And you've identified a big piece of it.
I think it may have been The Chalice and the Blade (Riane Eisler) or perhaps The Creation of Patriarchy (Gerda Lerner) that talked about the overthrow of ALL the goddesses and "reinterpretation" of the creation stories so that we had such impossibilities as Athena springing fully grown from Zeus's head and other atroicities. But it happened across a lot of cultures. Both are good reads.
As someone who also grew up Catholic and still very spiritually-oriented, when I opened Lerner's second book, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-seventy which tracks Patriarchy from the point she left off, I was so thunderstruck with her revelation that all her studies and research revealed that the main preoccupation of women was a spiritual one, trying real damned hard not to be so "other" as to be excluded from heaven and other spiritual considerations -- and I don't remember exactly what she said or how she phrased it -- but I closed the book, literally unable to read further. The thought still affects me profoundly all these years later.
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