In 1945, my junior year at New York City's Bronx High School
of Science, the school became coed.
The transition wasn't an epiphany for me about girls' equal rights. It just puzzled me—why would girls want to study science or engineering? "Female scientist" had a
minimal credibility after Mme. Curie's work earlier in the century;
"female engineer" was an oxymoron. One simply didn't think of women in connection with these
and most other professions.
Captive as I was to the mores of the society in which I'd
been raised, my attitude wasn't unusual.
Although I blush to say this now, I actually asked one of the coeds,
while riding on the subway with her one day after school, "What do you
plan to be: a secretary or a teacher?" I plead nolo contendere
to the charge of having been a dunderhead, claiming extenuation: I was merely
parroting my elders.
My topic today, however, is not sexism in the professions per
se.
Rather, I want to explore the source that underlies sexism throughout
society. The book I discuss below
has convinced me that, at least in the West, it is religion—the fundament upon
which our civilization is built.
The hierarchies of the so-called Abrahamic religions (Judaism,
Christianity and Islam), and probably most others, are even at this late date almost exclusively male,
and the few women in them are largely confined to the lower echelons. Gender inequality in religion has
invariably led to its flourishing in the larger society.
I was propelled into this line of thought by email correspondence
with my son's sister-in-law, Ruth.
Raised Catholic, in her twenties she searched for a religion where women
were equal. (Interestingly, she is
the namesake of possibly the sole woman in the Old Testament who made her own
decision about which god to follow.)
Finding no religious equality anywhere, Ruth decided that "religion
was a confidence trick of the highest order." She mentioned a 1970s book by Merlin Stone that she'd read
at the time, When
God was a Woman. It's still available digitally; I found
it an illumination.
Stone tells a fascinating story. She starts by pointing out that male domination of the
Abrahamic religions began with the male-fabricated myth of the Garden of Eden,
where God created Adam in His image, and
as an afterthought created Eve to serve as Adam's helpmate. Eve immediately showed her inferiority
by defying God and precipitating the Fall. Women have paid dearly since. Listen to the much later New Testament (I Timothy 2:11-14):
"Let the woman
learn in silence with all subjection.
But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man,
but to be in silence. For Adam was
first formed and then Eve, and Adam was not deceived, but the woman being
deceived was in the transgression."
Christianity, of course, went on to be dominated by a
celibate male priesthood preaching the concept of Original Sin stemming from
Eve's infraction. Mystical Jewish
writings like the Zohar, probably influenced by a passage in Isaiah cited
below, postulated that Adam had had a first wife, Lilith, formed from the same
dust as Adam, possibly even before him.
She—alas for patriarchy!—became the first feminist, asserting that she
had been created equal and refusing to be subservient to Adam. She fled Eden, later to be tormented by
angels and turned into a she-demon, eternally surviving among us to tempt men
into sin. The Lilith experiment
having failed, God tried another, creating Eve from one of Adam's ribs as his
more passive but still sinful helpmate.
Is it any wonder that Western civilization was brainwashed about the relative standing of the sexes by the two Testaments and the generations of males who interpreted them?
Women never had a chance.
It wasn't always this way. Stone goes on to document that, before Abraham (who
putatively lived some 4000 years ago) and his male God Yahweh, the Goddess
Astarte (Athtart, Ashtoret, Ishtar, Ate, Asherah, Attoret, Anath, Elat, Hathor,
et al., in various ancient languages) was almost universally recognized as the
principal deity around most of the Mediterranean and even farther afield. Contrary to the pernicious image of woman
that was to be attached to Eve, Astarte was revered as creator, law-maker,
healer, wise counselor and prophet.
Correspondingly, societies having Astarte as the principal deity tended
to be matrilineal and matriarchal—property and inheritance ran through women,
as did the management of affairs of home and state.
The evidence Stone presents for the ancient dominion of the
Goddess is compelling. Wherever excavations of upper Paleolithic, Neolithic and
early historical sites have found evidence of religion, it has usually been
accompanied by idols of full-breasted goddesses, often surviving emplaced in
wall niches. The oldest Sumerian
tablets tell of a principal Goddess, mother of all other gods, and this myth
propagates to subsequent cuneiform records of early antiquity. Those and other writings—particularly
in ancient Egypt and by later classical Greek and Roman historians—testify in
addition to widespread matrilinealism and matriarchy in those times.
It was only during the third and second millennia BCE that
the tide turned, as waves of invasions by Aryans from the north (later called
Indo-Europeans) descended on the Near East, bearing with them a male supreme
God, patrilinealism and patriarchy.
Stone posits that these incursions brought to Abraham the seeds of his
religious tenets, since he was born in an invaded area. As the Old Testament progresses, Yahweh
commands the destruction of all images and worship of Ashtoret (Astarte's
Hebrew name) wherever found, which was done with a pitiless wrath, especially
as the Israelites conquered Canaan.
In the passage from Isaiah mentioned above, Lilith (who in myth was one
of Ashtoret's priestesses) is represented as a night monster. Even as late as the Koran, Stone finds
ongoing evidence of the influence of the Goddess and God's animosity toward
her: "Allah will not tolerate idolatry … the pagans pray to
females." Soon God had
completely supplanted Goddess in the Western world, and patriarchy correspondingly
replaced matriarchy.
It was one of the West's many catastrophes. In a posting last year,
when asserting that the fairer sex is fairer in both senses of the word, I
looked to a future where women could lead us with a feminine sensibility. "Maybe in another generation or
two," I wrote, "when it hopefully will not be so difficult to climb
the ladder while carrying along a feminine worldview, we will have a world
whose ethos is completely different, and better." I wasn't talking about the Margaret
Thatchers and Angela Merkels of the world, who got to the top by beating men at
their own game. My model is
Eleanor Roosevelt, who didn't have to become masculine in order to reach the heights,
and therefore was able when there to maintain her feminine discernment and
responsiveness in effectively addressing society's needs.
What kind of society could have been built over the millennia if God had
been a woman all along? Or was it
inevitable that the collective testosterone of men would have overcome Her
ministrations anyway?