His activity has another dimension that endows him with supreme dignity: it is often dangerous. If blood were only a food, it would not be worth more than milk: but the hunter is not a butcher: he runs risks in the struggle against wild animals. The warrior risks his own life to raise the prestige of the horde—his clan. This is how he brilliantly proves that life is not the supreme value for man but that it must serve ends far greater than itself. The worst curse on woman is her exclusion from warrior expeditions; it is not in giving life but in risking his life that man raises himself above the animal; this is why throughout humanity, superiority has been granted not to the sex that gives birth but to the one that kills.
Here we hold the key to the whole mystery. On a biological level, a species maintains itself only by re-creating itself; but this creation is nothing but a repetition of the same Life in different forms. By transcending Life through Existence, man guarantees the repetition of Life: by this surpassing, he creates values that deny any value to pure repetition. With an animal, the gratuitousness and variety of male activities are useless because no project is involved; what it does is worthless when it is not serving the species; but in serving the species, the human male shapes the face of the earth, creates new instruments, invents and forges the future. Positing himself as sovereign, he encounters the complicity of woman herself: because she herself is also an existent, because transcendence also inhabits her and her project is not repetition but surpassing herself toward another future; she finds the confirmation of masculine claims in the core of her being. She participates with men in festivals that celebrate the success and victories of males. Her misfortune is to have been biologically destined to repeat Life, while in her own eyes Life in itself does not provide her reasons for being, and these reasons are more important than life itself.
Certain passages where Hegel’s dialectic describes the relationship of master to slave would apply far better to the relationship of man to woman. The Master’s privilege, he states, arises from the affirmation of Spirit over Life in the fact of risking his life: but in fact the vanquished slave has experienced this same risk, whereas the woman is originally an existent who gives Life and does not risk her life; there has never been combat between the male and her; Hegel’s definition applies singularly to her. “The other [consciousness] is the dependent consciousness for which essential reality is animal life, that is, life given by another entity.” But this relationship differs from the relationship of oppression because woman herself aspires to and recognizes the values concretely attained by males. It is the male who opens up the future toward which she also transcends; in reality, women have never pitted female values against male ones: it is men wanting to maintain masculine prerogatives who invented this division; they wanted to create a feminine domain—a rule of life, of immanence—only to lock woman in it. But it is above and beyond all sexual specification that the existent seeks self-justification in the movement of his transcendence: the very submission of women proves this. Today what women claim is to be recognized as existents just like men, and not to subordinate existence to life or the man to his animality.
Thus an existential perspective has enabled us to understand how the biological and economic situation of primitive hordes led to male supremacy. The female, more than the male, is prey to the species; humanity has always tried to escape from its species’ destiny; with the invention of the tool, maintenance of life became activity and project for man, while motherhood left woman riveted to her body like the animal. It is because humanity puts itself into question in its being—that is, values reasons for living over life—that man has set himself as master over woman; man’s project is not to repeat himself in time: it is to reign over the instant and to forge the future. Male activity, creating values, has constituted existence itself as a value; it has prevailed over the indistinct forces of life; and it has subjugated Nature and Woman. We must now see how this situation has continued and evolved through the centuries. What place has humanity allotted to this part of itself that has been defined in its core as Other? What rights have been conceded to it? How have men defined it?
1. Sociology no longer gives credit to Bachofen’s lucubrations.
| CHAPTER 2 |
We have just seen that women’s fate is very harsh in primitive hordes; in female animals the reproductive function is limited naturally, and when it occurs, the particular animal is more or less released from other toil; only domestic females are sometimes exploited to the point of exhaustion of their forces as reproducers and in their individual capacities by a demanding master. This was undoubtedly the case of woman at a time when the struggle against a hostile world demanded the full employment of community resources; added to the fatigues of incessant and unregulated procreation were those of hard domestic duties. Nevertheless, some historians maintain that precisely at that time, male superiority was the least marked; which means that this superiority is lived in an immediate form, not yet posited and willed; no one tries to compensate for the cruel disadvantages that handicap woman; but neither does anyone try to break her down, as will later happen in paternalistic regimes. No institution actually ratifies the inequality of the sexes; in fact, there are no institutions: no property, no inheritance, no legal system. Religion is neutral; the totems that are worshipped are asexual.
It is when nomads settled the land and became farmers that institutions and law appeared. Man no longer has to limit himself to combating hostile forces; he begins to express himself concretely through the figure he imposes on the world, thinking the world and thinking himself; at that juncture, sexual differentiation is reflected in the group structure, and it takes on a particular character: in agricultural communities, woman is often vested with extraordinary prestige. This prestige is explained essentially by the new importance that children assume in a civilization based on working the land; by settling a territory, men begin to appropriate it. Property appears in a collective form; it demands posterity from its owners; motherhood becomes a sacred function. Many tribes live under a communal regime: this does not mean that women belong to all the men in the community; it is no longer thought today that promiscuous marriage was ever practiced; but men and women only have a religious, social, and economic existence as a group: their individuality remains a purely biological fact; marriage, whatever its form—monogamy, polygamy, polyandry—is itself nothing but a secular incident that does not create a mystical link. For the wife it is in no way a source of servitude, as she remains an integral part of her clan. The clan as a whole, gathered under the same totem, mystically shares the same mana and materially shares the common enjoyment of a territory. But in the alienation process mentioned before, the clan grasps itself in this territory in the guise of an objective and concrete figure; through the permanence of the land, the clan thus realizes itself as a unity whose identity persists throughout the passage of time. Only this existential process makes it possible to understand the identification that has survived to this day among the clan, the gens, the family, and property. In the thinking of nomadic tribes, only the moment exists; the agricultural community replaces this thinking with the concept of a life rooted in the past and incorporating the future: the totem ancestor who gives his name to the clan members is venerated; and the clan takes an abiding interest in its descendants: it will survive through the land that he bequeaths to them and that they will exploit. The community conceives of its unity and wills its existence beyond the present: it sees itself in its children, it recognizes them as its own, and it accomplishes and surpasses itself through them.
But many primitives are unaware of the father’s role in the procreation of children, who are thought to be the reincarnation of ancestral larvae floating around certain trees, certain rocks, in certain sacred places, and descending into the woman’s body; in some cases, they believe she must not be a virgin if this infiltration is to take place; but other peoples believe that it also takes place through the nostrils or mouth; at any rate, defloration is s
econdary here, and for mystical reasons the prerogative is rarely the husband’s. The mother is clearly necessary for the birth of the child; she is the one who keeps and nourishes the germ within her, and so the life of the clan is propagated in the visible world through her. This is how she finds herself playing the principal role. Very often, children belong to their mother’s clan, bear her name, and share her rights, particularly the use of the land belonging to the clan. So communal property is transmitted through women: through them the fields and their harvests are reserved to members of the clan, and inversely it is through their mothers that members are destined to a given piece of land. The land can thus be considered as mystically belonging to women: their hold on the soil and its fruits is both religious and legal. The tie that binds them is stronger than one of ownership; maternal right is characterized by a true assimilation of woman to the land; in each, through its avatars, the permanence of life is achieved, life that is essentially generation. For nomads, procreation seems only an accident, and the riches of the earth are still unknown; but the farmer admires the mystery of fertilization that burgeons in the furrows and in the maternal womb. He knows that he was conceived like the cattle and the harvests, and he wants his clan to conceive other humans who will perpetuate it in perpetuating the fertility of the fields; nature as a whole seems like a mother to him; the earth is woman, and the woman is inhabited by the same obscure forces as the earth.1 This is part of the reason agricultural work is entrusted to woman: able to call up the ancestral larvae within her, she also has the power to make fruit and wheat spring from the sowed fields. In both cases it is a question of a magic conjuration, not of a creative act. At this stage, man no longer limits himself to gathering the products of the earth: but he does not yet understand his power; he hesitates between technical skill and magic; he feels passive, dependent on Nature that doles out existence and death by chance. To be sure, he recognizes more or less the function of the sexual act as well as the techniques for cultivating the soil: but children and crops still seem like supernatural gifts; and the mysterious emanations flowing from the feminine body bring forth into this world the riches latent in the mysterious sources of life. Such beliefs are still alive today among numerous Indian, Australian, and Polynesian tribes, and become all the more important as they match the practical interests of the collectivity.2 Motherhood relegates woman to a sedentary existence; it is natural for her to stay at home while men hunt, fish, and go to war. But primitive people rarely cultivate more than a modest garden contained within their own village limits, and its cultivation is a domestic task; Stone Age instruments require little effort; economics and mystical belief agree to leave agricultural work to women. Domestic work, as it is taking shape, is also their lot: they weave rugs and blankets; they shape pottery. And they are often in charge of barter; commerce is in their hands. The life of the clan is thus maintained and extended through them; children, herds, harvests, tools, and the whole prosperity of the group of which they are the soul depend on their work and their magic virtues. Such strength inspires in men a respect mingled with fear, reflected in their worship. It is in women that the whole of foreign Nature is concentrated.
It has already been said here that man never thinks himself without thinking the Other; he grasps the world under the emblem of duality, which is not initially sexual. But being naturally different from man, who posits himself as the same, woman is consigned to the category of Other; the Other encompasses woman; at first she is not important enough to incarnate the Other alone, so a subdivision at the heart of the Other develops: in ancient cosmographies, a single element often has both male and female incarnations; thus for the Babylonians, the Ocean and the Sea were the double incarnation of cosmic chaos. When the woman’s role grows, she comes to occupy nearly the whole region of the Other. Then appear the feminine divinities through whom fertility is worshipped. A discovery made in Susa shows the oldest representation of the Great Goddess, the Great Mother in a long robe and high coiffure, which other statues show crowned with towers; excavations in Crete have yielded several effigies of her. She can be steatopygous and crouched, or thin and standing, sometimes clothed, and often naked, her arms pressed beneath her swollen breasts. She is the queen of heaven, a dove is her symbol; she is also the empress of hades, she comes out slithering, symbolized by a serpent. She can be seen in mountains, woods, the sea, and springs. She creates life everywhere; if she kills, she resurrects. Fickle, lascivious, and cruel like Nature, propitious and yet dangerous, she reigns over all of Asia Minor, over Phrygia, Syria, Anatolia, and over all of western Asia. She is known as Ishtar in Babylon, Astarte to Semitic peoples, and Gaea, Rhea, or Cybele to the Greeks; she is found in Egypt in the form of Isis; male divinities are subordinated to her. Supreme idol in faraway regions of heaven and hades, woman on earth is surrounded by taboos like all sacred beings—she is herself taboo; because of the powers she holds, she is seen as a magician or a sorceress; she is included in prayers, and she can be at times a priestess like the druids among the ancient Celts; in certain cases she participates in the government of the tribe, and at times she even governs on her own. These distant ages have left us no literature. But the great patriarchal periods conserve in their mythology, monuments, and traditions the memory of times when women occupied very high positions. From a feminine point of view, the Brahman period is a regression from that of Rig-Veda, and the latter a regression from the primitive stage that preceded it. The pre-Islamic bedouin women had a much higher status than that accorded them by the Koran. The great figures of Niobe and Medea evoke an era when mothers, considering their children to be their own property, took pride in them. And in the Homeric poems, Andromache and Hecuba have an importance that classic Greece no longer granted to women hidden in the shadows of the gynaeceum.
These facts all lead to the supposition that in primitive times a veritable reign of women existed; this hypothesis, proposed by Bachofen, was adopted by Engels; the passage from matriarchy to patriarchy seems to him to be “the great historical defeat of the feminine sex.” But in reality this golden age of Woman is only a myth. To say that woman was the Other is to say that a relationship of reciprocity between the sexes did not exist: whether Earth, Mother, or Goddess, she was never a peer for man; her power asserted itself beyond human rule: she was thus outside of this rule. Society has always been male; political power has always been in men’s hands. “Political authority, or simply social authority, always belongs to men,” Lévi-Strauss affirms at the end of his study of primitive societies. For men, the counterpart—or the other—who is also the same, with whom reciprocal relationships are established, is always another male individual. The duality that can be seen in one form or another at the heart of society pits one group of men against another; and women are part of the goods men possess and a means of exchange among themselves: the mistake comes from confusing two forms of mutually exclusive alterity. Insofar as woman is considered the absolute Other, that is—whatever magic powers she has—as the inessential, it is precisely impossible to regard her as another subject.3 Women have thus never constituted a separate group that posited itself for-itself before a male group; they have never had a direct or autonomous relationship with men. “The relationship of reciprocity which is the basis of marriage is not established between men and women, but between men by means of women, who are merely the occasion of this relationship,” said Lévi-Strauss.4 Woman’s concrete condition is not affected by the type of lineage that prevails in the society to which she belongs; whether the regime is patrilineal, matrilineal, bilateral, or undifferentiated (undifferentiation never being precise), she is always under men’s guardianship; the only question is if, after marriage, she is still subjected to the authority of her father or her oldest brother—authority that will also extend to her children—or of her husband. In any case: “The woman is never anything more than the symbol of her lineage. Matrilineal descent is the authority of the woman’s father or brother extended to the brother-in-law�
�s village.”5 She only mediates the law; she does not possess it. In fact, it is the relationship of two masculine groups that is defined by the system of filiation, and not the relation of the two sexes. In practice, woman’s concrete condition is not consistently linked to any given type of law. It may happen that in a matrilineal system she has a very high position: but—beware—the presence of a woman chief or a queen at the head of a tribe absolutely does not mean that women are sovereign: the reign of Catherine the Great changed nothing in the fate of Russian peasant women; and they lived no less frequently in a state of abjection. And cases where a woman remains in her clan and her husband makes rapid, even clandestine visits to her are very rare. She almost always goes to live under her husband’s roof: this fact is proof enough of male domination. “Behind the variations in the type of descent,” writes Lévi-Strauss, “the permanence of patrilocal residence attests to the basic asymmetrical relationship between the sexes which is characteristic of human society.” Since she keeps her children with her, the result is that the territorial organization of the tribe does not correspond to its totemic organization: the former is contingent, the latter rigorously constructed; but in practice, the first was the more important because the place where people work and live counts more than their mystical connection. In the more widespread transitional regimes, there are two kinds of rights, one based on religion and the other on the occupation and labor on the land, and they overlap. Though only a secular institution, marriage nevertheless has great social importance, and the conjugal family, though stripped of religious signification, is very alive on a human level. Even within groups where great sexual freedom is found, it is considered conventional for a woman who brings a child into the world to be married; alone with an offspring, she cannot constitute an autonomous group; and her brother’s religious protection does not suffice; a husband’s presence is required. He often has many heavy responsibilities for the children; they do not belong to his clan, but it is nonetheless he who feeds and raises them; between husband and wife, and father and son, bonds of cohabitation, work, common interest, and tenderness are formed. Relations between this secular family and the totemic clan are extremely complex, as the diversity of marriage rites attests. In primitive times, a husband buys a wife from a foreign clan, or at least there is an exchange of goods from one clan to another, the first giving over one of its members and the second delivering cattle, fruits, or work in return. But as husbands take charge of wives and their children, it also happens that they receive remuneration from their brides’ brothers. The balance between mystical and economic realities is an unstable one. Men often have a closer attachment to their sons than to their nephews; it is as a father that a man will choose to affirm himself when such affirmation becomes possible. And this is why every society tends toward a patriarchal form as its development leads man to gain awareness of himself and to impose his will. But it is important to emphasize that even at times when he was still confused by the mysteries of Life, Nature, and Woman, he never relinquished his power; when, terrified by the dangerous magic woman possesses, he posits her as the essential, it is he who posits her, and he who realizes himself thereby as the essential in this alienation he grants; in spite of the fecund virtues that infuse her, man remains her master, just as he is master of the fertile earth; she is destined to be subordinated, possessed, and exploited, as is also Nature, whose magic fertility she incarnates. The prestige she enjoys in the eyes of men comes from them; they kneel before the Other, they worship the Goddess Mother. But as powerful as she may appear, she is defined through notions created by the male consciousness. All of the idols invented by man, however terrifying he may have made them, are in fact dependent upon him, and this is why he is able to destroy them. In primitive societies, this dependence is not acknowledged and posited, but its existence is implicit, in itself: and it will readily become mediatory as soon as man develops a clearer consciousness of self, as soon as he dares to assert himself and stand in opposition. And in fact, even when man grasps himself as given, passive, and subject to the vagaries of rain and sun, he still realizes himself as transcendence, as project; already, spirit and will assert themselves within him against life’s confusion and contingencies. The totem ancestor, of which woman assumes multiple incarnations, is more or less distinctly a male principle under its animal or tree name; woman perpetuates carnal existence, but her role is only that of nourisher, not of creator; in no domain whatsoever does she create; she maintains the life of the tribe by providing children and bread, nothing more; she lives condemned to immanence; she incarnates only the static aspect of society, closed in on itself. Meanwhile, man continues to monopolize the functions that open this society to nature and to the whole of humanity; the only efforts worthy of him are war, hunting, and fishing; he conquers foreign prey and annexes it to the tribe; war, hunting, and fishing represent an expansion of existence, his going beyond into the world; the male is still the only incarnation of transcendence. He does not yet have the practical means to totally dominate Woman-Earth, he does not yet dare stand up to her: but already he wants to tear himself away from her. I think the profound reason for the well-known custom of exogamy, so widespread in matrilineal societies, is to be found in this determination. Even though man is unaware of the role he plays in procreation, marriage has great importance for him; this is where he attains adult dignity and receives his share of a piece of the world; through his mother he is bound to the clan, his ancestors, and everything that constitutes his own subsistence; but in all of these secular functions—work or marriage—he aspires to escape this circle and assert transcendence against immanence, to open up a future different from the past where he is rooted; depending on the types of relations recognized in different societies, the banning of incest takes on different forms, but from primitive times to our days it has remained the same: man wishes to possess that which he is not; he unites himself to what appears to him to be Other than himself. The wife must not be part of the husband’s mana, she must be foreign to him: thus foreign to his clan. Primitive marriage is sometimes founded on abduction, real or symbolic: because violence done to another is the clearest affirmation of another’s alterity. Taking his wife by force, the warrior proves he is able to annex the riches of others and burst through the bounds of the destiny assigned to him at birth; purchasing her under various forms—paying tribute, rendering services—has, less dramatically, the same signification.6
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