ABSTRACT
The explosion of interest in the history of women and gender, triggered in the 1960s, has produced theories about how women's status and opportunities have been determined in recent centuries. The way in which men have accumulated and exercised political, economic and social power, in Judæo-Christian society in particular, has been called ‘patriarchy’. In patriarchal society, women are subordinate to men in virtually all areas of both public and private life. This has not merely been an informal arrangement; rather, it has been entrenched in a wide variety of societies by legislation and custom. Religious institutions, including the Christian churches with their male clergy, have sanctified it and contributed to a social system in which the dominance of men and the subordination of women have been enforced by the discipline of a community's acceptance or disapproval of individuals’ conduct. There has been no doubt about who has held power, in society and in individual households: men's greater physical strength has been the implicit, and at times the explicit, guarantee of their authority.
