I was actually responding to another post. If Christianity is misogynistic, it isn’t because of Christ.
Don’t tar all religion with the same brush. In theory, a religion can be formed that doesn’t treat women shabbily. There appear to have been long-term matriarchal cultures in Africa before the Abrahamic religions came in. A question in my mind for some time has been whether the rise of androcratic culture was almost sociologically determined or a historical fluke. Certainly today, we see the rise of gender equality in the educated West, & it appears amazingly stable.
I think the real answer is that the “traditional” religions have been sustained in corrupted forms. It’s not that serious religious thought is sexist, but that lack of moral guidance leads the strong to abuse the weak. In a society totally without law or taboo, men would abuse women because of men’s strength, & women’s vulnerability as child-bearers. The abuse of women came to be permitted as part of the compromise with man’s irreligious (sinful) nature. Sanctions against it would be disregarded by men who would do as they wish. Then some would even mistake such abuse for divine tradition, or justify it by appeal to Natural Law; while others would boldly forge false prophesy to claim that their right to power & the abuse of that power was the true religion, ordained by God.
So medieval illiterate Christianity & Mohammedan “Islam” were perhaps not successful due to their divine truth, but due to their appeal to man’s sinful nature.
There you go.
So that’s what they called it in those days? “Hey, baby, lemme reveal my Messiah to you.”
It’s true that early Christianity treated women like second-class citizens; this was one of the reasons it attracted so many female converts. Most other religions of the era assigned them a much lower role. When the other temples are calling you “the embodiment of evil” or “an occasionally useful household appliance” being regarded as a second-class citizen looks good.
a) The societies in which organized religion originated were patriarchies. It is impossible to understand modern society effectively without understanding that it was preceded by 9,000 years of patriarchy.
b) Religion, at least in its organized/institutionalized form, is a stodgy anti-change societal force. Therefore it lags behind. (As others have pointed out).
I don’t think they do -
if some society that had gender equality already were to pick up the sacred texts and/or officially recognized instructions of most religions and instituted them, in many cases you’d get gender equality or a “separate but equal” status. On their faces, many religions do not treat women poorly at all.
But, you stick the same religion into a society where there already is shabby treatment of women, and the texts can be skewed to further enforce and perpetuate the horrible treatment of women.
In other words, it’s the people, not the religion at fault.
Interesting–thanks. What about Asian religions, like Buddhism, Taoism, Shintoism? I know at least the ancient Greek and Romans had goddesses as well as gods.
Because men, on the whole, are stronger than women.
I’m not sure why no one ever seems willing to talk about this aspect. It’s a sad fact of human existence that the stronger members of society usually try to keep other people down. One obvious division is the male/female division, present in every society. Now, true, women are essential to any social group, and you’d think that would carry some power, but men are usually bigger and stronger, and brute force and the threat of it go a long way toward keeping people down. That’s half the population you don’t have to worry about right there. After that, you just have to worry about being the rest of your fellow males trying to topple you.
To my mind, the real question is, how did we all agree to be so civilized that violence is no longer seen as a viable solution within a society? I find it quite amazing.
A few years ago, when my daughter expressed her dissatisfaction with Christianity, I challenged her to study other religions and see if there were any others she might prefer.
Surprisingly, she took me up on it. Just a couple of months ago I asked her if the supreme god was always male.
Her thesis is that as civilization evolved into agrarian societies, that the men were generally the providers and protectors and the women became the nurturers. As religion evolved, the female was perceived as the creator, but the male became the protector, provider and avenger. Ultimately a hierarchy evolved with the male attributes dominating.
With the supreme being thought of as a male figure, it was natural that the evolving religion would pay more attention and respect to males, and relegate females to subservient positions.
There were a lot of meanderings and qualifications to her explanation, but that’s the main point.
Ah, the much sought after multi-poster, thread-long whoosh. I may not be able to top it and just might have to leave the boards. 
Honestly, I had to force myself to. I threw it across the room in disgust about three times. But I can pretty persistent about these things and I need to read the book to be able to point out all of the retarded parts to my more credulous friends.
Words to live by and a lesson learned, my friend.
I figured if I put the name Dan Brown, it’d be too obvious, so I just wrote the full Daniel. And I thought repeating “sacred feminine” a couple times would be the icing.
Eve, I have asked a Pakistani Muslim this very question. He retorted that his culture treats women wonderfully. In fact, it was the Americans who treated them shabbily. Viewing them as sexual predominately, viewing them as stupid, viewing them as “things.” In his culture, they were revered as wise mothers and counselors, and are treated with respect.
Take that as you like It certainly opened my eyes on how centered we are in our own culture.
Women aren’t people; they’re devices made by the Lord Jesus Christ for our entertainment.
– Peter Griffin, ‘Family Guy’
For once I agree with you Lib, it was that heretic Saul of Tarsus who perverted the Good News.
How were women treated in the pharohs’ Egypt?
Pretty well compared to the rest of the ancient world; mediocre by modern standards. Much if it in theory more than in practice; women did not always have in effect the rights that they had in legal custom (sound familiar to anyone?).
Women had the right to own property and businesses, and, in fact, retained ownership of those properties during marriage, though spouses had the right to use and enjoyment of those properties and their profits. They had the right to sue for divorce (as did men), though this is one of the things that they didn’t take advantage of in the same proportions that men did; in the event of a divorce, they left the marriage with whatever property they owned beforehand and a third of the joint marital property. Monogamy was expected of both sexes in marriage, enforced on women, but virginity was not a particularly valued marital property. Women were rarely given significant education (scribal training was essential for raising one’s social class), though a fair number were semi-literate. They had the opportunity to work in the temples, generally as entertainers; I don’t know off the top of my head whether any served as W’ab priests. Purity requirements for temple service excluded menstruating women; they also excluded anyone else who was bleeding, however. Several women were Nisut-Bity (the primary Egyptian term for ‘Pharaoh’) through the dynastic period, though this was not terribly common, and the Pharaonic regalia is male-gendered regardless of the sex of the Nisut.
Religiously speaking, there was no significant differentiation between the sexes that I am aware of. However, because the society was fairly male-dominated, most women were defined within wife-and-mother roles. There are a number of creation myths; some have male motivators, some female, some dual-sexed (with a typical gender used). Khnum, for example, who is responsible for the creation of human souls, bears the title “Father of fathers, Mother of mothers,” and is typically referred to as male. The most commonly known creators are, theologically speaking, considered dual-sexed and usually referred to with male pronouns.
It is worth noting that the modern Egyptian reconstructionist religious movement was started by a woman.
There are probably several theses that could be written on this subject. I have an interest in some related areas but I haven’t read anywhere near as much as I’d like to about this.
My take on it is that in general, it’s not really the religion, it’s the society. And part of the thing that shapes a society is how the people of that society make a living. Hunter-gatherer societies are generally much more egalitarian than even the most enlightened industrial society. It’s much more common for women and female-centered religions to have power in hunter-gatherer tribes than in almost any other kind of society.
I actually did a report in college years ago about Shinto in Japan. Early Shinto had priests and priestesses and the most important deity was Amaterasu, the goddess of the sun. The imperial family is supposed to be decended from Amaterasu, which makes her still the most important in the Shinto pantheon. Later, Buddhism was introduced from China, but some older Shinto practices were incorporated into Buddhism in much the same way that Christianity co-opted pagan beliefs. One of the differences here was that Shinto and Buddhism co-existed, and still do up to the present. Esoteric Buddhism preserved a tradition of female fortune-tellers called Mikkyo that may even continue to the present.
Japan has had ten empresses and women were often powerful and influential in early Japan. The oldest novel in Japan, perhaps the oldest recorded in history, Genji no Monogatari, was writen by a woman of the imperial court under the pen name of Murasaki Shikibu. Women are credited with developing the syllabic writing system called hiragana. One emperor’s wife, Jingu Kogo, is a legendary figure who is famous for not only leading battles, but by doing so while pregnant.
Some anthropologists point to the rise of agriculture as the main contributing factor to large-scale war, religious intolerance, and the oppression of women. As someone in an earlier post pointed out, fertility goddesses tend to be kind of important at first but are eventually made subservient to war deities, who tend to be male. Conquering less warlike neighbors, enslaving the men, and raping their women would tend to give you a low opinion of the value of egalitarian societies, I think.
Herding societies tend to be warlike also, but they are usually more egalitarian than agricultural ones. A surviving example would be the Maasai. There are remnants of female-centered religion and high social standing referenced in the older parts of the Hebrew bible. Yaweh specifically mentions conflicts with female deities many times in his instructions to his followers.
It’s a bit ironic that after a couple of hundred years of industry and science shaping our society, we are just now getting back to ideals that used to be pretty widespread 10,000 years ago.
I knew I would spell it wrong, and yet, mysteriously, made absolutely no effort to look up the word. :smack:
Thanks for the great answer. My mom and I were talking about this lately, she was mentioning that women were pretty well off in ancient Egypt, but I’d never really heard this before. Not that my mom would be wrong, but you know, it is nice to confirm these things.
Don’t tell her I asked. 
Was this treatment of women characteristic of most of its history, or was there really only a “good” time for women, surrounded by typical male-dominance?
sleel:
Neither ironic nor coincidental.
Before 10,000 years ago = preagrarian, prepatriarchal
Between then and the last couple centuries, give or take = agrarian, patriarchal
From 1800s on, and still even now only in mid-transition = postagrarian, postpatriarchal
Read Elizabeth Fisher and other feminist theorists on the interrelationship of agrarian systems and patriarchy as interlocking components.
I suspect that the status of women went down somewhat in the Greek period and during the Roman occupation, as both those societies were extremely patriarchal and controlling of women. During the period when Egypt was just Egypt (not a part of someone else’s empire), though, the condition of women was, as far as I know, pretty consistent. (Egyptian culture, overall, placed extremely high value on continuity and keeping things as they had been in the past, which would make that sort of thing tend to stick.) However, the limits of the archaeological information have to be taken into account – we only have really good information about the New Kingdom, and have to do a certain amount of extrapolation for previous time periods, especially with the status of women.
The books that I got most of that information out of are, by the way, Daughters of Isis: Women of Ancient Egypt by Joyce Tyldesley, and Private Life in New Kingdom Egypt, by Lynn Meskell. Meskell’s work tends to correct the overenthusiasm of Tyldesley’s – the former was somewhat likely to say “Women had these rights on paper, and thus can be presumed to have used them to their fullest extent”, while Meskell favors looking at the evidence of, say, actual court cases, to judge the effective rights women had. I was posting from memory, there, by the way – if you go through the books you’ll probably see places where I got it a bit wrong.
I’m tickled that someone asked your question in this thread, by the way, so thank you for doing it; I’m an Egyptian recon, and so I have something of a minor religious obligation to know this stuff that I take awfully seriously 'cause I’m a geek. It always makes me happy to see someone who wants to know.
Forgive my ignorance. But do you think this has anything to do with the “wealth” of the two types of societies? That is, does the relative comfort of an industrial society as compared to the hunter gatherer society that leads to the role differentials and thereby to the difference in valuation of those roles? I gues I’m asking if the relative poverty of the hunter gatherer societies might not lead people to treat each other more as equals. Everyone is in the same boat when they have to spend so much time simply subsisting. Meanwhile, the relative wealth of the industrial societies might lead to significant specialization and much more gender based role differentials.
Again, please forgive my ignorance. I’m curious because you seem to know quite a bit about this.