9. One Male God Over Women
Monotheism was a liberating and uniting force in most of the Western world. This section explores the lives of the founders and the women in the origin stories of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. As we are focusing on the impact of these faiths on women's status, remember that the social experiences of women in faith are different from their spiritual ones, and that women’s experiences within their faiths can be vastly different. Despite some of the ways women were discriminated against, women from all walks of life flocked toward monotheism.
Monotheism (n.), the doctrine or belief that there is only one God.
How to cite this source?
Remedial Herstory Project Editors. "9. ONE MALE GOD OVER WOMEN" The Remedial Herstory Project. November 1, 2025. www.remedialherstory.com.
Trigger Warning: This chapter references rape and sexual assault.
In the ancient world, many religions included prominent goddess traditions, attributing to goddesses the creation of the world and its ongoing survival. Many polytheistic faiths such as Hinduism presented the idea of a Divine Feminine, that God, or the Ultimate Being, was either completely without gender or had an equal feminine dimension. This view of a feminine god or goddesses was challenged, however, by the rise of the monotheistic and patriarchal Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam - all born in the Middle East. While the idea of divine feminine takes a back seat, it’s important not to understate how patriarchal pagan societies were. Pagan life was certainly not always a safe or progressive one for women.
The Holy Scriptures of these faiths - the Torah, the remaining books of the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Quran, consistently referred to the divine with masculine pronouns and are awash with male titles and images of God such as Lord, Father, King, or Brah. They led to the equation of God with not just the male gender, but also with traditional concepts of masculinity and male power. In this section, we will explore the complex place of women within monotheistic traditions and how their spiritual and social equality has been both enhanced and hampered by their faith.
Polytheism (n.), the doctrine or belief that there are multiple gods.
Abrahamic (adj.), denoting any or all of the religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) that revere Abraham, the Biblical patriarch.
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One Male God
From around the 5th century BCE to the 7th century CE, the view of a singular male god was solidified in Western culture through a thousand years of monotheistic tradition in which all the major prophets whose works we know were men. These faiths share many views on women, such as the impurity of menstruation, the need for some degree of male control over women (and in particular female sexuality), and an apparent condoning of economic and social reliance on men, even where the genders may be considered spiritual equals. These constraints all relate to the perceived purpose of women: to bear and raise children. It was all about the continuation of the male family line.
The Hebrew Bible is an early Abrahamic account of world events. Many stories within the Hebrew Bible are corroborated by other texts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, which discusses a great flood similar to that of Noah’s story, making it hard to ignore as both a religious and historical text. Although many women are featured in the Hebrew Bible, none of the confirmed authors are known to have been women, although, there are theories that some of them may have been female. For example, two books of the Hebrew Bible, Ruth and Esther, tell women’s stories and have women’s names.
Gender differences found in Hebrew literature suggest women were subordinate to men in ancient Jewish tradition. In fact, the first book, Genesis, is often called “God’s curse to womankind.” It begins with the story of Creation, where the idea of a strictly male monotheism is evident. God creates a garden and then Adam, or literally, “Man.” The scriptures say he is made in God’s own image, solidifying the view of God as a male (despite assertions elsewhere that God is beyond human concepts such as gender). Later, Eve, the first woman, is created from Adam’s rib. God tells them not to eat from the tree of knowledge in the garden, but Eve is corrupted by the devil (disguised as a snake) and eats from the tree, subsequently convincing Adam to do so too. They become “knowledgeable,” the meaning of which has been debated for millennia. God is furious, and banishes them from the garden.
In the Christian interpretation, Eve is deemed singularly responsible for the fall of humankind and humans’ expulsion from the garden because she was tempted by the devil to eat the forbidden fruit. In the 400s, this story was interpreted by Augustine of Hippo, who introduced the Christian concept of original sin. Some interpret it to mean that women were uniquely vulnerable to the temptation of sin.
In 1896, a German scholar purchased fragments of what would later be determined to be Gnostic Gospels. These 1st century Christian texts were meant to be destroyed as blasphemy and were not incorporated into the official Bible but are still used by scholars today. Combined, these fragments and complete works comprised over 50 different texts with different authors dated during and after the life of Jesus. They included gospels, poems, and myths, very different from those selected by the early Christian church to be in the Bible. Today, the Gnostic Gospels are regarded as an alternative set of books that reveal the story of creation and early humans. They show the diversity of early Christian thinking. These works had a different rendition of the story of Adam and Eve. For one, the snake is not evil; it represents divine wisdom. Historian Elaine Pagels claims that the snake “convinces Adam and Eve to partake of knowledge while ‘the Lord’ threatens them with death, trying jealously to prevent them from attaining knowledge and expelling them from Paradise when they achieve it.” Pagels also highlights a Coptic poem representing a divine feminine voice,
For I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin....
I am the barren one, and many are her sons....
I am the silence that is incomprehensible....
I am the utterance of my name.
Original Sin
Painting titled, “The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man”
Original sin (n.), the condition of sinfulness that all humans share, which is inherited from Adam and Eve.
Coptic (n.), a Christian ethnoreligious group of people who are native to Egypt and Sudan.
Judaism
Another example of women’s roles in the origin of the faith appears in the story of Judaism’s founder, Abraham; a man from the city-state of Ur, who accepts that there is only one true God. As in most patriarchal cultures, his wife Sarah follows him on his spiritual journey.
In the Book of Genesis, we learn that Abraham betrays his wife to save his own skin. A famine caused the couple to be refugees in Egypt and Abraham worried that his beautiful wife would be a target for Egyptian men, so he begged her to pretend to be his sister so they wouldn’t kill him to get her. The Pharaoh finds her desirable and rewarding her “brother” with wealth, she becomes his concubine. When a great plague hits the palace, the pharaoh learns of their deceit and demands they leave Egypt immediately. Abraham then pulls the same trick with their next host, King Abemelek of Gerar. God spoke to the king and told him to return Sarah to her husband, and until he did so no woman of Abemelek’s court would conceive. Despite Abraham being responsible for the lies, only Sarah is blamed for the misfortune of all these women. The Bible reads, “For the Lord had closed fast all the wombs of the house… because of Sarah, Abraham’s wife.” She was, again, returned to her husband.
As a part of their story, the couple had failed to bear children. It was essential for the patriarch to have an heir, so it was very common in ancient cultures of the Fertile Crescent for men to take on concubines, or secondary wives, even at the request of the primary wife, as the stability of the family relied upon a new generation. Sarah was worried that Abraham would have no heir with her, so she gave him an enslaved woman named Hagar to produce a male heir. In the story, God hadn’t intended this - he wanted Abraham to have a child with his wife. Because of her selflessness, Sarah becomes the first person in the Bible to have a healing, and God allows her to become pregnant and produce a male child, Isaac - another central figure in the development of early Judaism.
Some women featured in the Hebrew Bible seem to have power and autonomy, although they were socially unequal. Rahab, for example, was a prostitute who sheltered Hebrew spies during the invasion of Canaan. Deborah, is the only female judge in a male-dominated culture, and Esther, the influential Persian queen, saves the Jewish people by foiling a plot to murder them by the evil minister, Haman.
Other women are derided for that power and autonomy in the Old Testament. Jezebel persecuted the prophets and clung to idolatrous religion and thus earned such a reputation for wickedness that even today her name is used to describe a deceitful woman. Her story shows that she had her own beliefs and had some agency to act upon them.
Likewise, the Queen of Sheba was described extensively in the Abrahamic faiths, although some consider her to be a mythological character. She was a wise and respected queen from Arabia who found clever ways to protect and mother her people, including marrying an enemy to save her people from war, only to kill him on their wedding night. The Jewish King Solomon then heard of her power, but he really desired her spectacular throne and demanded she submit to him. After an exchange, she eventually came with an entourage, only to find that Solomon had stolen her throne and was sitting on it. In some versions of the story, she accepted defeat and submitted to him to save her people. Humbling herself before a powerful male king, she crossed a glass floor to approach him and, thinking it was water, lifted her skirts to cross it. He rebuked her for her hairy legs, but after she challenged him with a series of riddles, they inevitably parented the infamous Nebuchadnezzar. She can be viewed in a negative light for giving up her throne, but modern female scholars across Abrahamic faiths read her story differently. She was a wise queen who put her people before her pride and accepted humiliation to avoid war.
Sarah presenting Hagar to Abraham
Rahab depicted in a painting titled, “The Harlot of Jericho and the Two Spies”
Deride (v.), express contempt for; ridicule.
Idolatrous (adj.), worshipping of an image or representation of a god used as an object of worship.
Arabia (n.), a peninsula in West Asia, situated northeast of Africa (modern Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Yemen).
Jesus
These stories were well known when Jesus Christ, a Jew born under Roman rule, preached the story of a loving God who absolved sin and offered forgiveness. Women, including his mother, Mary, became immediate followers. His teaching was recorded in the four gospels and other books in the New Testament in which women were frequently portrayed either so pure as to be unattainable, or as whores.
Mary, or the Virgin Mary, is central to the story of Christianity and fits into the unattainable category. In the New Testament, God sends an angel to Mary to tell her that she will bear the son of God and is to name him Jesus. Mary's epic and pregnant journey to Bethlehem has been told and reenacted in churches around the world for millennia, but many have questioned the notion of the miraculous virgin birth.
Mary would have been very young at the age she was betrothed to Joseph, perhaps 12. A year after their betrothal, she would have been sent to live with Joseph and his family. Had she become pregnant out of wedlock at that time, she would have been terrified, as the consequences were severe, including the possibility of being sold into slavery or stoned to death. Yet, the New Testament tells us that Joseph was also visited by an angel and told to marry her anyway. Some have hypothesized that Joseph himself was the one to impregnate her, while others proclaim it was a matter of promiscuity. Some have also tried to claim she was raped by a Roman soldier and even provided a name of one, but this story was likely concocted to discredit Jesus.
However, this miraculous origin story was not unheard of. In the Greek and Roman traditions, virgin births were common. Dionysos was the son of a virgin. Jason was the son of the virgin, Persephone. Plato’s mother, Perictione, was a virgin. Attis, a Phrygo-Roman god, was born to the virgin Nana. Even Emperor Augustus traced his lineage back to Romulus and Remus, Rome’s founders who were born by a god to a virgin priestess.
The Gnostic Gospels also highlighted the importance of another female figure from Jesus’ life, Mary Magdalene. In fact, one of these gospel’s authors, uncopied for almost two millennia, was named after, and maybe authored by Mary Magdalene. The Gnostic Gospels made Mary complex and spiritual, thereby making her controversial. However, what has been uncovered from the Gospel of Mary is still missing large portions as yet to be found and interpreted.
From what has been discovered, the account makes her central in the aftermath of Jesus’ passing. In Chapter 5, the grieving disciples turned to Mary to hear the words of Christ. She said, “What is hidden from you I will proclaim to you.” In Chapter 9, Peter asks, “Did He really speak privately with a woman and not openly to us? Are we to turn about and all listen to her? Did He prefer her to us?” Mary weeps at his doubt, only to be defended by Levi, who says, “Peter you have always been hot tempered. Now I see you contending against the woman like the adversaries. But if the Savior made her worthy, who are you indeed to reject her? Surely the Savior knows her very well.” These and other parts of the text suggest that Mary was closer to Jesus than the male disciples.
A translation by the historian Elaine Pagels reads, “the companion of the [Savior is] Mary Magdalene. [But Christ loved] her more than [all] the disciples, and used to kiss her [often] on her [mouth]. The rest of [the disciples were offended] . . . They said to him, ‘Why do you love her more than all of us?’ The Savior answered and said to them, ‘Why do I not love you as (I love) her?’”
Was the idea of a female partner to Jesus too much? Or was Mary’s gospel and those of her supporters repressed because of the jealousy of the other disciples? Did Jesus truly love her more? Christian thinkers of the period created a landscape where obedience, self-abnegation, and perpetual remorse were the only acceptable attitudes for women. Why?
Early Christian leaders certainly held women in some contempt. Saint Paul, who spread the faith in the first century, wrote the most quoted line to silence and subordinate women in 1 Corinthians 14:34: “Women should keep silent in the churches, for they are not allowed to speak, but should be subordinate, as even the law says. But if they want to learn anything, they should ask their husbands at home. For it is improper for a woman to speak in the church.” Paul was writing his letters to Christians in Rome and Corinth with advice on how to avoid being slaughtered by the pagan Roman majority. Romans were very patriarchal compared to the early Christians, so what Paul was saying can be interpreted to mean that women should keep quiet in church in order to help the Christian minority stay “under the radar,” and keep them safe. Regardless, the effect was that a lot of people interpreted it to mean that Paul wanted women to remain silent.
Others would be far more direct in the condemnation of women. Another prominent Christian thinker, Tertullian, said: “The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives on even in our times so it is necessary that the guilt should live on also. You are the one who opened the door to evil, you are the one who plucked the fruit of the forbidden tree, you are the one who deserted the divine law; you are the one who persuaded him whom the devil was not strong enough to attack. All too easily you destroyed the image of God, man. Because of your deception, that is, death, even the son of God had to die.” Tertullian's philosophy and obsession with women’s subjugation became common by the Medieval Era. Popular literature portrayed women as subversive and connected to the wild forces of nature. Men became suspicious of women’s sexuality and fought to suppress it. Once again, sex for women was supposed to be just about reproduction.
The myth of Adam and Eve as justification for female subordination led historian Rosalind Miles to assert that it was “the single most effective piece of enemy propaganda [...] Eve did not fall, she was pushed.” Certainly its repetition among early modern writers and the continued denial of women’s education supports this.
The two Marys with central roles in the New Testament were stripped of their substance and became known not for their spirituality and guidance of Jesus, but for their sexuality. There was Mary the impossibly virgin mother and Mary the whore. The fact that information was withheld or forcibly repressed reveals the greatest error in traditional history: we disproportionately attribute achievement to men because of a lack of sources about and by women. Women were generally not taught to read and write so they could not leave source documents. Women were confined to households so they did not contribute to public discourse. This suggests that it was impossible for women to create sources, not that women’s writings were repressed.
Painting titled, “The Virgin in Prayer”
Painting titled, “The Conversion of Mary Magdalene”
Self-Abnegation (n.), the denial, humiliation, or degradation of oneself.
Subversive (adj.), seeking or intended to subvert an established system or institution.
Painting titled, “The Penitent Magdalene”
Spreading Christianity
A pesar de los ataques a las contribuciones de las mujeres a la fe, estas se dedicaron a difundir el cristianismo en los siglos posteriores a la muerte de Jesús. Además, así como Jesús murió crucificado por la fe, varios cristianos primitivos, incluidas mujeres, se martirizaron voluntariamente siguiendo su ejemplo. Dos siglos después de la muerte de Jesús, Perpetua era una noble de 22 años y madre lactante. Su esclava Felicidad estaba embarazada cuando ambas fueron arrestadas por haberse convertido al cristianismo en Cartago, en el norte de África. En prisión, escribió un relato generalmente reconocido como histórico, lo que lo convierte en el texto más antiguo que se conserva escrito por una mujer cristiana. Perpetua describió la ansiedad que sintió al ser separada de su hijo lactante, cómo su padre pagano le rogó repetidamente que renunciara a su fe y cómo finalmente se reunió con su hijo. Cuando pudo amamantar de nuevo, dijo: «Enseguida me sentí bien [...] de repente, la prisión se convirtió en un palacio para mí». Pero su amor por su hijo no debilitó su determinación. Ella, Felicidad y varios hombres conversos se mantuvieron fieles a su fe y fueron condenados a muerte por animales salvajes, un castigo común en la antigua Roma. Felicidad dio a luz dos días antes de la ejecución a una hija adoptada por otros cristianos, algo que ella consideró un milagro. Le preocupaba que su embarazo le impidiera unirse a sus amigos en el martirio, ya que la ley romana prohibía la ejecución de una mujer embarazada. Sin embargo, incluso en la arena, las mujeres eran separadas de los hombres para que una fiera, «una novilla enfurecida», pudiera matarlas.
Painting depicting the martyrdom of Perpetua, Felicitas, Revocatus, Saturninus and Secundulus
Convents
Another way that women served early Christianity was in convents. Monasteries and nunneries or convents were common across Europe and as early as the 300s, and women performed similar duties to their male counterparts (spiritual teaching, prayer on behalf of their community, caring for the sick and poor), although usually with male supervisors after the seventh century. Inside convents, women became scholars after vowing to be chaste, served the needy, and renounced their earthly possessions. By dedicating their lives to God, women were allowed a choice other than motherhood and domestic servitude. Nuns of this early era often lived longer than their married counterparts because childbirth was a leading cause of death for premodern women.
Convents did not upend patriarchy, but they provided refuge from it for centuries. Still, there was a limit to their academic and spiritual power. Nuns who forgot or defied the patriarchal power structure were punished, especially by the Reformation Era in Europe. In 17th century England for example, one nun who tried to build a school to educate young girls was imprisoned in a windowless cell. When two other nuns began preaching in the streets and were asked who their husband was (meaning, who gave them permission or who was responsible for them), the women replied, “They had no husband but Jesus Christ.” The mayor dubbed them whores and instructed the constable to whip them in the public square until blood ran down their backs.
Renounce (v.), formally declare one's abandonment of (a claim, right, or possession).
Constantine
Eventually, the Roman Empire split into two: the West and East. In Rome, Christianity gradually took root against a warring, bankrupt, and tumultuous political landscape. The Eastern emperor Constantine the First (or the Great), demanded religious toleration for all faiths, and he returned the sacked Christian churches to the faithful.
Constantine became the first Roman emperor to accept Christianity, and even converted himself in 312 CE. Roman traditionalists were horrified at his conversion and growing tyrannical rule. He used terror to force conversions and secure his power, which briefly reunited the fracturing empire. Constantine also convened the Council of Nicaea, a religious gathering which determined the fate of the Marys by sanctifying the canon of texts to be included in the Bible and destroying all others as heresy.
Pagan writings and beliefs ultimately met the same fate. A group called the parabalani operated throughout the empire as essentially Christian terrorists, persecuting non-believers. Following Constantine’s death, Theodisius I became emperor, declaring Christianity the state religion and empowering the parabalani and bishops to destroy Jewish and pagan temples and idols.
Hypatia and Maria
Ancient Egypt had a long tradition of polytheism and a caste of female-priestesses under the goddess of the alphabet and library. Egyptians in the early centuries saw notable women scholars emerge such as Hypatia and Maria of Alexandria.
Maria, for example, founded theoretical and experimental alchemy and invented tools used by modern chemists around the third century CE. Little is known about her because none of her original philosophical writings exist. Some scholars believe she may be more than one woman. It is possible there were multiple Marias or that women later assumed her name for her notability.
In Hypatia’s case, her accomplishments are well documented by primary sources. Her resistance to the dominant culture and her defiance of Christianity led to her demise in the early fifth century CE. She was brilliant and noted by her contemporaries for her intellectualism. She was the only woman to hold a position as an academic at Alexandria’s university and did so wearing the same robes as the male scholars. Historian Socrates Scholasticus described her, saying, “On account of her self-possession and ease of manner, which she had acquired in consequence of the cultivation of her mind, she not infrequently appeared in public in the presence of the magistrates. Neither did she feel abashed in coming to an assembly of men. For all men on account of her extraordinary dignity and virtue admired her the more.”
Hypatia’s high profile proved to be problematic for the newly-formed Christian church. Historian Joshua Mark explained that her “charisma, charm, and excellence in making difficult mathematical and philosophical concepts understandable to her students [...] contradicted the teachings of the relatively new church.” Hypatia’s world became the center of a religious conflict that disrupted the religious syncretism of the Roman Empire and ultimately cost her life.
Alexandria became a hotbed for the conflict when Cyril became the Christian bishop and a more moderate Christian, Orestes, was appointed the lesser title of prefect. Cyril expelled the Jewish population and destroyed pagan temples, images of their gods and goddesses, and documents, an act that infuriated Orestes. He wrote to the bishop in opposition, which resulted in a multi-year political confrontation. Over time, Cyril fueled Christians’ fear by turning on Hypatia, one of Orestes greatest supporters, using her pagan beliefs and unnatural position as a famous woman scholar to condemn her. Much later, the story was dramatized by John of Naikiu to emphasize her wicked qualities. He wrote, “She was devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music, and she beguiled many people through her satanic wiles. And the governor of the city [Orestes] honored her exceedingly for she had beguiled him through her magic.”
A sympathetic Socrates Scholasticus wrote,
Yet even she fell a victim to the political jealousy which at that time prevailed. For as she had frequent interviews with Orestes, it was calumniously reported among the Christian populace, that it was she who prevented Orestes from being reconciled to the bishop. Some of them therefore, hurried away by a fierce and bigoted zeal [...] and dragging her from her carriage [...] stripped her, and then murdered her with tiles. After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs [...] and there burnt them [...] surely nothing can be farther from the spirit of Christianity than the allowance of massacres, fights, and transactions of that sort.
The ancient historian, Damascus, told a much different - though no less horrifying - version of the story. He said that the Christian bishop was so shocked when he arrived in Alexandria by the throngs of people coming to listen to a woman that he immediately began to plan her murder. He said,
This information gave his heart such a prick [...] So next time, when following her usual custom, she appeared on the street, a mob of brutal men at once rushed at her—truly wicked men ‘fearing neither the revenge of the gods nor the judgment of men’ – and killed the philosopher [...] while she was still feebly twitching, they beat her eyes out [...] and as a result they laid upon the city the heaviest blood-guilt.
Other accounts say that the parabalani pulled her from her carriage and murdered her with oyster shells.
Whatever the details of her horrible demise, Hypatia’s essential crime was being an educated woman allied with Orestes in opposition to the fanatic Christians in Alexandria. None of the opponents who faced death for their pagan or Jewish beliefs died in such a way. Orestes himself, the person standing in Cyril’s path, merely disappeared. Had he been a woman, would he have met the same gruesome fate?
Following Hypatia’s murder, the school closed, and Hypatia’s writings were destroyed as heresy. Cyril was elevated to sainthood and Hypatia was forgotten until the Renaissance reignited European interest in the bygone knowledge.
Islam
Judaism and Christianity continued to spread, change, and adapt throughout the world over several centuries, and in the 7th century, the battle for monotheism spread to the Arabian peninsula with the birth of Islam. This religion, whose tenets were revealed through the Prophet Muhammad, began as a monotheistic tradition intended to replace paganism and perfect belief in the one true God as a culmination of the Jewish and Christian traditions.
As Christianity had adopted the teachings, (male) prophets, and stories of Judaism before branching off to follow the teachings of Christ who they deemed to be not only the son of God but their most important prophet, Islam adopted all of the male prophets and stories of the Old (Jewish) and New (Christian) Testaments, emphasizing the new teachings of Muhammad as the most important prophet. It also followed the Judeo-Christian tradition of referring to God or Allah - a being beyond human categorizations such as gender - with masculine pronouns, leading many to imagine God as male.
Conclusion
All around the world, religions played a critical role in creating the cultural and belief structures that defined women’s lives. Iranian writer and women’s rights activist Azam Kamguian went so far as to suggest, “Religions are one of the oldest and the most persistent obstacles on the way of women’s equality and freedom. Indeed, religion is women’s enemy and it is the nature of all religions [...] to look backwards to past ancient times and antiquated values.”
Across Afro-Eurasia and even the Ancient American civilizations - developing without Afro-Eurasian cultural diffusion - gods that had been genderless or dual gender were superseded by an all-powerful male, sun god, reflecting the military society they lived in. To this day, the role of women in the monotheistic traditions is a hotly contested topic. We encourage you to revisit these faiths and find the women whose stories have been downplayed or even erased for centuries.
What role did women play in the early days of these traditions, and how have they shaped them in the centuries since? How did women find agency despite official doctrine? How did these faiths affect the day-to-day realities of female followers of the faiths? If we look at the evidence, is the monotheistic God really as masculine as patriarchal tradition would have us believe? And those nunneries - what role would they play in pushing back against the male leadership?
