Research Paper on:
Women's Social Role from Babylonian to Reformation Periods

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
the modern era. By in large, women have been more active in every facet of life and far less submissive then traditional historical scholarship has portrayed them. The following review  of the role of women from Babylonian times through the sixteenth century, with particular emphasis on the scholarship of Steven Ozment shows that women in previous eras were intelligent, resourceful,  and very much an intricate part of the societies in which they lived. Womens historical research has shown that much of the nature of marriage in early antiquity --  i.e. ancient Babylon, Mesopotamia and Egypt -- was predicated on the connection between women and the Goddess, the life force of the earth, which went by various names in various  countries but always referred to the same basic paradigm. Ancient traditions connected male spiritual authority with a connection through marriage to the Goddess (Walker 587). Oriental mystics taught that a  man was spiritually incomplete until he experienced "husbandship," which connect him to the Goddess (Waddell 117). Tantric hymns asserted that all women were goddesses because they embodied the spirit  of the Goddess, and thus concluding that "women are Life itself" (Avalon 172). As this suggests in ancient times, prior to the full advent of patriarchy, women held a much  higher social position due to their connection with ancient religious traditions that honored the Earth Mother under her many guises, such as the Egyptian Isis. From this beginning  of equality, the status of women fell remarkably by the time of the Greek era in which women were denied education and relegated almost completely to the domestic sphere. Helenic  Greeks believed that men should, at every opportunity, force their wives to be obedient and submissive (Walker 588). As this suggests, the advent of patriarchy served to marginalize women,