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My mom used to tell me that my grandma would cry when she heard that a newborn baby was a girl. It wasn’t that she liked boys better, it was that she felt girls were destined for a hard life. When I think of her, I remember her twinkling blue eyes and a smile that lit up her face. She genuinely liked kids and enjoyed people, but her life, like that of so many women, was tough.

I read all kinds of things; lately I’m reading Women’s Lives in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook by Emilie Amt. It’s a collection of writings from about 500 through 1500CE that reveals the lives of women. It has essays about women, laws regarding women, women’s wills, and so forth. One of the most interesting pieces is by St. Jerome quoting a book on marriage by Theophrastus. In it he warns men not to marry. He lists a number of household objects, slaves, and animals. He says, unlike them, a wife cannot be tried ahead of time and her true nature reveals itself only after it’s too late. If one marries a beautiful woman, she’ll find lovers or he will have to fight off others to protect her. If she’s ugly it’s easy for her to become wanton. He goes on to say that while a woman might make a good manager of his house, a faithful slave will do a better job, he’ll be more obedient and be more observant of his master’s ways. He says that even if a wife is agreeable, a rare thing, a husband has to share her groans in childbirth and worry about her when she’s in danger.

It’s no secret that women have not been valued as highly as men over the past several thousand years. I heard recently that patriarchy came in with farming because a man was more successful if he had lots of strong sons to work his land. So, don’t value women for providing meals, making clothes, or keeping a home. Disconnect completely from the idea that women bear and raise those precious boys. How’s that been working for us?

Men may have originally set up this scheme, but women have supported it. It has been a no win situation. Put your daughter in danger and the entire family at odds with the group by teaching her to be all she can be, or teach her the ways that let her be one with the group at the expense of herself.

This is a time when the male is the laughing stock in sitcoms and commercials, while the woman in the scene knows better and even tries to warn him. We might think that we’ve come further toward honoring the feminine than we have, but the slights are everywhere. I read a book recently where a woman felt bad because she had sided with her father in putting down her mother when she was a girl. I think that’s pretty common. How often are women ridiculed for being emotional, for bad cooking, for changing their minds. Oh, she’s all in a tizzy because of this or that. Let her buy some new shoes and she’ll be fine. Emotional outbursts, warranted or not, are commonly dismissed as hormones. This is run of the mill stuff. There is a segment of our society that doesn’t see benefit in higher education for girls, that wants women to be subservient to their husbands, and disagrees with the idea of controlling reproduction.

We get lost when we look at this as a male vs. female issue. Many men perceive that a gain for women is a loss for men. It’s hard to not think that way, because that’s the mindset we created and the one we have been operating under. Rather than think of it as a tug of war, we might think of it as more of a bicycle with both wheels or a catamaran with both hulls. Things work better when they’re whole. I hope we’re at a time when we can restore the feminine to her rightful place in all of human endeavors, not above the male but in partnership with him. We’ve been acting as if we’ve cut off one of our hands and can’t figure out why we’re hurting and why it’s so hard to get anything done. We can choose to honor and use both.