Women and Women's Writings from Antiquity Through the Middle Ages | Jo Ann Mcnamara (Essay Date 2003)
JO ANN MCNAMARA (ESSAY DATE 2003)
SOURCE: McNamara, Jo Ann. “Women and Power through the Family Revisited.” In Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages, edited by Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski, pp. 17-30. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003.
In the following excerpt, McNamara investigates the origins and limitations of feminine social and familial power in the medieval period.
The gender system that developed in the second millennium changed the nature of woman’s position as part of a couple and advantaged the male, whether celibate or married, by divorcing men from the couple as a functioning social unit and barring women from the exercise of an inherent manliness that earlier theorists had recognized in them.1 The homosocial bond facilitated male commensurability and relegated women to an ontological femininity that effectively barred them from potency.
...[The entire page is 2752 words long]
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