Today, I stumbled upon The Book of Eve by Constance Beresford-Howe. It has a really strong opening with a nice jab at the Eden eviction story:
It makes one wonder how many millions if not billions of women living under Abrahamic religions were diminished based on that story alone (and similar misogynistic myths and beliefs) in the past two millennia (and possibly for a few hundred years more still).
Manfred Hauke wrote a nice intro to mariology (e.g. marianismo, mariolatry) back in 1996. Excerpts (with my emphasis added):
Simone de Beauvoir [...] pointed out the contrast between the ancient goddesses and Mary as early as 1949; whereas the goddesses commanded autonomous power and utilized men for their own purposes, Mary is wholly the servant of God: "'I am the handmaid of the Lord.' For the first time in the history of mankind," writes Beauvoir, "a mother kneels before her son and acknowledges, of her own free will, her inferiority. The supreme victory of masculinity is consummated in Mariolatry: it signifies the rehabilitation of woman through the completeness of her defeat."
Daly now sharpens this critique [Beyond God the Father (1973)] and puts it in a wider systematic context: Mary is "a remnant of the ancient image of the Mother Goddess, enchained and subordinated in Christianity, as the 'Mother of God'." To this attempt to "domesticate" the mother goddess, Daly opposes a striving to bring together the divine and the feminine.
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