I would like to take this opportunity to remind everyone of the historical roots of modern feminism, for it began quite unexpectedly thousands of years ago.
For aeons, women were held to a higher moral standard than their male counterparts. Pagan traditions held that the first woman was tempted into opening Pandora's Box, and was thereby responsible for each and every ill that plagued humankind.
The early Monotheists were not much better. Genesis taught that the first woman not only partook of the forbidden fruit, but also tricked the first man into eating it, thereby earning twice his divine punishment. While men were cursed to toil all the years of their life without rest, women were cursed first by the labor of child birth, and second as the physical property of their husbands, to do with as they wished.
That was the heritage into which a new way of thinking was to emerge. On a fateful day two thousand years ago, a simple yet extraordinary man by the name of Jesus of Nazareth was tempted by the priestly caste of that day, to partake in a ritual of capital punishment: the stoning of an adulterous wife.
His response would resonate throughout the ages: "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone". Upon hearing those words, one by one her accusers sheepishly meandered off, until only she and Jesus remained. "Has no one condemned you?" He asked. "No" she replied. "Then neither do I. Go on your way, and sin no more."
That momentous day would serve as the standard by which a new religion known as Christianity would resolve to treat its women. No more were they to be the property of their men. No longer were they to be stigmatized or ostracized, for they, like their men, were forever thereafter declared free.
The message itself has been rather slow to catch on. A great many people, supposed Christians among them, have fought bitterly against its realization over the years. But like a grain of wheat sown on fertile ground, it has gradually been incorporated into this world's foundations of moral understanding.
So anyone who claims to cherish feminism, and yet who hates and condemns He who first proposed it, must devote more time to self-reflection, and truly ask themselves what legacy they have inherited.
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