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
http://www.sicilialibertaria.it/wp-content/uploads/aprile2026_compressed.pdf
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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