Feminism, in both its 19th and 20th century incarnations, was correctly viewed by conventional religious institutions as a threat to the male privilege supposedly decreed by God. In 1885, Elizabeth Cady Stanton delivered a major speech, before a convention of Christian suffragists, on the many ways in which women had been denigrated by religion and had internalized the low opinion of the female sex promulgated by ministers and theologians.

Stanton's views on religion ensured that she would be written out of women's history for nearly a century, until the second wave of 20th-century feminists rediscovered her and helped restore her to her rightful place as the founding mother not only of the suffragist movement but of the larger drive for women's social and economic rights. Here is what she told her shocked audience:

"You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion which has breathed upon this earth has degraded woman...What power is it that makes the Hindoo woman burn herself upon the funeral pyre of her husband? Her religion. What holds the Turkish woman in the harem? Her religion. By what power do the Mormons perpetuate their system of polygamy? By their religion. Man, of himself, could not do this; but when he declares, `Thus saith the Lord,' of course he can do it...You Christian women look down at the Hindoo, the Turkish, the Mormon women, and wonder how they can be held in such bondage....

"Now I ask you if our religion teaches the dignity of woman? It teaches us the abominable idea...Augustine's idea--that motherhood is a curse; that woman is the author of sin, and is most corrupt. Can we ever cultivate any proper sense of self-respect as long as women take such sentiments from the mouths of the priesthood?"

This was a profoundly courageous speech, not least because Stanton did not confine her criticism to "alien" religions but took aim at Christianity itself.

I understand that Stanton's comments no longer constitute a universal description of the way religion treats women. Thanks in significant measure to the efforts of women--some of them commentators on this panel--the goddess has been put back in godhead (in some, but by no means all, religions). But much of what Stanton said still applies.

About the position of women in most of the Islamic world, it is best to consult the writings of courageous Muslim women who have spoken out against such atrocities as honor killings, genital mutilation, and systematic discrimination against women under Koranic law. I am disgusted by Western multiculturalists who pretend, because they don't want to criticize anyone else's religion, that religion itself has nothing to do with the position of women in Islamic societies. To say that the denigration of women in many Muslim nations has nothing to do with Islam is analogous to saying that Western anti-Semitism never had anything to do with Christianity.

A strict Orthodox interpretation of Jewish law, Halachah, also discriminates against women in many ways. A religion in which an abusive husband can refuse to grant his wife a religious divorce--thereby preventing her from remarrying with the sanction of her faith--is a religion that, however loudly it praises Sabbath queens, does not grant women full respect as human beings. Many Jewish women, of course, have challenged the strict Orthodox position on these matters.

And let us not ignore the more conservative precincts of Christianity. The Roman Catholic Church hierarchy prefers empty seminaries to the unimaginable heresy of admitting women to the priesthood. The Church could solve its priest shortage in an instant by ordaining women--the Catholic laity overwhelmingly supports the idea in the U.S. and Europe--but the old men in Rome can't stand the thought of admitting women to their club. Oh, excuse me. It isn't merely the judgment of old men who enjoy the power of making rules for everyone else. "Thus saith the Lord."

I admire the determination of women who have fought for, and continue to fight for, equal status within their religions. I admire them, but I am happy that replacing a patriarchal God with a matriarchal Goddess, or unisex Spirit, is not my problem. I would hate to think that the pain of childbirth, instead of being an evolutionary development connected with the size of the human brain, was decreed by some malicious goddess.