d Benecke argue that the social
and intellectual position of women was probably lower than at any time
since the creation of the world. It was while the position of woman as
wife and mother was thus descending into the slough which has been
termed the Dark Age of Woman that the Apotheosis of the Blessed Virgin
was accomplished. The attitude toward human love, generation, the
relation of the earthly mother to the human child because of Eve's sin,
all made the Immaculate Conception a logical necessity. The doctrine of
the virgin birth disposed of sin through the paternal line. But if Mary
was conceived in sin or was not purified from sin, even that of the
first parent, how could she conceive in her body him who was without
sin? The controversy over the Immaculate Conception which began as early
as the seventh century lasted until Pius IX declared it to be an article
of Catholic belief in 1854. Thus not only Christ, but also his mother
became purged of the sin of conception by natural biological processes,
and the same immaculacy and freedom from contamination was accorded to
both. In this way the final step in the differentiation between earthly
motherhood and divine motherhood was completed.

The worship of the virgin by men and women who looked upon the celibate
life as the perfect life, and upon the relationship of earthly
fatherhood and motherhood as contaminating, gave the world an ideal of
woman as "superhuman, immaculate, bowing in frightened awe before the
angel with the lily, standing mute and with downcast eyes before her
Divine Son."[41] With all its admitted beauty, this ideal represented
not the institution of the family, but the institution of the church.
Chivalry carried over from the church to the castle this concept of
womanhood and set it to the shaping of The Lady,[42] who was finally
given a rank in the ideals of knighthood only a little below that to
which Mary had been elevated by the ecclesiastical authorities. This
concept of the lady was the result of the necessity for a new social
standardization which must combine beauty, purity, meekness and angelic
goodness. Only by such a combination could religion and family life be
finally reconciled. By such a combination, earthly motherhood could be
made to approximate the divine motherhood.

With the decline of the influence of chivalry, probably as the result of
industrial changes, The Lady was replaced by a feminine ideal which may
well be termed the