gender and society Flashcards
Ephesians 5:22
“Wives, submit to your own husbands as you do the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church … Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the world”
Genesis 3:16 “To the woman he [God] said, ‘I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you”
Mulieris Dignitatum - Motherhood is a woman’s telos; natural purpose
Motherhood is a woman’s telos; natural purpose
Both physically in that they have a womb and also psychologically in that motherhood creates a ‘special openness’ in a mother to their child
feminists point to anthropological study of different human civilisations, where it is found that there is a large degree of variation regarding gender roles between different cultures
Sartre argued that there was no objective purpose/telos because “existence precedes essence”
Mulieris Dignitatum - There are important and valued women in Christian history/theology
John Paul II also pointed out that there are many female European saints and that Jesus coming to earth was only possible because of a woman, Mary
Simone de Beauvoir argues that the Christian valuing of Mary shows that it is only through being a man’s “docile servant that she will be also a blessed saint” in Christianity
Mary Daly - only to encourage women to become passive, submissive and obedient so that women would all the better become the sexual property of men.
Simone de Beauvoir
religion is merely a tool of the male oppressor group which keeps women under control in their oppressed place with false promises that they will go to heaven if they obey
“One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.” This means she thinks that gender roles and differences are the result of socialisation
Mary O’Brien is a naturalistic feminist who argued that motherhood can be a positive thing if women are in control of their choice to become a mother
Anne Oakley
interviewed women about motherhood. She concluded that the so-called ‘maternal instinct’ comes from culture rather than biology
suggests Paul 11 is wrong to think that God created women with a maternal instinct.
it could be that childhood neglect creates traumas which interfere with the maternal instinct
Nonetheless, if the maternal instinct evolved then it might not come from God which means it loses its moral authoritative force as something that ‘should’ be enacted.
