How is that all three Abrahamic religious extremes degrade women? Examples: Islam - Taliban And Saudi Arabia, Christianity - No women priests in Catholic church, Judaism - Orthodox has no women rabbis.
A sort of joke about the anthropology and history of humanity: Much of the human endeavor's superstitions arranged themselves around female mystery right up until the time the men figured out they were essential to reproduction, and we're all pretty much familiar with the result since then.
Kenyatta's
Facing Mt. Kenya includes a traditionalist defense of female genital mutilation in the tribes, but before even getting to that, the reader learns that once upon a time, the gods entrusted humanity to the creators of life, but those women became wicked and decadent, so the gods overturned that authority and gave power to their children, the men.
And there is also a thesis to be dug out from somewhere, though I usually only encounter it tangentially or orbitally, as something going on around something else I'm studying, that has to do with the economics of the human endeavor. Koontz, in her history of marriage, noted somewhere in Asia a small population that practiced extended-familial fatherhood, and some of that seems motivated by the need to keep those women operating in the societal economy; the meta-analytical suggestion would be that the group cannot afford to relegate women. It all gets complicated; for instance, I
so don't want to do the bit about Rousseau as a feminist.
Sometimes it's easy to forget how capable people of antiquity were. But I think of a particular site that started with unusual cooperation among hunter-gatherers and what follows is a two-thousand year experience; it's even longer until the advent of writing over three thousand years later, and another two thousand years from then until the period of the Hebrew Scriptures. We might consider what it means to suggest that the the Hebrew Scriptures somehow reflect an historically affluent or even luxurious period. Similarly, we can suggest the overlapping Roman experience was so luxurious as to afford the rituals and symbolic value of the Vestal cult.
So, inasmuch as I might have a grim joke about the rite of bitter water, that it was already known in the culture and wasn't invented on the spot by some scribe, we can also wonder approximately what is the luxury of a society that can afford to poison young women for the sake of some man's jealousy.
Human societal endeavors, by the period of recording the Old Testament, were hardly new. Given that men were largely in power, and the most part of the scribes, we might expect their attitudes and perspectives to be woven into the recorded narratives.°
And in the question of Abramism, everything just gets complicated from there.
Pretty much any religion will reflect the prejudices of its earthly masters. Moreover, relationships between religion and other aspects of society can influence the regard for women within both. Trying to describe the (
ahem …) place of women in Taoism is a complicated matter; indeed, it starts to read like the sort of dynamic historical thesis that some expect when comparing history to its living outcomes—that is to say, one can build a critical theory of the sexes, and even a critical theory of gender, just trying to figure it out. To wit, some strong, admirably virtuous women in the history of seeking perfection only did so in order to increase their marital prospects and be better wives; ask the socioeconomy at any particular time.
Additionally, it's worth observing that,
vis à vis other religions, Abramism as viewed through a Christian or post-Christianist lens presents an unusual perspective on religion in society, different from the rest of Abramism, or Hindu, Buddhism, Taoism, &c.; historian Karen Armstrong describes in modern Western thought an eccentric and idiosyncratic understanding of religion°°.
And I cannot help but recall Emir Ali Khan°°° on prevailing ideologies, attitudes of mind, and the challenging thereof, or Kharkovli°°°° on the inner aspect of religion.
If, for instance, it is true both that I do feel a particular severity about Abramism, and it is in no small part proximity and habit, the distortive effect is of even less certain description, but undoubtedly occurring.
It is not a matter of surprise, or whether or not misogyny and male chauvinism are present in other religions; the comparative discussion is messy insofar as, say, a post-Christianist outlook requires multiple critical theses in order to pry its way out of an idiosyncratic box. Then again, for non-Abramic outlooks, the critical theses finding their way in must feel at least a little eccentric. And along the way, yes, each will find of others plenty that seems familiar.
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Notes:
° I'm uncertain what to do with the point that while Judaism is not matriarchal, Hebrew culture is matrilineal. It's not irrelevant, but it's an unwieldy something or other.
°° See "On 'Religion'" #1↗; Armstrong suggests that since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, "our modern Western conception of 'religion' is idiosyncratic and eccentric. No other cultural tradition has anything like it, and even premodern European Christians would have found it reductive and alien." This is something of a complicating factor in comparative historical examinations of religion and society.
°°° See "Degrees of Misogyny" #213↗; Khan proposes, "The ideologies may be so ancient, so deep-seated or so subtle that they are not identified as such by the people at large. In this case they are often discerned only through a method of challenging them, asking questions about them or by comparing them with other communities."
°°°° See "On faith" #72↗; we can derive from Kharkovli's explanation of Sufism the basic idea of an "inner aspect of religion", beliefs and practices that, "over a period of time, become covered by social, emotional and other accretions which are established into religions".
