“All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is
in women insatiable.” Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum, 1487.
And so it began. This citation,
and those immediately following are taken from: Fearless Wives and Frightened Shrews: The Construction of the Witch in
Early Modern Germany, Sigrid Brauner, Univ. of Massachusetts Press,
Amherst.
We talk about the current War on Women, but never
why, where and when did this War start?
The following quote from the jacket of the above quoted book may give us
some insight.
“In fifteenth-century Germany, women were singled
out as witches for the first time in history; this book explores why. Sigrid Brauner examines the connections among
three central developments in early modern Germany: a shift in gender roles for
women; the rise of a new urban ideal of femininity; and the witch hunts that
swept across Europe from 1435 to 1750.
Brauner shows that the modern notion of the witch
as a willful, conniving, promiscuous woman was first established by German
Inquisitors in the Malleus maleficarum
(1487). In subsequent works by Martin
Luther and the sixteenth-century playwrights Paul Rebhun and Hans Sachs, the
witch emerged as the counterpart to the new feminine ideal of the urban housewife. By demonstrating how the binary concepts of “good”
housewife and “bad wife” (or witch) were propagated among the educated urban
elite who presided over witch trials, Brauner suggests that the witch hunts
functioned to discipline women who failed to display the docility and
subservience expected of the new urban housewife.”
Remember that the end of the witch trials in the
United States was in 1750, a mere 362 years ago. These views of women had entered Puritan
Christianity, and were promulgated by prominent pastors such as John
Winthrop. There are many books to
describe how this Puritan view of Christianity became so tightly interwoven
with the concept of America as a City Upon a Hill, continuing on into the 20th
century with Ronald Regan’s comment in his farewell address, a shining city upon a hill. “This is a story about that imaginary place,
so real in the minds of those for whom religion, politics, and the mythologies
of America are one singular story, and how that vision has shaped America’s
projection of power onto the rest of the world.” The
Family, Jeff Sharlett, pg.2.
I bring up this history because over and over I
hear otherwise intelligent political pundits asking what is wrong with the
Republican Party and Christian fundamentalists, both Catholic and Protestant, and
this supposed War on Women? Can’t they
see how destructive it is to their party?
No, they can’t, and the reason is it is all mixed up together with their
notion that God has blessed America with this wonderful notion of world-wide power. Thus they plow ahead with missionary zeal.
And women simply do not fit into this
picture. The men are to go out and do
battle for their wives and families, and the wives are to stay home and “guard
the home fires”, which is what they have been ordained by God to do. Thus, anything that prevents them from living
out their pre-ordained role in life is to be obliterated. Birth control, abortion, equal pay for doing
a man’s job (which they shouldn’t be doing in the first place), or any of the
other legislative actions against women’s rights that have taken place are just
what men should be doing to help
women stay in their God-ordained role.
Women should not be out working; they should be home with their husbands
taking care of them.
This quote is from The Family, pg. 269, and is an example of the sort of thinking taking
place in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere.
Most recently in Arizona. The
source of former Senator Sam Brownback’s political and religious thinking came
from American fundamentalist, Chuck Colson.
“Colson taught that abortion is a “threshold” issue, a wedge with which
to introduce fundamentalism into every question. Brownback, who’d been quietly pro-choice
before he went to Washington, recognized the political utility of the
anti-abortion fight and developed what is now a genuine hatred for the very
idea that a woman’s body is her own. It
is not, he learned from Colson; it belongs to God, just like that of a man, a
line of reasoning by which Colson claims that his fundamentalist faith is more
egalitarian than feminism, …” What is
not made clear in the above quote is that in the American fundamentalist faith
it is men who determine what God wants. Women
have no say in this matter.
This anti-woman attitude has been attributed to
the essence of Christianity. Nothing
could be further from the truth. The
essence of Christianity is what Jesus did and said. What the more conservative prelates, of
whatever church or of none, do not want to remember is that all of Jesus’ male followers
abandoned him at the Crucifixion – except for the women! And when Mary Magadelene went to the tomb to
prepare Jesus’ body for permanent internment, the stone had been rolled away
from the tomb. According to the New
Testament, Jesus appeared to Mary Magadelene, and instructed her to go and tell
the ‘others’, the men, what she had experienced. Thus, she was the first Apostle. She did as Jesus instructed, ran and told the
men.
And, guess what?
They didn’t believe her and had to go look for themselves. 2,000 years later we are fighting the same
damn battle!! But this time we’re mad as
hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore.
No comments:
Post a Comment