To_Mandalay
2d ago
I know it's ackshually dulia but if you don't assume Catholic doctrine is true, from an anthropological perspective Mary clearly occupies the role of a goddess in the religion.
To_Mandalay
3d ago
Children and especially babies require an immense amount of attention
Children really require much less attention than WEIRDos think they do. Historically you could mostly ignore your babies between feedings. And once they becomes ambulatory you can just let them do whatever pretty much except when they have to do work around the house or in the fields. They'll probably be fine, horrifying as most moderns find the prospect. High child mortality was due to illness which pre-modern mothering was powerless to prevent, no matter how attentive or caring, not due to kids wandering off and getting eaten by bears.
This is still the case in a lot of undeveloped countries, or at least it was a few decades ago. I've talked to people who grew up in Latin America in the 70s but essentially lived pre-modern peasant existences and described parenting as being very hands-off.
Like what does a modern "neglectful" mother do? She probably lets her kid eat whatever, doesn't take him to the doctor, doesn't buy him new clothes, lets him go wherever he wants with whoever he wants whenever he wants. None of these were factors in the pre-modern world (everybody was eating the same thing, nobody was going to the doctor for yearly checkups, everybody wore the same clothes all the time) except for the last one which would only result in death at the margins.
To_Mandalay
3d ago
Men and women are both created in the image of God.
Maybe, but to what extent? Augustine believed the woman was not as much the Image of God as the man. Aristotle said without much qualification that woman was inferior to man.
Women historically had been protected or privileged over men in things likely to result in death like drowning on a sinking ship
This actually isn't really true. Someone linked the wikipedia page for "women and children first" which makes clear this is not some ancient code of conduct but a rather recent 19th century phenomenon, observed only sporadically. Men tended to fare better in shipwrecks, the Titanic being the glaring exception, because they were better swimmers.
or serving in combat.
The idea that being exempted from combat is a privilege is itself a pretty modern one. For a very long time bearing arms was one of, if not the highest honor. Free men could bear arms, not slaves or women. Probably the oldest conception of what it means to "be a man" is to be a great warrior who can kill a lot of people.
"Where's all that 'male privilege' when it's time to get drafted?" is a complaint that belongs to the post-modern and especially post-industrial era where warfare has been stripped of all the glory and honor that historically attended it, and been reduced to merely an unpleasant duty not dissimilar from digging ditches or pulling wagons.
Occasional woman through history who have fought as soldiers or warriors, whether disguised as men or otherwise, tend to draw praise or at least neutral curiosity, while men who took on the role of a woman with regards to child-rearing or other tasks assigned to the female sphere were viewed as worthy of derision at best.
To_Mandalay
3d ago
Mary is a goddess, it's not really comparable.
To_Mandalay
3d ago
Healthy women have deep-seated, base, mammalian urges to reproduce and nourish healthy offspring. It is hardwired in them to feel pleasure through these behaviors. The bond a mother has with her children and how they give great meaning to her life is a story in every culture in existence.
A significant minority of women likely do not have this instinct or have it in a much weakened form. Through human and pre-human history women really haven't had that much of a choice on whether they bear children or not, so selection for enjoying motherhood is probably not as strong as you might think.
Women are forsaking these genetic behaviors for what reason? For whose benefit?
Cuz they don't feel like it, I guess? Really nobody is forcing women not to have kids. It's not a matter of it being too expensive or anything. You can be flat broke in a western country and your kids will have an infinitely more comfortable existence than those of the peasant woman in 1312 who popped out twelve children. If women really want to have kids, they can, it's not hard.
To_Mandalay
3d ago
Inferior in the great chain of being, in absolute worth, closer, in the mind of a pre-modern, to the Imago Dei
To_Mandalay
3d ago
If that were true, we would expect traditional societies to be more willing to allow women to suffer and die in place of men, because they have less value.
Not necessarily. Women are valuable because they can give you sons.
"Female infanticide" is it's own phenomenon deserving of a name but not "male infanticide." The wiki article only gives the examples of India, China, and Pakistan, but gender-skewed infanticide was also not uncommon in pre-modern Europe. Not a lot of men in history were going "awwww man, another son?" when their wife popped out the latest kid.
To_Mandalay
3d ago
Horses are better than humans at running but the number of people throughout history who would disagree with the statement "horses are inferior to human beings" is very small.
To_Mandalay
3d ago
Counterpoint: Say something about someone's mom who is from a traditionalist culture and if you survive the reaction you should reevaluate women not being valued. Mothers and matriarchal figures are highly respected.
Of course women have value in traditional societies. More than livestock. But less than men.
To_Mandalay
3d ago
Is your argument that modern society values motherhood more?
No.
Complementarianism, may be expressed more now, I suspect for much of existence it went without saying, but was no less true.
I don't think so, I think for most of history it has been the standard belief of most men that women are an inferior order.
To_Mandalay
3d ago
To claim that modern society has devalued motherhood and femininity, or made them low status, is completely backwards. Motherhood and femininity in general have been devalued for as long as patriarchy has existed, so pretty much the whole of human history. I can't think of any human cultures, let alone any of the big-name European and near-eastern ones that the modern west is descended from, which have not considered the female sphere and female pursuits to be intrinsically lesser than that of men.* The "oh, women aren't inferior to men, they just have different strengths/they're made for different roles" line you hear from conservatives nowadays (what Christians call 'complementarianism') is itself an anti-modernist rearguard action. For the great majority of the history of western civilization, philosophers, theologians, and intellectuals, whether Pagan, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or atheist, have been happy to state that actually, women are just strictly inferior to men. It's the reason you occasionally get figures like Elizabeth I or Catherine the Great who are praised for being essentially men in women's bodies, but you never get men praised for being essentially women in men's bodies.
What happened in more resent centuries isn't that motherhood and womanhood were devalued. Motherhood and womanhood were devalued way back in the primordial past, and only recently have women been allowed to escape such devalued roles at scale.
You can't make motherhood 'prestigious' because motherhood has never been prestigious. Closest thing would just be banning women from doing actually prestigious things.
What information? Do you disagree with the statement that the general opinion of pre-modern thinkers was that women were inferior to men? Can you find any such figures who disagreed? Maybe you can, I'm sure there were a handful, but they're going to be vastly outnumbered by those who held the contrary position. Mary is a goddess*. She is inimitable. The fact that according to Christian mythology she was once a mortal woman is irrelevant to the role she actually occupies in existing religious practice. She should be compared to her fellow divinities, not mortal men, and she is certainly inferior to God the Father and to her own son. Having warrior and scholar goddesses didn't stop the Greeks from pacing such onerous restrictions on their women that it surprised their own contemporaries. The divine and human spheres are different, and the reverence of female divinities says little more about the role of women in actual existing human society than the frequency of incest in stories of the gods says something about the acceptability of incest between actual flesh and blood human beings.
Necessary doesn't equal prestigious. Actually it often indicates the opposite, since the mundane and commonplace is rarely exalted.
*Yes I know it's not latria it's dulia etc. etc.
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