Good morning,

A week ago I went to a public lecture by Anne Enright, and this week it’s written up in the LRB. I loved it and have taken it as my theme for Fem Friday so that you can enjoy it as well.

It was called “Adam And Eve: The Genesis of Blame”, and I’d thought it might have had a blunt anti-Bible message, but in fact it had a blunt anti-misogyny message which I enjoyed a great deal. Before you read it, though, take some time to drink in this amazing image Anne Enright put up onscreen, of God creating Eve from Adam's rib:

Neither fusion nor repetition can hold together this expanding sequence of separations. It ends in estrangement, of God from mankind, man from woman; of flesh from flesh and bone from bone. And so it comes, the final act of distinction which happens when he turns and blames. Not me. Her.

It might have been seen as a story about human betrayal.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n05/anne-enright/the-genesis-of-blame

This made me think about Margaret Fell, Quaker and early feminist, who argued for women participating fully in the life of the church in terms that her audience would have understood and found hard to argue with:

But when Eve tells God the truth about the temptation and confesses her sin, God passes sentence on the Serpent: “I will put enmity between thee and the Woman,” he says, “and between thy Seed and her Seed”. In Fell's view, these words foretell the special role that women would play in the restoration of humankind. The “Seed of the Woman” refers to Christ himself, who is the Son of God “made of a woman”, the Virgin Mary. Those who prevent the Seed (or the inner light) of the Woman from speaking, Fell says, prevent the message of Christ.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/margaret-fell/#ArgWomSpeJus

Unrelated to Genesis, but related to faith and beginnings and women's words; I recently read a book that mentioned “the woman who wrote the book of Hebrews“. And I thought, okay, for sure someone is being trolled here, and it for sure isn’t me, but this is worth a quick search. Anyway, the theory is that Priscilla, who you might know from the book of Acts, wrote Hebrews! I like that at least a part of this argument is that she reps for other women:

Hoppin notes that all the women mentioned in Hebrews are envisioned as exemplars of faith with more emphasis than the Hebrew Bible pictured these heroines in the initial rendition of their stories. “Perhaps this is what we should add to the author’s psychological profile: generosity in evaluating the spiritual role of Sarah in her nation’s history – seeing her intrinsic faithfulness instead of her momentary confusion and disbelief”

http://robincohn.net/priscilla-author-of-hebrews/

I hope you enjoy reading and thinking about these things, have a lovely weekend,

A xx.