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confined to the home, especially if they were wealthy and lived in cities. They rarely went out, except to the temple, and when they did, they had to cover their heads and faces, with only their eyes show- ing. Pamela Norris, in her engrossing book Eve, argues that even with only one eye left uncovered, Jewish women knew how to call attention to themselves by using eye makeup and wearing colorful clothes and jewelry that jingled as they walked. 11 Such adornments had been con- demned in Scripture (most notably Isaiah 3:19–23) and continued to evoke the wrath of rabbis, convinced that male surveillance was required to control women from their innate bent toward seduction and troublemaking.
    In this vein, the words of Saint Paul would be cited endlessly by patriarchal advocates for the next two thousand years. “Wives, be sub- ject to your husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church” (Ephesians 5:22). Wifely obedience was to be conspicuously manifested in church, where, according to Paul, “women should keep silence. . . . If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home” (I Corinthi-
    ans 14:34–35).
    Early patristic thinkers, most notably Tertullian, Saint Jerome, and Saint Augustine, argued that the Fall, initiated by Eve, had conferred a moral taint on all carnal union, even that within marriage. There were, however, gradations of difference in the repugnance toward marital sex expressed by the church fathers. Augustine justified coitus according to the rationale of the three goods of marriage: procreation, social stability, and the safeguard it provided against fornication. He declared that mar- ried couples should engage in sex only to beget children, and should scrupulously avoid copulating merely for pleasure. 12
    Saint Jerome went even further. He considered sex, even in marriage, as intrinsically evil. He rejected sexual pleasure as filthy, loathsome, degrading, and ultimately corrupting. This linkage of sex and sin, with blame attributed primarily to the daughters of Eve, became increasingly entrenched within the church, and by the fifth century was common currency among ecclesiastical authorities. It was also related to the rise of monasticism, which, by the sixth century, offered an alternative to marriage for Christian men and women. (Institutionalized celibacy has not been a part of Jewish or Muslim practice.)
    Yet a few Christian theologians took a counterposition in praise of marriage. They pointed to the words of Jesus when he defended it as a God-given, indissoluble bond and to the wedding at Cana, where he miraculously provided wine for the wedding guests (Mark 10:6–9; John 2). They could even point to Saint Paul, who, having conceded the necessity of marriage for the purpose of procreation, endeavored to endow it with deep spiritual meaning by comparing it to the union between Christ and the church. They could also cite Paul’s prescription for spouses to love each other, with specific focus on the marital bed: “The husband must give the wife what is due to her, and the wife equally must give the husband his due.... Do not deny yourselves to one another” (I Corinthians: 7:3–5). Paul may have derived this con- cept from the Hebrew Bible, for in Exodus (21:10) a husband is ordered to provide his wife, even a slave wife, with “meat, clothes, and conjugal rights.” This recognition of a couple’s affective and sexual needs will be picked up later, during the Reformation, as the basis for a more positive view of marriage than that of the early church.
    Both Judaism and Christianity supplied enduring models of good and bad wives. Since all women were the daughters of Eve, they were, accord-
    ing to both Jewish and Christian lore, capable of leading men astray. But there were also the examples of the Old Testament matriarchs—Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah—and the “virtuous woman” of Proverb 31, who