Teaching Gender in Social Work - MailChimp

Until as late as the nineteenth century, women were subject to forced or
violent deaths which, to a greater or lesser degree, were gender-based. Regardless
of how the killing of women as a result of the deaths of their husbands was
actually performed in the old Slavic societies, the fact remains that those deaths
were forced. One can only speculate about the implications of ending one’s life
against one’s will were for the consciousness of those women. In any case, this
was a disciplinary mechanism which contributed to maintaining or extending
the life of the man, as the length of the woman’s life depended on the length of
the man’s life. However, such executions of women were not only characteristic
of the Slavic peoples. This custom can be associated with any civilisation where
it was customary to put the property of the deceased in his tomb so that it might
be available to him in the world beyond this one. As already mentioned above,
the aim of executing a woman in this world was to prevent her from being
available to anybody else. Ownership of the reproductive abilities of women is
thus transformed into control over them, despite the fact that the custom itself
has long died out. According to Lenard, 27 certain customs survived the process
of Christianisation in the Slovenian territory in a different, more acceptable
form. Thus, the patriarchal belief in the potency of man’s seed and woman as
a “flower pot”, 28 which is reflected in the control of reproductive abilities, also
provides the basis for the Christian attitude towards sexuality and women.
In this context, one can also interpret the persecution of witches and
mothers with illegitimate children. Witches were persecuted for being regarded
as healers who also performed abortions, and mothers with illegitimate children
for maintaining an autonomous position without a partner, for remaining
independent, even if only on a symbolic level. The price that witches and
mothers with illegitimate children had to pay for their autonomous position
was mainly their lives or, alternately, their lives became extremely unbearable.
Their autonomous position allowed both groups of women to be active in the
27
1922: 3–13.
28
Rothman suggests that the patriarchal concept regards children as the property of the father, as they arise from
his seed which passes through a woman’s body. The woman is merely a mediator in that line. The same concept also
assumes that the characteristics are transferred from the father to the son, who originates from the seed which is seen
as the sole agent of making a child. This concept also facilitates an interpretation of rape as a war strategy. It can be
seen as planting an alien seed, a certain kind of womb contamination, where the owner’s seed is no longer protected
against someone else’s characteristics. In this context, war rapes can be regarded as conveying a certain message and
devaluating men, whilst women only act as a tool for defeating the enemy. By raping a woman one defeats one’s
enemy, as one renders the purity of his offspring impossible. (Rothman, 1989).
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