St. John Chrysostom said: "When the first woman spoke, she provoked original sin" and St. Ambrose concluded: "If woman is allowed to speak again, she will again bring ruin to man".
The Catholic Church forbids them to speak.
The Muslim fundamentalists, they mutilate their sex and cover their faces.
The very orthodox Jews start the day thanking: "Thank you Lord for not having made me a woman.
They know how to sew.
They know how to embroider.
They know how to suffer and cook.
Obedient daughters.
Self-sacrificing mothers.
Resigned wives.
For centuries or millennia it has been like this, although we know little about their past.
Echoes of male voices. Shadows of other bodies.
To praise a hero it is said: "Behind every great man there was a woman", reducing women to the sad condition of chair back.
Today I am going to tell you, in my own way and manner, some stories of women that do not always coincide with this identikit.
There are painted on the walls and ceilings of the caves; moose, bison, figures that come from what they call Prehistory; horses, beasts, men, women of no age. They were painted thousands and thousands of years ago, but they are born again every time someone looks at them.
And one wonders: How could they, our remote grandparents, paint in such a delicate way, how could those brutes who fought hand in hand with the fiercest beasts, create those figures so, so full of grace, those magical flying works that escape from the rock and fly through the air, how, how could they?... Or were they?
Points of View / 1**_
If Eve had written the genesis? What would the first night of love of the human race be like? Eve would have dotted a few i's; perhaps, I say, I don't know, she would have clarified that she was not born of any rib, that she did not know any serpent, that she never offered any apple to anyone and that no one told her that, "You will give birth in pain" and "Your husband will rule over you".... And that all this, Eve would say, is nothing more than slander that Adam told the press.
Points of View / 2**_
If the Santas, and not the saints, had written the Gospels.... What would the first night of the Christian era have been like? The Santas would have told that they were all in a very good mood; everyone: the Virgin, the infant Jesus shining in his straw cradle, the ox, the donkey, the Magi just come from the East and even the star that had led them to Bethlehem.... Everyone, everyone was happy, except one. St. Joseph, gloomy, murmured: "I wanted a baby girl".
**Hildegarde
In 1234 the Catholic religion forbade women to sing in churches. Women, impure by nature, soiled the sacred music that could only be sung by boys or castrated men. This penalty of silence was in force for seven centuries, seven centuries and more, until, with the twentieth century, just a short time ago, women were allowed to sing in churches alone or in choirs. Shortly before this prohibition against the daughters of Eve was put in place, there was a nun named Hildegard, who led a convent on the banks of the Rhine, in a city, Bingen, and who created the liturgical music that seems to me the most beautiful of all, the one that most touches me, the one that most deeply touches me in the last corner of my soul. And that music was written, composed to be sung by women, the nuns of the Abbey of Bingen that Hildegarda directed; and luckily time did not erase their voices, those voices of angels who knew how to sing like no one else to the glory of paradise. And, Hildegard did not limit herself to compose marvelous music, that for centuries were treacherously intoned by men because women could not sing them, but she was also an advanced of her time, that many years ago, eight hundred years, year more year less, knew how to challenge the masculine monopoly of the faith and converted her convent in a redoubt, in a sanctuary of feminine freedom.And who knew how to write in her mystical trances pages that have endured, where women occupy a central place, because Hildegard said, and she knew what she was saying, that: "The really dirty blood is not the blood of menstruation but the blood of wars".
**Theresa
Four centuries later, by those strange twists of life and history, Teresa had already become a symbol of Christianity and a model of the Iberian woman. She was a Saint, Teresa, an example of virtue.... And her pieces were everywhere. Franco, in that very long agony, had an arm of Teresa in the bedside table, to help him fight the devil, and defend against his temptations ... and well ... and other pieces, other pieces of poor Teresa went to various destinations, including a foot, which is still in Rome.
**Joan of Arc
There was no man who could with Joan. Neither at the plow, nor at the sword.
At noon, in the silence of the orchard, she heard voices. Angels and saints spoke to her, and also the highest voice in heaven spoke to her, saying: "There is no one in the world who can free France, only you"... and she would repeat it, always quoting the source... "God told me so," she would say. And so this poor illiterate peasant girl, born to harvest children, led a great army, an immense army that grew in her wake. Joan of Arc, warrior maiden... virgin by divine command or by male panic, advanced from battle to battle. Spear in hand, charging on horseback against the English soldiers, she was invincible... until she was defeated.
The English took her prisoner and decided that the French should take charge of "this madwoman". By France and by God she was down. And the officials of the King of France and the officials of God, took it upon themselves to send her to the stake.
She, shaven, chained, had no lawyer. But the judges, the prosecutor, the experts of the Inquisition, the bishops, the priors, the canons, the notaries and the witnesses, all agreed without exception with the learned University of the Sorbonne, which by then already had a very well-earned prestige.
The Sorbonne University ruled that Joan, Joan of Arc, the accused, was: schismatic, apostate, liar, fortune teller, suspected of heresy, wanderer in the faith and blasphemer of God and the Saints.
She was 19 years old when she was tied to a pole in the market place of Rouen (Rouen)... and the executioner lit the wood.
Then time passed and her homeland and the church, which had roasted her alive, turned her into a Heroine and Saint, Symbol of France and emblem of Christianity.
**Olympia
The symbols of the French Revolution were feminine. Women in Phrygian cap, tits in the air, hair in the wind, flags in the wind. But the French Revolution proclaimed the declaration of the rights of man and citizen. And soon after, a revolutionary militant, the actress Olympia de Gouche proposed that the Revolution should also adopt a Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Citizen. And a revolutionary tribunal condemned her and the guillotine beheaded her.
When Olympia de Gouche was about to go to the scaffold she asked: "If we women can go to the guillotine? Why can't we go up to the public gallery?
A week later, the French Revolution beheaded none other than the wife of the Minister of the Interior, for dealing with politics.... "that those are not women's things".
And a few years later, when the first commune of Paris, a revolutionary period of great changes, where Universal Suffrage was approved...universal but not so much...because it was put to a vote in the Assembly how far Universal Suffrage was universal...and it turned out that the voters, all men, voted against women's vote; women had no right to vote by resolution passed by 899 votes to 1, passed unanimously minus one.
**Edelmira Agustini
It happened in Montevideo many years ago, exactly in 1914, and it happened in a rented room where a husband met his wife, from whom he was separated, and wanting to have her, wanting to keep her... he loved her and killed her... and he killed himself.
The Uruguayan newspapers published the photos of the body, of her body, lying next to the bed... Edelmira Agustini, poet, killed by two revolver shots, naked, like her poems, all undressed in red... "Let's go further into the night, let's go...", she had written; and she had sung to the fevers of love without any peaceful dissimulation; and she had been condemned by those who punish in women what they applaud in men, because chastity is a feminine duty and desire is like reason, a masculine privilege. And then the burial took place... and before Edelmira's corpse tears were shed, I think crocodile tears..., and phrases, solemn phrases about such a sensitive loss for "Las Letras Nacionales" that today live a day of mourning... but deep down, deep down the mourners sighed with relief... "the dead is dead and it is better that way".
But was she dead? Are not the lovers who burn in the nights of the world shadows of her voice and echoes of her body? Do they not make a little place for Edelmira Agustini in the nights of the world, so that her untied mouth may sing and her shining feet may dance?
**Violet
In the sad years of the dictatorship of General Pinochet, in Chile, the regime decided to change the names of twenty towns in the poorest suburbs of the city of Santiago; and in the renaming, one of the towns, the town Violeta Parra, received the name of some heroic military man, but its inhabitants refused to bear it, refused to be called by any other name than her name; and in a unanimous assembly they said: "We are Violeta Parra or nothing". And so they paid homage, once again, to that peasant singer, with a worn-out voice, who in her feisty songs had known how to celebrate the mysteries of her land and her people.
Violeta was, she was sinful and spicy, a friend of guitar playing and converse and love, and for dancing and clowning around, her empanadas were burnt... She sang in her last song "Gracias a la vida..." (Thanks to life...), and a love tumble threw her to her death.
**Tamara
Tamara Arce who disappeared at a year and a half of age was found by the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo. Tamara's mother Rosa had been imprisoned, tortured and raped and shot with blanks...and she had gone eight years without knowing anything about her daughter. When the Grandmothers found her, the mother and daughter looked in the mirror together and laughed and couldn't stop laughing because they were the same; and they had the same moles in the same places; and then when the night came, that first night of the reunion, Rosa, the mother, bathed Tamara, the daughter; and rinsed her, and soaped her and rinsed her and again and again and again....she bathed her again and again and again... she couldn't get the smell out, a thick, sweet smell and Rosa knew she knew that she knew that smell but she couldn't locate it... she didn't know why, there was no way, there was no soap to remove it; and then, suddenly Rosa remembered that this was the smell of babies when they finish breastfeeding. Rosa couldn't explain it, but Tamara the daughter was nine years old and smelled like a newborn.