Women’s Lives and Struggles over Purity

On various levels women’s strivings for dignity, respect, and equality, as covered in Paul Elovitz’ paper, may in part be viewed as ongoing strife related to doctrines of purity. This highly charged term, both virtue and burden, spiritual ideal and product label, asserts an array of values spanning racism and spring water. It is, in psychoanalytic parlance, richly overdetermined; in psychohistory, it is associated with abstinence crusades and sacrificial rituals. It often fuels a host of purification rites and ordeals.

Purity crusades, as Lloyd deMause has shown, drove prohibition. In our racial history, purity was quantified and deployed to measure dilution or pollution of white bloodlines, gauged from 1% (one-drop rule) to 16%. Thus armed, racial purity was deployed as a weapon against miscegenation and the franchise. The power behind the prejudice, of course, was the patriarchal system. Purity also propels cultural discourses privileging perfectionistic ideals. Seen in the present context, purity is one of those either/or double binds that have long plagued humanity since you can’t have a little purity.

Critical among purity’s influences has been the assessment of women’s worth on the scale of virginity. As Elovitz notes, in certain Asian and African areas, virgins are “soiled” by abductions and other violations, such as rape, compelling fathers to marry off their daughters at reduced rates or to pass them off to unworthy suitors. Notice in passing, the currency of the euphemism, “deflowering.” Factor in also the Christian coupling of “stain” to the inheritance of Original Sin. These associations may suggest a latent content of incontinence, but more disruptively to blood stain aversions accompanying menarche and menstruation, popularly dubbed “the curse.” “For centuries, around the world, menstruation has been treated as a source of shame, rather than as a normal, healthy part of women’s lives,” writes Chris Bell (New York Times, April 1, 2018, SR6). Besides disparaging women out of fear and ignorance, thereby compromising their agency, such impositions levy the market price of male-defined purity.

Do women place a similar value on purity? This is a some-

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what loaded question as women’s lives are traditionally circumscribed by ruling men. Should women value purity, it is most likely for an alternate set of values and priorities. They may be lured to some extent by the bait of superior status with the option of downgrading other less pure women. Factor in also a defensive strategy of identification with the aggressor, especially when construed in its political form as Stockholm syndrome. “Along with childbirth,” 12^th century Hildegard of Bingen considered “women’s periods” to be “one of the penalties of Eve’s digression,” writes Fiona Maddocks (Hildegard of Bingen, 2001, 170). All of which confirms that a woman does not make the rules in patriarchy, but must adopt them to survive. Regardless of how deeply she internalizes them she is in a subordinate position.

Whatever its origins, in its operations purity is a predominantly male construct, evident in some early cultures’ resorting to animal or human sacrifice where female virgins are most prized. Female blood purity is the most potent. It’s worth pausing to note that while in some faiths males also may favor virginity, it does not qualify as a virtue. In traditional Catholicism, males who assume spiritual status are not termed virgins but celibates, having taken the vow of chastity. Virgin is gender specific.

Why then do males extol female virgins? Not to be ruled out is the much-bandied womb-envy as resentment over women’s procreative advantage, countered by seizing control over fertility. But given the import of blood permeating early humanity on down to the present, women’s inborn participation in blood cycles strongly impacts their lives as well as those around them. Both powerful and dangerous in our prehistory, the mysterious flow of blood may prompt men’s shunning of woman’s periods through taboos, segregation, and obsessions with female virginity. The virgin’s reassuring purity posits a disembodied, bloodless entity, rendering her both an eligible wife/mother and a prized sacrifice to the gods. The tolerated rape of virgins that Elovitz cites and the enforced medical inspections in later centuries equivocally elevate bloodless virginity by hymeneal violation, since the medically authorized intrusions can induce bleeding. Unsurprisingly, in patriarchal societies women may feel they are damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

Manifest forms of male fantasy of virginal purity have survived over many centuries with flourishing latent contents. In classical oedipal fantasy, the mother’s pristine virginity is restored or recovered through displacements onto romantic substitutes, thereby

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undoing the sexual contamination inflicted by her husband, the male child’s rival, and sometimes the girl’s as well, for unqualified affection. Near the heart of Christianity is the tenet of preserved virginity. Mary, the mother of God, conceived by means of an ingenious, downright miraculous penetration via the ear by the Holy Ghost featured in art as a sacred dove. Her conception is thus Immaculate (bloodless). Her other related article of faith, Virgin Birth, addresses her manner of preserving her virginity intact while giving birth to the Savior. How women of faith can uphold the virtue of purity in fruitful marriage has long confounded countless theologians. “Did Mary actually menstruate?” they ask themselves. Logically, her exemption from the hereditary stain of Original Sin spared her the allegedly shameful curse.

Underlying this vexed history of purity roiling women’s lives is their struggle for self-ownership: their right to define themselves independent of imposed male categories and prerogatives. The current #MeToo movement of women speaking out about various male abusive behaviors, taken up by the symposium author, exposes the presumptuous exercise of male power over women. One has the sense that a new chapter in women’s historical struggle to redefine boundaries and reclaim agency has begun.

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