to be confused about the treatment of females culturally and historically

[wotoodoo]

This has been bugging me more than ever before so please bear with me as I need to get it off my chest.

We are hearing on the news about the routine rounding up/enslavement and raping of vunerable women and girls, if it's not by Boko Haram or Isis, it's in Rotherham and Oxford and throughout history, ancient and recent.

Both the Koran and the Bible put the female in complete subservience to the male, and the horrific treatment of females probably predates religion doctrine, which some could argue, actually improved the female lot.

Many women and girls who are pregnant, regardless of religious or cultural reasons/restrictions are for the most part going to be hellbent on wanting the best for their children and families as the driving force of their lives.

So why would religious doctrines and family/cultural pressure not be more supportive of women/girls who are suffering due to sadist /psychotic/violent/abusive husbands/partners/masters? Is it only in the West where there is (limited ) support?

I am thinking of the recent case of the Kuwaiti wife found with a screwdriver in her eye having been brutally tortured by her dh for years and her neighbours having heard it all before, presumably not reporting it. The routine horrific treatment of Afghan women, Yazidi women... the list goes on.

Historically Christians enslaved and brutalised women also. Women in 'faithless' societies like the Uk are not immune to poor treatment either.

My question to women in general therefore and particularly to women with strong religious/cultural beliefs is how can you reconcile your faith with the reality of poor treatment of females in your religion/culture?

Why does faith have to be intrinsic to equal opportunities for women?

I don't think it intrinsically has much to do with religion. Not in the way you are suggesting.

Historically, in most societies, for thousands of years, women have been mistreated by men.

Why? That's probably too massive a question for anyone on the internet to answer. Because they are physically weaker? Because constant childbearing makes them physically weaker?

It doesn't. Neither the Bible or Koran promotes equal opportunities for women. I can't understand why any woman or girl would willingly support a cultural or religious belief which actually ensured and ensnared them into poor treatment.

Yet apparently women have stronger faiths than men?

I guess part of the assumption is that all women believe that they should be equal, and want to be equal.

Sorry - I meant, that's probably not the case. I don't know much about it but I do get the impression that many women are comfortable with the idea that they are lesser in some way than men.

I'm reading a book at the moment on women in the seventeenth century and many of the women in it, through their diaries and publications, talk about how their role in life is to support their husband and to do what he says, and acknowledge they are the weaker sex, physically and emotionally, and also embrace the concept that they continue to be to blame for Eve's fall.

Women seem to the primary drivers in activities that promote social cohesion, most likely because that optimises the protections offered for them and their offspring during the most vulnerable periods of early child care.

In early societies oppression would have been a small price to pay for shelter, food and protection.

To give you a stark example: it incenses me so much that any ill educated, unintelligent sadistic, violent man would be able to spout he had the will of God on his side to endorse him to commit deplorable inhumane acts on an educated, bright, kind and innocent young girl.

I don't think Isis are particularly famed for treating men well either for starters..... Any takers for crucifixion or immolation?

I dunno. The idea that men and women are the same, and should be treated- and behave- the same is a Western ideal. I happen to agree with it, but as a secular British woman I would.

I don't think it's possible to generalise and say that all Muslim women (for ex) find being treated differently to the men to be a negative thing. Most Muslim men are not raping/beating/enslaving their wives, and lots of Muslim women are very happily married. Horses for courses a lot of the time I reckon.

The oppression of women seems to be common to the abrahamic religions.

I think oppression of women is common right across the boards tbh enormouse

I'm quite uncomfortable with it being attributed to religion or men from other nationalities.

My white British Atheist self and plenty of my white, Atheist friends have been treated like utter crap by more than enough white, Atheist men to make me uncomfortable with oppression/domestic violence being blamed on religion or men from other parts of the world.

(Ignore middle paragraph. Must start proof reading)

You will probably get the answers you are looking for if you post in Feminist chat. Good question, though.

Islam means peace and christianity is about love and forgiveness. Yet women from these backgrounds as well as Chinese, Indian, Pakistani and some African cultures often perpetuate female ill treatment by condoning the ill treatment of their daughters. Why? I just don't get it.

That's true saucy. It seems to be more of a cultural issue than a faith based one.

I was just thinking of Sikhism (the religion I was raised with) in comparison to Christianity and Islam.

It sounds like there are two different parts to your question which, to me, you are confusing together.

1 - Islam means peace and christianity is about love and forgiveness - well, yes, but that's a one sentence, massive generalisation about those religions, isn't it?

2 - [why] perpetuate female ill treatment by condoning the ill treatment of their daughters - of course. That's a huge, huge, huge question, and I don't imagine it has much to do with religion most of the time.

The nations with the lowest rates if belief in religion Have the highest rates of equality in terms of gender (Sweden, Norway, Finnland)
Religion (organised religion) is merely a tool to keep people in line and oppressed.

Definitely thurlow wrt to 2. There's the caste system, social class, conditioning, wealth and economics tied into that. Not just religion.

Exactly. I think wanting equality and a better life for your daughter, for example, relies less on your religion and even your upbringing, and more on whether or not you're just a nice person.

How many mothers will expect their daughters to go through the same experiences as them - generally negative - purely because they went through them?

I wanted to get diverse opinions which is why I posted here. As I have written above, it's not just men behaving deplorably to women but women to their daughters also!

One could even say it would be much more damaging if your own mother forced you to undergo FGM because she did or treated your brother better than you or sent you back to live with an abusive spouse.

Might it well be that originally physical strength was the reason men had power over women but with the historical improvement of shelter from predator or foe leaves the reason for the perpetuation of poor treatment of women is due to women themselves?

Just a question!

I think in a way it's not that complicated

Women have been treated as inferior throughout all of human history, across all cultures, in practice.

Men need a way of justifying this, to keep women in their place. So they use whatever are the most powerful guiding forces of their time, which have usually been religions. Religions (or at least, religious texts) are a product of their societies. So if the society is sexist, the religion probably will be too.

It doesn't have to be religion though, it could be ideology. We could say that capitalist ideologies that put priorities on economic productivity and paid labour help keep women down, because they don't value social contributions from producing children.

Anyway, these religions and ideologies emerge from a sexist society and then continue to reinforce the sexism. Women are raised in these societies. It's not always easy to challenge the principles under which you were raised, especially if you are not able to access a good education. So the cycle goes on.

People will do all sorts of terrible things if there is some justification for it. None of our societies are immune to this. Is it worse that people excuse killing in the name of religion rather than profit? I don't think so.

I remember having a discussion with a German friend about this years ago. Her take on it was that a man never knows if a child is really his or not, whereas a mother knows she's given birth. Therefore men feel that they have to absolutely control their women so they know that the children are theirs.

Has anyone studied the animal world? Are there parallels?

Trigger warning - discussion of violence and rape within warfare follows.

I've been having some really interesting but depressing conversations recently about this with an anthropologist friend. She says that on the whole, the highest levels of gender equality and lowest levels of male on female violence take place in hunter-gatherer societies which are not subject to external threat. Once you move either to agrarian societies (where people become heavily invested in concepts of inheritance), or start facing an external threat (where you need a "warrior caste" to defend you, inequality and male on female violence go up. Her take on male on female violence in this context is that it's like owning a loaded gun - you don't know which direction it's going to go off in. Depressingly, she says women in these societies typically construct narratives in which they justify coping with male violence because the non-fatal violence they face at the hands of men within the society is dwarfed by the level of external threat from external warrior groups. And (even more depressingly) when you look at the level of external threat (she mentioned one tribal society where captured women were gang raped prior to the men from the rival tribe deciding whether the women were worth keeping as spoils of war or should simply be killed on the spot), the women are probably adopting a rational survival strategy.

Moving on to the religion issue (and this bit is my kind of amateur Durkheimian speculation, not hers) - it's not that the religious beliefs construct the social norms, it's that the religion is constructed after the fact to justify the norms already in the society - so if you have a warrior culture, it's useful to have a monotheistic patriarchal god who loves you but hates your enemies and sanctions you going to war against outsiders - and if he also condones a bit of wife beating, that's a bonus (I use "bonus" ironically, to indicate the perspective of the section of society which benefits from this warped world view).

About the only good news is that in her considered opinion, western liberal democracies are close to the levels of gender equality seen in hunter-gatherer societies not subject to external threat. Which I guess is good and bad - nice to know that historically and cross culturally we're doing pretty well, bad that this is the best case scenario when we still see gender inequality and sexual violence on a fairly major scale.

muminhants - again, according to my anthropologist friend - the answer to your question is probably that it doesn't help shed that much light on human beings. Our closest relatives, chimpanzees, vary enormously. Chimps are fairly violent, have intergroup rivalries, and I think do practise infanticide when a new male joins a group. Bonobos are fairly peace-loving (and of course notoriously use sex as a means of cementing group cohesion). I think most writers who've studied the sociology of primate research will tell you that which behaviours a given group of researchers focusses on and which they hold up as mirrors to human behaviour tell you more about the preconceptions of the human scientists than about the actual behaviour of the animals (the American primatologist turned philosopher/sociologist of science, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, has written some good stuff on this).

Lurcio I think the problem though is that while we may have better gender equality within our liberal democracies, in large part due to our prosperity -- this prosperity is built upon a global economic and political system that massively exploits women in other countries.

Basically I'm not comfortable with the line of thought that things are pretty good in our own democracies and it's all these other countries with their terrible religious and cultural norms that are doing terrible things to women -- a lot of women are suffering in the world because of things we in the West are doing that have nothing to do with religion, that are just about making money. (I know this isn't what YOU are arguing Lurcio, just saying it seems to be a subtext in a lot of these discussions.)

Really interesting posts, Lurcio. We were watching a world history lecture recently, the suggestion was that hunter-gatherer societies were more equal - roles clearly different with actually the gatherers providing more food than the hunters; then agriculture was invented probably by the women and it all went downhill for us from then on. For one thing, agriculture requires a lot more work than being a hunter-gatherer (the food supply is more stable, but it's more work) and this led to large families being more desirable, with obvious consequences for women.

Would I be right to guess that the rise of female equality is closely correlated to reduction in family size in modern societies?