Rosemary R. Ruether on the "good news" for women...

"Radical Christians through the centuries have interpreted this 'good news' for women as one that liberates women from subjugation to the male into a new autonomous personhood through renunciation of sex and childbearing, but mainline Catholic and Protestant Christianity strove to correct this radical view. Instead women were told they were saved by Christ only by redoubling their subjugation to the male as their 'head', whether that meant their husbands as wives or their male ecclesiastic superiors as celibate 'sisters'. Thus redemption for women has been filtered through a deeply misogynist lens that identified femaleness with the sources of evil, that is, sex, sin and death, and the mortality of the body and the earth."