A-Infos (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria #468 - THE FATHER'S ENEMIES. - The Religious Institutionalization of Domination Over Women (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Exploring the Greek and biblical roots of women's status in the West, a 
structural fact emerges: Western culture has built its stability on the 
invention of "female guilt." If in Greek myth, Pandora opens the jar, 
unleashing evil into the world through unwary curiosity, in the biblical 
context, it is Eve who disrupts the divine order. Both myths express her 
responsibility not only for the origin of human suffering, but also for 
its very subjugation: if women are ontologically dangerous or weak, male 
domination ceases to be an abuse and becomes a necessity of public and 
moral order. The "law of the father" is cloaked in sacredness, becoming 
an irrevocable divine mandate against which any rebellion is, by 
definition, not only a crime but above all a sin. However, it was with 
the advent and development of the Christian churches, both Catholic and 
Protestant, that this "mythological guilt" transformed into political 
and institutional practice. Its biblical roots were exploited by 
centuries of domination that transformed submission into an 
authoritarian bureaucratic structure. In the Catholic world, the 
institutionalization of patriarchy occurred through a double maneuver: 
hierarchical exclusion and the mystification of the female figure. While 
on the one hand, the priesthood is shielded as an exclusively male 
attribute, reflecting the idea of a God-Father who speaks only through 
his sons, on the other, real women are crushed between the negative 
model of sinful Eve and the unattainable model of Mary, the Virgin 
Mother of the Son of God.

This dichotomy found its greatest expression in scholastic theology, 
where theologians like Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, codified 
women as "failed males" (mas occasionatus), naturally flawed beings who 
require male guidance to avoid error. On the other hand, Marian 
devotion, far from elevating the status of women, has sanctioned their 
political neutralization. Mary is the "slave of the Lord," a mother 
deprived of desire and the power of her own voice, whose only destiny is 
subordinate intercession. The confessional and canon law became the new 
courts where women's freedom was sacrificed on the altar of "feminine 
nature," defined by male theologians as fragile, emotional, and in need 
of constant protection.

With the Protestant Reformation, this control did not diminish, but 
rather changed form, becoming more widespread and domestic. While 
Catholicism offered monasticism as an alternative, albeit separate and 
controlled, to marriage, Luther and Calvin closed convents, eliminating 
the only space for women's intellectual, economic, and social autonomy. 
Women were "liberated" from the cloister only to be permanently walled 
up in the home: their sanctity no longer resided in mystical virginity 
or study, but in absolute obedience to their husband-pastor. 
Ecclesiastical patriarchy thus transformed into domestic patriarchy, 
where each home became a small church with an absolute sovereign: the 
father, and then the husband. Women lost every vestige of public space, 
relegated to the role of "priestess of the home," whose virtue coincided 
with their complete disappearance as individuals.

Despite these repressive apparatuses, the history of the Catholic world 
is marked by forms, even radical ones, of intellectual and community 
resistance that sought to undermine male power. If the Church attempted 
to wall off female thought, many women responded by imagining 
alternative worlds. This is the extraordinary case of Cristina da 
Pizzano, who, in her work The City of Ladies (1405), reversed the 
narrative of "guilt": starting precisely from a critique of those texts 
that depicted women as an error of nature, she symbolically constructed 
a fortified city where educated, active, and thoughtful women could live 
free from male violence. Alongside her were the Beguines, lay women in 
autonomous communities who ran hospitals and studied sacred texts 
outside the control of a husband or priest. Mysticism also became a 
political weapon: figures such as Hildegard of Bingen and Catherine of 
Siena used the authority of "vision" to speak on equal terms with popes 
and emperors, transforming the renunciation of the body and social role 
into an act of intellectual autonomy derived from divine inspiration.

Unfortunately, the institutionalization of guilt transformed at the end 
of the Middle Ages into a systematic extermination operation with the 
witch hunt, a veritable war on women's knowledge during the transition 
to modernity. Between the 15th and 17th centuries, the figure of the 
"witch" was deliberately constructed by jurists and theologians to 
target herbalists, midwives, and healers, custodians of millennia-old 
knowledge on natural cycles, health, and fertility. Through ruthless 
propaganda, this popular knowledge, which guaranteed women a central and 
authoritative role in communities, was renamed and stigmatized as 
"diabolical arts." The accusation of witchcraft served to shape a 
totally submissive social space: the fear of being burned at the stake 
imposed silence, destroyed solidarity among women, and handed control 
over the female body to the state and male medicine. The "witch" can 
thus be seen as the ultimate transformation of Pandora and Eve: the 
woman who, possessing her own autonomous knowledge, threatens the 
Father's order and must be physically erased. With the advent of the 
modern state, this subjugation becomes secularized without losing its 
coercive force. Although the power of the Churches seems to be receding 
under the blows of reason, their legacy is absorbed by the new medical 
and legal sciences. Women are no longer "sinners" in the strict sense, 
but are defined as "hysterical" or "naturally fragile." Ecclesiastical 
patriarchy passes the baton to the scientific one: the maternal function 
is exalted as the only acceptable destiny, while public space remains a 
male prerogative. The Churches react to modernity by hardening their 
boundaries and recalling women to their "natural mission" in the home, 
maintaining that "public silence" codified centuries earlier by the 
Church Fathers and theologians of the Reformation.

Drawing the conclusions of this journey, it becomes clear that male 
preeminence in the West is neither a biological given nor an inescapable 
destiny, but the result of a violent history that has systematically 
obscured female otherness. Each era has simply rebranded submission: 
what was once "the will of the gods" became "the word of God," then 
"inferior nature," and finally "biological destiny." The legacy of this 
age-old war still lives today in the patriarchal claim to legislate the 
female body. However, even if only in a minority, this iron circle is 
being broken thanks to the struggles of women who refuse to submit to 
male power any longer, identifying its knots and intrigues where they 
have become most stringent and suffocating. Although often only 
intellectually and only partly politically, women's struggles have 
exposed the complicity between the dogma of the Churches, which 
expropriated the soul, and the violence of the modern state, which 
sequesters the body through discriminatory laws. Rediscovering figures 
of resistance, from mystics to "witches," from medieval thinkers to 
radical feminists, means recognizing that another coexistence has always 
been possible. The future will depend on the ability to definitively 
emerge from the "City of the Father," restoring to women absolute 
sovereignty over their own history, their own knowledge, and, above all, 
their own bodies, the ultimate and non-negotiable territory of freedom.

Emanuele Amodio

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