Selected reading from Charles Templeton's book, Farewell to God: My Reasons for Rejecting the Christian Faith
http://www.submission.org/christians/templeton_women2.html
What is the status of women in the Bible? Even a perfunctory reading makes it clear that, with rare exceptions, women were regarded and treated as inferior, subsidiary creatures, often as little more than chattels
THE BIBLE IS A BOOK by and for men. The women in it are secondary creatures and usually inferior. The woman is portrayed as the temptress in Eden, the tool of the serpent (a.k.a. Satan). He gulled her into getting her husband to eat of the forbidden fruit - "the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil." When, as a consequence of their disobedience, the first couple was banished from Eden, Yahweh laid a threefold curse on all women:
· That her suffering in childbearing would be "greatly multiplied.'
· That she would nevertheless be made to lust for her husband.
· That she would be subsidiary to the man: "He will rule over you."
THE GOD OF THE Bible is not genderless; he is male. His attributes are masculine as are his actions and most of his attitudes. The Holy Trinity comprises three males, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Jesus was himself unquestionably male, and when it became needful that the Virgin Mary be impregnated so that he might be brought into the world as a man, the Holy Ghost "came upon her" and Jesus was conceived.
Adam and Eve had three children, all male: Cain, Abel, and Seth. They may have had daughters but the writer of the Genesis account does not find them worth mentioning. In the long list of Adam's descendants over the hundreds of years that intervened before the Great Flood, not one female is so much as named!
An unmarried woman was regarded as the property of her father or of a brother. A father could, at his option, give her away or, indeed, sell her to a prospective husband. He could also sell her as a slave and she had no say in the transaction. A prospective groom paid what was called a "bride price," in part because the bride had some value around the house and in the bedroom and because if she bore him children they would be the property of the husband. If a man seduced a virgin he was required to pay her father a bride price and do so even if the father refused to give her to the seducer in marriage.