The Women’s History of the World. Rosalind Miles
or rather total licence. If you allow them to achieve complete equality with men, do you think they will be any easier to live with? Not at all. Once they have achieved equality, they will be your masters . . .25
I certainly do not give the name ‘love’ to the feeling one has for women and girls, any more than we would say flies are in love with milk, bees with honey, or breeders with the calves and fowl they fatten in the dark . . .26
As Plutarch here reminds us, for the Greeks there was ‘only one genuine love, that which boys inspire’. The homosexuality of ancient Greece in fact institutionalized the supremacy of the phallus, denying women any social or emotional role other than childbearing. But to the emerging male, newly born into consciousness and thinking with his phallus, it seemed inescapable that such a creature should have as little part as possible in his children: and in the famous ‘Judgement of Apollo’ at the climax of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, the sun god obligingly pronounced:
The mother is not the parent of that which is called her child: but only nurse of the newly planted seed that grows. The parent is he who mounts.
In this simple, brutal diktat phallic thought reversed the primeval creation beliefs of thousands of years. Woman was no longer the vessel of nature, creating man. Now man created woman as a vessel for himself. As the sun overthrew the moon, the king beat down the queen, so the phallus usurped the uterus as the source and symbol of life and power.
Under the new dispensation women’s rights went the way of their rites, and in cities and states from Peking to Peru women dwindled into little more than serfdom. They became property; and found that truly property was theft. The new social and mental systems robbed them of freedom, autonomy, control, even the most basic right of control over their own bodies. For now they belonged to men – or rather, to one man. At some unidentified but pivotal point of history, women became subjected to the tyranny of sexual monopoly – for once it was realized that one man only was necessary for impregnation, it was a short step to the idea of only one man.
Yet the exclusive possession of a woman and the monopoly of her sexual service could always be waived when a greater need arose. In Eskimo tribes, for instance, wife-lending is endemic. For the Eskimo husband, this is ‘a wise investment for the future, because the lender knows he will eventually be a borrower’, when he needs a woman who ‘makes the igloo habitable, lays out dry stockings for him . . . and is ready to cook the game he brings back’. Nor was this all – the extent of the obligations of the borrowed wife can be judged from the special term by which Eskimo children refer to any man who does business with their father: ‘he-who-fucks-my-mother’.27
As their property, women of these early societies were at the disposal of men; and when women were no longer the struggling tribe’s prime resource, nor the sacred source of life and hope for the future, nothing inhibited men’s use of force against them in the struggle for control. Among the ancient Chinese, the Greek writer Posidippus noted in the second century A.D., ‘even a poor man will bring up a son, but even a rich man will expose a daughter.’28 On the other side of the world, a chieftain of Tierra del Fuego told Darwin during the voyage of The Beagle that to survive in a famine they would kill and eat their old women, but never their dogs.29 From written records, epics and chronicles, and from anthropological and archaeological evidence, come countless examples of sexual hostility in action, frequently carried to extremes: women are traded, enslaved, ravished, sold in whoredom, slaughtered on the death of their lord or husband, and in every way abused at will.
One poignant story from an Anglo-Saxon settlement of pagan England puts some flesh on the bones of this stark generalization. Two female skeletons of the pre-Christian period were discovered lying together in one pit grave. The older woman, in her late twenties, had been buried naked and alive; the position of the skeleton after death showed that she had tried to raise herself as the earth was thrown on to her. The younger of the two, a girl about sixteen years old, had previously sustained injuries ‘typically the result of brutal rape, which was strongly resisted by the victim’, including a cavity in the bone behind her left knee where she had been prodded with a dagger to make her draw her legs up for the rapist. She had survived for about six months after the attack, and the fact that she was buried naked, bound hand and foot and possibly alive like her sister-inhabitant of the same grave suggests that her death was the result of her unchastity coming to light, most probably through pregnancy, as the archaeologists conclude:
We can only guess what crime and punishment enmeshed the older woman . . . But for the young girl, naked, bound, lacerated and perhaps still alive, with the howl of human jackals in her ears, her passport to a merciful oblivion is likely to have been the slime and mire of this chalky trench.30
No longer sacred, women became expendable. One Aztec ceremony of death was indeed a direct mockery of women’s former power; every December a woman dressed up as Ilamtecuhtli, the Old Goddess of the earth and corn, was decapitated and her head presented to a priest wearing her costume and mask, who then led a ritual dance of celebration followed by other priests similarly attired. This was only one of a number of Aztec rituals of this kind. Every June a woman representing Xiulonen, Goddess of the young maize, was similarly sacrificed, while in August a woman representing Tetoinnan, Mother of the Gods, was decapitated and flayed, her skin being worn by the priest who played the role of the Goddess in the ensuing ceremony. The ‘strike-the-mother-dead’ motif is even clearer in one detail of this grisly procedure – one thigh of the woman victim was flayed separately, and the skin made into a mask worn by the priest who impersonated the son of the dead ‘mother’.31 But similar customs obtained worldwide – in pre-feudal China a young woman was annually selected to be ‘the Bride of the Yellow Count’, and after a year of fattening and beautifying, was cast adrift to drown in the Yangtse Kiang (Yellow River).32 From ritual sacrifice to the enforced suttee of unwanted child-brides, the destruction of women spread like a plague virus through India, China, Europe and the Middle East to the remotest human settlements – anywhere in fact where the phallus held sway.
As societies evolved, male control through brutal force was gradually supplemented by the rule of law. In Rome, the paterfamilias held undisputed power of life and death over all members of his family, of which he was the only full person in the eyes of the law. In Greece, when Solon of Athens became law-giver in 594 B.C., one of his first measures was to prohibit women leaving their houses at night, and the effect of this was to confine them more and more to their homes by day. In ancient Egypt, women became not simply the property but legally part of their fathers or husbands, condemned to suffer whatever their male kindred brought down on their heads. As the horrified Greek historian Diodorus recorded in his World History (60–30 B.C.), innocent women even swelled the ranks of the pitiful slaves whose forced labour built the pyramids:
. . . bound in fetters, they work continually without being allowed any rest by night or day. They have not a rag to cover their nakedness, and neither the weakness of age nor women’s infirmities are any plea to excuse them, but they are driven by blows until they drop dead.33
Not all women, however, lived as victims and died as slaves: it would be historically unjust as well as inaccurate to present the whole of the female sex as passive and defeated in the face of their oppressions. Even as Aristotle was earnestly discoursing to his students on the innate inferiority of women, a woman called Agnodice in the fourth century B.C. succeeded in penetrating the all-male world of learning. After attending medical classes she practised gynaecology disguised as a man, with such success that other doctors, jealous of her fame, accused her of seducing her patients. In court she was forced to reveal her sex in order to save her life, at which new charges were brought against her of practising a profession restricted by law to men alone. Eventually acquitted of this, too, Agnodice lived to become the world’s first known woman gynaecologist.34
As this suggests, even under the most adverse circumstances, women have never been wholly subordinate. As a sex, the female of the species has taken a lot of treading down, and the greater the efforts of the emerging phallocrat, the more resourceful and sustained was the resistance he produced. It did not take much female ingenuity, for example, to subvert the systems that men had themselves set