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# 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.
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title: A World Without Women
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