"Men create gods, women worship gods"

“Men make gods and women worship them” condenses Simone de Beauvoir’s account of how male sovereignty shapes religion as well as social life. The expression distinguishes female divinity from female authority: a goddess may be revered, yet the power to define the divine and determine women’s place remains in men’s hands.

Meaning and Historical Argument

In her discussion of patriarchy, Simone de Beauvoir presents the line as a statement about who controls religious representation. Men decide whether supreme divinities will be female or male; even where a goddess commands reverence, women do not thereby acquire the power to make social law. The expression therefore challenges the assumption that images of powerful goddesses prove women once ruled as men’s equals.

The argument connects religious myth to material and political arrangements. Women could be treated as sacred beings, associated with fertility and feared for their perceived powers, while still being denied the standing of autonomous subjects. In this account, symbolic elevation and social subordination can coexist: an idol’s prestige does not establish the worshippers’ authority.

The Goddess and the Limits of Reverence

Simone de Beauvoir contrasts the recurring prominence of mother goddesses with the later supremacy of male gods. She cites divine couples around the Mediterranean, including Isis and Horus in Egypt, Astarte and Adonis in Phoenicia, Cybele and Attis in Asia Minor, and Rhea and Zeus in Greece. Even where female divinities remained important, male gods could occupy the highest position: Ra was supreme in Egypt, Bel-Marduk ruled in Babylon, and Zeus reigned in Greece.

These examples complicate any account of a lost golden age of female sovereignty. The existence of powerful goddesses does not, for Simone de Beauvoir, demonstrate a society in which women held political authority as men’s peers. Woman as an absolute Other might be imagined as Earth, Mother, or Goddess precisely while being excluded from reciprocal relations between subjects. Men’s reverence for a female divinity could thus coexist with women’s status as dependents, possessions, or intermediaries between male groups.

Power, Myth, and Social Order

The expression belongs to a wider claim that patriarchal society uses myth to make its arrangements seem eternal and legitimate. Religious stories and symbols translate social imperatives into forms that can enter individual consciousness; they present historically shaped customs as if grounded in an unchanging order. The divine image is not outside politics: its meaning is made within a society in which men hold authority.

Simone de Beauvoir also argues that myths serve the interests of those who create and circulate them. The idealized or threatening image of woman can turn particular experience into a supposedly timeless truth, helping men justify their own position. In this framework, a culture may celebrate feminine fertility or sanctity without granting women the authority to define the terms of that celebration.

Significance

The line’s central distinction is between symbolic power and social power. A woman may be represented as a goddess, a source of fertility, or an object of reverence and still not be recognized as a subject who establishes law. Simone de Beauvoir uses the expression to show why religious honor alone cannot serve as evidence of women’s emancipation: the decisive question is who creates the values, customs, and institutions that govern their lives.