Mary From The Bible

Mary, the mother of Christ, influences the people who read her Biblical and non-Biblical stories. Since the Bible was written, she has been responsible for many different movements, mannerisms, political revolts, and deaths. This is odd because the Bible portrays her as such a docile woman. She inadvertently laid the ground work that would later promote the Church’s idea of what a woman should be physically, sexually, and emotionally. It was only the Church’s interpretations of Mary from the Bible that caused these standards, she cannot be held accountable for these ‘Marian moral rules’ came into play long after she was dead. As Mary says in Chris Tóibín novella, The Testament of Mary, “I found the sharp knife…‘I have another one hidden,’

Despite these unreasonable, and for the most part fabricated standards, women are pressured to live up to these standards. A world where almost everyone in the Western culture has equal rights is not a world where there should visible sexism. Even the people whom we revere as Saints have said demeaning things about women: “St. Clement of Alexandria wrote: ‘Every woman should be filled with shame by the thought that she is a woman’ ” (Ellerbe), in addition to St. Clement of Alexandria, St. Paul also declared that women are “the weaker vessel” (Ellerbe). Keeping in mind that Mary was a woman too, this seems counterintuitive. On the one hand, you have a woman revered as ‘the perfect woman,’ but you also have women being looked down upon for no apparent reason other than the fact that they are women. I once read that we could phase religion out of society in one generation if we wanted it gone. With that in mind, why are social stigmas around gender roles, Feminism, and related issues pertaining to gender and sex still in our Western society today? At the beginning of the 19th century, people started to notice that there was a problem with these social

However, there are certain aspects from each Feminist movement that are more important and justifiable than others, and one can still support ‘Feminism’ without agreeing with each aspect of a given type of Feminism. We’d still be in the era of women cooking, cleaning, taking care of the children, not holding a job, and being the lesser half of a marriage. Women should be able to go through every stage of their lives without once having to uphold the standards of Mary. Absence of virginity does not make a women any less pure. A woman should not have to be a virgin to be appreciated by a man, in fact she should not have to serve his needs either. As a matter fact, there is little to no proof that Mary was actually subservient to Joseph. In today's Western society, a woman is no longer expected to act as though she belongs in the 50’s, and if there are people who expect these things of women, then they need to join us in the 21st century. That way of thinking about women is archaic if not barbaric; society has to work towards giving women what they deserve, and what they had no chance of receiving even one century ago. They are people too, and women should not be seen as less than a man, or more than a man, but they should be seen on the same level as any given man. Women have been demanding equal treatment from the beginning (Kumar). However, that is not possible because men and