Between the Dark and the Daylight by Joan Chittister

Author:Joan Chittister [Chittister, Joan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-8041-4095-9
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC
Published: 2015-02-24T05:00:00+00:00

17

THE LOSS OF THE MASCULINE EMASCULATES THE FEMININE

The average advert of the Western world tells the whole story. Women are voluptuous, or weak and curvaceous, or—according to the more pious ones—motherly, nurturing, protective, and self-sacrificing. Always self-sacrificing.

What women face, in the midst of what the human race has long known as a “man’s world,” is the obligation to propagate, to care for, to sustain the other half of the human race. They are just what it seems a good human being should be. Provided, of course, that they are at all times, and in all situations, quiet about it.

The problem is that for some reason, the formula has never really worked. In every generation women, unlike the template, have emerged full of life and zesty about it, bright and visionary, clear and confident. These women, churchmen, statesmen and insecure men declared, were to be put in their “place.” Churchmen theologized female inferiority, philosophers explained female inferiority, and small-souled men of every ilk enforced male domination and took their own superiority for granted, as a result.

The great iconic model, of course, on which they built the notion of female inferiority, irrationality and subservience was Eve, mother of the human race, first woman, spouse of Adam. His nemesis. His failed partner. His weaker side. The one whose “sin” had upended the history of humanity, made it a tale of disgrace and women the very eidolon of distrust. And all of this despite the even greater declaration of the same Hebrew scriptures that both females and males were “made in the image of God.”

Public myths, jokes, and wisdom stories have all enshrined the fantasy of female disrepute so that women might never be foolish enough to suspect the slander of it all. “There are three ways to send a message,” the old saw taught. “You can telephone, tell a friend or tell a woman.” Or advice to men taught that “If a man steals your wife the best revenge is to let him keep her.” Or better yet, as F. Scott Fitzgerald writes in The Great Gatsby, “I hope she’ll be a fool. That’s the best thing a girl can be in this world—a beautiful little fool.”

Girls got those messages—and denied every one of them.

For centuries, the attempt to define women has been a losing task. Era after era women had to be told again and again what they were supposed to be, what Creation had created them to be, how their position in life was domestic. Female. Secondary. “Helpmates” of men as translators of Genesis in the Hebrew scriptures put it. And that despite the fact that in the over thirty other places the Hebrew phrase ezer kenegdo was used in scripture, the words the writers used were always translated “a power equal to” rather than “a helpmate for.”*

For centuries, up to our own time, women have been trained to be docile, meek, quiet, and nonthinking bearers of the human race. They were considered the appendages of men who had defined themselves the crown of creation.

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