Biological reproduction is the sine qua nonof species survival. The centrality of maternity, and hence of women, in this crucial process is obvious, in contrast to the relative obscurity, marginality and uncertainty of paternity. Unlike the mother, the father - whoever he really is - may die immediately following insemination, without biological consequence. And since one father may provide this service to many potential mothers there is no need for an equivalent number of them.

Societies have thus been preoccupied primarily with insuring an adequate supply of fecund women while at the same time sending men to die in battle - not necessarily because they are stronger or braver than women but because they are more expendable.

Goddess worship and the celebration of female fertility have marked all ancient societies. In response, it seems, men have sought somehow to appropriate the female function, ritually (through couvade, puberty rites, born-again baptism), ideologically (male creation myths), and institutionally (via patrilineage and marriage).

They also sought to compensate for their relative reproductive insignificance by locating their own unrivaled, unambiguous centrality elsewhere. Relegated by nature to the periphery in this world, they established their reproductive centrality in another, transcendent world—in other worldliness. Sent off to fight, they found another existential redoubt in warfare and the standing military - hallmark of “civilization" - and bonded together with misogynist rituals of purification.

Thus arose the great monotheistic Father-worshipping cults of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, with their corollary militarized and misogynist cultures. Here males became the central creators, as well as destroyers. God the Father gives birth to the universe, Adam gives birth to Eve. And the providential promise to the patriarchs -- the covenant of Abraham -- is fulfilled by the holy swords of Joshua, David, the Maccabeans, the militia Christi, the Crusaders, and the warriors of Mohammed.

Having inverted the natural order, this masculinized culture now, in turn, marginalized and demonized women as descendents of Eve and gateways to perdition. Having securely located male centrality in the realms of religion and the military, these two were now institutionally conjoined to form another: the clergy. Repeatedly, in times of social disarray or renewal, women have temporarily gained a foothold in organized religion, only to be thwarted by clerical resistance. And this clerical culture became the template of all subsequent "traditionally masculine fields,” such as philosophy, law, medicine, science and engineering.

Even today, as women haltingly gain entry to these realms, including the clergy, often by foregoing motherhood or otherwise demonstrating their "virility" (Augustine's approving term for female celibacy), the universe of male compensation seems ever to be expanding. How else to explain the veritable explosion of religious zealotry and clerical excess, the mounting militarism and incessant warfare, the ever-widening web of inhuman technological instrumentality, the escalation of scientific escapism?

Or, perhaps, beneath it all, the telltale sign of our times and our culture lies rather in the steady advance of artificial reproduction toward the consummate male compensation: A womb of their own.

David F. Noble is a professor of social science at Ontario's York University, and author of 'A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science'