Sublime

Of course women can’t flourish in a system that needs us as support pillars for someone else’s building. We’re here to prop it up, not to live in it. This is not a place that was built for us to thrive.

Somehow, Hildegard managed to balance equal dignity with meaningful difference, in a way I’d not yet encountered. I wish I’d followed that thread; perhaps it would have pulled me into the Christian cosmos earlier. Instead, I let it go and lost myself in the labyrinth of postmodern feminism for the next ten years.

Herbal knowledge was very deep before the witch burnings, and midwife-healers were the main practitioners in European villages and towns. In those days women controlled their own fertility.

She is encouraged to pursue an ideal of self-invention and self-mastery that hails from a culture where someone else’s labors (that of wives and enslaved persons) would provide for the necessities of daily life.

When de Beauvoir writes that one is not born but becomes a woman, she is driving a wedge between “woman” and “female”, arguing that “woman” is a social and cultural fiction that is layered onto the biological reality of femaleness. She writes this in the 1940s, prefiguring the postmodern turn. It didn’t take long for a movement centered on the idea

To three things, the Torah was likened: to the desert, to fire, and to water. This is to tell you that just as those three things are free to all who come into the world, so also are the words of the Torah free to all who come into the world.

For generations women accepted the role of legitimizing humans through marriage to a man. They agreed that a human was not acceptable unless a man said so.