Things must have been otherwise, no doubt. Feminism should not have been a self-defense movement, forced by circumstances that have occurred since the dawn of time.
But every culture, every civilization always advanced with the burden of the feminine as something "complementary" in the best of cases ...
Original sins represented in women capable of guiding the human being to perdition. Temptations worse than the devil himself in the desert. The paradox (or rather the ancestral paranoia) between the capacity to give life and the manna made disgusting carnal pleasures.
The man forced his way through. And once established in a favorable position vis-à-vis women, he built, as civilization advanced, defenses against her, excuses for not representing himself as an equal.
All this in conjunction with a Sue Monk Kidd book that goes back to the time when Jesus walked the earth, preaching, sowing his peace and gathering storms.
The story of Jesus Christ had its great fictional development for me in the series «Caballo de Troya», by JJ Benitez. Now we find a new intrahistoric development to fit the role of women in those days when feminism did not even exist as a term (it took something like nineteen centuries to materialize). And the result is equally fascinating thanks to a character like Ana, who shares in this novel the most intense life of Jesus outside of what is known by sacred scriptures.
Ana is a young woman from a wealthy Jewish family with concerns and dreams. Her life changes when she meets Jesus, a rebellious young man who peacefully opposes the domination of Rome, who does not perform miracles but does help the poor and prostitutes, and who becomes a leader almost despite himself.
But what is told here is not the story we already know but that of women in a time when intelligence, ingenuity and restlessness were the property of men. A feminist claim in a novel in which the wealth of historical details and the masterful setting lead the reader to a landscape a thousand times explored but which appears totally new.
You can now buy the novel "The Book of Desires", by Sue Monk Kidd, here: