2) "Men's need to dominate women may be based in their own sense of marginality or emptiness; we do not know its root, and men are making no effort to discover it. " page 19

      3) "Religions do not require men to support or reward or help women in this task [child-bearing and child-raising], but they demand that men control it." page 20

      4) ". . . male violence against women could not flourish as it does without the support or at least toleration of institutions like the courts and police; and psychological studies show the preponderance of men who rape or commit incest to be within the range of what is considered "normal" for men in American society." page 21

      5) "If individual violence could not be as widespread and devastating without broad-scale support, neither could global wars against women continue without the support of individual men." page 22

      6) "If we set out (for a change) to prove men inferior, we could cite the fact that men die at a greater rate than women in every decade of life, that they are emotionally stunted, unable to provide emotional support, cannot have babies or raise them, or even make their own dinners. Subject to hormonal swings that cause them to flare into rages that threaten life (their own and other people's), they are also fascinated by toys, particularly adept at inventing structures that give then the illusion that they are in control. They have certain redeeming features: they are sexually passionate, and their irresponsibility frees them to be playful or brilliant about matters unconnected to the real business of life. Surely, such a species should be set in a playpen to amuse itself while women take the burden of responsibility for managing society, raising children, and cooking dinner. If this were the prevailing ideology, individual acts that challenged the definition could be fit into it, and protests by male groups would be seen as resulting from hormonally caused mood swings." pages 23-24

      7) Citing Waring's If Women Counted: "The most devastating indication of our values is that while producing and raising children, maintaining families, and preserving the environment count for nothing in global economic accounting, war is treated as productive and valuable." page 37

      More of Waring's If Women Counted: "Military work is counted as a valuable contribution to society, raising children is not." page 37

      8) "In societies that value primarily money and power, the value of a group is shown by its financial reward." page 39

      9) "In fact, no religious tenet except male supremacy rests on the Genesis myth." page 60

      10) "Women, major figures in the founding and spread of Christianity, were very powerful within the Roman church from its early years until the high Middle Ages. But once it had political control of Europe, the church excluded women from any form of power and shut once-active nuns in cloisters." page 86

      11) Regarding the Catholic Church and abortion: "During its first six centuries, the church took the position that abortion was not murder because a fetus had no soul. Augustine held that "one cannot be said to be deprived of a soul if one has not yet received a soul"; "the law does not provide that the act pertains to homicide, for there cannot be said to be a live soul in a body that lacks sensation, if it is not yet formed in flesh and so not yet endowed with senses." The early church accepted woman-hating Aristotle's pronouncement on the beginning of life- a male fetus becomes human forty days after conception, a female ninety days after conception. ("Becoming human" is not the same as quickening; it is not a biological but a symbolic quality, something simply said to occur.)

      The church considered abortion wrong mainly because it concealed real sin - adultery and fornication. It not only was not murder, but was punished less seriously than illicit sex, bribery, theft, or divination." page 87

      12) "The first authoritative code of canon law, compiled by Gratian in 1140, stood until 1917. It decreed abortion homicide only when the fetus was formed (again, at forty days if male, ninety if female.) In 1588, Pope Sixtus V, a fanatical anti-sex puritan trying to rid Rome of all extramarital sex, issued a papal bull, Effraenatum, decreeing all abortion and contraception murder. But Gregory XIV annulled it in 1591, returning to the earlier position that abortion was not homicide early in a pregnancy because the fetus was not human. There were no further pronouncements until 1869, a year before the doctrine of papal infallibility was issued. Apostolicae sedis, issued by Pius IX, directing that abortion at any stage be punished by excommunication, became part of canon law in 1917, yet to this day the church rarely baptizes fetal miscarriages or even full-term stillborns- does not, in other words, treat them as living creatures with souls.

      Thus only in the nineteenth century, after women had begun to agitate for rights, did the pope declare his own infallibility ex cathedra and the church firmly oppose abortion. It did not begin to wage war against abortion until 1968, when feminism revived and women began to demand rights over their own bodies. In that year, Paul VI issued Humanae vitae, forbidding contraception and all abortion, even for therapeutic reasons. In 1974 (a year after abortion was legalized in the United States by Roe v. Wade), the Vatican issued a "Declaration on Abortion" that finessed any uncertainty about when life begins; claiming that to abort a fetus was to risk committing murder, it named it a "grave sin."

      The Catholic church opposes abortion on the specious ground that it is murder if a fetus is a living being. Neither the Catholic church nor Protestant fundamentalists or their allies in the campaign to criminalize abortion have ever shown much compunction about murder. The clergy accompany soldiers to war and bless battles; "pro-lifers' ardently support executions and war, the murder of people who may be enemies today but will become friends tomorrow. If life is sacred before it exists, it should be even more so once it breathes in a person. . . . a study by Catholics for Free Choice shows that legislators who oppose legal abortion also almost across the board oppose economic and social assistance to poor women and children. They want women to bear the babies they conceive: after that, they are on their own. This is not concern for life, bur repression of women.

      The real motivation of the Catholic church is revealed by several of its positions. It denies women control over their own bodies by forbidding contraception and abortion and by teaching women they are subordinate in marriage. A subordinate woman does not have the right to refuse conjugal intercourse. . . .

      Abortion has always existed, whether it was legal or not, because it is necessary. Like infanticide, abortion has been legal when men controlled it. Those who oppose it may criminalize it, but cannot eradicate it." (my emphasis in bold) pages 89-91

      13) "Fundamentalist Protestants provide a facade in most protests against legal abortion. The Catholic Church is the power in the background, providing money and propaganda. That its animus is less moral outrage at female autonomy is suggested by the fact that Catholic clergymen who denounce political figures mainly target women: they helped destroy Geraldine Ferraro, a Catholic for choice, for having the temerity to run for national office. But they have not seriously moved against New York governor Mario Cuomo, also a Catholic for choice who is nationally known, far better known than Ferraro before she ran for vice president. This, one might think, would be reason to make an example of him." pages 90-91

      14) "Since the first male leader imagined the first state, men who wanted to dominate- as priests, soldiers, or both- needed war to establish their supremacy. But war requires fighters, and people who have not been indoctrinated into a gender cult, have not been taught that aggression equals identity, do not want to fight. To get men to fight rather than flea, male leaders had to turn them against life, identified with women, sensual pleasure, the growing and eating of food.

      Male leaders pursue the same policy today. Sexual harassment of women asserts male solidarity across class lines and divides working-class men from working-lass women and reinforces class domination." pages 175- 176

      15) "Most infuriating, given women's heartrending guilt after rape- their constant questioning of what they did or wore or where they went or how they acted that could have precipitated this action - is that all the men in this survey, asked why they had chosen a particular woman replied, "It could have been any woman," or "It didn't have to be her, she was just there at the wrong time." page 192

      16) "Feminist experts on rape like Pauline Bart and Susan Brownmiller agree that rape is "a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear." " page 193

      17) "All patriarchists exalt the home and family as sacred, demanding it remain inviolate from prying eyes. Men want privacy for their violations of women." page 196

I noted the following books:

      Betty A. DeBerg, Ungodly Women: Gender and the First Wave of American Fundamentalism (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990)

      Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975)

      Marylin Waring, If Women Counted

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