I always wondered if they thought I had given my assignment short shrift. In fact, I had given it an enormous amount of thought. It stayed with me for ages because even though I believed what I wrote, I didn’t exactly know what I meant.

It just seemed to me that, growing up and watching my mother relate to my father, and watching my friends’ parents relate to each other, that women ruled the world.

Now I have to say that my father was a very large man, an enormously powerful figure, a general with a square jaw that wouldn’t quit, a deep voice, a commanding charismatic presence and someone other men trembled before. My mother had him wrapped around her little finger. She was a southern belle from Savannah, Georgia with a melodious accent, a flirtatious manner and the best looking legs you ever saw.

“Dahlin’”, she would say to me, “just tell them they’re handsome and sexy and smart, listen to what they say and look at them as if they are the only man in the world.” That was her secret and boy did it work. Men followed her around like puppy dogs.

But there were times when my father rebelled, times when it seemed that he felt or understood that he was losing his power to her. That’s when he would become angry or resentful, retreating into stony silences. She would always win him back. Even as innocent as I was, I suspected I knew how. But there was something about the minuet they did that made me uncomfortable. There was not a sense of equality there. In order to exert her power she was forced to manipulate him. She was brilliant at it and half the time he didn’t even know what was happening. The most dreaded word in our family growing up was “henpecked.”

When I began thinking about and studying religion a few years ago, the one question I couldn’t ever resolve was why women had indeed, fared so badly in world religions through out the ages. After all, women were the mothers of all the men who had been born. How could they not revere their mothers? Then it occurred to me that it was about power.

Though men in general are bigger, stronger and more physically powerful than women, women have the sexual power, the life-giving power, the nurturing power, the emotional power. Men’s sexuality is exterior and vulnerable, women’s is interior and hidden, inaccessible, mysterious. Women have wombs. They can carry babies. They can breastfeed them. When I was pregnant and then nursing I felt so sorry for my husband, who could never have the thrill of carrying a child, of feeding that child. He was reduced to putting his hand on my stomach to feel the kicking and holding a bottle to our son’s lips. I felt so powerful then, as though I were a magical person, a blessed person.

I could see how men would feel somehow diminished, envious, resentful, less powerful. Those feelings in some men might produce a kind of impotent rage. That rage would force them to wield their physical power in frightening, threatening and forceful ways.

And while women were giving birth, they were in fact more vulnerable and needed men to protect them and their little children. In ancient times, without birth control, women often had as many as 14 children. Without their men to protect them they couldn’t survive. So it was left to the men to write the laws, fight the battles, and create the legends.

When I was a child and my parents made me go to Sunday school I never really believed in God because I simply couldn’t relate to an all-powerful male God. I couldn’t ever imagine that if God had been a woman she would have sent her only begotten daughter to earth to be crucified. It was too horrifying to even contemplate. The idea of actually worshipping someone who would do that was unthinkable. And knowing my mother, whom I adored and who loved me more than life itself, none of it made sense to me at all.

As a number of our panelists have pointed out, Jesus revered women. And according to "On Faith" panelist Elaine Pagels, the early Christians treated women as equals. “Among the heretical groups,” she said, “women took major roles. They taught, they baptized, they exorcised, they healed people. They performed what one of the fathers of the church called ‘masculine functions.’ In 180 CE, this man said that 'heretical' women are audacious. They do all the things they shouldn’t be doing.”

In Paul’s time, Pagels added, “his was a fringe movement and he welcomed women and anyone he could get, though he felt women should be celibate.” Pagels thinks that one of the reasons women lost their power was because the Christian movement reached the middle and upper classes in Rome and then adopted “the mores of those households where the father was in charge. They adapted to the cultural norms of the Roman Empire.”

However, it wasn’t just in the Christian religion that women fared badly. It was in the Hindu, Jewish and Muslim religions as well.

Yes, things are getting better in some religions and in some parts of the world, but the list of atrocities and discriminations against women is still appalling. When men treat women badly and deny them equality, they are fearful, weak and impotent. Men and women have different attributes and strengths, all of which are valuable and admirable, and without which neither sex could thrive. Slowly and surely women will take their rightful place beside men because they both have been created equal.

I don’t believe women should rule the world or have the power, as I did when I was a child. But neither should men. And a loving God, if there is one, would not believe so either.