Aging & Wisdom Quote by Carol P. Christ

Christ is doing something slyly radical here: she rewrites “respect” as a historical verdict, not a polite attitude. By pointing to agriculture, weaving, and pottery, she refuses the familiar hierarchy that treats “real” invention as male-coded (war, law, philosophy) and domestic production as background noise. The intent is corrective, but also strategic. She anchors women’s authority in material technologies that literally make civilization possible: food systems, cloth, storage, craft. This isn’t a plea for inclusion; it’s a claim about origins.

The subtext is a rebuke to the way Western memory gets curated. “Old Europe” and “Ancient Crete” aren’t neutral settings; they’re shorthand for alternative genealogies of the West, places often invoked in feminist theology and goddess scholarship as counters to patriarchal origin stories. Christ implies that reverence for women once had a public rationale: women weren’t “respected” because society became nicer, but because their work was legible as innovation.

It also carries a warning about what happened next. If women could be respected for inventing foundational arts, then their later marginalization isn’t natural or inevitable; it’s political, contingent, and enforced through whose labor counts as culture. Even the phrasing “roles in the discovery” does careful work, hinting at collective, communal knowledge rather than the lone-genius myth that tends to erase women twice: first from the workshop, then from the archive.

As an educator, Christ’s context is pedagogical and polemical: teach different evidence, get a different civilization.