The Women’s History of the World. Rosalind Miles
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HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
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
For all the women of the world who have had no history
Contents
I IN THE BEGINNING
II THE FALL OF WOMAN
III DOMINION AND DOMINATION
8 Revolution, the Great Engine
IV TURNING THE TIDE
Woman is and makes history. MARY RITTER BEARD
‘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