‘Northern invaders known as Indo-Europeans’ brought the new monotheistic religion with them to the Near East, and this entailed, ‘the worship of a young warrior god and/or a supreme father god’ (Stone, 1977, p. 37). The female goddesses and their followers were then subjected to attacks that targeted any ‘female creator ideas’. The new religious scholars undermined the female creator by calling her a ‘fertility goddess’ and calling her religion a ‘cult’ to diminish it (Stone, 1977, p. 4). The Goddess and her worship were, Stone explains, ‘represented as improperly sensual’. Stone says she does not advocate a return to the old Goddess religion but argues that women need to understand this history in order to acquire self-respect:

It is only as many of the tenets of the Judaic-Christian theologies are seen in the light of their political origins, and the subsequent absorption of those tenets into secular life understood, that as women we will be able to view ourselves as mature, self-determining human beings.

(Stone, 1977, p. 15)

Influential Jewish feminist theologian Judith Plaskow details the conflict between the new patriarchs and the old religion, in which many gods – including female ones – were worshipped (Plaskow, 1990). She explains that a subtext in Genesis is the ‘establishment of patrilineal descent and patriarchal control’ (Plaskow, 1990, p. 4). She points out that as late as the ninth to eighth century BC there was evidence for polytheism in Israel, with references in texts to Yahweh and his Ashera and many female images. In polytheism, she says, many positions of influence were open to women, whereas the new religion barred women from leadership and consolidated a new all male priesthood of Yahweh (Plaskow, 1990, p. 43). These new interpretations of religious history were inspiring to second-wave feminists because they indicated that patriarchal monotheism had a starting point, and therefore possibly an end point too. It is not the only religious system that has existed, and may be particularly suited to the severe forms of male control of women that currently exist in most parts of the world. Understanding that there was a ‘before’ can help to put the male-dominated religions of the present into perspective, and reduce their earthly power.

Womanhating in religious texts

These feminist commentators have been involved in a deliberate political project to expose the patriarchal takeover so as to create confidence in women that they could rebel and seek change. Another aspect of this project was to document how the subordination of women was accomplished in the early texts of those religions, and to map the ground on which women's subjection was justified. In the early part of second-wave feminism the major works of feminist theory incorporated excoriation of the prescriptions of the monotheistic religions for women's role. Julia O'Faolain and Lauro Martines undertook the task of documenting the womanhating pronouncements and practices of the Hellenistic period onwards in their book Not in God's Image (1973). The statements of Christian divines, Judaist prophets and the Qur'an, are so uniformly hostile towards women, and in such very similar ways, that it is hard to understand why there should be an increasing respect for religion by political actors in the present, when women's equality has supposedly made advances. I will examine here the similarities between the three monotheistic religions on a series of issues fundamental to women's equality: the idea of women's natural subordination to men; the idea of the feminine evil; the segregation and covering of women and women's inherent disgustingness. Nawal El Sadaawi, the Egytian feminist whose work offers a swingeing critique of the way that Islam is used to justify the oppression of women and girls, argues that the monotheistic religions are similar in their traducing of women:

Any serious study of comparative religion will show clearly that in the very essence of Islam, as such, the status of women is no worse than it is in Judaism or in Christianity. In fact the oppression of women is much more glaring in the ideology of Christianity and Judaism. The veil was a product of Judaism long before Islam came into being. It was drawn from the Old Testament where women were adjured to cover their heads when praying to Jehovah, whereas men could remain bareheaded because they had been created in the image of God. Thus arose the belief that women are incomplete, a body without a head, a body completed only by the husband, who alone possesses a head.

(El Sadaawi, 2007, first published 1982, p. 5)

In the following section I shall use a number of feminist sources to illustrate the basic themes of the womanhating revealed in the texts of the monotheistic religions, and show their similarities.

The myth of feminine evil

There was a strong consciousness among feminist theorists of the second wave that ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• MAN’S DOMINION
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The devil’s gateway: religion and the subordination of women
• 2 Fundamentalism: the divine right of patriarchs
• 3 The right to religion trumps women’s human rights
• 4 Multiculturalism and ‘respect’ for religion
• 5 Desecularisation and women’s equality
• 6 Covering up women
• 7 A harem for every man? The rise of polygamy
• 8 The master’s tools: Islamic feminism and its critics
• Conclusion: liberating women from religious oppression
• References
• Index