Daily Inspiration Quote by J. M. Roberts

Roberts is doing something more cutting than tossing out a familiar anticlerical jab: he is insisting that women’s subordination wasn’t only enforced by laws, customs, and brute power, but also manufactured at the level of ideas. “Theoretical elements” is the tell. It points to doctrine, moral philosophy, and the kind of intellectual scaffolding that makes hierarchy feel natural, even virtuous. When a society can narrate inequality as order, the argument becomes self-reproducing: people police themselves, and domination stops looking like domination.

His phrasing also signals a historian’s careful aggression. “It is not possible to avoid the conclusion” is a scholarly way of saying: the record is too consistent to wave away. Roberts isn’t claiming the Church single-handedly invented patriarchy; he’s isolating a particular accelerant: an institution with unmatched cultural reach and an interest in regulating bodies. That’s why he pivots to sexuality. Control of sex is control of lineage, inheritance, legitimacy, and reputation. It is also the quickest route to turning women into symbols of temptation, disorder, and moral risk - categories that justify surveillance and restriction.

The subtext is about how moral systems can launder social anxiety into cosmic principle. By adopting a “hostile stance towards sexuality,” the Church didn’t just discourage certain acts; it helped define desire as a problem to be managed, then assigned women a disproportionate share of that supposed danger. Roberts’ intent is to make the reader see subjection not merely as a historical condition, but as an intellectual project with institutional authors.