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The souls of women are so small,
That some believe they"ve none at all.
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Samuel Butler (1612-1680), Miscellaneous
Thoughts
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Historically the church's position on this matter followed
the biblical texts such as Genesis 3:16, where God tells Eve
that her husband will rule over her, and passages where wives
are listed along with a man's other goods and chattels.
This view is comprehensively confirmed in the New Testament:
Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is
fit in the Lord.
Colossians 3:18; cf. 1 Peter 3:1 and Ephesians 5:22
... I would have you know, that the head of every man is
Christ; and the head of the woman is the man ... For a man
indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the
image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of the
man. For the man is not of the woman: but the woman of the
man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman
for the man.
1 Corinthians 11:3 and 7-9
Let your women keep silence in churches: for it is not permitted
unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience,
as also saith the law.
1 Corinthians 14:34, cf. 1 Corinthians 11:3-9 and 1 Timothy
2:11-12
In line with these statements women were until recent times
not permitted to speak in church, and they are still expected
to cover their heads in traditional churches. Under Christian
emperors and bishops the rights that women had enjoyed under
the Roman Empire were gradually pared away. As early as the
fourth century it was decreed by a synod that women should neither
send nor receive letters in their own name (Synod of Elvira,
canon 81 ). They were also confined to minor Orders and forbidden
to sing in church. Later they would be deprived of Holy Orders
altogether. By 581 a Church Council at Mâcon was debating
whether or not women had souls.
The great Roman Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas taught that
women were defective men, imperfect in both body and soul. They
were conceived either because of defective sperm or because
a damp wind was blowing at the time of conception*.
Leading scholars accepted Aquinas's teaching that women
had a higher water content than men and that this made them
sexually incontinent*.
Since they were so watery, weak and unreliable it became a fundamental
premise of canon law that they were inferior beings. Following
Aquinas*, canon law decreed
that women could not witness a will. Neither could they testify
in disputes over wills, nor in criminal proceedings Generally
women suffered the same sort of legal disabilities as children
and imbeciles. They could not practice medicine, law or any
other profession, nor could they hold any public office. Here
is a piece of reasoning from two famous Roman Catholic scholars:
after saying that women are intellectually like children, they
explain why women are given to the practice of witchcraft:
But the natural reason is that she is more carnal than a
man, as is clear from her many carnal abominations. And it
should be noted that there was a defect in the formation of
the first woman, since she was formed from a bent rib, that
is, rib of the breast, which is bent as it were in a contrary
direction to a man. And since through this defect she is an
imperfect animal, she always deceives*.
Protestant Churches were no better than the Roman Catholic
Church. It was Martin Luther himself who coined the phrase "A
woman's place is in the home" and in strongly religious
areas of Germany it is still commonplace to hear that women
should concern themselves only with kinder, kirche, küche
(children, the Church and cooking), an attitude that has caused
a modern childcare crisis in Germany according to the country's Minister for Family Affairs.*.
Luther also insisted on a man's traditional Christian right
to beat his wife. He also held firmly to the traditional line
on a woman's duty to bear children, even if it killed her:
"If they become tired or even die, it does not matter.
Let them die in childbirth — that is why they are there"*.
Under canon law a woman's husband was both her sovereign
and her guardian. In practical terms this meant that she could
not legally own property or make contracts. She could not sue
at common law without her husband's consent, which meant
that in particular she could not sue him for any wrong done
to her. If she deliberately killed him, she was guilty not merely
of murder but, because of the feudal relationship, treason*.
Within living memory it was common in Christian countries for
a married woman to be denied credit, and to require her husband's consent for surgical operations. This is still the case in some
particularly devout areas, for example in Switzerland After
all 1 Corinthians 7:4 states that "The wife hath not power
of her own body, but the husband ...". (The Bible goes
on to state the converse — that a wife has power over her
husband's body — but canon lawyers either missed this
part or else deduced that it bore a completely different interpretation.
As Gratian put it "The woman has no power, but in everything
is subject to the control of her husband".
Even a queen's job, spelled out in an old marriage service
was “to be bonay and buxome in bed and at board*”.
In the words of the Anglican marriage service a married couple
were one flesh, and the canon lawyers held them to be a single
person: erunt animae duae in carne una.
The very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended
during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated
into that of her husband*.
It was this legal doctrine that gave rise to Dickens"
observation, put into the mouth of one of his characters, that
the law is an ass*. The
doctrine enabled an Englishman to lock up his wife and not be
liable for the tort of false imprisonment. He could beat her
and not be guilty of assault.
The same principle permitted him to rape her without the law
recognising it as rape. A wife could not proceed against her
husband, nor be called to give evidence in court against him.
Most such constraints were done away with in Britain by Acts
of Parliament in 1935 and 1945*
in the teeth of fierce opposition from the organised Churches.
In England it remained impossible for a man to be charged with
the rape of his wife until the 1990s.
Unmarried women were also inferior beings, or as the Bible
puts it weaker vessels (1 Peter 3:7). Fathers were
free to treat them as their personal property and swap them
for other goods or for political advantage, which is what arranged
child marriages often amounted to. Unmarried adult women were
not permitted many of the privileges allowed by law to men,
nor thought capable of fulfilling the duties expected of men.
Like married women, they were prohibited from practising all
professions and all but a few trades. In 1588 Pope Sixtus V
even forbade them to appear on the public stage within his dominions.
Soon the whole of Western Christendom had banned actresses and
female singers.
Well into the twentieth century women were debarred from sitting
on juries and were permitted only a few selected jobs, such
as school teaching and nursing. Even these they were generally
obliged to give up when they got married. Women were so little
regarded that until this century they were often excluded from
Church membership rolls. No one knows with certainty how large
some denominations were until recently, because they did not
count women in their membership statistics.
Throughout their histories, the Churches have consistently
opposed women's right to the franchise. Only after the
Church's influence had seriously weakened did women obtain
the vote. In England this happened in 1918, when the franchise
was extended to women over the age of thirty. Even now women
do not enjoy equality in all spheres of life. In England, for
example, the taxation laws and laws of inheritance still discriminate
against them. There are areas of Europe where traditional Christian
values prevail and women were denied the vote until recent times*.
There is one area in the European Community, Mount Athos in
Greece, where for religious reasons women are not even permitted
to set foot.
The traditional position of the Church, that women were mere
chattels of their husbands, was challenged by the usual selection
of freethinkers such as Thomas Paine and Jeremy Bentham. The
atheist Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the
Rights of Women in 1792. Her husband, the philosopher William
Godwin (1756-1836), was a campaigner for women's rights,
and so was their atheist son-in-law, the poet Shelley. Other
prominent proponents included the unbelieving Mary Anne Evans
(1819-1880), whose pen name was George Eliot, and Harriet Law
(1832-1897). The Utilitarian J. S. Mill launched the women's suffrage movement in England with a petition to the House of
Commons on 7 th June 1866. He published The Subjection of
Women in 1869. Other active campaigners included the atheists
George Holyoake, Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant. In France
the argument for women's rights was led by enemies of the
Church like Denis Diderot (1713-1784) and the Marquis de Condorcet
(1743-1794), and much later in the USA by atheists like Ernestine
Rose, Matilda Gage, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan Anthony.
It seems that a disturbing number of men, bolstered by Christian
attitudes, still assume that they have the right to subjugate,
abuse and beat their wives*.
A sociological study in 1962 revealed that religious orthodoxy
was positively correlated with social conservatism on issues
such as women's rights*.
It is notable that the Church continued to discriminate against
women for years after such discrimination was abandoned outside
the Church. It was not until 1970 that a woman was authorised
to teach Roman Catholic theology*,
and throughout the world Churches are still given exemption
from sex discrimination legislation. Senior Anglican clergymen
could still be outraged in 1996 at the idea of a woman playing
the part of God in the York Mystery Plays — denouncing
it as paganism*. Christian
mainstream thought is now in the process of change. The more
liberal sects have started ordaining women again, while the
more traditional ones still hold out against it. For them feminism
is little short of demonism. The TV evangelist Pat Robinson
spoke for many when pointed out that feminism encourages women
to “kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy
capitalism and become lesbians”.
More social issues:
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