The modern day version of “the one who teaches his daughter Torah is teaching her lasciviousness” (Talmud, Sotah 20a) has arrived. An article in the Seattle Times links an increase in education for girls to an increase in drugs, alcohol and partying. The blog Feministing, picked up this article and critiqued it as a new strain of patriarchy. However, this argument is old, and identical to the one the Talmud makes for excluding women from learning Torah. Yesterday’s “lasciviousness” is today’s “drugs and partying.”
Some might respond to this critic, by attacking the conclusion (rather than the premise); this of course has been done in the Jewish community in regards to women’s learning. Jewish feminists he fought back by saying “It is not true, a learned woman will be just as moral as she was before, even more so.”
This argument is actually devastating to women’s dignity, because it assumes that a goal for womanhood is good behavior, and if men let us learn, we’ll continue to behave (aka be sexually pure). This of course is not true, it cannot possibly be true. Be it Talmud or calculus, a woman who lives in a world where she is taught what is considered valuable for her culture, will by definition have a measure of freedom that will enable her to be “lascivious,” a right that men have cherished for quite some time.
Bottom line: The idea of trading girls’ education, for their good behavior is still alive and well and it will continue to be that way while we accept their premise: women’s top priority is propriety. Time for a new premise: Women exist for their own sake, and not for the purpose of blindly reproducing the hegemonic regime of the moment.
Despite what some well intentioned feminists might say, Women’s liberation is a liberation from “good behavior” first and for most; because it was in the name of “good behavior” that women were locked away from the world, century after century, civilization after civilization.
