The Women's History of the World

by Rosalind Miles

  And what did Hollywood have to tell a breathless world through the undying magic of the silver screen? What was the message of the moguls who knew All About Eve, how women became Notorious, feared a Psycho and longed for King Kong and a grapefruit in the face? What else but that there were bad girls and good girls, girls you fucked and girls you married, little women and good wives, and the birth of a nation was man’s work (tell the women to boil some water, lots of it). Study on this, sister, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Without knowing how, for it was always very respectful towards religion (Jesus of Nazareth, the Man Born To Be Box-Office), Hollywood became the Church of America, every film the new covenant, every picture told a story and the story was the greatest, oldest, cruellest, dumbest story ever told, the man born to be man.

  For boys will be boys, and nowhere more so than in the ail-American playground of the Hollywood movie. As film after film rolled off the cameras under the beady scrutiny of the first generation movie-moguls, patriarchs of the purest water to the last man, the father gods must have been hugging themselves with glee. For who needed physical restraints, savage laws, exclusion from education, from work and from society to keep women in their second-rate ‘sphere’, when you could show them a film that did the same job, and sent them away happy into the bargain?

  The extent to which the mass media of the twentieth century have served to replace the older instruments of dominance and restraint in the perennial patriarchal work of keeping women subordinate has yet to be fully acknowledged. But in its groping, voyeuristic response to the female, its tireless recycling of the same old female archetypes of mother, maiden, whore, its unreeling of ideal scenarios contrasted with the threatening accounts of the ‘girls who went wrong’, Hollywood has to take its proud place alongside the ‘morals police’ of the Ayatollah Khomeini for its valuable work in keeping women in line and training them to be everything a regular guy could ever hope for as his wife and the mother of his children.

  As these pseudo-modern industries, the mass media, lead us firmly by the genitals backwards into the future, we can recognize the new arena in which the next stage for the freedom and equality of women will be fought out. Over the millennia of civilization, the source and site of women’s inferiority has been located in nature, biology, religion, physiology, brain size and the female psyche. Women have fought back, for the right to read, to own money, to vote. One by one those oppressions have gone down in some parts of the world, thereby undermining the ‘natural’ and inevitable status of those that remain. But underlying patterns change slowly. This is in no way to belittle the fruits of the struggle to date. It is simply to insist that in the deeper struggle which feminists worldwide now realize that they face, changing the world takes longer.

  For there is much to do, amounting in fact to a remaking of modern society. All democratic experiments, all revolutions, all demands for equality have so far, in every instance, stopped short of sexual equality. Every society has in its prestige structures a series of subtle, interacting codes of dominance which always, everywhere, finally rank men higher than women. Nowhere has any society successfully dispensed with the age-old sex-role division of labour and the rewards in goods and power that accompany it. Nowhere do women enjoy the rights, privileges and possibilities and leisure time that men do. Everywhere men still mediate between women and power, women and the state, women and freedom, women and themselves.

  This story has no ending, as the history of women, so long in the making, is in one sense only just begun. Women have always fought not just for survival, but for the meaning of the struggle – now, they are organizing, grouping and pushing forward, not merely for new definitions, but for the right to define. What will the writing of history be like, Gerda Lerner wonders, ‘when that umbrella of dominance is removed and definition is shared equally by men and women?’ In her vision of the future, ‘we will simply step out under the free sky’:

  We now know that man is not the measure of that which is human, but men and women are. Men are not the center of the world, but men and women are. This insight will transform consciousness as decisively as did Copernicus’s discovery that the earth is not the center of the universe.24

  This will be crucial: the new woman needs a new man. But she will not now make the mistake made by so many women in the past, of trusting her freedom, her future, to him alone. The new spirit of women’s self-discovery and self-reliance has permeated every outlet from feminist theory to popular music, as in this song by Helen Reddy:

  I am woman, hear me roar

  In numbers too big to ignore,

  And I know too much to go back and pretend,

  Cause I’ve heard it all before,

  I’ve been down there on the floor,

  No one’s ever going to keep me down again . . .

  I am woman, watch me grow

  See me standing toe to toe,

  As I spread my loving arms across the land,

  But I’m still an embryo,

  With a long, long way to go

  Until I make my brother understand . . .

  If I have to, I can do anything –

  I am strong,

  I am invincible,

  I AM WOMAN!

  This new strength of woman lies in the clear-sighted and untroubled recognition of the oldest truth in the newest voice of young black feminism: ‘We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation is us. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and our work.’25 Love, struggle and work – the history of the world’s women, past and future. And if there can be one final certainty it is this: that the love, the struggle and the work will go on, through the one inescapable imperative outlined by Alfred Adler:

  Whatever name we give it, we shall always find in human beings this great line of activity – this struggle to rise from an inferior to a superior position, from defeat to victory, from below to above.

  Notes and References

  Chapter 1 The First Women

  1Elizabeth Gould Davis, The First Sex (1971), pp. 34–5. The argument that the male chromosome ‘Y’ is no more than ‘a defective X’ has a long pedigree – see Francis Swiney, Women and Natural Law (1912). In the modern period it has been vigorously advanced by Valerie Solanas in The SCUM Manifesto (New York, 1968), and by Gould Davis: ‘this small and twisted Y chromosome is a genetic error . . . the first males were freaks, produced by some damage to the genes . . .’

  2Amaury de Riencourt, Women and Power in History (1974, first published in English in 1983), p. 52.

  3Nigel Calder, Timescale (1984), p. 10.

  4Accounts of the ‘gene fount mother’ are to be found in the Listener, 27.2.86, and the Guardian, 3.3.86.

  5For the shortness of the first humans’ life span, see Marian Lowe and Ruth Hubbard (eds.), Woman’s Nature: Rationalisations of Inequality (New York and Oxford, 1983), p. 131.

  6George P. Murdock, Our Primitive Contemporaries (New York, 1934); Social Structure (New York, 1949); ‘World Ethnographic Sample’, American Anthropologist (1957); ‘Ethnographic Atlas: a Summary’, Ethnology 6, No. 2, 109–236. Murdock’s own work is discussed in Jo Freeman (ed), Women: a Feminist Perspective (Palo Alto, California, 1979), p. 94. See also the work of Richard Lee, in Man the Hunter, eds. R. B. Lee and Irven De Vore (1968). Lee showed that even failure at the hunt would not induce the !Kung bushmen of Botswana to hunt more than one week in three or four; since hunting was subject to magic outside their control no amount of effort on their part, they believed, could reverse a run of bad luck. Their refusal could go on for a month, or even longer, during which visiting, entertaining and especially dancing were the primary activities of the men, and women’s gathering alone sustained the tribe.

  7Women’s gathering skills are described by Elaine Morgan in The Descent of Woman (1972), p. 184; and see Calder, p. 156, for a description of the botanical and ecological knowledge dis
played in the most famous of prehistoric burials, that of ‘the Flower Man of Shanidar’. This unknown Mesopotamian was laid to rest about 60,000 years ago on a bed of flowers like ragwort and hollyhock, all known to have medicinal properties, and all used to this day in women’s traditional remedies. Of course the flower-gatherers could have been men – but if prehistoric Shanidar boasted a man who could tell a hollyhock from a hole in the ground, he failed to hand down the secret of his skill to most of his male descendants.

  8For a discussion of tool-making, see Kenneth Oakley, Man the Tool-Maker (1947); R Leakey and R. Lewin, Origins (New York, 1977); G. Isaac and R. Leakey, Human Ancestors (1979); B. M. Fagan, People of the Earth: an Introduction to World Pre-History (1980).

  9Elise Boulding, in The Underside of History (Colorado, 1976), p. 78, discusses women’s discovery of the technique of fire-hardening and suggests that women thereby invented hunting, by providing the tribe with weapons capable of spearing and impaling.

  10See Sally Slocum, ‘Woman the Gatherer: Male Bias in Anthropology’. This landmark paper is to be found in Rayna Reiter (ed.), Towards an Anthropology of Women (New York, 1975), and in Mary Evans (ed.), The Woman Question: Readings in the Subordination of Women (1982). The importance of the swag bag is also discussed by Sheila Lewenhak in Women and Work (1980), pp. 20–1.

  11Slocum, above.

  12The story of Man the Hunter is to be found everywhere, in scholarly and popular books for adults and children – see Lee and De Vore (above); S. Washburn and C. S. Lancaster, ‘The Evolution of Hunting’, in Lee and De Vore (eds.), Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers (Harvard, 1976); Sol Tax (ed.), Evolution After Darwin, Vol. II: The Evolution of Man (Chicago, 1960); Josef Wolf and Zdenek Burian, The Dawn of Man (London and Prague, 1978); Robert Ardrey, African Genesis (1961) and The Hunting Hypothesis (1976); and many, many more.

  13Ardrey (1976), pp. 91–2.

  14W. I. Thomas, Sex and Society: Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1907), p. 228.

  15Calder, pp. 142–3.

  16Morgan, pp. 58–63. The human male’s super-sized penis is also examined at length by Desmond Morris in The Naked Ape (1967), p. 65 and p. 75.

  17Boulding, p. 83.

  18Vonda McIntyre’s argument is to be found in Joanna Russ, How To Suppress Women’s Writing (Texas, 1983), pp. 51–2.

  19Elaine Morgan, p. 116, describes the hygiene routine of female monkeys; Sheila Lewenhak (p. 20 and pp. 23–4) the Stone Age sling-makers; and Paula Weideger, History’s Mistress (1985), pp. 133–4, the experiments with tampons.

  20Donald C. Johanson and Maitland A. Edey, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind (London and New York, 1981), p. 340.

  21H. G. Wells, The Outline of History (1920), p. 94 and p. 118.

  22Ardrey (1976), p. 83.

  23Morris, p. 65 and p. 75.

  24Ardrey (1976), p. 100.

  25Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection (1859), and The Descent of Man (1871); Thomas Huxley, Ethics and Evolution (1893); Herbert Spencer, Principles of Biology (1864–7); Carveth Read, Origins of Man (1925); Raymond Dart, ‘The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man’, International Anthropological and Linguistic Review V.i., n. 4 (1953).

  26Robert Ardrey (1961), p. 316; Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression (1966); Anthony Storr, Human Aggression (1968) p. i.

  27Wells, pp. 77–8; Ardrey (1978), p. 91.

  28Washburn, and Lancaster, p. 303; Johanson, p. 65; John Nicholson, Men and Women: How Different Are They? (Oxford, 1984), p. 5.

  29De Riencourt, p. 6.

  30Myra Shackley, Neanderthal Man (1980), p. 68.

  31Peter Farb, Man’s Rise to Civilization as shown by the Indians of North America from Primeval Times to the Coming of the Industrial State (1968), pp. 36–7.

  32Shackley, p. 68.

  33J. Constable, The Neanderthals (1973).

  34Shackley, p. 206.

  35Shackley, p. 94.

  36Lowe and Hubbard, pp. 114–15.

  37Shackley, pp. 107–8.

  38Robert Graves, The New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology (1959), p. 6; and see G-H Luquet, The Art and Religion of Fossil Man (Oxford, 1930).

  39Lewenhak, pp. 19–36.

  40Graves, Larousse, p. 7.

  Chapter 2 The Great Goddess

  1The fullest examination of the historical phase when the supreme deity was female has been carried out by Merlin Stone, The Paradise Papers: the Suppression of Women’s Rites (1976), and Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood (1979); see also the work of Elizabeth Gould Davis (above), and Elizabeth Fisher, Woman’s Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society (New York, 1979). But this idea has been established among scholars for many years through the work of Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (New York and London, 1955); E. O. James, The Cult of the Mother Goddess: An Archaeological and Documentary Study (1959); Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (1948); C. Kerényi, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter (New York and London, 1967); and many others.

  2For a discussion on Inanna and her poet-priest Enheduanna, see Paul Friedrich, The Meaning of Aphrodite (Chicago and London, 1978), pp. 13–15.

  3The vision of L. Apuleius is to be found in The Golden Ass, translated by Robert Graves, (Penguin, 1950), pp. 228–9. As Apuleius insists here, the goddess had different titles and was worshipped by rites which differed from place to place, but she was one deity, ‘the Goddess of ten thousand names’, as Plutarch describes her: Isis, Ishtar, Ashtoreth, Astarte, Athar, Aphrodite, Inanna, Cybele, Demeter, Au Set, Allat, and hundreds, if not thousands more. Her titles were equally varied, and often strangely familiar: Our Lady, the Queen of Heaven, the Holy One, Divine Ruler, the Lady of the High Place, the Lioness of the Gods, the Lady, the White Lady, the God-Mother of the Country, Holy Mother.

  4Sir Arthur Evans, The Palace of Minos at Knossos (4 vols, 1921–35), passim, and de Riencourt, pp. 26–7 and p. 30.

  5Neumann, p. 94.

  6The sacred status of women, and the anthropological and archaeological evidence to support it, is to be found in James (1959), Neumann, Wolf and Burian (above), Stone (1976), particularly pp. 19, 34, 46, 172, and numerous other sources.

  7‘According to women archaeologists, there are far more representations of women’s thighs and vulvas in Paleolithic cave art than has ever been reported in the literature. Not only the Abbé Breuil, who played such an important part in publishing this art, but several of the other early researchers in the field were members of the Catholic clergy, and they tended to ignore these disquieting reminders of the dangerous female’ – Fisher, p. 143. One honourable exception was The Art of Prehistoric Man in Western Europe (1967), by André Leroi-Gourhan. The frieze at Angles-sur-l’Anglin is discussed by John Coles in The Archaeology of Early Man (1969), p. 248.

  8The mystery of birth in prehistoric cultures, and complete ignorance of the masculine part in reproduction, are documented in Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough (1922); Margaret Mead, Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World (1949); Jacquetta Hawkes, Dawn of the Gods (1958), Prehistory (New York, 1965), The First Great Civilizations (1975); S. G. F. Brandon, Creation Legends of the Ancient Near East (1963), and elsewhere.

  9James (1959), pp. 42–3; and see the work of Graves (1960); Frazer; and Brian Branston, The Lost Gods of England (1974).

  10Allen Edwardes, The Jewel in the Lotus: a Historical Survey of the Sexual Culture of the East (1965), pp. 58–9.

  11Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove, The Wise Wound: Menstruation and Everywoman (1978), p. 178.

  12Graves, Larousse, p. 58.

  13Friedrich, p. 31.

  14Graves, Larousse, p. 60.

  15The Epic of Gilgamesh, translated by N. K. Sandars (London, 1960).

  16Helen Diner, Mothers and Amazons: The First Feminine History of Culture (1932), p. 15.

  17M. Esther Harding, Women’s Mysteries, Ancient and Modern: A Psychological Interpretation of the Feminine Princ
iple as portrayed in Myth, Story and Dreams (New York, 1955; English edition 1971), p. 138.

  18See Diner, p. 174; Frazer, p. 267 and p. 270; James (1959), p. 101; and Harding, p. 128.

  19Shuttle and Redgrove, p. 182.

  20The first serious work on matriarchy was done by the Swiss scholar J. J. Bachofen in Das Mutterrecht [The Mother-Right] (1861); see the English version, Myth, Religion and Mother-Right (Princeton, 1967). The theory of the existence of a world-wide matriarchy before the emergence of the ‘patriarchal revolution’ was also accepted by Engels in The Origin of the Family (1884); and by Mathilde and Mathias Vaerting in The Dominant Sex: A Study in the Sociology of Sex Differences (English translation, 1923). Other early contributors to the discussion included Matilda Joslyn Gage, Women, Church and State (1893), Robert Briffault The Mothers (1927), and Helen Diner (above). Later work includes that of Evelyn Reed, Woman’s Evolution (New York, 1975), Fisher and Gould Davis (above). See too Paula Webster, ‘Matriarchy: A Vision of Power’, in Reiter (q.v.), which includes a helpful review of the literature.

  21The Second Sex (English edition, 1953), p. 96; but see ‘And then the Great Mother was dethroned’ (p. 101), and other similar references in Chapters 11 and 12 that tend to undermine de Beauvoir’s own dismissal of the subject. However, hers is still substantially the position of modern feminists – see Mary Lefkowitz, Women in Greek Myth (1987).