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To claim that modern society has devalued motherhood and femininity, or made them low status, is completely backwards. Motherhood and femininity in general have been devalued for as long as patriarchy has existed, so pretty much the whole of human history. I can't think of any human cultures, let alone any of the big-name European and near-eastern ones that the modern west is descended from, which have not considered the female sphere and female pursuits to be intrinsically lesser than that of men.* The "oh, women aren't inferior to men, they just have different strengths/they're made for different roles" line you hear from conservatives nowadays (what Christians call 'complementarianism') is itself an anti-modernist rearguard action. For the great majority of the history of western civilization, philosophers, theologians, and intellectuals, whether Pagan, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or atheist, have been happy to state that actually, women are just strictly inferior to men. It's the reason you occasionally get figures like Elizabeth I or Catherine the Great who are praised for being essentially men in women's bodies, but you never get men praised for being essentially women in men's bodies.
What happened in more resent centuries isn't that motherhood and womanhood were devalued. Motherhood and womanhood were devalued way back in the primordial past, and only recently have women been allowed to escape such devalued roles at scale.
You can't make motherhood 'prestigious' because motherhood has never been prestigious. Closest thing would just be banning women from doing actually prestigious things.
If you believe in patriarchy then motherhood was the only way to actually have any prestige. If you mothered successful sons, then you earned status of clan matriarch basically for free due to them. There is a reason why mother-in-law is such a hated archetype especially by women - she achieved the status via motherhood and the bride is there to serve her. There is nothing more dangerous than clan matriarch - some man inappropriately touched some other female as attested by this highly respected matriarch of family? The men of the clan will make sure to defend the honor of the family while the matriarch is sipping her tea on the porch.
Modern women are the ones absolutely fucked. If shit hits the fan, all they can do is call the cops who will ignore them or rant on social media into the void as they are getting robbed by predators. There is nothing more sad, pathetic and useless than childless and bitter old woman.
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The Catholic faith reveres a human woman as the "Queen of Heaven" above all other human born men. Extending Marian reverence further, it is believed that her willingness (choice) to bear that child led directly to thecomplete salvation of mankind. That is the model for femininity / motherhood. That's a pretty excellent model.
Sure, you can point to millions of examples of flawed humans perhaps not living up to this. But the ideological / theological apparatus is there. Handwaving it away with your sweeping comment...
...Is to obviously discard any information that could be contrary to your assertion.
It's the only way the species can continue. I ... I can't think of anything more prestigious.
By that logic the serfs were the most prestigious caste of medieval society, because food, unlike swords and castles, is actually necessary for society.
That was not so and isn't so still. Neither was motherhood.
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What information? Do you disagree with the statement that the general opinion of pre-modern thinkers was that women were inferior to men? Can you find any such figures who disagreed? Maybe you can, I'm sure there were a handful, but they're going to be vastly outnumbered by those who held the contrary position. Mary is a goddess*. She is inimitable. The fact that according to Christian mythology she was once a mortal woman is irrelevant to the role she actually occupies in existing religious practice. She should be compared to her fellow divinities, not mortal men, and she is certainly inferior to God the Father and to her own son. Having warrior and scholar goddesses didn't stop the Greeks from pacing such onerous restrictions on their women that it surprised their own contemporaries. The divine and human spheres are different, and the reverence of female divinities says little more about the role of women in actual existing human society than the frequency of incest in stories of the gods says something about the acceptability of incest between actual flesh and blood human beings.
Necessary doesn't equal prestigious. Actually it often indicates the opposite, since the mundane and commonplace is rarely exalted.
*Yes I know it's not latria it's dulia etc. etc.
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This is the second comment in this thread talking about eschewing motherhood being the more "prestigious" option, hence the more favored.
Healthy women have deep-seated, base, mammalian urges to reproduce and nourish healthy offspring. It is hardwired in them to feel pleasure through these behaviors. The bond a mother has with her children and how they give great meaning to her life is a story in every culture in existence.
Women are forsaking these genetic behaviors for what reason? For whose benefit? Have we stacked the value of the maternal bond against an economic forecast and decided it doesn't measure up?
A significant minority of women likely do not have this instinct or have it in a much weakened form. Through human and pre-human history women really haven't had that much of a choice on whether they bear children or not, so selection for enjoying motherhood is probably not as strong as you might think.
Cuz they don't feel like it, I guess? Really nobody is forcing women not to have kids. It's not a matter of it being too expensive or anything. You can be flat broke in a western country and your kids will have an infinitely more comfortable existence than those of the peasant woman in 1312 who popped out twelve children. If women really want to have kids, they can, it's not hard.
Children and especially babies require an immense amount of attention and in the premodern environment child mortality was extremely high. There was obviously a strong selection effect for women who enjoyed childcare because their children died less often from neglect.
Children really require much less attention than WEIRDos think they do. Historically you could mostly ignore your babies between feedings. And once they becomes ambulatory you can just let them do whatever pretty much except when they have to do work around the house or in the fields. They'll probably be fine, horrifying as most moderns find the prospect. High child mortality was due to illness which pre-modern mothering was powerless to prevent, no matter how attentive or caring, not due to kids wandering off and getting eaten by bears.
This is still the case in a lot of undeveloped countries, or at least it was a few decades ago. I've talked to people who grew up in Latin America in the 70s but essentially lived pre-modern peasant existences and described parenting as being very hands-off.
Like what does a modern "neglectful" mother do? She probably lets her kid eat whatever, doesn't take him to the doctor, doesn't buy him new clothes, lets him go wherever he wants with whoever he wants whenever he wants. None of these were factors in the pre-modern world (everybody was eating the same thing, nobody was going to the doctor for yearly checkups, everybody wore the same clothes all the time) except for the last one which would only result in death at the margins.
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I see comments like this a lot, and it goes with the general sentiment that men don't respect women and only think of them as sex objects. The truth is that men do value women greatly for certain things that are unique to their womanhood and less for other things that are not unique to women. It's contemporary women who have devalued the qualities they have which men do value.
I know this is controversial to say these days, but the bodies of men who act like women cannot do the things the real women can do with their bodies and, generally, women are highly valuable because of what their bodies are built to do: nurture life. If I owned a goat who just wanted sit in my chicken coop all day, he wouldn't be very valuable to me because he can't lay eggs.
I'm not saying that all people should be strictly limited to traditional gender roles -- there are outliers that just can't perform those roles. However, society is currently obsessed with making outliers the new normal, which is wreaking havoc on both the healthy operation of human interactions and the self-worth of those who have been yaslit into devaluing their natural gifts.
Really? Sure, there's lots of male respect for the cute twenty/thirtysomething new mom with a baby or two on her hip. Let's even be charitable and assume this does show genuine value for the Life-Nurturing Feminine, not just that hot moms are hot. But whatever that value is, it localizes pretty strictly around the 5-10 years of baby-toddler momhood. In mass culture, middle-aged moms of tweens and teens are bad cops and out-of-touch laughingstocks, older moms of grown-up kids are the ones who get vented about in therapy, accused of narcissism/busybodyness and subjected to aggressive "boundary-setting" if they're even tolerated in the kids' lives at all. Is it a wise choice for a woman to opt into an identity with a mandatory retirement policy that's at most decade out? What's she supposed to envision doing for the rest of the time?
A person's value can change over time from one asset to another.
I know you want to read a lot into this, but it's reall very simple, and universal for both men and women:
If you want to be valued (beyond the default "all human life has value" value, which is a wash across the board), you need to provide value.
A young man, for example, is generally valuable for his strong back and plentiful energy; an old man is generally valuable for his learned wisdom, accrued wealth and maybe even skill at the management of young men. If an old man is stupid, poor and cannot lead the young, he is shirking his own value. It doesn't matter if other people want to imbue him with value or not, he provides nothing.
Women, likewise, can be valuable for a lot of things when they're younger, and less valuable for those things later, but valuable for other properties that align with their age and experience.
I am not proscribing that women only do certain things -- certainly there is variability with every person, and I'm libertarian in terms of what part the law should play in this -- but rather suggesting that women who complain that they aren't valued are probably not providing value out of their own choice. Just like men who don't feel valued by women. This type of value is not innate but something one must identify correctly and work towards providing. Old-fashioned gender roles were better at teaching young people how they can be of value to others than today's gender roles are.
So to go with OP's scenario, a woman in her 20s has the option of rendering value through: (a) having babies and raising them, or (b) focusing on her career and developing her ability to offer economic value, maybe while trying to fit in a baby or two for personal gratification along the way.
In option (a), she's maybe got 15-20 years of being valuable to others (since people value mothering mostly through the end of the cute phase); that value is mostly rendered privately, since community members don't much care who breeds or not; and the past value she's rendered is extremely perishable, expiring pretty immediately when her fertility ends and the kids leave elementary school.
In option (b), she can continue to produce value for others, and thus be regarded as valuable in turn, through age 60-65+; her value is rendered publicly and comes with the benefits of stronger community relationships and public respect; and even if something happens so that she gets fired at 55, her compensation thus far has been in investment-friendly cash plus professional connections, which will hold their value well in tough times.
I think this is why old-fashioned gender roles did very much emphasize women's economic productivity, focusing on diligent spinning, weaving, prudent financial management, etc. (Also, creation of children used to be another form of economic productivity/retirement savings, but is definitely less so now that they don't contribute to the household and feel no obligation to look after aged parents.) For better or worse, our grinding middle-management girlbosses are more truly aligned with old-fashioned notions of women's value than the modern sentimental tradwife who stays hot for hubby, bakes cute cupcakes and cuddles the babies all day.
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The gender roles were also very good at determining/controlling pitfalls, too; a society that is only capable of condemning stupidity/violence in men [who provide value by doing], or anger/entitlement in women [who provide value by being], is inherently divided against itself simply because that is the most common failure mode of each gender. It gets worse when those faults are portrayed as positive.
Maybe, but along came mechanization and post-scarcity, and the West hasn't quite figured out how to deal with that yet; now, men need to act like women to succeed (sit down, shut up, regurgitate is how they'll waste their physical and mental peak times of their lives), and women need to act like men to succeed (you have to waste your physical peak proving you're fit to receive the welfare that is most public service jobs and by the time you've done that you're already starting to wilt- divorce doesn't pay well, after all).
And when "how well you can pass as the other gender" is the order of the day, it's not a surprise that men-acting-as-women aren't attractive to women, and women-acting-as-men aren't attractive to men. And while that's great for man-women and woman-men, maybe most people are better off steering clear.
(And really, it's threading the needle: making sure the bi-gender people aren't held back, but at the same time pointing out that cargo-culting their inherent success is a bad idea. If humanity was capable of understanding that nuance we'd probably be better off, but I don't think the average human is and it doesn't remain stable between generations either.)
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Where do you get the idea that adults' mothers are looked down upon in such a way? All around the world, men will literally kill people for insults directed at their mothers. There is a reason "Son of a bitch" is such a common insult. To denigrate a man's mother is worse than insulting himself, his siblings, or his father.
I was responding to the earlier poster's comment:
made specifically in defense of the proposition that women should abandon professional careers to pursue instead early stay-at-home motherhood. So the question of whether the average dude would beat up some other guy for insulting his mother isn't really germane to the question.
Do these mother-loving men love motherhood enough to listen to older women's perspectives, defend their rights, respect their ideas, hire them in preference to hot young recent grads, offer them salaries commensurate with the years they spent in this ostensibly ultra-high-value experience? Do they go out of their way to live near their own moms and spend time with them?
Do they deeply admire a CEO's wife who raised his four kids, just as much as they do the CEO for whatever email/boardroom/golf wankery he did during that same timeframe? Would they go to hear her TEDX talk and buy her vanity book afterwards? Because men find motherhood so high-value and so darn important?
Nobody needs to propose anything because women already abandon their professional careers for motherhood. For many of these women, they would have been far happier pursuing motherhood earlier. Are there women who are happier pursuing careers than if they had pursued motherhood? Sure, but the exception should not drive societal policy and culture. You don't hear anyone push motherhood except conservatives, which most young women do not listen to. So your average young woman might hear from their parents/family about pursuing motherhood, and then nearly the rest of social media/entertainment/school/friends/society tell her to pursue a career instead.
Respect for motherhood does not mean men have to treat all mothers with respect, or treat any random mother to a higher degree of respect than they do for any other person. If the parents did a good job raising their children, it is likely there to be a good relationship between a man and his mother. Most men I know that have a good relationship with their parents do in fact respect their mother and take her input into consideration. I personally also regularly talk with my mother for advice. This does not mean if I meet any random mother, I would respect her opinions any more than that of any other person, unless we were talking about something where her experiences as a mother would be relevant to the conversation.
Why would and should anyone respect a CEO's wife to the same level of respect as the CEO? If the CEO was a woman and her husband raised their kids I would respect the CEO more than her husband because she's the one making the decisions for the company. The CEO is making business decisions that likely have a greater impact on my life than a mother does raising her children. A man can also aspire to be a CEO. So of course a CEO get more respect on the basis that it's something men can aspire towards and on the impact it could have on their day-to-day lives. Does this mean men don't respect motherhood? No, what you're doing here is a false equivalency. You're basically arguing that men don't value motherhood or don't value it enough because they wouldn't respect a CEO's wife who is a mother to the same level of degree as they would for a CEO. The thing is, I respect and admire my own mother a hell of a lot more than I do any CEO, and I'm sure many other men feel the same way towards their mother. A man can simultaneously find motherhood high-value and important and still admire a CEO more than they would that CEO's wife.
Plenty of rich and successful people attribute their success to their mother. You don't hear that type of respect and love as often for a father. If anything, in modern American culture motherhood is highly elevated while fatherhood is not. The most common trope of a father you see in movies, tv shows, video games, advertisements, books, academic articles, the news, etc. is a deadbeat dad, a missing father, a dead father, a stupid father, the list goes on. Of course, there are negative stereotypes about women mothers too, narcissistic parents and all that but despite that, your average person seems to still outwardly declare their love and respect for their mother far more often than they do for their fathers. Just because there are negative tropes about mothers does not mean motherhood is not respected, it just means there are bad mothers out there. If a child does not speak with their parents and has a bad relationship with them, to me that is indicative of poor parenting and not reflective of a societal dislike and hatred for mothers or fathers in general.
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Ah, yes, 40's and 50's girlbosses are widely admired among the masses, the stereotypes of cats and alcoholism are signs of respect.
I think people Just Don't Like Middle Aged Women regardless of whether they're moms or not. Honestly I'm not sure middle aged men get the greatest shake either, although there's positive stereotypes slightly more often I suppose.
Oh, I agree that it's a curse of middle-aged womanhood in general. Underneath that, likely just the bitter animal truth that humans only seek the favor of other humans when they (a) have something to gain from them or (b) have something to fear from them. Men are more physically intimidating into midlife, thus retain the power to command respect and amity for longer.
However, given the choice to be a widely-reviled middle-aged woman with a fat bank account, a nice apartment, some social clout and active power over one or two resentful underlings... or a widely-reviled middle-aged woman with a menial job, no money or future prospects, and the wistful memory of long-ago baby cuddles with grown adults who are now far away living their own lives, calling maybe once or twice a year? It doesn't seem obviously rational to choose the latter.
Family connections bring actual literal benefits; it's probably better to be the lower earning partner in a couple than a higher earning single person. Like the whole thing about a housewife is that it's being a housewife meaning she's married; if a sufficient amount of relationship security is available then this is a rational decision, and given that divorce risk is not distributed equitably then many women- and I would estimate most who consider the stay at home mom route- should proceed under the assumption that they have sufficient relationship/family security to make the SAHM route a more rational decision.
And most adults are not that estranged from their parents, even in early young adulthood, nor do most marriages with a SAHM end in divorce. The median 'retired housewife' is happily married and posting instagram photos of her grandchildren, not alone and working at walmart to pay the bills.
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In modern mass culture, the middle-age dads of tweens and teens are also portrayed as out of touch laughingstocks. At least the moms are portrayed as competent. As for older women, yes, there’s the stereotype of the overbearing mother (or mother-in-law), but there’s also the great respect shown to grandmothers. Just think about the messaging during Covid. Everyone was told to mask and get vaccinated in order to save grandma, but no one even thought to be concerned about grandpa.
Either way, I’m pretty sure dasfoo was talking about the traditional views under the bad old patriarchy, not modern views.
Grandpas typically don't live as long. That's a larger factor towards why grandmas represent the covid-endangered family member than increased respect towards grandmas, I think.
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Well therapy culture sucks. See below.
What, as opposed to "she's a witch, burn her" and the associated other super-compassionate pre-therapy approaches to a society's superfluous old women? Can you cite a single historical or modern context where men as a group eagerly step up to show respect and deference for (non-related) moms in their 40s, 50s, 60s, on account of the erstwhile life-giving properties of their bodies? (And no, abstract Marian devotion doesn't count unless you can show it translating to heightened value for real flesh-and-blood older moms).
Even on this forum, would the folks lavishly praising young motherhood also endorse really serious social consequences for wealthy men who ditch their aging wives to pursue younger, hotter options once the kids have become teens? Consequences on the order of the philandering dude's losing his career or identity, since those are the effective results of family breakup for a wife who's made stay-at-home momhood her professional vocation? If not, then it's definitely safer to be Jeff Bezos than Mackenzie Bezos, and you can't blame young women for trying.
Yes. Abandoning your wife is scummy behavior.
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Alimony was the social invention. And Mackenzie Bezos got billions for literally marrying a dude.
Mackenzie's contributions to Amazon were a lot bigger than just "being Jeff's wife".
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Jeff and Mackenzie started out in their early 20s in roughly the same position, collaborating on a business, both presumably thinking they had talent and some good ideas. So they make a great test case for the options facing young women who choose between (A) early marriage/kids and (B) pursuing their career.
Mackenzie chose A, stayed home with the children and after two decades got to be the unilaterally discarded middle-aged wife with no future, no vocation, no social or professional power, no marketable skills to build on, and zero credit or respect for the 25 years of work she put into the supposedly-so-valuable work of motherhood and family-building (just "literally marrying a dude," in your words). She gets to keep some of the accumulated assets of their joint family project-- much less than half-- and the male public is in broad agreement that she should be damn grateful to emerge with even that.
Jeff chose B, cultivated his career, and gets not just riches but power, public respect, a robust personal and professional network, and a vocation/identity that will stick with him well into his '70s, where his value will increase, not decrease, over time.
Explain to me again why you think young women should follow Mackenzie's path, not Jeff's?
We are talking about billions with a B. The idea that if she worked she’d be in a better situation financially is laughable.
And no, what she did wasn’t as valuable as building Amazon. But that is literally one of the biggest companies in the world. The question is answered by the extremes; it is answered by the average.
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People in Jeff's circles who aren't begging for handouts acknowledge pretty openly that he was a scumbag for what he did. He and his duck-faced new woman are viciously mocked by everyone from the well-educated inhabitants of elite tech and political circles to the literal tabloid press that made fun of him for his 'alive girl' texts and delights in publishing pictures of the couple where they look awful.
Being one of the richest people in the world is always going to attract a baseline level of respect from the majority of the people who surround you, since a pittance from you is enough to set them and their descendants up for generations. Still, I'd hesitate to say that Jeff came out of it better than Mackenzie. You also don't acknowledge that she didn't demand her fair share, she didn't care enough to and settled for much less. She could have demanded (and would have been granted) both more equity and voting shares in Amazon if she wanted them.
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Why the non-related requirement? The point of honoring your mother is honoring the sacrifice she and her body made giving you life and then sustaining and raising you.
In many more traditional cultures, men remain more loyal to their parents, especially their mothers, than to their wives. This appreciation-for-life is truly seen as a life-debt which can't really ever be repaid.
Well, I would.
The original discussion was specifically about young women giving up a career in order to focus on having kids right out of college. The compensation for 5 years of paid professional work in the mid-20s is not just $X salary, but greatly expanded skillset and prospects for future earning, a solid professional network, plus a certain amount of prestige/ social capital that can be traded in for increased power in community interactions, etc. If you're saying the only compensation needed for an equivalent amount of time spent in stay-at-home childrearing should be the freely-rendered love of your own hypothetical someday babies (assuming you don't do anything to piss them off), well, it's a sweet sentiment, but it sounds like a terrible deal for the woman.
I don't think status compensation is the right way to look at it. Kids are their own reward. The main thing women get out of the arrangement is more kids who are more well-adjusted.
Their husbands arguably get the same thing with less personal risk, which is why divorce should bear extreme social and financial consequences in most cases.
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Go and say ten Hail Marys for this post….
Said of course in jest but Mary was clearly important.
Mary is a goddess, it's not really comparable.
That's heresy.
I know it's ackshually dulia but if you don't assume Catholic doctrine is true, from an anthropological perspective Mary clearly occupies the role of a goddess in the religion.
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Modern society values femininity more and motherhood less than it used to, leaving the total prestige of motherhood more or less unchanged, but the relative prestige greatly diminished. Women seeking status have better alternatives now than motherhood.
I believe fatherhood and motherhood to be people's highest and most noble roles. There's a reason God generally has us call him Father rather than Friend, Boss, or King. It's good that we value women more now than we used to (if we actually do anyways--I didn't live back then), but if this change had happened without motherhood being correspondingly diminished, the family would have grown more important, not less.
God is referred to as the Lord far more then he is referred to as the Father. If you include Jesus it's even more lopsided in favor of king or lord. Lord is substituted for the name of God in the bible not father. You can hardly go a passage without someone talking about the Lord.
That's how the scriptures refer to him, but my understanding is that that's not how he generally asks to be referred to. The Lord's Prayer instructs us to refer to him as "Father".
I'll admit my knowledge here is much more cultural than I realized. My church refers to the Father as "Heavenly Father" much more often than any other name, besides perhaps "God", and emphasizes the familiar terms perhaps more than the scriptures themselves do.
The new testament seems often to use the term lord (κυριος) most frequently apply to Jesus. (And since you are asking for verses instructing to call us that, Phil 2:11: "and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father".) At the same time, it was typically also used as a translation for the Hebrew יהוה, the proper name of God.
Our own ability to call God Father isn't really seen much in the old testament. I imagine it's probably also only a thing because we're adopted as sons of God in Christ.
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The Lord's Prayer also talks about the coming of his kingdom on Earth. I don't know why you hide the fact you are Mormon. I assumed you were coming at this from the perspective of a Christian or Jew whose religious texts and practices I am familiar with. "Heavenly Father" makes more sense in the context of Mormonism's theology, but in the context of more standard Abrahamic faiths, Lord is more common.
He said "my church refers to God as the Heavenly Father most times", which is both a factually accurate statement and hardly hiding the fact that he's mormon to anyone who's moderately familiar with it. That is not "hiding" his mormonism, unless you think online mormons should preface discussion of their religion with "My church (THE KOOKY HERETICAL MORMON CULT, WE'RE NOT NORMAL CHRISTIANS) calls God Heavenly Father"
FWIW, I was raised (catholic) christian, found his remark about God mostly being referred as Father weird & didn't recognize his Mormonism since it's not very common in Europe. I would have preferred if he had been specific.
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I was referring to his earlier post. Where he talks about how God is referred to in scripture. Mormon scripture and it's interpretation differs from the Trinitarian majority a lot. He was making claims that only make sense in the context of his Mormonism. The LDS aren't some church, they are a very particular group with very different background assumptions from a standard church that only uses the Bible.
As I said, I didn't realize how much of that was specific to the LDS church, which places extreme theological emphasis on family. I think there's a good scriptural basis for this, but really am not interested in starting another theological debate lol.
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Not trying to hide it, I just talked a good deal about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints recently here and don't want to be That Guy lol, at least any more than I already am.
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Is your argument that modern society values motherhood more? That there have never been so few women per capita becoming mothers, to me is evidence against this.
Complementarianism, may be expressed more now, I suspect for much of existence it went without saying, but was no less true.
Why do you think this was his argument? He says nothing remotely similar to this.
I read OP's post
and this had been the case when tfr was higher, though I don't see that @Tenaz actually makes this argument.
This disagreement with OP leads me to believe @To_Mandalay also believes that @Tenaz has said that motherhood was more valued before 'modern society'.
Though I don't see that he says it I read OP to mean the perceived 'value' of motherhood had declined from the past to the present. @To_Mandalay disagreeing could mean that perceived value had increased over time. Hence my question.
I now take this to mean that @To_Mandalay means the perceived value of motherhood has been flat or unchanged because the patriarchy. I don't find this argument particularly compelling.
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No.
I don't think so, I think for most of history it has been the standard belief of most men that women are an inferior order.
Inferior at breast feeding or baby having?
Horses are better than humans at running but the number of people throughout history who would disagree with the statement "horses are inferior to human beings" is very small.
Inferior in what sense or to what end? Would be a more sensible response than agreement.
Inferior typically applies between variations of a type or catagory, and then often for a specific use. Horses would make inferior men, and men inferior horses. Your usage makes little sense.
Inferior in the great chain of being, in absolute worth, closer, in the mind of a pre-modern, to the Imago Dei
I'm not sure I see evidence for this. Men and women are both created in the image of God.
Women historically had been protected or privileged over men in things likely to result in death like drowning on a sinking ship, or serving in combat.
This is the point that @omw_68 made to me in a private message that was perhaps meant to be a reply here.
Maybe, but to what extent? Augustine believed the woman was not as much the Image of God as the man. Aristotle said without much qualification that woman was inferior to man.
This actually isn't really true. Someone linked the wikipedia page for "women and children first" which makes clear this is not some ancient code of conduct but a rather recent 19th century phenomenon, observed only sporadically. Men tended to fare better in shipwrecks, the Titanic being the glaring exception, because they were better swimmers.
The idea that being exempted from combat is a privilege is itself a pretty modern one. For a very long time bearing arms was one of, if not the highest honor. Free men could bear arms, not slaves or women. Probably the oldest conception of what it means to "be a man" is to be a great warrior who can kill a lot of people.
"Where's all that 'male privilege' when it's time to get drafted?" is a complaint that belongs to the post-modern and especially post-industrial era where warfare has been stripped of all the glory and honor that historically attended it, and been reduced to merely an unpleasant duty not dissimilar from digging ditches or pulling wagons.
Occasional woman through history who have fought as soldiers or warriors, whether disguised as men or otherwise, tend to draw praise or at least neutral curiosity, while men who took on the role of a woman with regards to child-rearing or other tasks assigned to the female sphere were viewed as worthy of derision at best.
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Nope, it was definitely not intended to be a reply. Omw likes sending private messages to engage in a point for some reason.
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Counterpoint: Say something about someone's mom who is from a traditionalist culture and if you survive the reaction you should reevaluate women not being valued. Mothers and matriarchal figures are highly respected.
Inferior is a relative term, it simply depends on what we are measuring. With that said, the standard deviation for achievement is limited for women. Becoming a king is a greater achievement than motherhood. Alexander the Great clearly beat all mother's throughout history in achievement. However, few men live up to that level. The mother's aren't valued aspect is dependent on a culture where people think they can be whatever they want and they are comparing house wife to astronaut. Not average job of a man to mother of 2-3
Of course women have value in traditional societies. More than livestock. But less than men.
If that were true, we would expect traditional societies to be more willing to allow women to suffer and die in place of men, because they have less value.
Except we don't. Every human society treats men as disposable relative to women.
However human psychology shakes out in any particular society, I think 'high status vs low status' is simply an inappropriate measure to use when comparing the stations of men and women. Men and women are not competing ethnic or religious groups, where power and status differentials can be clear, deliberate and explicit. The relationship is more complicated than that.
Not necessarily. Women are valuable because they can give you sons.
"Female infanticide" is it's own phenomenon deserving of a name but not "male infanticide." The wiki article only gives the examples of India, China, and Pakistan, but gender-skewed infanticide was also not uncommon in pre-modern Europe. Not a lot of men in history were going "awwww man, another son?" when their wife popped out the latest kid.
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Ok, then if you're in any shape to continue the experiment, insult someone directly and compare the results to insulting their mother (you probably should pick a different dude though). You really think they'd beat you up more?
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In achievement, maybe. In prestige, Mary the mother of Jesus has him and probably all other men beat.
Does “all other men” include Jesus?
Jesus is the only reason for the "probably," but yes. I can't count the number of Catholics who argued that Mary was greater than Jesus because she was his mother. If I brought up Mary's mother as someone who was therefore even greater than Mary, they didn't have a good response, but I don't think I convinced anyone that way either.
Catholic doctrine holds Christ above Mary (right?) but I'm pretty sure most Catholics worship and respect Mary more.
I'm rethinking it now though--altogether, Jesus, Mohammed, and Buddha are probably held in higher esteem.
Technically, the Catholic position is to worship (latria) God alone, and to merely respect or venerate (dulia) saints, including Mary. However, because of Mary's special status as the Mother of God and Queen of Heaven, she is offered "hyperdulia" the highest form of respect or veneration.
Fun fact: standard Catholic teaching also says that the human body of Christ is to receive hyperdulia, if I remember correctly. (I'm not Catholic, but I'm pretty sure that's right.)
Edit: When I look up hyperdulia, it refers only to Mary, but I'm pretty sure I'd seen it applied to Christ in some theological writings in Latin? If you like, I can try to find it.
I'm not familiar with that, and it sounds like Nestorianism to me. I have never heard hyperdulia applied to anything but the Mother of God.
Looking into the matter, I found Thomas Aquinas arguing the opposite, that Christ's flesh is offered latria on account of its unity with the Word, but also that it receives dulia on account of Christ's human perfection:
He also adds, "So that one and the same Person of Christ is adored with "latria" on account of His Divinity, and with "dulia" on account of His perfect humanity," which sounds misleading, but is really saying that Christ the Hypostatic Union is worshipped on account of his divinity and venerated on account of his perfect humanity, in an additive and not mutually exclusive sense.
I'd argue that if you're not doing systematic theology like St. Thomas, talking about separate worship for the humanity and divinity of Christ has already taken you far afield of Nicene Christianity. Later on, Chalcedon would seem to argue with any other interpretation:
And of course the Miaphysites, who disagreed with that definition, did so because they believed it wasn't insistant enough on the inseparability of the divine and human! In recent times, they insist on the formula that the humanity and divinity are inseparable "except in thought," i.e. when you're doing a Summa and not in actual worship. Chalcedonians, including Catholic theologians, agree with that stipulation.
Except in the tomb, Catholicism doesn't really like talking about Christ's body apart from his human soul and divine person. It's for that reason, when affirming the Eucharist to be the real body of Christ, they're quick to add the gloss, "blood, soul, and divinity," because separating these things just isn't something they do. The tomb is a weird case -- maybe that's where your quotation was from? I'd be inclined to offer the crucified Lord latria in any case. The body is not separate from the soul, that it ever is is an abberation due to sin, which God will correct on the last day.
An excerpt from Quenstedt, a Lutheran scholastic (translation, my own):
(in the context of him listing those who disagree with the Lutheran stance)
"Of the papists, who, distinguishing between latreia, duleia, and hyperduleia, to God alone attribute latreia, to angels and men, douleia, and to the humanity of Christ and the blessed virgin, the devotion [cultus] of douleia. So Thomas, in book III, upon [Lombard's] Sentences, distinction 9. [I looked there, and though things seemed relevant, didn't quite find usage of the word hyperdulia in a way relavent to what I am attempting to demonstrate] Thus also, Alexander of Hales: "To God", he says, "we owe latria, to Christ, by reason of his human nature, hyperdulia, to the saints, only dulia." [Adam] Tanner, in book 4, Theologia Scholastica, disputation 1, question 7, dubia 7, declares his opinion in two assertions, of which the first is, "The humanity of Christ united to the Word, in the same supreme adoration of latria, by which the incarnate word is adored, rightly at the same time is worshiped [colitur] and adored, but by diverse reason," which then he explains thus, as he asserts, "the word is the per se, primary, and absolute object of adoration or latria, even the formal object itself, but the humanity is only the material object of the same adoration, and indeed secondary only, and concomitant and respective," etc. His other assertion is this: "Christ, as man, and therefore also his humanity, speaking per se, rightly is able to be worshiped by an inferior worship, namely, if the reason of worshiping is the dignity and created excellence which his humanity has either from habitual [different sense of habitual] grace and created holiness, by the spirit inhering, also by abstracting from the Word, or by the grace of union." This opinion of Thomas and his followers, Robert Bellarmine and Denis Patau not obscurely oppose. For [Bellarmine], in book 2, on images, chapter 24, denies, "by the worship of latria something is able to be adored, in such a way, however, that it is not affected by this worship on account of itself," which is the manifest opinion of Thomas, Gregory de Valencia, Tanner, etc. But Petavius, Th. Dogm. tom. IV lib. XV. cap. XV. num. 5, after he gives the opinions of the fathers and councils, at length, concludes, "in all which, considering, latria, or latreutic proskynesis, to be opposed to schetic [habitual, in the unusual sense above, I think: something one has, roughly], nor is any schetic latreia recognized by those fathers;" etc. In a few, "the papists do not concede Christ according to his human nature, properly, per se, by the same highest worship of adoration, by the force of personal union and of the communicated immense majesty, to be pursued." See Thomas part 3, question 25, article 2, Bellarmine, book 1 on the adoration of saints, chapter 12, article 2, Tannerus, loc. cit. Compare Dorscheus loc. cit. page 1001 and following."
Which I realized as I was translating had few dispositive proofs in the passage itself of the word hyperdulia.
Oh, wait, Aquinas does use "hyperdulia" at the end of reply to objection 1 in the Summa, in the passage you read. The Bellarmine passage cited there also refers hyperdulia to the humanity of Christ and his mother, as Bellarmine is listing the kinds of worship. And I decided that's enough, I'm not going to check the Tanner or Dorscheus. So I guess there was more proof from those, beyond the Alexander of Hales quote.
Anyway, so yeah, hyperdulia is applied to the humanity of Christ, although it does look like it's usual also to say that Christ's humanity is worshipped with latria on account of the hypostatic union, as you rightly pointed out.
And of course, you're right that worship wouldn't be separated, so it doesn't actually matter.
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Technically, Mary is defined as the highest created being, above all the angels and saints, but firmly beneath the trinity.
Nothing that I said contradicts your clarification. Hyperdulia is still less than latria.
It goes: latria > hyperdulia > protodulia > dulia. (Or more accurately, latria is qualitatively different than dulia, and not on the same track at all.)
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