Woman, Church & State The Original Exposé of Male Collaboration Against the Female Sex — A Closer Reading

The Matriarchate as a Lost Baseline

Gage devotes her first chapter to establishing the matriarchate as a widespread historical reality. She cites traces among “many nations,” from ancient Egypt to Malabar, and emphasizes that monogamy, not polygamy, was the rule under mother-rule. The Iroquois receive particular attention: Gage describes a government where women held authority, and she credits this system with the first conception of “inherent rights.” This evidence is not merely antiquarian—it serves as a benchmark against which later Christian and patriarchal institutions are measured. The reader should note that Gage treats the matriarchate as a global phenomenon, not a local anomaly.

Celibacy and the Double Moral Standard

Chapter Two, “Celibacy,” argues that the church’s elevation of virginity degraded marriage and women. Gage claims that “woman not regarded as a human being by the church” and that clerical celibacy led to “a double Code of Morals.” She lists consequences: wives sold as slaves, women driven to suicide, and monastic life used to drain women of wealth. The chapter extends to Protestant orders and even Mexico under President Diaz, suggesting that the pattern crosses denominations and continents. Gage’s tone is accusatory, and she relies on a cascade of specific harms rather than abstract theology.

Canon Law as a Tool of Dispossession

In “Canon Law,” Gage examines how ecclesiastical courts reshaped property and family rights. She notes that husbands could leave wives no more than one-third of their property, and daughters could be disinherited while sons could not. The clergy formed “a distinct body from the laity” with separate legal standards—seven witnesses were needed to convict a priest. Gage highlights the Reformation’s failure to change these laws, and she points to contemporary governments, including the U.S., catering to Pope Leo XIII. The legal detail is dense, but the pattern is clear: law served male clerical power.

Property Rights and the Irish Example

Later excerpts focus on Ireland and Wales as case studies in the erosion of women’s property rights. Gage contrasts ancient Irish law, which gave wives control over their own property, with English-imposed Christian law that transferred that control to husbands. She cites the Senchus Mor tradition and notes that the wife without possessions “became the slave of her husband.” Welsh law similarly allowed wives separate property and even grounds for divorce based on a husband’s “fetid breath.” Gage uses these examples to argue that Christianization, not civilization, dismantled women’s legal standing.

Gage’s argument is cumulative: each chapter adds another layer of institutional collaboration against women. Readers will benefit from tracking her use of legal codes and historical anecdotes, as these form the backbone of her evidence. The book does not offer a narrative of progress but a warning about the durability of patriarchal structures. Approaching the text as a legal and historical brief rather than a polemic will reveal the depth of Gage’s research and the precision of her indictment.

Sitting with Woman, Church & State, I kept circling back to a quieter thread—how institutional memory gets rewritten by those in power. It reminded me, oddly, of another text I once lingered over, one that traces a similar loss of early freedom within religious history. That felt less like comparison and more like finding an old echo: The Great Apostasy, Considered in the Light of Scriptural and Secular History — A Closer Reading, where the turning away is also recorded, gently, as a kind of forgetting.