2022-05-25 - A World Without Women by David F. Noble ==================================================== Chapter 1, Mothers, Daughters, Sisters, Wives ============================================= Ely Cathedral, north of Cambridge, England is a former abbey dating from the seventh century. The front row of pews today bear embroidered cushions which silently recount the illustrious and long list of this monastic center. Each cushion bears the name of an abbot, beginning with the founding of the abbey. One is immediately struck by a starling fact: the earliest abbots were all abbesses, starting with the foundress of the abbey Ethelreda. The next cushion bears the name of Ethelreda's daughter Weburga. Then there is a huge pillar, tacitly symbolizing a historic interruption in gender relations (although tradition has it that there were several additional abbesses after Werburga). Chronologically, the pillar coincides roughly with the period of Viking invasions in the ninth century, during which time, in 870, the abbey was destroyed. On the far side of the pillar, the embroidered cushions continue, but now they bear the names exclusively of abbots. ... Here at Ely, then, we have a clue about the origin of a world without women, which was apparently much more recent than the alleged ancient Greek antecedents of Western science culture. Proponents of the concept of patriarchy emphasize continuity in history rather than change, to demonstrate the persistent power of men over women. Certainly female subordination is a recurring fact of human history, and the presence of women in these centers of learning reflected neither a reversal of such gender domination nor an end to it. But it is important to remember that, within this overarching patriarchal pattern of gender relations, there have been significant variations of experience, variations that have shaped particular cultures and lives. It was only in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, in the wake of Gregorian reforms, that clerical marriage was decisively discouraged in the West. Whatever their paraclerical role, however, the presence within the clerical world of the wives of clergy is indisputable, and this presence would persist, along with clerical marriage, for a millennium. Chapter 2, Revivals =================== Although there was considerable variation in their physical structure and society and religious practice, double monasteries were distinguished by the close association of men and women. The men and women lived in adjoining or neighboring houses; they sometimes but not always shared a common church and a common cemetery, followed the same rule, participated together in common services, and obeyed the same leaders--male or female. [Double monasteries] also reflected the sustained belief in the androgynous ideal, which surfaced again and again in the wake of monastic revivals. In her study of double monasteries, Mary Bateson noted that "double monasteries arose in many countries and at many times as the natural sequel to an outburst of religious enthusiasm." If double monasteries foundered in the East, they flourished in the West. "In the West there was no systematic opposition of church and state as there was in the East." Compared with the Eastern Empire, which was within easy reach of the imperial and ecclesiastical authorities in Constantinople, the West was a frontier, a "wild" West beyond the reach of the centers of imperial power. The absence of an all-powerful Western secular authority, moreover, was coupled with the relative weakness of the Latin Church. This relative absence of church and state authority, and the disarray engendered by the great barbarian migrations, encouraged in the West an institutional independence and diversity unknown in the East, and provided a fertile ground for "moral experiments." Barbarian society, so called, also fostered a relative independence for the propertied clerical and warrior classes from centralized authority, an independence rooted in the landowning family. ... changes in Germanic law guaranteed women greater rights to inherit, own, and administer property. Visigoths and Burgundian laws were especially liberal in this regard... but Frankish, Alemannian, and Bavarian laws also gave wives and widows enlarged property rights. If the Irish of the early-medieval period were known for their independence, their ascetic rigor, and their evangelical earnestness, they were known above all for their great learning. In this period, Ireland "was a veritable land of scholars... Her monasteries were world renowned as institutes of learning" and for centuries drew a stream of students from England and the continent. Here alone in the Christian West, scholarship had continued uninterrupted from the fourth century, and Irish scholars were unrivaled in their command of Greek and their knowledge of classical and early church literature. Irish double monasteries carried forth this learned tradition, for women as well as men. According to Eckenstein, Bede's accounts of English monasteries indicate "how naturally he felt it to be that the role of a settlement should pass from mother to daughter," and that it was the Anglo-Saxon custom for double monasteries to be headed by an abbess. The distinguished double monasteries of the seventh and eighth centuries fell into decline and all but disappeared in the following centuries, in the wake of Viking invasions and a succession of monastic reform movements. Although no longer a part of the monastic mainstream, double monasteries reappeared briefly during the religious revival of the twelfth century. Chapter 3, Saints: The Ascent of Clerical Asceticism A world without women did not simply emerge, it was constructed. ... it was brought about through the rise of clerical asceticism within the church. As we have seen, the early Christianity no doubt reflected ancient traditions and ideas, it also held out an eschatological promise of gender equality and spiritual companionship which was seized upon by many Christians in their pursuit of new social relations. This ambiguous potential of the early church is well reflected in the contradictory statements of Saint Paul. On the one hand, in the interest of attracting a broad following, he announces the transcendence of social divisions, including those between the sexes; on the other hand, in the interest of unity and order, he admonishes church members to adhere to the norms of established authority, including the strict subordination of women to men. This mixed message was exploited by different people for different, and indeed contradictory, purposes during the early-Christian centuries. Beginning in the second century, however, with the emergence of clerical asceticism, we can identify certain incipient institutional and ideological developments which would not only reinforce the second side of this contradiction at the expense of the first, but would ultimately overcome the contradiction altogether in a world without women. ... to demarcate the boundaries between "us and them," the church fathers singled out for attack various features of the sects' allegedly misguided teaching and practice, such as the leadership roles of Gnostic women. Over against the blasphemies and permissiveness of sects, no orthodox Catholic women should teach, preach, baptize, exorcise, offer the Eucharist, or prophesy. Thus the mainstream church's limitation of women's roles can be understood in part as an aspect of its quest for self-definition--that is, for an identity that clearly distinguishes it from rival movements. And if sexual temptation posed a threat to androgynous asceticism, the greatest danger to clerical asceticism was more narrowly defined: the presence of women. Whereas the androgynous ideal had fostered a chaste mingling of men and women, the clerical ideal instead drove men into frightened flight from women. The inherited patriarchal assumptions of the household-based clergy had subordinated women; the new ideals of the ascetic clergy eliminated them [the women]. The monastic ideal reflected and reinforced the chief characters of the ascetic orthodox clergy; sexual renunciation, a disciplined bond of brotherhood, and, on both counts, distrust of women--in short, the characteristics of a military culture. Anthropologists have amply documented the ascetic, misogynist, and male homosocial orientations of warrior societies, marked as much by their distance from women as by their bonds between men. The imperial conversion [Constantine] resulted in what Philippe Cantamine has called a "sacralization of war"; by the beginning of the fifth century, an imperial edict excluded non-Christians from the Roman army. The reverse side of this process was the militarization of the church. The pacifism of Tertullian and Origen gave way to a new Christian defense of war against heretics and barbarians... Chapter 4, Fathers: Patristic Anxiety of Papal Agenda ===================================================== In the Pelagian controversy, and especially in his dispute with the married Pelagian Julian of Eclanum, Augustine was forced to formulate a full exposition of his new theology of grace. Augustine's theology both signaled the end of the traditional household church of married clergy and denied the eschatological promise of early-Christian asceticism. By unequivocally exalting virginity over marriage, Augustine paved the way for the enforcement of clerical celibacy. [Henry] Lea also suggests that, with the great enlargement of church property under imperial auspices, some churchmen lobbied for clerical celibacy as a way of eliminating clerical family inheritance and thus securing the "inalienability" of ecclesiastical possessions; certainly such a motive was acknowledged in later centuries. Chapter 5, Brothers: The Militarization of Monasticism ====================================================== The reduction in number of wives and the exclusion of concubines from control over property are reflected in the decline of female ownership and alienation of property in the second half of the ninth century, even though Frankish inheritance laws remained unchanged. From the beginning of the Carolingian dynasty, the church and state were bound together in mutual dependence and obligation. Just as the church sought by means of clerical celibacy to prevent the alienation of its property, through clerical marriage and inheritance, into the hands of the clergy, so the kings sought to prevent the loss of church property, through clerical marriage and inheritance, into the hands of the nobility. [royal versus noble interests] If religious practice was now a form of warfare, the church altar and the monastery were battlefields, and thus, as Martin of Tours had argued, no place for women. The militarization of the church, in short, was also a masculinization. The isolation of women from the mainstream of Carolingian clerical and monastic life had as its inevitable corollary their exclusion from the Carolingian world of learning and education. Indeed, Charlemagne's instructions on the promotion of scholarship expressly indicated that such work would be done only by men. The restriction that convents would educate only girls undoubtedly served to justify the exclusion of nuns from the mainstream of education and intellectual life... In short, the mainstream had become, to borrow Mary O'Brien's felicitous phrase, the "malestream." Whatever the motives of her accusers, however, Gerberta was in fact executed as a witch. According to Wemple, "this is the first known instance in the Latin West of witchcraft being used as a legal ground for the execution of a woman." Chapter 6, Priests: The Monasticization of the Church ===================================================== The clerical reforms of the Carolingian dynasty were largely eroded by the close of the ninth century. The spirit that had inspired those reforms, however, Benedictine monasticism, remained alive. Indeed, the self-sustaining monasteries, though shorn of royal patronage and protection and forever embattled in this time of troubles, survived as oases of Carolingian continuity under aristocratic auspices. Knights were men. Like the Carolingian reform upon which it was grounded, the Cluniac reform was masculine to the core and all but ignored women. Cluny thus contributed significantly to the decline of female monasticism that was to mark the tenth-century monastic reform movement. The monasticization of the church commenced in earnest, however, with the coronation of King Henry II's cousin, Bishop Bruno of Toul, as Pope Leo IX in 1049. "A keen supporter of the Cluniac monastic reform, [Leo] at once began to reform the church"; immediately after his ascension, at the Easter Synod of 1049, "celibacy was enforced on all the clergy..." Thus the initiator of the papal reform movement, Leo IX, had himself been a warrior-bishop and continued to lead military campaigns as pope. It was actually Gregory who first came up with the idea of a holy military crusade. "Twenty years before the First Crusade," Southern points out, "Pope Gregory VII had suggested a way in which the knighthood could be rescued from the radical defects attaching to its human and sinful origin, by dedication to the service of Saint Peter." ... the First Crusade against Islam was proclaimed by Gregory's immediate successor, the ardent reformer--and Cluniac monk--Pope Urban II. The revival of learning in the cathedral schools of Europe, which spawned the medieval university, was itself an instrument of the reform movement. Indeed, it was no accident that the new universities emerged at the very moment when the clergy was finally forced to become celibate, when the ecclesiastical world without women had at last been secured. Thus was created the most powerful and enduring men's club in history. Chapter 7, Bachelors: The Scholastic Cloister ============================================= By the end of the twelfth century, the papal-supported clerical ascetic reform movement against simony, clerical marriage, and the heretical vestiges of androgynous asceticism had all but swept away the material and ideological supports of future female participation in the mainstream world of learning. As never before, educated women were on the outside looking in. From the thirteenth century onward, "there was no suitable outlet for their great abilities and no satisfaction for their spiritual and intellectual yearnings." In 1078, Gregory VII adapted earlier Carolingian education reforms to papal purposes, ordering that "all bishops were to have the arts of letters taught in their churches..." The remarkable growth and fame of the episcopal schools in the eleventh and twelfth centuries marked the beginning of a new educational era, with the shift of the chief locus of medieval learning from male monastic schools ... to the cathedral schools... In the twelfth century the First and Second Lateran Councils of 1123 and 1139 ... forbade ordination of married men, thereby creating once and for all a clerical world without women. "This ecclesiastical character of the pre-university education should be remembered," Rashdall insisted, "as the first of the conditions which determined... the form of the intellectual movement out of which the universities grew and the shape of the university system itself." Thus the monastic ideals that had engulfed the church and its cathedral schools had come to characterize as well the new European culture of learning. As was the case with the Cluniac monasteries, this military aspect of the university served the psychological needs of the noble-born students to ritualize and thereby sublimate their knightly spirit--in intellectual rather than liturgical warfare. Only now [in the thirteenth century], with the European rediscovery, via the Arabs, of the entire corpus of Aristotle, did the misogyny of this essentially monastic culture gain the classical, naturalistic, seemingly scientific legitimacy that would perpetuate it for centuries to come. [Aristotle asserted that women were inferior to men.] "Since i was born a girl...," she [Christine de Pisan] wrote in 1400, "I could not inherit that which others take from the precious spring [of knowledge], more by custom than by right. If justice were king, neither female nor male would lose, but mostly, I am certain, custom reigns, rather than justice, and for that reason, in every way I have been unable by lack of learning, to gather any of this most precious treasure, concerning which custom I am displeased, since if things were otherwise I presume I should be rich, full to the brim of treasure taken at the fountain... [regarding the slander and blame of women:] Although you have seen such things in writing, you have not seen them with your eyes [and hence ought not believe] that which thou feelest not, nor see not, nor know other than by a plurality of strange opinions. The books that so sayeth [slandering women], women made them not." Chapter 8, Revelation in Nature =============================== However some historians might retrospectively characterize western science as a secular enterprise, it was always in essence a religious calling, more a continuation of than a departure from Christian tradition. To their own minds, the early devotees of science were not precursors of a secular future but heirs to the Christian past, which which they were obsessed. "One of the most dramatic changes brought about by the Protestant Reformation," Wisner observed, "was the replacement of celibate priests by married pastors with wives and families." In 1539, Henry VII mandated the publication and wide availability of the vernacular Bible, thereby fostering religious development throughout the realm, including among women of the middle and lower classes. Apparently the effort of this reform quickly extended "far beyond the King's intentions," and four years later an Act of Parliament formally restricted access to the Scriptures along class and gender lines. Aristocratic men and women were still allowed to read the Bible in private, but only men were permitted to read from it aloud to the assembled household. Men of the merchant class remained free to read the Scriptures in private, but their wives and daughters could no longer share that privilege. Among the lower ranks of society, both men and women alike were denied the right to read the Bible. Such restrictive legislation was difficult to enforce, however, especially at a time of mounting religious enthusiasm. The principle obstacle to first-hand knowledge of the Bible remained not law but literacy. Chapter 9, The Scientific Restoration ===================================== Women, meanwhile, in the wake of the Catholic Counter-Reformation and the consolidation of the Protestant churches, were increasingly being identified with heresy, as witches and enthusiasts (even while women woman were gaining momentary entry into the cultural mainstream.) Thus, as so often in the near and distant Christian past, the ready identification of diverse social and intellectual movements with women offered the orthodox a sure and time-honored sign of heresy. The sixteenth and seventeenth century connection between witchcraft and heresy, which fueled the period's unprecedented witch-craze, drew its inspiration from the earlier association between women and heresy. According to the church concept of witchcraft, witches were women. This feminization of witchcraft was but the reverse side of the demonization of women by the clerical world without women. It is striking to note in this regard, that the only place in Europe in which a masculine word was used for "witchcraft" was Iceland, the one country where clerical celibacy had never been accepted, even among the higher clergy. A trans-European exercise in exorcism, the witch-hunt also offered authorities convenient means of expropriating land, property, and knowledge from vulnerable widows, healers, and midwives. Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Germany and Italy witnessed thousands of executions of women. In some German cities, executions averaged two a day; 900 women were killed in a single year in Würzberg, and over 1,000 around Como. In the late sixteenth century, this wave of gender-bound genocide swept through France. In Trier, two villages were left with only one woman each; in Toulouse, the old Cathar stronghold, 400 women were murdered in one day. ... the judicial records reveal two essential facts about the accused witches [in England]: they were poor, and they were usually women. In the person of the witch, the female practitioner of popular magic, like the female religious enthusiast, became identified with heresy, and now, as heretics, the witch and the enthusiast became practically indistinguishable. Indeed, as Ashworth has suggested, the Jesuits were perhaps really "the first true scientific society." If so, the order established a clear cultural pattern for such scientific organizations, only already well reflected in all clerical academic institutions... For Mersenne, the mechanistic philosophy, which purged nature of its own spirits and hence any imminent meaning, made possible the orthodox reappropriation of nature. Nature would become a divinely ordered domain, fixed in its behavior by externally imposed natural laws to be discovered only by the proper authorities. The idea held similar appeal for Mersenne's friend and former Jesuit schoolmate Descartes. The supreme antianimist, Descartes armed the reconceptualization of the universe as a grand divine mechanism whereby all spirits would be effectively driven from nature to the safe confines of the mind. As an exclusively male retreat, the Royal Society represented the continuation of the clerical ascetic culture, now reinforced by what might be called a scientific asceticism. .. it was the layman Isaac Newton who epitomized both the mechanistic philosophy and the ascetic scientist, the twin orthodoxies of the renewed world without women. In essence, the triumph of mechanism as Mersenne had hoped, signaled the reclericalization of natural philosophy. Now, in the wake of a religious and philosophical revival which had identified God with nature and had thereby afforded people a more immediate connection with God through nature itself, without clerical intervention, the re-establishment of orthodoxy required a new form of mediation between mankind and nature. Linked closely to religious institutions, the emergent scientific establishment constituted in effect a new layer of ecclesiastical (but increasingly lay) "clergy," interposed between mankind and nature, and thus between mankind and God. Chapter 10, Women in a World Without Women ========================================== In its religious aspect, then, early-nineteenth-century America was remarkably reminiscent of earlier periods of Christian revival, going back to the dawn of Christianity itself. Like the earlier episodes of religious ferment, this revival too spawned a movement for popular education. "Few people viewed science and religion as enemies before the Civil War," Ann Brande has recently pointed out. This other force [that pried open the world without women] was capitalist enterprise, increasingly dependent upon a reliable work force and a ready supply of useful knowledge which could be put to productive and pecuniary advantage. [The new self-consciously "revolutionary" masters of industry" pressured the established institutions to create schools of industrial science, founded new technical institutions devoted to such purpose, and supported popular "democratic" efforts to develop public institutions for training in the useful arts--all the while railing vehemently against the backwardness of the established clerical and "monastic" institutions. In their quest for a disciplined and able work force, moreover, they welcomed the enrollment of women, viewing them either as just so much more potential labor, or, better, as cheaper labor... Finally, they made common cause with the pioneers of women's education, lending material support to their efforts and securing in turn their considerable energies, religious and otherwise, for the battle against the "backward" institutions. It was this unlikely alliance that eventually rendered women's access to higher education and science an enduring reality. The new obstacles confronted by women in science were not unique to science but, rather, reflected a more general academic and professional backlash against the advances of women. In 1873, the Harvard physicist Edward H. Clarke had published his popular book Sex in Education, which asserted that women's health, and especially their reproductive capacity, suffered as a consequence of the mental strains required by higher learning. Ideologically and culturally, this new "main thrust of science" was all too familiar. As professional scientists legitimized themselves as society's sole authorities in the understanding of life, nature, and the cosmos (and a now largely unspoken God), they assumed the "clerical" mantle of secular society. Displacing the now diminished clergy at center stage, they nevertheless carried forward their predecessors' proclivities for a world without women. Epilogue ======== The word "scientist" first appeared in a review of a scientific book written by a woman. William Whewell, master of Trinity College, coined the new word in 1834 in his glowing, albeit anonymous, review of Mary Somerville's On The Connection of the Physical Sciences. Somerville tried to establish some underlying unifying principles and hence a common identity for practitioners in the various fields of natural philosophy. Whewell proposed the term "scientist" in the same spirit, to fulfill what he believed to be a pressing need; he noted that the members of the recently established British Association For the Advancement of Science had felt themselves handicapped "by the want of any name by which we can designate the students of knowledge of the material world collectively... There was no general term by which these gentlemen could describe themselves with reference to their pursuits." As Whewell assumed, and Somerville understood all too well, this new collective identity, like the word invented to name it, had a decidedly masculine aspect. "Science was not yet professionalized," her [Somerville's] biographer Elizabeth Patterson pointed out. "At that date no formal course of training had yet been designed, and scientific men--safe from economic or professional threat from women--were cordially welcoming to serious students be they male or female." ... Somerville was awarded a civil-list pension; her book was made a standard text for advanced students at Cambridge University...; and a bust of her was commissioned and put on prominent display by the Royal Society (still the only bust of a woman ever owned by the society). But, like so many women before and after her, Somerville understood all too well the gendered boundaries of science. Her book was used as a required text in a university in which she could not teach nor have her daughter study. Her bronze likeness was placed in the Royal Society's Great Hall, from which she herself was barred. Mary Somerville was a staunch advocate of women's rights, especially, of higher education for women. To what extend might the overriding scientific obsession with infallible universal knowledge and artificial instrumentality reflect a long-standing clerical effort to subdue the feminine in society and nature, in order to effect man's recovery from the fall--"as if he had never sinned"? Such a bold quest was depicted, as yet without equal, by Mary Shelley in her sci-fi novel Frankenstein; she aptly rooted its passion and excitement in male loneliness, desperation, and horror. author: Noble, David F. detail: LOC: Q130 .N63 tags: book,gender,history,non-fiction title: A World Without Women Tags ==== book gender history non-fiction