Eve's Evil Legacies - Joanna Bourke

Summary of the video (Joanna Bourke: “Eve’s Evil Legacies”)

Joanna Bourke introduces a six-lecture series on “evil women,” arguing that using the label evil for women raises tensions: what “evil” means, and how gender shapes who gets blamed or treated as monstrous. She contends that evil is relational and tied to human agency—namely, acts that perpetrate, maintain, or ignore harms to sentient life—rather than an abstract force.

How Bourke frames “evil women”

• She centers on cases with moral agency (individuals who intentionally harm or enable harm), not on “natural evils.”
• She advocates an intersectional approach to avoid essentializing “women,” drawing on Kimberlé Crenshaw: oppression can’t be understood by merely adding “women” to existing categories. Instead, gender interacts with race, class, disability, sexuality, caste, religion, age, and more.
• She also uses Foucault’s genealogical method, asking how discourses generated by institutions—such as religion, law, and psychiatry—help produce and circulate the idea of the “evil woman.”

The central case: Eve and how “Eve” became a theory of female guilt

Bourke then turns to the biblical story in which Eve introduces evil into Eden. She notes disputes over details (e.g., whether the fruit was an apple, pomegranate, or banana), but argues that the myth’s function is what matters: Eve’s act leads to time/history and to divine punishment specifically aimed at women.

Key claims about Eve’s legacy:

• Eve’s “curse” becomes a script for patriarchal ideology, including claims that women are naturally inferior, morally dangerous, or responsible for human suffering.
• Church authorities and theologians across centuries used the Eve narrative to justify female subordination and restrictions—such as arguments that women should not teach or teach scripture.
• The myth of Eve helps rationalize violence against women, especially during witch trials, where many accused witches were women (often older/menopausal), framed as both weak/insane and powerful/dangerous.

Eve as justification for social control over women

Bourke describes how Eve’s story is used even beyond extreme persecution to constrain women’s life prospects:

• In 19th-century Britain and beyond, Eve becomes an excuse to confine women to domestic roles—the contrast between “the angel in the house” and “the harbor of evil.”
• She cites popular and religious writing that depicts women as simultaneously “graceful virtue” and the cause of ruin, provided women remain under male authority.

“Two creation stories” and why interpretation becomes political

A key analytical section examines how debates about Genesis became entwined with gender hierarchy:

• Bourke describes late 19th/early 20th-century theological efforts to reconcile Genesis with Darwinism.
• She emphasizes that choosing between Genesis “accounts” (e.g., simultaneous creation of male and female vs. Eve made from Adam’s rib) affects beliefs about:
  • the legitimacy of marriage doctrines,
  • women’s subordinate status,
  • who holds authority in religious life (including restrictions on women speaking or teaching).

She argues that prioritizing one creation story over another is itself political:

• If woman is created simultaneously, she is framed as equal in lordship and agency.
• If woman is created after him, she is framed as belonging under his rule.

Feminist rebuttals: turning Eve’s act into evidence of intelligence

Bourke presents defenses that reinterpret Eve in pro-women ways:

• Suffrage advocates used “Eve first, Adam next” moral logic to argue that women’s supposed guilt was being engineered to deny rights.
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton (in The Woman’s Bible) reimagined the Bible from a feminist perspective, arguing that the fall narrative supported misogyny and female bondage.
• Feminist theologians interpret Eve’s initiative—treating the fruit as food and wisdom—as curiosity and intelligence, while depicting Adam as passive.

Modern consequences: the myth still shapes harassment and sexual blaming

Bourke closes by arguing that the Eve/fall narrative continues to denigrate women and other minoritized groups today, including through:

• Victim-blaming in sexual harassment, such as “eve teasing” in Bangladesh, where girls are pressured or attacked in public and responsibility is framed as stemming from “descendants of Eve.”
• Softening evil into something sexy or erotic, with Eve used as an image of dangerous sensuality in advertising and popular media (including references to Desperate Housewives opening imagery).

Bourke’s conclusion: evil isn’t inherently female, and patriarchal narratives pick “Eve” as the other

Bourke concludes that although Eve is constructed as the “other” to Adam, the real pattern is ideological: blame and monstrosity are gendered through religious and cultural storytelling. She argues that both man and woman are implicated in the fall, yet history often frames the violent inheritance as male—while treating Eve’s legacy as proof of female danger.

She ends with a contrast:

• Eve’s myth has justified harm to girls and women,
• while a later counter-image is “Mary,” symbolizing care and protection—positioned as the opposite moral framing to patriarchal “evil woman” narratives.

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Presenters / contributors

• Joanna Bourke (speaker/author of the lecture)

Referenced contributors/thinkers and figures:

• Claudia Card
• Kimberlé Crenshaw
• Michel Foucault
• Saint Jerome
• Thomas Aquinas
• Martha Luther
• Garrett Fawcett (also noted as “Garrett Fawcett / Millicent?” in the subtitles)
• Phyllis Trible
• Dermot Finnegan
• John Philip
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton
• John Milton
• Alexander Brown
• Gordon Kelthorpe
• George Terrell
• Eve, Adam, Mary Magdalene, Delilah, and other biblical figures

Note: Some names appear uncertain or potentially misquoted due to subtitle transcription (e.g., “Thomas slender,” “Mislin? misaligned,” and other unclear entries).