ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how women acquiesced to the male view that femininity was corrupt and dangerous. It suggests that at the roots of modern feminism lay a fundamental switching of alliances, once women began to cast off this view of them. Through popular culture as well rode a visceral male fear of women's "magical" powers. A religious practice called "churching" provided the most consistent evidence of a male disposition to believe women's bodies dangerous to society. Village women were willing to intervene in wife beating much sooner than were village men, as Roderick Phillips has pointed out for Rouen. Some scholars have argued that the woman's emotional isolation in modern marriage created new forms of bonding among women. One scholar has shown, for example, that starting around 1830 American husbands began to replace neighbor women in participating in a wife's childbirth.
