At first, when Buddha’s female family members came to him and asked him to let them into the Sangha, he said no. In result, over five hundred women chopped their hair off, put robes on, and walked to where the Buddha was; but yet again they received the same response, and the Buddha dismissed them. Yet, a woman named Mahapajapati fought back and asked him why; her questioning eventually resulted in the Buddha allowing the women to be ordained and consequently become enlightened. However, the Buddha gave these nuns have a collection of eight strict, intense, limiting rules for how they should act; this was a reflection of women’s current lower position in society. Oddly enough, for a nun to become fully ordained, a plethora of both nuns and …show more content…
When the Buddha went to leave his wife and child at the beginning of his renunciation, he couldn’t manage say goodbye to them because the love he had for them was so much. Yasodharā gave him love and support all throughout their marriage and that was hard to leave. She even had prophetic dreams about her future child. Once her husband left her, she was overcome with massive grief. Although, from their past lives she actually knew that he wanted to become a Buddha. Yasodharā can recall her previous lifetimes with her husband in “samsāra” where they loved each other greatly. But despite this, in her present life she felt completely abandoned. She missed, longed, and was concerned for her husband greatly, yet she knew why he left and accepted it. Yasodharā was always thinking about if he was okay and if he was living healthily and well. Eventually, she goes and becomes a nun herself. In her past lives, she explains how she was a consistent devoted lover and wife of Gautama. The Buddha praises her for her sacrifice, her, intellect, and her meditative powers and abilities, for she could “perform miracles” for many people, including the monks. Overall, Yasodharā was a supportive, committed, loving wife in her past lives, and when it was time for her husband to go away she cared for him, and eventually followed him into his path of enlightenment. Without her, Buddha
The Enlightenment is known as the revolution that brought to question the traditional political and social structures. This included the question of the woman’s traditional roles in society. As the public sphere relied more and more ?? and the advances in scientific and educated thinking, women sought to join in with the ranks of their male counterparts. Women held gatherings known as salons where they organized intellectual conversations with their distinguished male guests. Seeking to further their status, enlightened women published pamphlets and other works advocating for educational rights and political recognition. Even with this evolution of woman in society, many still clung to the belief that the role of the woman was solely domestic. The females that spoke up were usually deemed unnatural. However these women used the time period of reason and science that allowed them the opportunity to break away from their domestic roles and alter the view of women in society.
Anna Julia Cooper’s, Womanhood a Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress, an excerpt from A Voice from the South, discusses the state of race and gender in America with an emphasis on African American women of the south. She contributes a number of things to the destitute state African American woman became accustom to and believe education and elevation of the black woman would change not only the state of the African American community but the nation as well. Cooper’s analysis is based around three concepts, the merging of the Barbaric with Christianity, the Feudal system, and the regeneration of the black woman.
In China and India, Buddhism helped women gain ground in maintaining education in. Buddhism allowed and encouraged women to join religion and education as equal to men. While in China a few women were Buddhist scholars, the Neo-Confucianists excluded women from the politics and educational system to prevent the power of women in government. Upper class women commonly had more opportunities for higher education then the lower class. Women in Europe and America lived more freely and openly than in other societies. European upper class women were able to read and write, become apprentices in towns, and perform family medicine, and some were caught with English Bibles.
Ihara Saikaku’s Life of a Sensuous Woman written in the 17th century and Mary Woolstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman written in the 18th century are powerful literary works that advocated feminism during the time when women were oppressed members of our societies. These two works have a century old age difference and the authors of both works have made a distinctive attempt to shed a light towards the issues that nobody considered significant during that time. Despite these differences between the two texts, they both skillfully manage to present revolutionary ways women can liberate themselves from oppression laden upon them by the society since the beginning of humanity.
Women are sacred and must be taken care of in the sense that they are the pride of a sole “clan”. Women are child bearers, they are what secures the future. Nature says women must be protected as they bear the future. We’ve build up on nature, it’s the old survival of the fittest mentality that forged this into our cultural legacies, into religion. And that’s exactly why religions refuse to allow women roam and explore freely. It’s protection. Religion says women must be controlled. They’ve misinterpreted protection for imprisonment. This imprisonment of women always needing to be caged suffocates and torments their soul that they forget they’re also human. These misinterpretations of women being a result of a sinful nature has influenced mankind to a point where the prevalence of sexism and gender inequality has increased to become a part of the generic lifestyle of human
Today, women share the same equal rights and opportunities as men; nevertheless, that has not invariably been the case. Before the Jazz Age era, gender discrimination between men and women in society was considerably popular. Women were seen as inferior to men. Their jobs were to care for the home, children, and other domesticated duties while men were able to work, get an education, and become doctors or lawyers. Many women like Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ida B. Wells, Sojourner Truth, Zora Hurston, to mention a few, seen the unfairness in women's rights and fought for equal rights for women through different movements, efforts, protests, and even marches to abolish women’s rights. As a consequence, women now pursue not only higher education and higher paid jobs/ businesses, but their rights. One of the world’s most controversial issues among churches of today is the role of a woman. Many people are confused about the duty of a woman and how she is supposed to serve God because of history. History taught us to never deny someone of gender, race, or even diversity since he or she has human rights. However, this issue should not be viewed as men versus women because this is not a political issue; instead, it should be viewed as the structural of a church. Women should not be priests, pastors, or even rabbis for God condone women for being priests, pastors, and rabbis as well as proscribed.
The everyday role of women in many countries is quite different from that defined in Buddhist scriptures. Pure Buddhist ideology The Buddha originally banned women from monastic practice (nuns) but later reversed. his decision, allowing them to practice in separate quarters. The Buddhist scriptures say very little about women, treating them as equals. In one scripture, the Visuddhi Magga, a monk asked, “Reverend Sir, have you seen a woman pass this way?”
The second segment of the chapter discussed the divine law, gender roles, daily living, the paths to enlightenment, the religious life, and death. What I found interesting was the discussion on how women were portrayed in Buddhist scriptures. Like most sacred texts, there are contradictory statements about the nature of women and their role in society within the Buddhist scriptures. The ancient texts often depict women as " seductresses who, because of their carnal sensual nature, are a threat to the spiritual welfare of men" (Bilhartz, 2006, p. 238). For example, in the parable found in Itivuttaka, it is evident that women are viewed as obstacles in the spiritual welfare of men. The parable is about a man who is being carried away by a river to whirlpools with monsters and demons. According to the
With following stories with women in early Buddhism, evidence from texts have shown indications of what their place was in the communities and who they were. The kind of women that came forward wanting to be nuns came from all levels of the social pyramid. Examples of some of these such women were those that were mothers, those who widows, and some who left their old life behind in search of wandering the world. This group of women included those that were wealthy, intelligent and dignified but were in search of reaching new heights in their spirituality. The extents to which women went to become nuns were unbelievable. Defying the social norms and going against what the majority had thought, some women went above and beyond even disfiguring themselves to make a point of their devotion.
This is a metaphoric way of portraying women’s role in society at the time frame of enlightenment. We see that the women were looked down upon and the image of a woman was considered less respectable than the image of a man. We see this when the author says,” minds of women are not in a healthy state”. This conveying that in this period of Enlightenment that men had no sort of respect for women and all they were looked at as were servants. The author depicts woman as a flower, as woman are the more delicate sex but are considered beautiful in appearance like a flower. Since the women are referred to as flowers this also means that even though they are beautiful they are weak and useless in men’s eyes.
Women were often subjects of intense focus in ancient literary works. In Sarah Pomeroy’s introduction of her text Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves, she writes, “Women pervade nearly every genre of classical literature, yet often the bias of the author distorts the information” (x). It is evident in literature that the social roles of women were more restricted than the roles of men. And since the majority of early literature was written by men, misogyny tends to taint much of it. The female characters are usually given negative traits of deception, temptation, selfishness, and seduction. Women were controlled, contained, and exploited. In early literature, women are seen as objects of possession, forces deadly to men, cunning, passive, shameful, and often less honorable than men. Literature reflects the societal beliefs and attitudes of an era and the consistency of these beliefs and attitudes toward women and the roles women play has endured through the centuries in literature. Women begin at a disadvantage according to these societal definitions. In a world run by competing men, women were viewed as property—prizes of contests, booty of battle and the more power men had over these possessions the more prestigious the man. When reading ancient literature one finds that women are often not only prizes, but they were responsible for luring or seducing men into damnation by using their feminine traits.
In contemporary society, feminism is emerging as a theory of social construct. In literature it is often challenging to discover female characters that go beyond the limits of marginalized female stereotypes and roles as a means to transgress beyond societal norms. Women are characterized as subordinate objects, amid the dominant patriarchal nature entrenched amid the epic. In The Ramayana, women are portrayed as powerless objects that succumb to the manipulation of men as the text portrays a false empowerment of women, which ultimately succumb to common archetypes accustomed to women in literature; implementing a hierarchy of gender that institutionalizes male dominance amid female inferiority. The women of The Ramayana struggle to oppose the systemic patriarchy and pursue a pathway towards attaining dynamic elements of power, that enable their ability to embody autonomous authority. In Valmiki’s The Ramayana, while women appear to be empowered, ultimately they are feeble instruments utilized to fulfill the desires of men.
The role of women in religious scripture dictates an inferior position in society. Beginning with the creation of Adam and then Eve, as his helpmate. Her purpose was that Adam would not be lonely. This origin provides the ground work for inequality of genders on the basis of religious scripture. The roles prescribed determined that women should be in a subordinate position to man. The female role and relationship with God is defined by the various books of the Old and New Testaments, the reported actions of Jesus Christ, and finally the Qur'an.
It reflects a belief in an ideal woman such as the Virgin Mary. This ideal woman is gentle, passive, virtuous and self-sacrificing. In the 19th century, there was an belief in the “Cult of True Womanhood.” It was an idea similar to marianismo, where the virtues were piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. Religion was considered a natural sphere for women and for the ability as moral centers to influence men. To be a “True Woman” gave a woman the ability to make a better man. Purity, of course, was essential. No good woman ever considered lewdness or sin. Submission was dictated in the Bible and was an essential part of family life. Women wanted a strong man and the man needed to be the head of the family. It carries over into modern households, where the man is the breadwinner and often domestic violence is just the man getting his wife in line. Domesticity was the obvious “women belong in the home” and “real women take care of their children, not their career.” Women were wives and mothers, taking care of their kinfolk and making a beautiful home. Few women were able to live up to this ideal, then and now. However, the traces of it still linger in the media and in social expectations of
In the Greek language the term monk can apply to women, but in modern English it is mainly used for men. Meanwhile, nun i...