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From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1

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Marilyn French
Marilyn French

Marilyn French, born on November 21, 1929 and died on May 2, 2009, was a prominent American author known for her feminist perspective in her works. Her writings focused on the status of women in society, family, and sexuality, with notable works including 'The Feminine Mystique'. more

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“The first laws we know about that make females inferior Uruk (Sumer). These laws list a new crime - adultery - that only women could commit. And in Sumer, a knew occupation - prostitution - is devised by the temple priests. The coincidence (in the same culture if not at the same moment) of an assertion of female inferiority, the criminalisation of free sexuality in women, and the use of female sexuality in commercial transactions benefiting men demonstrates the new male vision of women: as sexual objects to be possessed and used by men.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“Historians often debate whether women have more rights and capabilities in religious or secular, Catholic or Protestant, capitalist or communist, or militaristic or humanitarian states. Such debates assume that the oppression of women is incidental to another aspect of culture. All early states deprived women of their status as human beings and of the rights men possessed. Religious states like India used religion to justify this constriction; China's guiding secular philosophy, Confucianism, constricted women as much as India's religious laws.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“Both men and women collude in their oppression when they accept their societies myths, but many believe the myths and propaganda teaching male superiority. Laws forcing women into marriage by denying them any other avenue of support, or allowing them access to power only through sons, co-opt their loyalty. Women may even accept constrictions if it puts them in the superior group, makes them "ladies" in worlds that despise women.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“Unlike men, women have not, until the feminist movement had sex based solidarity the isolation is not incidental; solidarity is what men have feared most in women. To prevent its formation, every state we know about separated women from each other, imprisoning them in the home, where they were under the direct surveillance of husbands or kin. When women began to ally with each other and to politic during the French revolution, men barred female assembly. In India today, men suspiciously eye women who gather at wells or pumps. Women are afraid to speak to each other, although no law forbids it. Simply making men central, by making them necessary to survival, is enough to set women against each other.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“In 381 Theodosius I organised the Council of Constantine, which proclaimed the doctrine of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are of the same substance, consubstantial, one person comprising god. The doctrine went even further than Greek myth in eliminating the female from the godhead. The Christian father-god utters the Word, his son, and procreates through language, entirely without a woman. The holy spirit is born from the mutual love of son and father. This creation is not incest because bodies are not involved. The Trinity, understandably called a mystery, lies at the heart of Christianity. It achieves two major goals: it posits a realm that transcends the physical world, in which reality is made by the word. History is filled with rules who claim divinity to justify their superiority, but not until Christianity and the sacralising of the notion that language creates reality does the debate between appearance and reality begin to pervade Western literature and thought. [...] the Trinity procreates without the female - without body, blood, ooze, without nature, and superior to it. Generations of clerical writers, wishing that women did not exist, lament that this sort of procreation was possible only to god. The church defined the divine realm in opposition to the earthly one, celebrating birth through utterance, death as life, the overcoming of sex and body, a realm where nothing changes and power and justice are one.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“Everywhere, men base their claim to superiority on a connection with the deity that women lack. During the period of state formation, women lost the right to perform rites of worship. This denial led to the devaluation of female children and the exclusion of women from property rights.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
Create image