![]() I’m pleased that I had that experience, because I gained a familiarity with Christian religious ideas which has been most useful for understanding their role in subordinating women. I was sent to Methodist Sunday School when I was a child and won prizes for good attendance. The feminist critique of religion seemed unimpeachable to me, when I discovered it in the 1970s, because I had been an atheist since I was 12 years old. These ideas are common to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Religion provided a how-to guide to keeping women down, through rules of modesty, obedience and male headship, and notions of women’s innate disgustingness. Religion provided the justification for subordinating women through various versions of the myth about Eve unleashing sin on the world and causing the need for Jesus to die. When I became a feminist in the 1970s it was well recognised that the misogynist ideologies of the three middle-eastern monotheistic religions formed the very foundation of male domination. ![]() ![]() I wrote my new book, Man’s Dominion: the rise of religion and the eclipse of women’s rights, because I was concerned that it had become more and more difficult for feminists within the activist movement and within universities to criticise religion. ![]()
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