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The rise of courtly love and the de-emphasis of the Catholic Church began elevating women to emotional partners more equal to men. Respect and admiration for women increased with increased economic activity. But women still had few individual or legal rights. Extreme double standards were still practiced.
A new man-woman relationship developed that was previously unknown to Western civilization. Women gained respect and admiration. Courtly love elevated women from child bearers and lust satisfiers to more equal partners with men.
The Church fought viciously to stop the rising new concepts of romantic love, happy man-woman relationships, and pleasurable sex. Pope Innocent VIII started the inquisitions and witch trials. Millions of innocent women were killed, tortured, and burned to death by the Roman Catholic Church. But the growing enlightenment of the Renaissance with spreading economic freedoms began liberating the human mind and reason from the dark, brutal mysticism of Christian theology.
Renaissance noblemen equated women to beauty and good. The church fought back by promoting the "evils" of women and witchcraft. They advocated hanging "evil" women by their thumbs, twisting ropes around their heads, pushing needles under their nails, and pouring boiling oil on their feet in the "devout hope" of forcing confessions of their "wickedness". The Roman Catholic church then proceeded to burn to death tens of thousands of innocent women.
With increasing economic activity, the Puritans rejected the Church's hatred of women, sex, and happiness. They accepted the normality of sex, pleasure, and happiness. Women's rights greatly improved under Puritanism. Women could divorce. They gained property and inheritance rights. Marriage became a civil contract.
Men respected women for their minds and intellectual development. People involved in business began scrapping the gloom and hatred of Christianity and its idea that women were evil. Yet, women were still held as subservient to men.
The rationalists rejected the malevolence of Christianity. But women were often considered as ornaments, toys, or nitwits.
Slobbering sensitivity became the ideal. Men sought shy, virginal women. The togetherness concept developed. Glorification of "pure" women was a pretext for a desperate last attempt by neocheating conservatives and the Church to subjugate women as servants of men. A great increase in double standards occurred under the guise of "moral" standards. Women lost considerable individual freedom.
Men grew shy and sought "pure" women. Virginal-type women were "glorified" and idealized. But that "morality" was only a new pretext for the continued subjugation of women by men. The U. S. Surgeon General, Dr. William Hammond, issued the warning that decent women should not feel the slightest pleasure during sexual intercourse. Many doctors considered sexual desire in women to be pathological. But women began revolting against their "purified" and "glorified" status.
Capitalistic economics undermined the oppressive customs of the past and broke the unjust, feudal hierarchy of the social classes. Capitalism crippled the influence of the Church. Capitalism created the atmosphere and pressure for female suffrage, individual rights, divorce reform, and equal legal and economic rights. Victorianism was a desperate delaying action against increasing honesty, individuality, justice, earned equality, and rising economic freedoms.
With the rise of capitalism, women gained significant economic rights for the first time since the anti-Christian, pagan Roman Empire. Capitalism broke the stifling, unjust religious/feudal-class patterns. A new optimism and cheerful happiness rose among the middle class. Capitalistic economics greatly accelerated the collapse of hypocritical snobbishness, racism, artificial social ties, and oppressive religious and social customs. The rigid Victorian home was threatened by increasing economic freedom for females, divorce reforms, and free-choice love. Victorianism was a last-stand action by the conservatives and the church against the inevitable, liberating changes caused by capitalism and a prosperous, industrial civilization.
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