The Women's History of the World Read online

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  HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

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  First published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph Ltd 1988

  Published by Paladin Books in 1989

  Copyright © Rosalind Miles 1988

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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  Source ISBN: 9780586088869

  Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2016 ISBN: 9780007571970

  Version: 2016-09-13

  Dedication

  For all the women of the world who have had no history

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  I IN THE BEGINNING

  1 The First Women

  2 The Great Goddess

  3 The Rise of the Phallus

  II THE FALL OF WOMAN

  4 God the Father

  5 The Sins of the Mothers

  6 A Little Learning

  III DOMINION AND DOMINATION

  7 Woman’s Work

  8 Revolution, the Great Engine

  9 The Rod of Empire

  IV TURNING THE TIDE

  10 The Rights of Woman

  11 The Body Politic

  12 Daughters of Time

  Notes and References

  Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  About the Publisher

  Woman is and makes history.

  MARY RITTER BEARD

  Preface

  ‘What is history?’ brooded Gibbon, the great historian of the Roman Empire. ‘Little more than a register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of men.’ At last the hand that rocks the cradle has taken up the pen to set the record straight. In history, there were women too.

  It would be hard to find much support for this proposition from the historical record. When a memorial stone was carved into the quay at Plymouth to commemorate the Founding Fathers who made the historic Mayflower voyage of 1620, there was no mention of the seventeen women who sailed with them to build the new world. In general, the historians of every era have shown little interest in the female sex. In 1238, only one maidservant, ‘awake by night and singing psalms’ saw the assassin who gained entry to the bedchamber of the king of England, knife in hand. She changed the course of history – and the chronicler, Matthew de Paris, did not even get her name.

  Yet the women of the world have had a history, and the full story has been far more rich and strange than we are ever led to think. The chief aim of this book is to assert the range, power and significance of women’s contribution to the evolution of the human race, its huge-variety in both the public and the private spheres, and the massive female achievement on every level – cultural, commercial, domestic, emotional, social and sexual. Our world past is packed with countless stories of Amazons and Assyrian war queens, mother goddesses and Great She-Elephants, imperial concubines who rose to rule the world, scientists, psychopaths, saints and sinners, Brunhild, Marie de Brinvilliers, Mother Teresa, Chiang Ch’ing.

  The lives of unsung heroines also have the fascination of the greatest story never told. Every historical period and place has brought a new slant on the old saga of the re-creation of the human race. From the empress undergoing a month-long accouchement attended by doctors, midwives, ladies-in-waiting, astrologers and poets laureate, to the peasant field-worker stepping aside to give birth crouched over a hole under a hedge, then returning to work with her new-born child swaddled at her back, the renewal of the species has always been the sole, whole, unavoidable and largely unacknowledged gift to the future of the female sex worldwide.

  All this is lost when our view of history concentrates on men only, claiming a universal validity for the actions of less than half the human race. That view is a one-eyed sham – fractured, partial and censored. Historians have made a fetish of ferreting around in pipe rolls and laundry lists to track down the dirty linen of great men in preference to the great deeds of unfamous women. Society has glorified golden balls, orbs, swords and maces as symbols of worshipful masculinity, flashy phallic shows to elevate what men most valued about themselves. Each generation has bamboozled posterity for a thousand years with fancy-dress fictions and hollow bluster; among a forest of historical phallacies, the so-called ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German People’, for instance, was none of these things. As Jane Austen demurely remarked, ‘I often think it odd that history should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention.’

  Women’s history by contrast has only just begun to invent itself. Males gained entry to the business of recording, defining and interpreting events in the third millennium B.C.; for women, this process did not even begin until the nineteenth century. Early women’s history was devoted to combing the chronicles for queens, abbesses and learned women to set against the equivalent male figures of authority and ability, creating heroines in the mirror image of heroes: Joan of Arc, Florence Nightingale, Catherine the Great. This pop-up, cigarette-card version of women’s history, though it has some value in asserting that women can be competent and powerful, had two weaknesses – it reinforced the false effect of male domination of history, since there were always many more male rulers and ‘geniuses’ than female; and it failed to address the reality of the majority of women’s lives who had neither the opportunity nor the appetite for such activities.

  What then should a women’s history of the world do? It must fill the gaps left by conventional history’s preoccupation with male doings, and give attention and dignity to women’s lives in their own right. Women’s exclusion from the annals represents a million million stifled voices. To recover the female part of what we have called history is no mean achievement. Any women’s history therefore has to be alert to the blanks, the omissions and the half-truths. It must listen to the silences and make them cry out.

  The second task is to confront the story of women as the greatest race of underdogs the world has ever known. ‘Women live like bats or owls, labour like beasts, and die like worms,’ wrote an English duchess, Margaret of Newcastle, in the seventeenth century. Both women and men have to accept the violence and brutality of men’s systematic and sustained attacks on the female sex, from wife-beating to witch-hunting, from genital mutilation to murder, as the first step towards righting history’s ancient and terrible wrongs.

  As this argues, it is essential to acknowledge that the interests of women have very often been opposed to, and by, those of men. It is no paradox that historical periods of great progress for men have often involved losses and setbacks for women. If there is any truth in Lenin’s claim that the emancipation of its women offers a fair measurement of the general level of the civilization of any society, then received notions of ‘progressive’ development
s like the classical Athenian culture, the Renaissance, and the French Revolution, in all of which women suffered severe reversals, have to undergo a radical revaluation: for, as the American historian Joan Kelly drily observes, ‘there was no Renaissance for women – at least in the Renaissance.’

  A women’s history, then, must hope to explain as well as narrate, seeking the answer to two key questions: How did men succeed in enforcing the subordination of women? And why did women let them get away with it? At the origin of the species, it is suggested, Mother Nature saddled women with an unequal share of the primary work of reproduction. They therefore had to consent to domination in order to obtain protection for themselves and their children. The historical record shows, however, that women in ‘primitive’ societies have a better chance of equality than those of more ‘advanced’ cultures. In these, male domination has been elaborated into every aspect of life, indeed strenuously re-invented in every epoch with a battery of religious, biological, ‘scientific’, psychological and economic reasons succeeding one another in the endless work of justifying women’s inferiority to men. Traditionalist arguments of masculine supremacy have been remarkably resilient over time – all democratic experiments, all revolutions, all demands for equality have so far stopped short of sexual equality – and women, seen as biologically determined, continue to be denied the human right of full self-determination.

  Given that men have sought control, why did women let them have it? As with the ‘inevitability’ of male dominance, the explanations interlock. Handed over as children by one man (their father) to another (as husband), they were legally, financially and physically subject to the power of males in its undisguised form for thousands of years – until very recently, men of all cultures had the right to kill a wife they even suspected was adulterous. Backing up physical force, and successfully superseding it as a technique of control, came mental violence. Commandeered in mind as well as body, women have always been subjected to a barrage of psycho-sexual conditioning to shape them up to the demands of their males. As Dora Russell remarked, ‘the astonishing fact of human history is that religion, philosophy, political, social and economic thought have been reserved as the prerogative of men. Our world is the product of male consciousness.’ How then could women think the unthinkable, in Virginia Woolf’s words, of ‘killing the Angel at the Hearth’? Finally, and this cannot be dodged, women have colluded in their own subordination – too comfortable with the accommodations they had made, too locked into the ways they had found to live with men and with themselves, too wedded to their own often pathetically ingenious and resourceful solutions, they have not only helped to sustain the systems of male dominance but have betrayed their children, male and female, into them too.

  Yet – and this is the final paradox of women’s history – women have not ultimately been victims either of men or history, but have emerged as strong, as survivors, as invincible. Now, freed at last from the timeless tyranny of enforced child-bearing, they are moving onto the offensive to correct these antediluvian imbalances. For patriarchy has run its course, and now not only fails to serve the real needs of men and women, but with its inalienable racism, militarism, hierarchical structures and rage to dominate and destroy, it threatens the very existence of life on earth. ‘We women are gathering’, declared the American women’s Pentagon Action Group of 1980, ‘because life on the precipice is intolerable.’ As long as women go on allowing men to make history, we are responsible for the material and moral consequences of our evasion.

  The effort then must be to free women from their historical shackles – from the tyranny of ancient customs like bride-burning and genital mutilation still horrifically alive in the twentieth century – and to combat those newly minted in our own time. For the struggle to set women free is far from over, as Westerners like to think. In this century, the new technologies, advances in medical science and urbanization have offered women unparalleled freedoms – but each has carried within it the seeds of its use against women, bringing new opportunities for degradation and exploitation, new forms of drudge labour, new attacks on life and hope. The amniocentesis test, for example, devised as a means of promoting the birth of healthy babies, is now widely used to detect the sex of a child as a preliminary to aborting unwanted females: one clinic in Bombay alone performed 16,000 abortions of female foetuses in 1984–5 (Guardian, 4.11.86).

  With a subject of this magnitude, there could have been as many different histories as there are women to write them. This book does not try to be comprehensive, nor does it purport to have solved all the problems of writing women’s history. Many people will feel that they could have done better. Please try – we need as much women’s history as we can get. This version makes no pretence to the traditional historical fiction of impartiality. Accordingly, as with any work on women, some good ol’ boy somewhere is bound to object that it is unfair to men. There is no better reply to this than the spirited self-defence of the pioneer women’s historian Mary Ritter Beard: ‘There is sure to be an over-emphasis in places, but my apology is that when conditions have been long weighted too much on one side, it is necessary to bear down heavily on the other.’

  It will also be objected that women should not be singled out for special pleading, since both sexes suffered alike. When both men and women groaned under back-breaking labour with the ever-present scourge of famine and sudden death, the women’s afflictions, it is argued, were no worse than those of men. This is another widely held belief that will not stand up to any examination of the real differences between the lives of women and men. The male peasant, however poor and lowly, always had the right to beat his wife; the black male slave, though he laboured for the white master by day, did not have to service him by night as well. Nor have changing social conditions had the same impact on men’s and women’s lives – the industrialization of Europe and America in the nineteenth century that improved the material quality of so many people’s lives, itself depended upon the introduction of the ferocious consumerism that more than anything else has devalued women in twentieth-century society.

  The future of the world, then, has to be better than its past. In finding the way to the future, our understanding of our past has a crucial part to play. As Lord Acton observed, ‘history convinces more people than philosophy.’ Historians create explanations, rationales, symbols and stereotypes that guide us from one era to another. Consequently, history will lead us all astray if it continues to look asquint. Women have been active, competent and important through all the ages of man, and it is devastating for us if we do not understand this. But history is also without meaning for men if the centrality of women is denied. Like racist myths, these one-sided accounts of the human past are no longer acceptable: intellectually spurious and devoid of explanatory power, they more and more betray the void of unknowing at their heart.

  Can human beings learn from the lessons that history teaches? To move towards a fairer society in the ideal of full humanity for all, men must be ready to dispense with patriarchy’s rigid orthodoxies and life-denying hierarchical systems. Women in return have to take up their share of the responsibility for the public organization of their societies, and in the private sphere, learn to love men as partners, not in the insulting traditional combination of domineering father and overgrown child. All future developments from now on must be assessed from the perspective of both sexes, since both men and women are equally important to the making of history. The hope for the future, like the triumph of the past, lies in the co-operation and complementarity of women and men.

  ROSALIND MILES

  I

  In the Beginning

  The key to understanding women’s history is in accepting – painful though it may be – that it is the history of the majority of the human race.

  GERDA LERNER

  1

  The First Women

  The predominant theory [of] human cultural evolution has been ‘Man-the-Hunter’. The theory that humanity origin
ated in the club-wielding man-ape, aggressive and masterful, is so widely accepted as scientific fact and so vividly secure in popular culture as to seem self-evident.

  PROFESSOR RUTH BLEIER

  For man without woman there is no heaven in the sky or on earth. Without woman there would be no sun, no moon, no agriculture, and no fire.

  ARAB PROVERB

  The story of the human race begins with the female. Woman carried the original human chromosome as she does to this day; her evolutionary adaptation ensured the survival and success of the species; her work of mothering provided the cerebral spur for human communication and social organization. Yet for generations of historians, archaeologists, anthropologists and biologists, the sole star of the dawn story has been man. Man the Hunter, man the tool-maker, man the lord of creation stalks the primeval savannah in solitary splendour through every known version of the origin of our species. In reality, however, woman was quietly getting on with the task of securing a future for humanity – for it was her labour, her skills, her biology that held the key to the destiny of the race.

  For, as scientists acknowledge, ‘women are the race itself, the strong primary sex, and man the biological afterthought’.1 In human cell structure, woman’s is the basic ‘X’ chromosome; a female baby simply collects another ‘X’ at the moment of conception, while the creation of a male requires the branching off of the divergent ‘Y’ chromosome, seen by some as a genetic error, a ‘deformed and broken “X”. The woman’s egg, several hundred times bigger than the sperm that fertilizes it, carries all the genetic messages the child will ever receive. Women therefore are the original, the first sex, the biological norm from which males are only a deviation. Historian Amaury de Riencourt sums it up: ‘Far from being an incomplete form of maleness, according to a tradition stretching from the biblical Genesis through Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas, femaleness is the norm, the fundamental form of life.’2