Men, however, took over the simple elements of religious feeling and
social requirement in which women bore so great a part and made of
them religious cults and theologies, and they then became a masculine
monopoly. Men also took over the simple healing of gifted women and
made it first the prerogative of the "medicine man" and at last of the
medical profession, from which women were barred until very lately.
The social customs which women once had power to enforce in so many
ways became the "law," made and executed solely by men. Art, science,
literature, grew to great proportions as man acquired the opportunity
and the skill to concentrate his intelligence upon specialties of
effort; and from all the walks of educational preparation and of
professional achievement women were debarred. Hence, in the family
order, in which the first and obvious place of women had been
relatively high, man took the position of mastery by right of
religious priesthood, by right of legal supremacy, and by right of
monopoly of the money power.
Back of all this lay the assumption of the superior relation of the
father to the spiritual life of the child.
Man gained his larger leisure first by the use of women as slaves when
individual women became the property of individual men, and later by
conquest over other men through which process he secured more slaves,
and finally by the military systems that in various forms gave some
men a chance to work at what they liked and from which they could gain
advantage in the growing complexity of increasing social organization.
Man's larger leisure, which gave him money power or its equivalent in
earlier forms of exchange, could not have been secured by him had not
woman been socially and by religious sanction set to the constant task
of the family service and the more peaceful occupations of primitive
agriculture.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account