Martin Luther and Women

In this blog, I will be demonstrating ideas of Luther about women.

Young Luther was believing in some way that all women were whore or prostitutes. He mentioned women in terms of their closeness to Satan instead of God. Women were something that must be resisted by men, according to Luther. He interpreted Eve as a symbol of all the other women. For Luther, Eve was an example to show the adverse impacts of letting women be freely participating in the world (Jurgens, 2019). They were seen as stupid, and they may be exploited by evil and influence men in exchange. Like most the men in that time, Luther demonized women and aimed women to exclude them from social life as can be seen in his functionalist ideas. He thought Eve showed that all women are poor artifacts and could be used by the Devil as tools. In his early writings which were in 1523 and 1524, he identified Eve who was dominated by Adam as an aider of him and talkative as well as superstitious. Because of the time he grew up, his idea of marriage was also changeable throughout his life.

Luther, in his early life, believed that marriage should include only the aim of bearing a child (O'Reggio, 2012). He advocated that marriage was important for men to provide for their sexual needs and to avoid sin. He married Katharina von Bora as the reason why his family wanted him to construct his own family. (It was criticized by also Henry the VIII. ironically and which is so tragic for Luther. He accused Luther for glorify religion to legitimize this sin.) However, according to some rumors, the main reason could be that Bora was pregnant (Jurgens, 2019). If it was true, then it would mean that Luther was a man who was full of sin, who did not have a resistance to women, and who contradicted himself, which would be so tragic for Luther. In the first years of his marriage, Luther called Bora "my rib" in parallel to the relationship between Adam and Eve. In his theology, women should be dominated by men and obey the husband as we can see from his writings that he described Bora as compliant. However, she was not completely submissive as he expected; on the contrary, she ruled over and above him and did whatever she pleased. Also, she can be considered confident in accordance with the letters she wrote. Furthermore, she sometimes disputed with Luther about a lot of things Hence, Bora was mostly different from the description of women in Luther's theology. Although he formerly portrayed Eve as a weak and superstitious woman, after he fell in love with Bora, we can examine that his description of Eve also was altered as fearless in later writings. So, it can be said that after Katharina von Bora, Luther's radical view of women was damaged. He was faced with his failure the description of women as if his failure in realizing his religious ideals is not enough. Also, he fell in love with Bora, which means that he could not resist a woman and protect himself from a "prostitute" who could be manipulated by evil and could manipulate a man exchange. For me, it can be interpreted that Luther could also be manipulated by a whore of the devil in accordance with Luther's understanding of women. The tragedy here is that I think, he contradicted himself and faced that his words and his actions were completely different, which led him to be criticized a lot. In fact, the closure of monasteries pushed women to get married which caused them to be killed less and be involved in men’s social life. It could be interpreted as it laid the foundation for women's awareness, which Luther would not want to.

REFERENCES

Jurgens, L. K. (2019). Martin Luther and Women: From the Dual Perspective of Theory and Practice (Unpublished doctoral thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. Retrieved from:https://prism.ucalgary.ca/bitstream/handle/1880/110570/ucalgary_2019_jurgens_laura.pdf?sequence=1

O'Reggio, T. (2012, March), Martin Luther on Marriage and Family, retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1019&context=church-history-pubs

Fudge, T.A. (2003), Incest and Lust in Luther's Marriage: Theology and Morality in Reformation Polemics, (p.p. 319-345), The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 34, No. 2, Marriage in Early Modern Europe, retrieved from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20061412