Independent Study with Prof. Bessie Chambers, Episcopal Divinity School
January 1977.
Among the factors that led me to begin researching the idea of exclusion within women’s history were hunches that needed verification. For example, the non-involvement of women reinforces male control and vice versa. Men and women should be more honest in acknowledging what is projected onto the other because of personal feelings of inadequacy. More needs to be observed from the essential nature of a historical perspective on human relationships There must be inherent error in control or boundaries that deprive development.
I am also personally interested in psychological dynamics of relationships between women and men. More adequate reading in the field will assist in assessing situations more fairly. Experience does indeed teach, and is not to be denied. But developing critical skills in analyzing a person’s account of an incident, or observing patterns in forced and/or free behavior, is also essential.
Having done most of my previous research related to women in the areas of theology or biblical material, the church (Protestant), or church institutions (except for limited study of the American employment scene for women), I needed breadth. The enclosed bibliography suggests my valid start. I have a budding respect for looking at material within its historical context. The ever-present danger of generalizations or oversimplifications are as real as reading into a previous set of factors prominent contemporary conclusions. We read and write within a context, strongly influenced by cultural and cultured prejudice, orientations, and facts. Of the resources used, J. J. Bachofen1 seemed more sensitive to this concern.
Bachofen particularly stressed concern in relation to materials from ancient times, to material of tradition. How knowledge was transitioned matters more than the probability of a circumstance. Working toward complete, unprejudiced investigation, moving through the particular to comprehensive ideas, noting differentiation and repetition, the researcher analyzes the whole of a definite period of time in relation to periods before and after. This goal, admittedly, exceeds what will be accomplished here.
More problematic for the inexperienced is transferring ideas from one’s own time to that of a different world.2 Vern Bullough3 illustrates the risk by noting that “women confined to the home,” subordinate to husband,” nearly “denied existence apart from men” receive varied meanings in different times. The “subordinate” village woman had a common operational base with her husband, essential to economic existence The meaning of subordination necessarily shifts when husband and wife have different bases.
Historian Eleanor McLaughlin cautions against assuming much understanding of psychological feelings even a decade prior to oneself.4 Wolfgang Lederer simply avoids discussion of the recent past or the broad contemporary scene in studying the fear of woman.5 Yet, a person can hardly deny that experiences or observations prompt an individual to consider phenomenon worthy of study.
To move discussion more directly into exclusion of women in or from history as recorded, the term exclusion should be clarified. Like light and darkness, male and female, exclusion cannot be isolated from its counterpart inclusion. Either has meaning partly because of the existence of the other. Neither is known in its wholeness separate from the other Bases for excluding and including are: 1. age, as in speaking of senior citizens; 2. belief, as in ascribing to one of the world’s religions; 3. purpose, as in professional associations: The Salvation Army Rotary International, or intentional communities. Clearly, such divisions imply that those who qualify will participate. Others do not qualify until distinguishing characteristics appear.
What matters here is whether participation, opportunity, or responsibility can legitimately be restricted from or reserved for an individual on bases of sex. Sex-based stereotypes emerge established when people perpetuate certain patterns. Bias usually occurs, gross or subtle. Bias assumes that certain conditions merit particular judgments and commensurate actions, that factors of influence need not be re-examined and tested Growth in human relationships would be more complete if all were more honest about recognizing and altering the degree of bias shaping our thoughts and actions.
If, as George Boas writes in the preface to Bachofen’s work,6 “creation is but one end of destruction, destruction the beginning of creation,” dare one question a similar correspondence between exclusion and inclusion? Does exclusion but end inclusion or inclusion but begin exclusion? Assuming that they reflect but two dimensions/effects of one phenomenon, why be more concerned about exclusion than inclusion? Or, dare we conclude that dissatisfaction with one implies the other’s inadequacy, even if not stated? Likely so, at least when value judgment shapes the distinction.
Such judgment, more often than not, enters into exclusion-inclusion circumstances involving the two sexes. Within the business world, significant decision-making centers where men predominate. Women, more often the inclusive group, enable facilitating what group is determined as essential. “Man is the organizer of life; woman is his organ for carrying out plans.”7 Each to some degree can be excluded from the other’s domain, the one due to less esteem, the other granted because of excessive power (by those who control the valuing process.)
The power of presence shapes any committee or board setting. Not only is awareness of possible contributions from those who are absent frequently missing or denied by those present. Those involved can intentionally deprive the non-involved from even developing needed skills and necessary growth to function by depriving growth through experience. Such deprivation marks the cruelty of exclusion. Seldom recognized by those included is the limited effectiveness or whether creativeness is being diminished.by those who exclude.
Church organizations evaluate participation. Within the Episcopal setting the Eucharist, that which receives greatest significance, denotes the division point of exclusion-inclusion between women and men. Preaching poses less of a problem. A contrast appears in denominations where examining or teaching scriptural truth holds prime import. While in the latter setting women have almost sole right in nursery-children’s education departments, men reign as interpreters of faith for adult members of the community. This detail in turn reflects another fallacy or bias of value judgment that marks groups. As Assist. Prof. Sue Hiatt concludes: “Whatever is more significant (to those making the judgment), from that gift women are generally excluded.”8 And Rita Leposky suggests : “Even if women are taught the meanings of the central mysteries (of a religion), it seems that men formulate those meanings, while women simply learn the conclusions reached by the men who study the central mysteries.”9
Psychological factors operate when people balk at or mock those who insist that speech, written language, even silent prayer, are effective tools for exclusion-inclusion. If, for example, to specify women is difficult, when women are being discussed, or to refuse to use descriptive, accurate terminology about them, the desire to ignore or diminish them becomes prominent. This will be denied, particularly by those most fearful of including them, most unwilling to value themselves equally with others.
Glib adults respond, “But we know everyone is meant.” Such justification totally ignores the damage to self-image done to the young child, for example. Boys’ self-understanding can be seriously deformed through value judgments that assume that the other sex can legitimately be excluded. Girls know from early vocabulary development that they are not included in the word man. Prayers and hymns of the church less rarely credit them; childhood story characters and visual arts provide few models to imaginatively or literally pattern. One need not rewrite all history, psychological theory, or literature. But future appearances of value-based exclusion-inclusion in written or verbal form deserve to be noticed.
Some women have contributed significantly to their own exclusion. Unwilling to assume responsibility, they may hide their potential behind the superficial safety of a man’s risking. For example, the virtually nameless, those wishing to be known primarily as “wife of the president, preacher, or pioneer.” Or, some continue to raise generations on a diet of milk for girls and meat for boys, in the process valuing solid food more the liquid. This holds true when formal education at any level is thought to be more important for males than females.
Some women consider concern for inclusive language to be trite. Western civilization, as influenced as it is by biblical writing, still fails to ponder the psychological impact of value judgements that result from translations of male oriented scripture. And some women today promote artificial control through power of seduction, as those who find “the Total Woman” phenomenon an adequate expression of a marriage relationship. Consider also these quotes:
“Fear of women’s procreative powers is one of the most profound of human imprints.”10
“Prostitution will be suppressed only when the needs to which it responds are suppressed.”11
“Man’s view of woman was distorted by his dominant relationship to her.”12
“ . . .women are invisible to each other, as well as to men, as the makers of history.”13
“Bonds among fighting men have always been powerful and exclusive.”14
“Whatever may have been the state of women in the earliest days of human beginnings, ‘by degrees the woman’s enforced specialization of function affected her both physically and psychologically.”15
“What he does not understand, the primitive fears and what he fears, that he seeks to control by taboos, regulations.”16
To re-read such a list suggests that psychological distinctions between the sexes are founded in procreative capacities. Can we conclude that the psychological basis for sex-role differences for women and men stem from the biological differences between them? Although different millenniums and centuries have understood the phenomenon of precreation variously, patterns of relationship based on previous understandings have lingered in spite of new knowledge.
For ancient peoples, two facts were beyond question: 2. Females, for many years of their lives, bled genitally at nearly regular monthly intervals. 2. Newborn children came out of the genital area of females. The “progress” of civilization since then is almost jolting: we today believe the same two facts. An early mystery, now clarified, was why the first fact was affected by the second. The question to ask here is: Why do these facts instigate experiences of exclusion-inclusion for women and men?
While mystery surrounded both circumstances, more fear evolved around and from the menstrual (meaning moon, month) cycle. Blood and power were associated. Without blood, life discontinued. Woman was considered to have an exceptional mana (“a supernatural power, either good or bad, infusing everything, but more intensely, the alien and the unusual.”17 Men lacked a similar supernatural power. Therefore, woman might overpower men.
Cultural patterns varied in the form of exclusion that was imposed on women because of this cycle of nature. For many, a five-day seclusion in considerable discomfort, in a hut or cave (suggestive of the moon’s dark phase) isolated from everyone occurred. Methods were devised for getting food to her without contaminating the carrier Few other amenities were considered. Her condition could have a destructive force over anything related to agriculture: seed, growth, food processing Men going on hunts or to war could be ruined if they contacted her. Information about preparation and needs considered important for how such practice was explained to young girls so initiated in ancient times is not available. Some could have seen it as opportunity for solitude, to get away from a demanding husband, or as a purifying rite.
Leposky’s research18 on exclusion and participation of women in Melanesian and Australian religions concludes:
The seemingly negative fact . . . that women are excluded from so much of the religious life points to the man’s perception of a kind of sacredness in women—a sacredness that generates an ambiguous response. On the one hand, women are avoided, not because they are irrelevant to the religious life, but because their own “other kind of sacrality” deriving especially froa their maternal capabilities is potentially destructive to the men’s specific sacrality.
Maternal sacrality is known to be different from men’s sacrality, yet in the male cultic life imitations of female functions were incorporated into initiation rites for boys. Women and the woman goddess embody both the good and the destructive. Herein lies the mixture of attraction and avoidance. Both have been operative throughout history. The balance or imbalance between pulling toward or away from determines the overall tone of female/male relations.
Generally, the scale has tipped heavier on avoidance. To illustrate: whereas initially a woman’s menstrual power could ward off evil or protect life from harm or evil greater than impurity, that feature was lost. Fear of menstrual blood, of magic or the possible demonic, remained too intense. Potential good could be subdued by excessive connotations of evil. Brief periods of segregation led to perceiving woman as unclean. Simone deBeauvoir contends that “the blood does not make her impure; it is rather a sign of her impurity.”19 From declaring the menstrual woman unclean, to absorbing a more totally negative view of woman individually and women collectively took less time to evolve than destroy. “Temporary defilement of a specifically feminine characteristic may easily lead to the notion of the permanent uncleanness of the female sex” wrote Edward Westermarck.20
Precisely defilement is documentable in Jewish thought. While Jewish women were considered unclean for “only” seven days beyond the menstrual flow, Samaritan women were simply “credited” with being continuously unclean. Jews were not to associate with them. Jesus’ dramatic conversation with, inclusion of, a Samaritan woman, to the extent of his first self-revelation (John 4) called for radical reorientation. Despised, excluded women and races were to be part of those who had “responsible care” as governing priority.
But through much of human history women continued to be seen as Other She can and needs to be kept at a distance. Her maternal sacral nature cannot blend with what men have defined as sacred or magic. Cooperative participation or mutual inclusion demands too much. It leaves no one ranked or comparable, no neat orders that distinguish and separate. However, the image of being taboo makes clear who’s where, who’s pure. Moving out from such bondage brings to the fore another dynamic. Those with the power to exclude assume that reverse domination holds for the Other. The pattern of experience is projected onto attempts by the Other to honestly discover or recover herself.
What is intriguing is that while the menstrual cycle brought fear and distance between women and men, men have not evidently wished they could be the ones to menstruate. Initiation rites for boys in numerous cultures do indeed pattern aspects of the experience of menarche for girls. But the monthly bother—pregnancy opportunity experience—of “getting” to produce blood and as a result be “set aside” has not triggered competition. Interesting also is the fact that taboo itself means variously “unclean, holy, or set apart.”21 From an inward hunch, I would speculate that if men were the menstruants, the likelihood of such being considered holy would be more likely!
Earlier in this paper, potential for the childbirth process was acknowledged as a second distinct feature of being female. This fact did not result in exclusion for women in the same way as with menstruation (with the exception of the general months immediately following birth when the mother was unclean—power again associated with blood discharge. If anything, the setting apart at birth has had a more “exclusive” connotation. Often only women may participate in the delivery.
Men responded by having their own exclusive rights. Initiation was for the specific purpose of separating or breaking the initiate boy’s relation to his mother. Her power over him since birth had to be destroyed. Membership with men was unforgettably begun. Centuries of clear-cut loyalty or function lines of separation, and mutuality-cooperation-reciprocity are orientations foreign to each other. Transition is always painful and slow.
Why then was the association of woman and goddess so fundamental, so early? Bachofen analyzes this issue in Myth, Religion and Mother Right, his original material first published fifty years ago. Although writers since have refuted his analysis, significant material relates to the phenomenon of exclusion-inclusion. Bachofen writes of three major epochs of human history: hetaerism, matriarchy, and patriarchy. No one would deny that we live in the last epoch, that it has been in process for several thousand years. No fine line marks the end or beginning of such epochs. That each epoch built on or improved aspects that were degenerating in the previous period, I accept. That patriarchy is not the ultimate, that its points of deterioration now need to be replaced, I propose.
Bachofen says, “The historicity of one period supports the historicity of the period that preceded.”22 Matriarchy, followed by patriarchy, was preceded by hetaerism. What preceded hetaerism, or what patriarchy will precede is unknown. That which is unfortunate is when either sex is identified in the name or title of the period. Such indicates prominence and has increasingly generated privilege for the one, with corresponding exclusion in some form for the other. Language, meanings associated with terms, powerfully depicts this fact.23
Hetaerism, according to Bachofen,24 is broader than Webster’s definition that limits it to concubinage, or a “supposed primitive state of society in which women were held in common.” Rather, it was a “law of matter (its principle bound up with the lowest level of plant and animal life) that rejected all restrictions.” To exclude or be exclusive (as we use the terms) was an offense against divinity as then understood. (Nor does the contemporary concept of inclusion describe this circumstance; it includes and is part of exclusion.) There was no experience of private property. Marriage and family concepts were unknown. This state allowed for what contemporary society would call “unregulated sexuality.”
Bachofen understands matriarchy to have developed as a resistance to the beastly or universal promiscuity of hetaerism as it had developed, replacing it with stricter discipline and morality A form of marital agreement also began. Agriculture, with the sacred symbols of ear of grain and seed corn, characterized the period of increased settlement.
Motherhood was seen as exclusive of fatherhood, women as the stabilizing factor. They managed the children and property and proved to be available for governing within the tribe or state. Men were almost totally absorbed in hunting and warfare, away from the settling group activity. This independent existence either brought on the pattern that only daughters claimed family inheritance, or because men were excluded from the inheritance, they were driven to fend for themselves. Bachofen illustrates this particular pattern of Mother Right from among the people of Lycia.25 Similarities appeared among most peoples of that time.
In Robert Birffault’s important work The Mothers, Mother Rights was seen as “the source of all social organization . . . Kinship, political organization, beginnings of law, economic life, magic and religion were created and completely dominated by women.” Until men seized power, their influence was almost nil.26
The Mother was always biologically identifiable, not necessarily the father. Children were named after and their status achieved through the Mother. In Egypt, for example, agriculture was founded in material nature. This is generally linked to the goddess Demeter. Motherhood came to be enthroned; women ruled without men. With Mother Right, the principle of agriculture and sexual union, both areas (nomadic and settled agriculture and marriage) were governed by matriarchy.27 This pattern eventually evolved, degenerated, into a more carnal emancipation, into Amazonism, and from that needed to be restricted by patriarchy.
In the transition that took place the material principle became less dominant, though the principle of spirit was not fully developed. Property accumulated for personal rather than community benefit. Marriage was experienced as a more exclusive bond. Along with increasing formal control, compared to hetaerism, is the sense of ownership. Woman came to be part of that owned. Much of what had previously been women’s realm was taken over by the settling men. Even motherhood and childbirth significance diminished. Man came to be understood not only as father, but sole begetter. Dionysius came to be woman’s god with emphasis on love, beauty, and the sensual.28
Elise Boulding identifies the recession of the clan structure and expansion of the public sphere as the time when woman’s participation diminished. They found themselves involved in less significant decision-making. In failing to specialize, they were then assigned to or left with unskilled, miscellaneous tasks.29
While sketchy, this discussion notes steps toward exclusion-inclusion. Whereas each sex presumably had its own realm of significance with neither dependent on the other in matriarchy, women in patriarchy become subordinate to man. The now is relative. Mary Jane Sherfey suggests that the span of time involved in women’s being subjugated stretched perhaps five thousand years30 Whereas with Mother Right women served as industrial, agricultural, educational hub for the children of the clan, today these enterprises have been largely removed from the nuclear home setting. Within patriarchy, particularly when in transition from matriarchy, one finds “mixed” information. But everywhere in what we call the ancient Near East, women were subordinate to men. As “bearer of life” and mother did they know esteem
The temple served as center of considerable activity. Priestesses, “servants of gods,” of different “grades” served the cult. What initially served as “veneration of the process of begetting as a divine act” gradually became plain prostitution and “business.” The wife and mother of the ruler often acquired some degree of prominence. That the earliest “chemists” known by name were two Mesopotamian women of the thirteenth century BC indicates some freedom for women to choose and pursue trades. 31
Egyptian women of the ancient patriarchal world were considered to have had more status than women of Mesopotamia. Bullough wonders if the fact of greater fertility of soil and less emphasis on wars established a more general relaxed life. Compared to the men, women were more restricted, as for example in certain trades. But they did work alongside men in the fields and a few functioned as rulers. Primarily, though their major influence was aa mother in the home.32
From biblical to contemporary history the two pronounced characteristics continued to be motherhood and sex object. Bullough suggests that prior to the 6th century BC, little consciousness of sex as a problem existed.33 Whether totally fair, the Jewish culture, compared to Babylonian and Egyptian civilizations, identified woman as evil, in part through seeing her as sex object. Later movement toward the other extreme of super glorifying the maternal, as with Virgin Mary, still later gave way to the concept of female devil-prone during witchcraft centuries.
Keep in mind such prominence of male understandings. Men formulated, taught, and recorded thought. Although the majority of women accepted the role designated to them, often fully believed its truth, some always found exclusion from decisive actions, the primacy of mothering, and vicarious existence unbearable. Medieval monastic life for women helped to meet this need, though again the recorders of history worked hard, seemingly, to ignore the phenomenon and its impact.
An interesting comparison of spheres of influence emerged between Church Fathers and family mothers. Clara Henning asserts: “Women were sacrificed as human beings in order to elevate priests to sanctified beings.”34 How people could be persuaded to consider the Church without Mothers, to raise the next generation with significant fathers, reflects the exclusion-inclusion habit. God’s purpose in creating humanity seems here to be denied. How Church Fathers came to be vested with so much authority repeats Jewish and the early church’s inability to absorb or pattern Jesus’ radical insistence on and example of including the witness and teaching of women. (John 4:37; 11:27; 20:16-18)35
Jesus had neither Gentiles or women among his twelve immediate followers. Acceptance of one and not the other of these groups since then in nearly unquestioned membership and leadership overlooks half of what he came to restore. It misses half of what he tried vainly to teach about who comprise the eventual Community.
Men’s inordinate fear of women’s potential power through the unknown of her menstrual cycle was later misinterpreted for centuries in the form of maleness alone as the procreating and positive force. Woman’s uneducated readiness to accept themselves as inferior to men, as inherently evil since “Genesis” (because told by the men that so they were) in turn instilled profound differences of value on the children they nurtured. This, to me, seems basic to separate exclusion-inclusion categories for women and men in our present millennium.
The Middle Ages provided several influential developments. Adoration for the Virgin Mary became almost like identifying her the “4th person of the Trinity” which also drastically set her apart from common women. The latter was made even more conscious of her failure, of her similarity to the assumed negative Eve by contrast. A strong celibate movement for men proved to be the way to avoid associations with such danger. Therefore, Bullough concludes: “The very anti-sexuality and fear of sex led Christianity to elevate woman.”36Both negation and excessive praise tended to separate women from men.
At approximately 1240 a woman’s religious movement called the Beguines began. With a main theme of “dedication to God,” they came into existence because of male hostility toward women religious. In this setting, control and planning was at last done by and for women. They could expect to encounter the male religious’ assumption of female danger and contamination. Projection was again at work: what men were unable to control was blamed as woman’s inability to resist temptations. Medieval historian Eleanor McLaughlin reports how the inclusive Beguine movement resulted from the “Medieval Church’s inability to deal with woman at a level of spiritual equivalence.”37
The inability to appreciate “the bipolarity of God’s creation recurred along with the presupposed hierarchical difference of function and order. From such thought we are not yet removed. For, as long as:
As long as the Genesis creation accounts are twisted to mean that maleness preceded femaleness (What is the one without the other?) and therefore man has been sanctioned or hierarchically destined for anything in anyway different from woman;
As long as part of God’s judgment for woman is identified as “submission to man” while for man to have his intended equal submit to him is not equally called judgment;
As long as either sex is given more blame than the other for rejecting the dominion of God alone;’
As long as either sex projects on to the other unequal lust in the symbolic incident;
As long as people bless marriage on the basis of the creation story rather than call above all for full respect and genuine unity of women and men;
As long as human beings fail to represent God’s dominion (responsible care) to the rest of created life as humanity experiences it from God’
As long as humanity in its difference (male and female) and oneness or solidarity of purpose (“bone of bone, flesh of flesh”) fail to image the Divine;
As long as humanity fails to completely, authentically, concurrently relate to each other and God, the God who depends on personal relationship;
As long as certain tasks or characteristics are designated exclusively to one sex or the other, failing to notice that these divisions characterize fallenness rather than the created intent.
—For just so long, and perhaps longer, will the new creation of Jesus be but partially understood. For that long will excuses be made for excluding and /or including women or men on bases that endorse value difference.
As implied, factors prominent in the thinking of one time period, such as hierarchical authority, will remain until we become thoroughly honest with each other (therefore, with our psyche and soul) as women and men.
Another example of a result of control losing control is the Inquisition, generally dated from 1450-1750 (though some writers identify witchcraft as beginning two hundred years earlier). Actually, Boulding reminds us that every society (including persons in high places such as kings of Israel) has turned to seers, soothsayers, fortune tellers. In this sense it did not originate by pointing derogatorily at either sex.38
But H. R. Hays quite bluntly credits the Inquisition, from which Germany suffered most, to the fantasy and imagination of medieval males, particularly sex-repressed celibates. He acknowledges that broader dissent within the Church caused considerable anxiety for a clergy that had obsessively come to equate heterosexual activity with sin.39 Bullough sees the belief in witches broadly as “a clerical phenomenon foisted on the public, which reflected all the hostilities of the clergy, including misogyny.”40
The clerics commissioned by Pope Innocent VIII to study the situation and recommend action were Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger; their famous document: The Malleus Maleficarum. These researchers concluded that the increasing numbers of heretics and witches were intent on plotting against civilization. Their intent seemed to abolish about everything: monarchy, private property, marriage, order, all religion. None were considered more harmful than midwives. Witches who lead others from the one Holy Roman religion were especially unpopular. To deny the Faith was worse than the sin of fallen angels.
Three things concur in the process: the devil, the witch, and the permission of God. God does not intend to prevent evil. God’s omnipotence is, however, able to bring good out of evil.41 Women were assumed to be especially vulnerable. The good and destructive within them knew little limitation due to their carnal lust. Narrowed to its essence, woman meant lust of flesh. Whereas men were more intelligent and more able to defend themselves against the powers, women were so impressionable, their faith easily corrupted.42
So, understandings were formed, vehemence released, hundreds of “guilty” duly(?) sentenced and blotted out. Witch hysteria also left footprints in the U.S. Anne Hutchinson’s deformed, knobby creature was but “sure proof” to those who judged. What began, perhaps, as genuine frustration over increasing numbers of people dissatisfied with the Roman Church led to impressions and validations for exclusion, particularly of women. It could not have occurred had women been valued equally with men. Such could not take place when women and men together are fully educated to make responsible decisions. The impressions failed to die in the last glowing embers of a phenomenon, their roots being too deeply secured.
BIBLIOGRAPHY – (plus 8 conferences and 1 telephone conversation with professors)
Batto, Bernard Frank. Studies on Women at Mari. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Pr., 1974.
Beard, Mary R. Woman as Force in History. NY: Collier Books, 1946.
Boulding, Elise. The Underside of History A View of Women through Time. Boulder: Westview Pr.,1976.
Brown, Raymond E. “Roles of Women in the 4th Gospel,” Theological Studies, 36/4, Dec. 1975, 688-99.
Bullough, Vern L. The Subordinate Sex A History of Attitudes Toward Women. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1973.
Culpepper, Emily E. “Zoroastrian Menstruation Taboos: A Women’s Studies Perspective,” in Women and Religion, Judith Plaskow & Joan Arnold Romero, eds. AAR, Scholars Pr. 1974.
deBeauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. (Trans., ed. by H. M. Parshley), NY: Bantam), 1952.
Delaney, Janice, Mary Jane Lupton, & Emily Toth. The Curse A Cultural History of Menstruation. NY: Dutton & Co., 1976.
Flexner, Eleanor. Century of Struggle. NY: Atheneum, 1972.
Harding, M. Esther. Woman’s Mysteries A Psychological Interpretation of the Feminine Principle as Portrayed in Myth, Story, and Dreams. NY: Harper & Row, 1971.
Hays, H. R. The Dangerous Sex The Myth of Feminine Evil. NY: Putnam’s Sons, 1964.
Holy Bible, The Revised Standard Version. NY: Nelson & Sons, 1953.
Kramer, Heinrich and James Sprenger. The Malleus Maleficarum. (Republication of 1928 ed., 1948 Intro.) NY: Dover Pub., 1971.
Iglitzin, Lynne B. “The Persistence of Patriarchal Thinking” Women-as-Property. The Center Magazine, May-June 1974, 44-47.
Lederer, Wolfgang. The Fear of Women An inquiry into the enigma of Woman and why Men through the ages have both loved and dreaded her. NY: Jovanovich, 1968.
Leposky, Rita. “Exclusion and Participation: The Role of Women in Melanesian and Australian Religions,” Conference of Women Theologians, Milwaukee, WI, June 1971.
Longcope, Kay. “Feminists Redefine Therapy,” Boston Sunday Globe, Sept 5, 1976.
McLaughlin, Eleanor L. “The Christian Past: Does it Hold a Future for Women?” Anglican Theological Quarterly, Jan. 1975. And “Equality of Souls, Inequality of Sexes: Woman in Medieval Theology,” in Religion and Sexism Rosemary Radford Ruether, ed. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1974, 213-66.
Miller, Jean Baker, ed. Psychoanalysis and Women Eminent Psychoanalysts dispel myths and explore realities, NY: Penguin Books, 1973.
Neumann, Erich. The Great Mother An Analysis of the Archetype. Princeton Univ. Pr., 1955.
Ruether, Rosemary Radford,ed. Religion and Sexism Images of Woman in the Jewish and Christian Traditions. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1974.
Seibert, Ilse. Woman in Ancient Near East. London, George Prior Publ, 1974.
Swidler, Leonard. Women in Judaism. The Status of Women in Formative Judaism. New Jersey: Scarecrow Pr., 1976.
Wahl, Joseph A. “The Exclusion of Women from Holy Orders,” dissertation excerpt, Catholic Univ. of America, Studies in Sacred Theology, Second Series, Number 110.
Winslow, Donald F. “Sex and Anti-Sex in the Early Church Fathers,” in Male and Female, Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse & Urban T. Holmes III, eds. 28-38.