Free Ascent of Women by Sally Armstrong Page A

citizen to his wife, dating from 1 BCE, demonstrates the casual nature with which infanticide was viewed: “I am still in Alexandria.… if (good fortune to you!) you give birth, if it is a boy, let it live; if it is a girl, expose it.”
    So where did these ideas—that baby girls are worthless, that women can bring shame to the family—come from? Many presume the oppression of women began with the holy texts. While every one of them—the Bible, the Torah and the Quran—is patriarchal and contains passages that denigrate women, they also represent some of the earliest records of women’s lives and offer clues as to their treatment. Even before recorded history, we know that societies were either matriarchal or patriarchal, so at least in some places women were leaders. Modern scholars of the New Testament claim that women had leadership roles during the first thirty or forty years of Christianity. In the early days of the Roman Empire, women (presuming they survived birth, given that infanticide wasn’t outlawed until 374 CE) could own property, their own businesses and run their own households, but those rights were stripped from them in 381 CE, when the Roman Empire became Christian.
    As male leaders took over, they reinforced the scriptures of the Old Testament that basically suggested that the ills of humanity derive from women. Christians, Jews and Muslims all look to the Old Testament as the original document. Judaism came first in about 900 BCE, then about a thousand years later Christianity developed, followed in 600 CE by Islam. So these three world religions are rooted in scriptures that denigrate women. Despite the endless scholarly debates by rabbis, priests and Islamic religious leaders about what the holy texts say and don’t say, most agree that in the Bible, the Torah and the Quran, women are not blessed with equal rights. For example, the Old Testament says in Ecclesiastics 30:3, “The birth of a daughter is a loss.” Ecclesiastics 26: 10–11: “Keep a strict watch on her shameless eye; do not be surprised if she disgraces you.”
    The Old Testament also serves up the Adam and Eve story featuring the snake and the apple. Depending on the religious analysis of that story and the modernization of the text, women have borne the taint of Eve in churches, synagogues and mosques ever since.
    But it’s the New Testament that seals the social destiny of women in Christianity. For example, the sentiment “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fit in the Lord” is included not just once but three times in three different books (Colossians 3:18, 1 Peter 3:1 and Ephesians 5:22). Paul’s letter to the Corinthians says, “It is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church” (1 Corinthians 14: 34–35). Timothy 2:8 says, “I permit no woman to teach or have authority over a man; she is to keep silent.”
    The Quran and Torah have similarly discriminatory injunctions that forbid women to inherit or to own property. The tone isalso noteworthy. This passage from the Talmud, for instance, is derisive in the extreme; you can practically hear the contempt: “How can a woman have anything; whatever is hers belongs to her husband. What is his is his and what is hers is also his” (Sanhedrin, 71a; Gittin, 62a).
    Once religion took a male-dominated stand, it nurtured the oppression of women. Augustine of Hippo, who would become St. Augustine, said, “What is the difference whether it is in a wife or a mother, it is still Eve, the temptress that we must beware of in any woman. I fail to see what use woman can be to man, if one excludes the function of bearing children.”
    In twelfth-century Baghdad, the home of Islam, women were doctors and owned businesses. What’s more, Islam was the only religion of the time that allowed people to practise any other religion, and its leader, the prophet Muhammad, had a working wife. So why do so many of today’s mullahs and imams interpret the Quran in