This speech was delivered on December 6, 1997, at the 20th annual convention of the Freedom From Religion Foundation in Tampa, Florida.
Sometimes, when I speak of the great Mother Goddess religions of antiquity, a Christian will say they must have been evil because they used blood sacrifices, including human sacrifice, to appease angry deities and win forgiveness of sins. My answer is, what in the world do you think the sacrifice of Jesus was all about?
Jesus was, and is, called the sacrificial lamb. His death was supposed to mitigate the anger of a god no less bloodthirsty than his forerunners. Directly copying the later wine/grain communions of Osiris, Dionysius, Mithra, Attis, and other pre-Christian dying saviors, Jesus was and is symbolically cannibalized by worshippers seeking rebirth in his sacrificial blood. Human sacrifice is the very core of Christian theology.
We find this theme of divine son-sacrificing fathers in many mythologies, with the biblical legend of Abraham and Isaac representing a transition from human to animal sacrifices. Myths suggest that Freud’s notion of Oedipal rivalry as a son’s jealous hostility toward a father was really the reverse, originating in adult males’ jealousy of the children who took women’s attention away from them. In several species of higher mammals, including the human one, mothers protect their children from attack by adult males. Patriarchy, however, managed to suppress women’s power to oppose child abuse, and even enshrined such abuse in religious symbols and in male mottoes like “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” The Christian father god was cruelest of all, not only to his allegedly “dearly beloved” son but to all his earthly children, for whom he devised the most sadistic hell ever envisioned
We must realize that ritual bloodletting was probably not part of the original religion of the Great Mother. The custom arose with the late advent of male gods who were trying to imitate the natural female mysteries of life- giving, painlessly flowing, lunar-cycled blood of creation–women’s blood–in a time when women were believed to possess all the reproductive magic, creating their children from the moon-blood of the womb, and the Goddess was said to have created the whole universe in the same way, all by herself.
Men had no such magic obviously linked to celestial phenomena. If a tribe was to derive “life” from male blood, then, the men decided, some male creature would have to die to provide it. Hence the many savior gods, who were eaten in both human and animal form for centuries before they were eucharistically reincarnated in wine and wheat. Feasts of symbolic or real flesh-eating were supposed to unite male worshippers in a divine blood relationship, because the original relationships of blood passed only through the female line. The earliest human clans were only “motherhoods,” with no known physical connection between offspring and fathers. We still speak of family relationships as those of “blood,” recalling that universal primitive belief that all children were formed of the mysterious blood magically clotted into human flesh within a mother’s womb.
In Christian history, the real human sacrifices have been women. More than nine million women were sacrificed to the Christian god during the so-called Burning Times. Women’s bodies, minds, and fortunes were sacrificed to that god’s church for many centuries. Women’s legal freedoms, reproductive capacities, and intellectual accomplishments continue to be sacrificed to male interests as a result of attitudes promulgated by that god’s church.
Modern American women are justly proud of the social and political progress they have made in the last century; but many enlightened women –even women who call themselves feminists–are still locked into a religious worldview that cannot serve, and has never served, the feminine spirit.
Nearly every American woman now alive was taught in her childhood that God is male. She was indoctrinated into one or another brand of Judeo-Christianity. As Ernestine L. Rose remarked more than a century ago, “All children are atheists, and were religion not inculcated into their minds they would remain so.”1 We are not born to believe in a deity of either sex; but we are born to need the devoted attention of a parent, to bond with a larger, benevolent, competent person who will take care of us, a person whose nurturing behavior is essential to our lives. For the vast majority of human beings, this person is Mother; so, for the vast majority of human history on this planet, the only recognized deity was the Mother Goddess.
Our mothers and grandmothers may have been strong or spiritual women, powerful in their individual hearts and minds. But from the advent of patriarchal religions, roughly five thousand years ago, the images of female divinity and power have declined to the point where our mothers and grandmothers had no such images to pass on to us. Yet it has been only a very small fraction–one six-hundredth–of our three million years on this earth that father gods have been postulated in any form at all. The Judeo-Christian god is such a Johnny-come-lately that his adherents have had to turn much of their attention to discrediting his greatest and oldest rival, the Great Mother.
Many contemporary scholars have shown that our traditional religious organizations have been dedicated to denial or demonization of the Goddess, all the way from biblical times to the present. Bible writers referred to the great Mother Goddess of the Middle East as an abomination (2 Kings 23:13), even though it is clearly acknowledged in the New Testament that “all Asia and the world” still worshipped her (Acts 19:24). Even Pope John Paul II has issued warnings against what he called “the cult of the Earth Mother.” During all the centuries between the former and the latter, no heresy so aroused patriarchal religious authorities to heights of vituperation and violence as any hint of feminine divinity. Epiphanius, the fourth-century bishop of Salamis, indeed defined every heresy as “a vulgar woman,” and “female conceit and womanish madness,” existing because women are “easily mistaken, fallible and poor in intelligence.”2
There is no doubt that the rampant sexism of western civilization is the product of its religion. Fathers of the church were bitterly opposed to women, who had been seen so long as made in the image of the Goddess. St. Augustine declared that his god made man to rule, and woman to obey. St. Anthony said, “When you see a woman, consider that you face not a human being, but the devil himself. The woman’s voice is the hiss of the snake.” Other theologians insisted that no savage beast is as harmful as a woman; that the social subjection and enslavement of women is essential to a Christian salvation; that “although the dragon is fierce and the asp is cunning, woman is the malice of both.”3
Christian authorities blamed women for the natural fact that some day their own precious selves would have to die, and their own allegedly “sure and certain” promise of resurrection didn’t seem to do much to alleviate their fear. The Fathers insisted that the very existence of death in the world was Eve’s fault. She “conceived by the serpent and brought forth death,” and in her “the whole female race transgressed.”4 Tertullian added that every woman is another Eve, the devil’s gateway, endlessly guilty of bringing death even upon the son of God.5 None of the church fathers seem to have had courage enough to suggest that God was the one really responsible for his son’s death, since he had decreed it, as a peculiarly ugly and cumbersome way of inducing himself to forgive sinners–particularly since, even after the sacrifice, the sinners were still condemned to hell anyway. What then was the point of such fatherly cruelty?
Certainly women would never have evolved a religion so cruel and so obsessed with death, but the sexism that vilified the life-affirming, nurturant sex and deprived women of basic human rights was a result of the unremitting efforts of churchmen.6 The first generation of American proto-feminists understood this well enough. Matilda Joslyn Gage wrote, more than a century ago, “The most stupendous system of organized robbery known, has been that of the church towards woman, a robbery that has not only taken her self-respect but all rights of person; the fruits of her own industry; her opportunities of education; the exercise of her own judgment; her own conscience, her own will.”6 She pointed out that “it is the church and not the state, to which the teaching of woman’s inferiority is due: it is the church which primarily commanded the obedience of woman to man. It is the church which stamps with religious authority the political and domestic degradation of woman.”7
In 1919, Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner said, “The independence of women and the equalization of their rights have come only little by little; every step has been gained in defiance of the Church and the teachings of the Scriptures, and in no way through their aid.”8
More than twenty years earlier, the redoubtable Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote: “The Bible and Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women’s emancipation. . . . The whole tone of Church teaching in regard to women is, to the last degree, contemptuous and degrading. . . . The religious superstitions of women perpetuate their bondage more than all other adverse influences.”9 Stanton spent many years exposing the biblical foundations of our civilization’s woman-hatred in The Woman’s Bible, which would have been even more devastating if she had known some of the facts about our “good book” that scholars have unearthed more recently.
The early feminists were groping toward a nonpatriarchal spirituality that would support their human rights; but they got only as far as rejection of the patriarchy that they perceived as their ideological burden. They had little to put in its place. It would take a new generation of feminist scholars to demonstrate how the patriarchy attacked and finally managed to overthrow ancient established religions of the Goddess, the Mother- Creatress, who preceded male gods in every mythology of the world. That ideological battle extended over thirty centuries and caused some of the worst manifestations of man’s inhumanity to woman, including the Inquisition’s five-century reign of terror and male political usurpation of nature’s most sacred bond, between a mother and her offspring, creating a society in which interpersonal violence is considered routine.
Nineteenth-century American feminists allied themselves with the wave of rationalism then stemming from the Enlightenment, moving toward the new Freethought. Their leaders openly declared that the Judeo-Christian god is a myth, and Eve’s alleged responsibility for sin and death is a myth. They declared that men had been putting women down for two millennia on the basis of a primitive legend that made no sense. Stanton sweepingly rejected churchmen who had been cursing women on Eve’s account throughout European history. She said, “Take the snake, the fruit-tree, and the woman from the tableau, and we have no fall, no frowning Judge, no Inferno, no everlasting punishment–hence no need of a Savior. Thus the bottom falls out of the whole Christian theology.”10
Stanton put her finger on the reason why today’s fundamentalists are still insisting that their children be taught the literal truth of the Eden myth, even against every known principle of geology, paleontology, archeology, zoology, prehistory, and common sense. So-called “creation science” (surely an oxymoron) demands that the story of original sin be preserved at all costs. Without it, God’s execution of his son becomes just another archetypal symbol of a jealous father’s propensity to child abuse, leaving the believer without any compelling reason to be Christian at all. As a result of such fundamentalism, many people are straitjacketed into a crude, primitive worldview that reduces Mother Earth’s 4.5 billion years to a mere 5,000, and obliges the children of the Jurassic Park decade to believe that the dinosaurs’ 165 million years of existence somehow never happened, not to mention the whole two billion years of living creatures evolving since the earth became habitable to them. Such ideas represent a pinnacle of hubris, coming from creatures less than a mere three million years old, and whose patriarchal creator gods were postulated only in the most recent one six-hundredth of that time.
Having been misled by the biblical god’s directive to “subdue” the earth and “have dominion over” every other living thing (Genesis 1:28), patriarchal thinkers unfortunately ignored ecological considerations, with which the modern feminists’ new personifications of Mother Earth are more compatible. In the Bible and elsewhere, women have been equated with the female earth and similarly viewed as subduable by the heavenly “fathers” created by men in their own image. There has never been a Father Earth or a Father Nature. We are returning to the recognition of the Great Mother Goddess not as a transcendent deity but as a lively symbol of our home planet, of whose substance we are made, and to whom we owe all we can know of life, beauty, and enlightenment.
Some people understand the Goddess as metaphor for the life force in general, but see little difference from the god concept, other than a change of pronouns. If both god and Goddess are constructs of the human imagination, they ask, how can one be any more valid than the other?
The crucial answer is that the validity of a religious image depends not on its empirically ascertainable reality (or lack of it), but on its effect on human behavior and acculturization. There is no doubt that the Goddess image induced more tolerant, peaceful, caring societies than the god image, whose worshippers usually tended toward war, violence, and puritanical hierarchy.
Nowadays one hears various religionists claiming that their churches promoted women’s rights and reform movements like those of the nineteenth-century suffragists. Actually, the reverse was true. Susan Wixon writes, “In the face of a history replete with abuse, cruelty, scorn and dogmatic insolence toward woman, the Christian church still has the audacity and impudence to declare that it has been her friend . . . . It says that what she is today she owes to the church. A blacker falsehood was never uttered.”11
American churches firmly supported all the political, economic, and social inequalities that plagued women. What people today seldom realize is that the suffragists had more at stake than winning the vote. For example, 19th-century American women were legally barred from signing contracts, making wills, or even keeping property inherited from their own families. Everything belonged to their husbands, including their children, who could be willed away or sold into bondage by their father, whether their mother consented or not. When a wife worked for wages, all her earnings belonged to her husband. When a wife died, her husband automatically took everything; but when a husband died without a will, in many states the widow was allowed to live in her home for only forty days. The home was then sold. The widow received only one- third of its value, and was sent to live with the nearest male relative. If both husband and wife died together, the estate went to the husband’s family.
Widows and single women who earned money were forced to pay taxes, even though they couldn’t vote. When religious women began speaking out against slavery in the 1800s, the most influential churches in New England demanded a ban against the abolitionists, not because they wanted to free the slaves but because they “set aside the laws of God by welcoming women to their platform and allowing them to speak in public.”12 Abe Lincoln’s government “of the people, by the people, for the people” was actually a government of men, by men, for men. Women had no part in it.
Churchmen found plenty of historical precedent to support their anti-woman viewpoints. The revered Saint Thomas Aquinas was a rich source, saying for example that every woman should have a man as her personal master, because her intellect is no better than that of a child or an imbecile; and fathers deserve more love than mothers, because they are “the active principle of generation” and mothers are only passive vessels.13 Obviously it was inconceivable to Saint Thomas that women might take an active part in “the act of generation,” or that women might even be as capable of experiencing orgasms as men. An amazing degree of sexual ignorance is another of our Christian legacies.
In his popular Emile, 1762, Jean Jacques Rousseau insisted that every woman’s primary characteristic must be “sweetness,” and that she must learn to submit without complaint to even the most abusive husband, however wrong or unjust his actions might be. Throughout history, abusive men often cited the Bible as their justification for torturing women. At the Fifth National Women’s Rights Convention in 1854, the Reverend Henry Grew had the effrontery to stand up and say that “the Holy Scriptures show that it is clearly the will of God that man should be superior in power and authority to woman . . . . No lesson is more plainly and frequently taught in the Bible than woman’s subjection.”14
A Catholic theologian has written that the church’s long-held insistence that Christianity meant liberation for women is a false claim. On the contrary, the church taught that wives should be their husbands’ slaves. Even reform movements within the church aimed at repressing and silencing women, depriving them of human rights. “The whole of church history adds up to one long arbitrary, narrow-minded masculine despotism over the female sex. And this despotism continues today.”15
The fact is that women’s causes during the last century have been served by the increasing rejection of Judeo-Christian mythology that accompanied the rise of scientific rationalism. Joseph McCabe says, “The world grows more humane as it discards Christianity. That is the subtle grievance of the modern priest.” But the not-so-subtle fear of the modern priest is that women will finally abandon the churches in numbers large enough to create an effective boycott. As Marilla Ricker stated, “Many of the churches couldn’t be run three weeks without the women. They do all the work, for which they get no credit.”16
Robert Ingersoll wrote:
“Priests, theologians, have taken advantage of women–of their gentleness, their love of approbation. They have lived upon their hopes and fears. Like vampires, they have sucked their blood. They have made them responsible for the sins of the world. They have taught them the slave virtues–meekness, humility, implicit obedience. They have fed their minds with mistakes, mysteries, and absurdities. They have endeavored to weaken and shrivel their brains, until to them, there would be no possible connection between evidence and belief–between fact and faith . . . . Superstition, the mother of those hideous twins, Fear and Faith, from her throne of skulls, still rules the world, and will until the mind of woman ceases to be the property of priests.”17
Barbara Simpson confidently expected that “As women’s minds are freed by education, the church will disappear, and high time too. It is entirely a man-made institution, even if it is woman supported, and I think that in the future every thinking woman will congratulate herself that her sex had no finger in that pie.”18
To their credit, a few of the more honest clergymen are beginning to admit their organizations’ complicity in the cultural tragedy of sexism. Father Leo Booth wrote: “All women have been sexually abused by the Bible teachings, and institutions set on its fundamentalist interpretations. There would be no need for the women’s movement if the church and Bible hadn’t abused them.”19
Secretly realizing that Woman is the true foundation of the human family, and trying to lure vacillating women back into the fold, some Christian fundamentalists give a lot of lip service to “traditional family values.” But this phrase is just a new code name for the male-dominated patriarchal family. It is heard often from “fundamentalist and other religious groups who are still told by their leaders that the ranking of man over woman is divinely ordained.”20 Feminists may joke about the Eden myth that God finally got it right on his second attempt at humanness; but the woman who takes the myth literally is trapped in a belief system that will not allow her much self-esteem.
We now know that the primary sex is the female one. We know that every fetus begins as a female, and it is the egg rather than the spermatozoon that contributes most to the new life. We know that every young mammal depends on its mother for survival, and mammalian females inherit the genetic propensities for caring and sharing that originally created families, clans, civilizations. We know it was originally the women who made laws, gave judgments, harnessed the forces of nature, and invented agriculture, pottery, shelters, medicine, calendars, writing, clothing, manufacture and many other civilized arts. We know it was the women who communicated with the divine, in ancient times, in ways that their men couldn’t understand, and who brought forth new life in ways that their men couldn’t imitate and deeply, obsessively envied. It was the women who mothered both sexes, and provided men with sexual “bliss” that was considered a foretaste of heaven. It was the women who developed ideas of divinity in the first place, tracing their mother-lines back to a birthgiving Creatress of the Universe.
Human history shows that the Goddess image helped to enhance human potential for peaceable cooperation, whereas the god image tended to enhance human capacity for violent competition. The loving, nurturing, sensual, body-centered, pragmatic feminine spirit would have considered killing rather than sexuality the worst of sins, would never have developed a cult of asceticism, and would have honored motherhood above all. The newer so-called “cult” of the Earth Mother has intrinsic appeal for women, as Marie Helene Laraque said at a Canadian Women’s Commission conference: “As women, we are particularly identified with our Mother Earth . . . we must respect her, care for her, love her. The churches must respect our religion. . . . the churches should ask our forgiveness.”21
Churches have not done so, of course; nor are they likely to do so as long as they can get away with concealing the historical truth from their female congregations. Observing the pious women of his day, historian Arnold Toynbee remarked, “Religion and its practices have consistently been one of women’s fiercest enemies . . . . The fact that many women do not realize this shows how thorough the brainwashing and intimidation have been.”22 Throughout the Christian era, men have been defining female weakness and passivity as attractive, and female strength or tough-mindedness as a hideous personal threat to their male egos. Many generations of women wishing to win male goodwill have played weak, played dumb, played bubbleheaded incompetence. Unfortunately they also played into the hands of men’s thinly disguised contempt, which was patronizing to their faces and degrading behind their backs. Man’s “respect” for the weak, clinging, vulnerable, passive woman has always been a fib, aimed at keeping her in her place, i.e., well below his own level of self-importance. According to Naomi Wolf, a similar fib is crippling young women today, the fib called postfeminism. It is said that young women don’t want to be called feminists any more because feminism is not considered sexy. She says, “It would be stupid and sad if the women of the near future had to fight the same battles all over again from the beginning just because of young women’s isolation from older women. It would be pathetic if young women had to go back to the beginning because we were taken in by an unoriginal 20-year campaign to portray the women’s movement as ‘not sexy’.”23
Blessed are the poor in spirit, runs the Christian teaching, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven; and the corollary is that they should be content with that pie-in-the-sky, and seek no kingdoms –or queendoms–on earth. Poor in spirit described orthodox Christianity’s ideal woman. But, as Emma Goldman said, heaven must be an awfully dull place if the poor in spirit live there. “How can anything creative, anything vital, useful, and beautiful come from the poor in spirit?”24
For a few moments, let us imagine a world as it might have been if women had not been kept poor in spirit or in body either; a world in which patriarchy never took hold, and the Mother Goddess had remained the ultimate image of divinity. What would women have made of the ethical, moral, and social aspects of civilization, left to follow their natural collective inclinations?
Imagine a world in which no child is ever born unwanted or unloved. No child is born to a mother too young, too poor, too busy, or too ignorant to care for it properly. Unwelcome births are prevented by routine use of birth control or abortion, which are considered women’s business, not to be dictated by any man. Consequently, no child is abused, neglected, or abandoned. Every pregnancy carried to term is the result of conscious planning and preparation by responsible adults. Every baby is welcomed with joy and tenderly nurtured. When women control their own reproductive functions, human populations do not outgrow the capacity of the environment to sustain them.
Imagine a world in which these loved and wanted children are raised gently without harsh punishments or implanted fears. They are not exposed to acts of violence masquerading as entertainment. They are not encouraged to play with imitation weapons or to indulge in games of aggression. They do not sit for hours in front of television sets watching cartoon creature–or human beings–smashing, shooting, and blowing each other up. They do not witness any murders, rapes, physical assaults. Such things are not considered enjoyable.
On the other hand, sexuality is not only considered enjoyable but is honored as a sacred ritual that puts humans in touch with a higher, warmer kind of interpersonal communication. Sexuality and sin are not linked in public consciousness.
Sensuality, in general, is freely enjoyed without guilt feelings. As young people grow into adolescence they are carefully trained in the right use of their sexual capacities. The ten percent of us who seem to be born with a homosexual orientation are freely permitted to take the route that seems natural to them, without censure or blame. Rape is unthinkable, because no man or woman is conditioned to associate sex with cruelty.
Imagine a world in which cooperative groups help each other raise the children, care for the sick and the aged, create the evolving culture, and do the work of the community. Imagine a world in which people are taught to help one another as readily as, in our society, they are taught to compete. Imagine a world in which no group, race, nation, color, or ethnic background is considered inferior to any other, but all are appreciated as authentic manifestations of human diversity; all people see each other as siblings, children of one Mother Earth. Imagine a world in which prejudice is unknown, and war unthinkable.
Imagine a world in which the unique, sentient lives of animals are as well respected as the unique, sentient lives of people; where no wild creature is ever killed for sport, and no domestic animal is abused. People do not use natural fur, ivory, horn, or other animal products that involve gratuitous slaughter or species endangerment. If animals are slain for meat, it is done humanely, without suffering, and no part of the carcass is wasted. Pets are cared for with competence and kindness, so that their lives and deaths are made as comfortable as possible.
Humans too can be assured of comfortable deaths. For cases of painful terminal illness, euthanasia is both legal and customary. Each person is granted unchallenged control of his or her own life, including the decision to end it. Like voluntary birthgiving, voluntary death is viewed as the rightful choice of a mature individual, to be supported and helped by others.
Imagine a world in which no one is very rich or very poor, but everyone has enough to live comfortably. Acquisitiveness and conspicuous consumption are not admired, but viewed as bad manners. Thus, envy and greed are rare. People work hard to win their neighbors’ respect, to express their own creativity, to enjoy the privilege of education, to add to human knowledge, to help others. Those who can’t work–the very old, the very young, and invalids–are lovingly cared for. The moral code represents usefulness and pleasure-giving as primary virtues, and causing unhappiness as the primary sin. “Do what you will,” say the teachers of ethics, “as long as you harm no one.” They say all acts of love and pleasure are righteous. People trust one another because no one has either reason or desire to hurt someone else.
In short, imagine a world where every person may enjoy what every good mother wishes for her child: a useful, happy life that develops her or his capacities to their full extent, and fosters positive, rewarding relations with others. If there be a religion in this imaginary world, it would be one that projects the maternal guardian spirit onto Mother Nature, Mother Earth, symbolizing the feminine powers of our own uniquely life-giving, life-sustaining planet. No punitive, demanding god would have a place there, but rather a metaphoric embodiment of the milk of human kindness, idealized as a supreme Goddess, not transcendent but immanent in the human heart.
Such is the world toward which women’s spirituality points as its Utopian goal–the only heaven we can ever really know. The way to achieve this heaven is surely not to keep sending prayers and praises into the void, in the fatuous belief that some god of this unthinkably vast universe has a male ego that requires our constant flattery. The way to achieve this heaven is to learn and respect the needs of our Mother Earth and all the life that she sustains.
Swami Vivekananda was devoted to the Great Mother under her Indian name of Kali Ma. Perceiving the rediscovery of her spirit by American women, he remarked that “Western women will be the salvation of the world.”25 Let us work together to make this prophecy come true.
Barbara G. Walker is the author of 21 books, including the landmark Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, The Skeptical Feminist, The Crone, Amazon, Women’s Rituals and Feminist Fairy Tales. Her ten books on knitting patterns and knitwear design are classics in the field. Some of her books have debunked New Age and traditional beliefs about crystals, minerals, and tarot. She has worked as a dance instructor, reporter, and freelance designer. In 1993 she was named “Humanist Heroine” by the American Humanist Association. In 1995 she received the “Women Making Herstory” award from New Jersey NOW. She has written numerous magazine articles and presented lectures on a variety of subjects of interest to women and rationalistic thinkers, and is widely recognized as one of the modern leaders of the women’s movement against religious traditionalism.
1. Gaylor, Annie Laurie (ed.) Women Without Superstition. Freedom From Religion Foundation, Madison, WI 1997, p. 82
2. Epiphanius, Panarion, c. 374 CE
3. Bufe, Charles (ed.) The Heretic’s Handbook of Quotations. Sharp Press, Tucson, AZ, 1988, pp. 124-125
4. Ashe, Geoffrey. The Virgin. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1976, pp. 178-179
5. Bullough, Vern L. The Subordinate Sex. University of Illinois Press, Chicago, IL 1973, p. 114
6. Walker, Barbara G. The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths And Secrets. San Francisco, CA 1983, pp. 921-927
7. Gaylor, op. cit., p. 218
8. Ibid., p. 332
9. Bufe, op. cit., pp. 121, 123, 210
10. Daly, Mary. Beyond God The Father. Beacon Press, Boston, 1973, p. 69
11. Gaylor, op. cit., p. 289
12. Gray, Carole. “Nineteenth-Century Women of Freethought.” In Free Inquiry, vol. 15, no. 2, Spring 1995, p. 33
13. Ranke-Heinemann, Uta. Eunuchs For The Kingdom of Heaven. P. Heinegg, trans. Doubleday, NY, 1990, p. 189
14. Starr, Tama. The “Natural Inferiority” of Women: Outrageous Pronouncements By Misguided Males. Poseidon, NY, 1991, pp. 122
