Church doctrine both sanctified and prohibited marriage generating the women’s quarrel.
Evidence
The Church made it a sacrament and yet prohibited it for the Christian elite: this is the source of the contradiction of the querelle des femmes. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 220
Categorization
- DEFINE: Identifies the structural contradiction (marriage as sacrament yet forbidden to clergy) that gave rise to the querelle des femmes — a useful definitional anchor for the whole debate.
- XREF: connects to: The Church’s marriage-degrading clergy drove the medieval attack on women.; Ancient religious and legal codes across cultures uniformly framed woman as vile or subordinate.