NEW ORTHODOXIES: XII
THE CURSE OF WOMEN
Margaret FitzHerbert regrets
that most feminists prefer equality to supremacy
[Editor's Note: Margaret FitzHerbert wrote this article the week before her death in January. Because of her first paragraph I thought it prudent to keep it till the end of our series.] THE fashionable young editor of the fashionable old magazine, the Spectator, has had a fashionable idea. Let us, he declares, have a series of articles on modern fashionable -isms: Thatcherism, structuralism, feminism or preferably lesbianism. . . . Does he really think that feminism is just a fashionable modem -ism, or that it is to be equated with lesbianism? 0 dear, 0 dear — a jest one hopes, one hopes.
Perhaps it is best to begin at the beginning. Let us take a look at the Book of Genesis. In the first chapter we learn that God at the end of a busy six-day working week came to the creation of man. Man was to be his chef d'oeuvre. He had started with heaven and earth, slowly progressed through light and land and sea to living things. There he began with the lowest form of life: grass and plants and trees but by the fourth day he had created fish and fowl and on the fifth day the beasts of the earth were made and all was ready for his ultimate masterpiece `So God created man in his own image: in the image of God created he him: male and female he created them. And God blessed them and God said unto them: Be fruitful, and multiply and replenish the earth, and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.'
And so we learn from the first chapter of Genesis that God made man, male and female, and set them to rule over the rest of creation. In the second chapter of Genesis, however, some important details are filled in. It is revealed that man, the male of the species, was God's penultimate creation. Woman he made last — the apex of his creation. And so from the second chapter of the book of Genesis we learn that there is a divinely instituted natural order. At the head stands woman, a little lower comes man, and then in descending scale come beasts, fowl, fish, plants etc. And that would have been that but for the terrible events in the Garden of Eden to be found in chapter three.
Eve, as befitted her position, ate first of the forbidden fruit, and although Adam ate too, at Eve's bidding, God was justly more angry with Eve. Expelling them both from Paradise he cursed each of them in turn. Adam's curse was relatively minor, to do with sweat and toil, but to Eve God said `and thy desire shall be thy husband and he shall rule over thee' or, more clearly and brutally as the Douay version has it, 'and thou shall be under thy husband's power and he shall have dominion over thee'. Now when God had given Adam and Eve dominion over the birds and the beasts he was not punishing the animal kingdom but assigning that kingdom its place in the natural order of creation. But when he gave Adam dominion over Eve he was reversing this natural order and putting an inferior to rule over a superior. It was a grave and cruel punishment, which has had lasting repercussions through the ages. But it should be noted that God did not, as is often the case with curses, add the words forever and forever or any similar phrase, and that by any calculation the unfortunate events in the Garden of Eden took place a very long time ago.
Thus it can be argued that feminism, considered in a traditional Christian or Jewish context, should be seen not (as the editor of the Spectator supposes) as just another fashionable -ism but as an ancient and noble struggle to exorcise the curse of God and regain the natural order. It must be admitted, however, that most feminists, unaccustomed to strolling down the byways of scriptural speculation, seem less interested in supremacy that in equality, a notion which does not appear to have crossed God's mind. Of course there is always the possibility that the God of the Bible does not exist and that there is not therefore a divinely instituted natural order, in which case feminists are sensible to strive only for justice and equality.
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