We Still Believe the Biblical Myth That Made Women Inferior

Evolution, Eve’s apple, and a religious agenda aimed at oppressing women.

Photo by Deleece Cook on Unsplash

Do you know the story of Adam and Eve? It’s a Biblical creation story about the dawn of humankind, a perfect garden, and a fall from grace. In sum, the first woman is tempted by the devil to eat forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge and gets herself and Adam cast out from the garden of Eden. Her mistake curses women with painful childbirth forever.

We know Eve’s mistake. But an often overlooked part of the story comes before the forbidden fruit ever touches her lips — it’s her very creation that makes her second to man. She was created after Adam, from one of his ribs. It was this myth-turned-fact that established women’s inferiority as a God-ordained rule and made people so resistant to evolution when Darwin first published his infamous idea.

It’s one thing that people didn’t accept Darwin’s dangerous idea in the nineteenth century. It’s quite another that people still use this myth to explain women’s inferiority to man today.

In her book From Eve to Evolution, author and historian Kimberly A. Hamlin puts forth a triumphant argument for the ways in which evolutionary theory and feminism interacted with and supported each other in the…