Keep in mind that for feminist criticism patriarchic societies define gender roles based on biological sex functions, and that these roles and the rules that follow them are completely man-made, not God-given. The Puritans, one such society, gave symbolic meaning to all natural phenomena, and in this we can see how superstitious and ignorant they were for all their professed moral enlightenment. Their concepts of women can be traced to archaic myths of female fertility and the earth. The earth, seen as a parallel of female fertility, had to be controlled, civilized, and ruled over by man…
