Second-fiddle females.

• Author: Kreyche, Gerald F.
• Position: Parting Thoughts

FOR A MAN TO WRITE about women may seem incongruous as most of us are familiar with that 600-page tome, What Men Know About Women. All the pages are blank! One has to feel very intrepid to touch the topic. Nevertheless, the so-called "Women's Movement" deserves an apology from those who ranted against it in the past and those who still do so. Let us investigate the raison d'etre and background of this social revolution, equally as great as the Industrial Revolution since both have turned the world topsy-turvy.

Even to those less than fair-minded, there is no question that females have drawn the short end of the stick in history. One obvious reason is that history has been written by men. The universal bias in the Judeo-Christian tradition begins, as always, with the story of Adam and Eve. The fact that many biblical scholars regard the recounting as apocryphal is of no moment. As far as women are concerned, the story has done its damage.

The literalists mad fundamentalists believe that woman's secondary status was due to the will of God. Adam, after all, was created first and when the Lord saw that "it was not good for man to be alone," He created woman--the second sex. He did so by fashioning her from a rib of Adam. Eve also became the scape-goat in tempting Adam to cat of the forbidden fruit the tree of knowledge. Adam took the bait and both were punished by being cast out of Paradise and into a "veil of tears," forced to work by the sweat of their brows. Other biblical stories carry on the tradition as the perfidious Philistine Delilah, who betrays Samson's secret of his strength, thus enabling her people to subdue him. Salome, the exotic dancer, is promised whatever she wants by Herod as her reward. At the behest of her mother, she asks for the head of John the Baptist on a platter.

The Greeks took it from there with the story of Pandora's Box. In Greek mythology, she was the first woman and Zeus thrust her upon humankind as a punishment for Prometheus stealing fire from the gods and bestowing it to humans. She was given a box and told never to open it. Curiosity got the better of her: she took off the cover, thereby unleashing all the evils on the world.

The seagoing Greeks often had their boats grounded and destroyed on various rocky shoals, but rather than fault themselves, they, quite naturally, blamed women. Thus came about the story of the Sirens, alluring beauties who beckoned men to the shallows and their doom. Later, the...