From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:

A religion which teaches men and women to regard their humanity as chronically flawed can alienate them from themselves.  Nowhere is this alienation more evident than in the denigration of sexuality in general and women in particular.  Even though Christianity had originally been quite positive for women, it had already developed a misogynistic tendency in the West by the time of Augustine.  The letters of Jerome teem with loathing of the female which occasionally sounds deranged. Tertullian had castigated women as evil temptresses, an eternal danger to mankind …. Augustine is clearly puzzled that God should have made the female sex: after all, “if it was good company and conversation that Adam needed, it would have been much better arranged to have two men together as friends, not a man and a woman.” Women’s only function was the childbearing which passed the contagion of Original Sin to the next generation, like a venereal disease.  … Western Christianity never fully recovered from this neurotic misogyny …