In 1923 feminist economist and philosopher Charlotte Perkins Gilman published a book called His Religion and Hers in which she outlines two fundamentally different orientations to life based on the crises of male and female experience. For man, historically as hunter and warrior, the pivotal experience is death, both as killer of animals and other humans and as one threatened by violent death himself. Male religion thus becomes centered on “blood mystery” of death and how to escape it. For woman, on the other hand, the pivotal experience is birth and her basic concern is how to nurture ongoing life here on earth. In Gilman’s words: To the death-based religion, the main question is, ‘What is going to happen to me after I am dead? – A posthumous egoism. To the birth-based religion, the main question is, ‘What is to be done for the child who is born?’ – an immediate altruism. The death-based religions have led to a limitless individualism, a demand for the eternal extension of personality…The birth-based religion is necessarily and essentially altruistic, a forgetting of oneself for the good of the child, and tends to develop naturally into love and labor for the widening range of family, state and world.
Reuther, Rosemary Radford, Sexism and God-Talk, Beacon Press: 1993, 236.
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