The First Sex - Synopsis - The Tragedy of Western Women

The Tragedy of Western Women

The final part of The First Sex focused on the period since Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire in 313 A.D. Gould Davis aimed with this part of the book to show how Semitic myths of male supremacy were preached by the early Church Fathers to a Pagan people who would not believe them and did not take them seriously until Constantine became emperor. Gould Davis believed that the writings of Paul in the New Testament were used by the Church to justify violence against women, leading throughout the Middle Ages to a level of cruelty and barbarity unheard of in previous ages. Gould Davis believed that once Christianity had attained civil power, the demotion of women and the "terrible materialism that marks and mars our present civilization" were inevitable. She argued that the influence of Mary as a "Goddess" grew as the violent imposition of Christianity erased the ancient Goddess religion. Quoting Jules Michelet, Gould Davis argued that women by the fifteenth century were treated so badly by men of all social classes that they were seen as "worse than beasts". The Church, she said, approved of this domestic violence, and brutality to women extended beyond families to the priesthood, who cited the Bible to justify themselves.

In Gould Davis's view, the status of women was only improved briefly by the Reformation and a flowering of learned women during the sixteenth century. Afterward, Puritanism's witch-hunts and a strengthened papacy placed women back in the same level of submission, and women were tortured and studied in the most prurient manner for "witch marks". Millions of people, she said, most of whom were women, died by burning, drowning, hanging, or from torture during the Catholic and Protestant Inquisitions. In Gould Davis's view, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries marked the first time Western women accepted their own inferiority, and before Mary Wollstonecraft nobody spoke up for them. Gould Davis made a special effort to show how the minds of women were subjugated during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

In the last part of The First Sex, Gould Davis attempted to show the beliefs used to subordinate women to be myths, contending that in reality women are stronger, and physically, mentally, and morally more than equal to men; and that the survival of humanity depends on the restoration of women to their former position as rulers of society. Gould Davis argued that patriarchal civilization is destroying itself, and that only the values of the "matriarchates" can save humanity, because a society based on the mechanistic, Cartesian duality of dominant and violent males leads inevitably to a focus on technology and gadgetry rather than on loving human relationships.