Doubtless she could: doubtless she would have, if given the chance. But this she was not to be. For the same set of historical circumstances that gave rise to nineteenth-century feminism produced also the masculine response to it. Throughout the West, wherever a father god, legal, professional, domestic, had been kicked off his throne, men lay on the ground, howling with injured pride, screaming to be reinstated. The hour found the man. From Vienna, Sigmund Freud set about the vital cultural work of restoring man to his rightful place at the centre of the universe.
The first cosmic misfortune for women was Freud’s birth into German bourgeois society just at the mid-point of the nineteenth century – for a man destined to reshape the world’s notion of the female sex, Freud could hardly have had a worse model of social organization than this stultifying, narrow, reactionary and destructive framework which reduced women to empty-headed dolls or drove them into hysterical fugue. Freud’s own attitudes had been quite unaltered from the paths of Jewish patriarchy by any of the great women’s campaigns of his time, as this scolding letter to his fiancé makes clear:
It really is a stillborn thought to send women into the struggle for existence exactly as men. If, for instance, I imagined my sweet girl as a competitor it would only end in my telling her . . . that I am fond of her and that I implore her to withdraw from the strife into the calm uncompetitive activity of my home . . . I believe that all reforming action in law and education would break down in front of the fact that, long before the age at which a man can earn a position in society, nature has determined a woman’s destiny through beauty, charm and sweetness. Law and custom may have much to give women that has been withheld from them, but the position of women will surely be what it is: in youth an adored darling, and in mature years a loved wife.26
With Dame Nature reappearing on the primal scene to prop up the rightful disposition of power between males and females in the status quo, it is no surprise to see another former leading man thrusting back into his old role centre stage. With sublime unself-consciousness, as if all the years, the work and the successes of the women’s movement had never been, Freud brought back the phallus. In reality, of course, the great snake had never been away. But he was beginning to hide his head, as the women’s attacks on unbridled masculine sexual prerogative had begun to beat him down. Now though, there was a new play by the new German dramaturg, and he had the principal part.
The plot was simple. A little boy grows up loving his mother. One day he discovers a great wonder, the adult male dong. Regrettably it is not attached to him – small boy collapses in confusion. Meanwhile his sister has also seen this great sight – she too burns with rage because she does not have it. Little brother will at least overcome his parricidal hatred and castration fears, and grow up to get a plonker of his own to play with. Small girl would however be stuck for always in her immature envy of the sacred object. The moral of the Oedipal drama is therefore simple, too: it is better to be a boy than a girl, and there is nothing in the world so wonderful, powerful, important and worth having as a penis.
From this starting-point, there could be no getting away from the logical extension of it: woman as a sex was inferior because of her ‘poverty of external genitals’: simply to be woman was to be defective. Then again, stuck himself at the ‘mine’s bigger than yours’ stage of development Freud could not help but find the ‘woman’s penis’, the clitoris, pathetically inadequate. Recognizing that the clitoris is richly sensitive despite its apparently unimpressive size, Freud decided that it was suffering from a kind of retardation, a ‘childish masculinity’. Only if the ‘excitability’ transferred itself from the clitoris to the vagina was a woman sexually mature. The vaginal orgasm was the mark of a real woman, the clitoral meant ‘go back and start again’. The impact of this has been summed up by a modern American biologist:
Freud’s theory of the vaginal orgasm required women to deny their own senses and knowledge about their own eroticism in order to be mature and female, a truly debilitating and depressing enterprise. The effects were profound and far ranging. For many women it was a fruitless effort that only deepened a sense of inferiority, inadequacy and guilt. As a theory to explain and cure ‘frigidity’, it ensures lack of orgasm by requiring women to have sex in precisely the way it is most difficult for them to experience an orgasm . . . It reinforced the phallocentricity of sexuality by defining women’s sexuality in terms only of the penis.27
Cuntry matters. The legacy of Freud ensured that women’s most personal and intimate part, her sex, was from now on to be hijacked by male ‘experts’ – men who, while they never asked women how they thought or felt, nor listened to the evidence women gave anyway, could still have the authority to know belter than women what their sex, at every level, was and should be. For men, this was a rich new terrain where old Mother Nature could be brought into the service of the new father god of science. And screwed out of her skull, what would she do but replay the story as before: man strong, woman weak, man active, woman passive, man dominant, woman submissive, even exquisitely so, as in this description of the ‘true woman’ by one of Freud’s female acolytes, the Princess Marie Buonaparte in her work on Female Sexuality:
For the role of everything female, from the ovum to the beloved, is a waiting one. The vagina must await the advent of the penis in the same passive, latent and dormant manner that the ovum awaits the spermatozoon. Indeed, the eternally feminine myth of the Sleeping Beauty is the retelling of our first biological relation.28
It was a good trick. And it came just at the right time. With the spread of contraceptive knowledge and techniques, women had been on the brink of taking control of their bodies. From now on it would be harder, for men in the West at any rate, to keep their women down through multiple child-bearing, ensuring that they stayed ‘barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen’. But this was not to be, as the gallant campaigners had hoped, the end of the oppression of women through their sex. For when they could no longer be imprisoned and beaten down for it, when they were not trapped by too many babies to be able to refuse it, the powers-that-always-were came up with this, in some ways their finest card – women were to be psychologically coerced into it, intimidated by fears of frigidity, of not being a ‘true woman’, of being an ‘immature man’, or an incomplete child. It was flawless. Everywhere the word of the Viennese fabulist spread, women, made anxious, struggled to comply. ‘No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her own body,’ said Margaret Sanger. And as the spirit of the Father looked upon his works and found them good, he could only agree.
12
Daughters of Time
Truth is the daughter of Time, not of Authority.
FRANCIS BACON
History, if you read it right, is the record of the attempts to tame Father . . . the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male.
MAX LERNER
How are men and women to think about their maleness and femaleness in this twentieth century, in which so many of our old ideas must be made new?
MARGARET MEAD
On 4 August 1914, Sir Edward Grey, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, looked down Whitehall over a darkening London. ‘The lamps,’ he said, ‘are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’ This was hardly to be wondered at – after the hostilities, none of the countries involved could have afforded to pay a gas or electricity bill. Fighting this war had cost Britain alone over £50,000 million, and the cost of putting to rights all the devastation it had caused came to about twice as much again.1 Money that could have been spent on better housing, public services, food supplies, went into a conflict that left millions of people throughout Europe without a roof over their heads or a crust of bread.
They were the lucky ones. In four years, over ten million people lost their lives in the service of this god of war, who to this day demands hecatombs of human sacrifices. What drives old men in government to send the choicest of
their youths to murder the youth of an enemy state, and/or be murdered themselves? Whatever the reason, when the women who had lost lovers, husbands, sons or the prospect of all of these were told that their sterling war service had brought them an enhanced social and legal status, they must have thought the price was rather high. And even then, the twin goals of freedom and equality were as far away as ever. During the course of the hostilities, the British nurse Edith Cavell was shot by the Germans for helping wounded soldiers to escape, and the Dutch dancer Mata Hari by the French, allegedly for being a German spy.2 This brutal extension of the equality of the firing squad, when in all other respects women were still excluded from the privileges men awarded themselves, was a chill reminder of how little circumstances, or men, had changed.
This lesson of the First World War was only repeated and reinforced in the Second World War. There the rise of fascism, with its unbridled stress on virility and exaggerated masculinity, undermined almost all the gains won by women in the previous century of struggle. Nazism in particular was wedded to the ‘Gretchen image’ of womanhood, Hitler calling the emancipation of women a symptom of depravity produced by frustration and malfunctioning sex glands, while Goebbels announced that ‘the female bird preens herself for her mate and lays her eggs only for him.’ The kernel of Nazi thinking on the woman question was a doctrine of inequality between the sexes as immutable as that between the Aryan and non-Aryan races. As always throughout women’s history, though, this inequality took a great deal of brute force to sustain. As historian Richard Grunberger explains:
The Weimar constitution gave women the vote, and a feminist elite, ranging from Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin on the far left, through to some National Reichstag deputies on the right, had helped shape the political postwar scene. Interposed between these political figures and the army of working women was the professional vanguard of the second sex: nearly 100,000 women teachers, 13,000 women musicians, and 3000 doctors.3
These were the women who were now to be dismissed from public life – one of the earliest Nazi party ordinances of January 1921 excluded women in perpetuity from holding any office in the party. What women were to do, of course, for their party and war work, was to breed, in numbers, the child of the future, the Aryan dream. In return for reverting to the old formula of ‘Kinder, Kirche, Küche’, women were promised ‘the esteem they deserved for their essential dignity’.
Only some women, however. How far the Nazi reverence for women went was clearly illustrated by episodes like this, where the system conformed to the party ideology with typical Nazi efficiency:
In Auschwitz there was a bordello of forty rooms in block 24 for the black triangles, German inmates, and a few select sycophants with green triangles. Tickets were handed out as a reward by the SS to this ‘Puff Haus’. The madame was called the ‘Puff Mutter’. The girls worked a two-hour day and three times a week . . . The Puff Mutter rang the bell each twenty minutes (same time as the burning shift in the ovens) . . .4
With the ingenuity of cruelty for which the regime became notorious, the Nazis even discovered a new and hitherto untried use for prostitutes – they were strapped to the bodies of male concentration camp inmates who had been immersed in icy water until they died, to discover if the application of their body heat could restore any life to the dead man. The point of these ‘scientific experiments’, by Dr Sigmund Rascher of the Luftwaffe at Dachau, was to discover if a Luftwaffe pilot who had come down in icy seas could survive the ordeal. Sunlamps, hot water bottles, even electro-convulsive therapy were all tried before the idea of female ‘animal warmth’ occurred to the experimenters. Himmler’s only stipulation in this directive to Pohl, his deputy for concentration camps, was that the women should not be German prostitutes.5
By the standards of the Holocaust, these women were fortunate. Outside the camps, a handful of women were swimming against the tide of the wild female enthusiasm for Hitler that had been one of the key factors in his rise to power, from the unknown schoolgirl Hiltgunt Zassenhaus, who thrust her arm through a pane of glass rather than give the Nazi salute, to the now-famous heroines of the Resistance. Given their exclusion from the armed forces, the women’s anti-fascist activity had to be expressed through intelligence or guerrilla activity. This was nothing new, for women have a history of covert operations against the enemy dating back to Delilah and Jael. Although generally obscured in times of open war, when the mythologizing of the conflict demands the repetition of the old lie that men are only fighting to protect and defend ‘the weaker sex’, the contribution of women cannot be disguised or denied in times of internal conflict or revolutionary upheaval. Revolutions of the modern period have in fact been crucially dependent for their success upon women; who, when they throw off the conservatism which voting patterns suggest are more characteristic of the sex than violence, often prove themselves, in Fidel Castro’s words, ‘twice as revolutionary as the men’.
There was of course nothing exceptional in the association of women with radical activity. Most revolutionary movements begin with the highest ideals on women’s behalf: the T’ai-P’ing Rebellion that brought China to its knees between 1850 and 1864 originally planned to give full social and educational equality to all females, in that context a proposal even more revolutionary than the primitive communism for which the movement is remembered. But no matter how much revolutions can, like war, be presented as for women, they are always of and in it too, deeply committed at every level. Six hundred women died at the last stand of Piribebuy in the struggle of Paraguay against Brazil, this bloody massacre only one of a number of engagements fought by women in the Paraguayan War of 1864–70. Their prominence was due to the devastating casualties inflicted on the men, as well as a pitiful shortage of ammunition – at Piribebuy in 1868 the women went down still firing volleys of stones, sand and empty bottles at the enemy, in one of the most sublime yet futile acts of defiance in military history.6
As this shows, under the topsy-turvy conditions of revolution, women found themselves once again serving as soldiers in the front line. The last known female regular soldiers had been abolished in Ireland in the seventh century A.D, but the tradition, stretching all the way back to the old matriarchies, had never entirely disappeared. In Africa, for instance, the ‘fighting Amazons’ of Dahomey had attracted the derision of Sir Richard Burton in 1863 – ‘ . . . mostly elderly and all of them hideous . . . the officers decidedly chosen for the size of their bottoms . . . they manoeuvre with the precision of a flock of sheep . . .’7 But Burton also recorded that this army, 2500 strong, was well armed and effective in battle. Nor could they all have been old and ugly, since all 2500 of them were official wives of the king.
Despite the official refusal to use women in the front line, a surprising number from the early modern period onwards have managed to see active service of one sort or another. The Spaniard Catalina de Erauso in the sixteenth century escaped from a convent the night before she was due to take her vows, and fought for the Spanish all over South America; ‘Kit’ Cavanagh joined the British army in 1693 to find her husband, who had been press-ganged, and fought the French so successfully that she was promoted to the cavalry; Hannah Snell, who received twelve wounds fighting at the British naval assault on Pondicherry in 1748, extracted a ball from her groin herself, to prevent discovery of her sex; Loreta Velasquez of Cuba joined the Confederates to fight in the American Civil War after her three children all died of a fever; and English vicar’s daughter Flora Sandes captained a Serbian infantry unit against the Bulgarians in the First World War. There were many, many more women soldiers, whose war service formed a violent contrast to women’s essentially passive wartime role of nursing the injured and mourning the dead.
For as combatants shoulder to shoulder with men, women had a position of strength denied them in their traditional roles – Trinidad Tescon, the Filipina who fought against the Spanish in all the key engagements of the Philippine Revolution after 1895, used her reputation as a w
arrior-heroine to set up hospitals for the wounded, where she was known to the men simply as ‘Ina’ (Mother). Equally brave though less compassionate (her milk of human kindness curdled somewhat by experiences of childhood prostitution and a gynocidal spouse) was the Russian Bolshevik soldier Mariya Bochkareva. After outstanding military service rewarded by many decorations for valour, Bochkareva founded an all-woman crack corps of 2000 high-grade volunteers in a ‘Woman’s Battalion of Death’. These shock troops were so successful that similar units were organized all over Russia, with as many as 1500 women enlisting in one night, so great was their eagerness for the fray.8
In general, though, women made their greatest contribution to revolutionary movements as freedom fighters rather than as soldiers on the masculine pattern. This tradition was particularly marked in Latin America, where Gertrudis Bocanegra created and ran an underground network of women during the Mexican War of Independence, dying after government arrest and torture in 1817. The same fate overtook the Chinese revolutionary Ch’iu Chin, a conscious feminist who took Joan of Arc as her model when she launched herself into the struggle against the Manchu dynasty in 1898. After the failure of her planned uprising, Ch’iu Chin’s life work seemed to be destroyed with her execution in 1907. But her network survived, through her heroic resistance to her torturers (she refused to implicate anyone else, writing only the seven Chinese letters, ‘The autumn wind and rain sadden us’), and her bravery in itself inspired her successors and helped to ensure the final victory of the cause for which she died.
To the eye of history though, the cause often seems to be the true winner, not the women who fought for it. Many died who might have lived, like the Russian Sofya Perovskaya; the clarity and conviction with which she planned the assassination of the Tsar Alexander II in 1881 deserted her when her lover was arrested, and careless of all safety, she threw her life away. Even those who survived paid an appalling price: Perovskaya’s co-worker and friend Elisaveta Kovalskaya spent twenty years in Siberia, the same sentence as that served by another of the group, Vera Figner, in the terrible island fortress of the River Neva, where, as Figner later put it in her memoirs, ‘the clock of life stopped’. Most poignant of all, perhaps, was the story of Vera Liubatovich, who escaped to Geneva with her lover, where they had a child. When he was subsequendy taken by the secret police, Liubatovich left her baby to search for him, was arrested herself and banished to Siberia, and so lost everything.9
The Women's History of the World Page 30
