Publisher's Synopsis
This compilation of key texts regards the position and contribution of women to the world's religions, past and present, Western and Eastern, mainstream and alternative. The literary genres include creation myths, sacred biography, folk tradition and, most controversially, religious laws on such subjects as menstruation and childbirth, sex and marriage, and inheritance. Cross-cultural themes reveal positive, as well as negative images - woman as evil, but also wisdom as feminine, witches and goddesses, myths of gender conflict and transformation.
