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 up: the worldwide system of menstrual taboo, for instance, by which menstruating women were excluded from society so that they should not infect men, pollute food, or, as Aristotle believed, tarnish mirrors with their breath, in fact provided ample and perfect opportunity for women to develop alternative networks of power, all the more effective for being invisible, unseen. What went on in the menstrual huts or women’s quarters when the women foregathered to bring food, news or messages to a menstruating sister would be beneath the ken of the males; but it would make itself felt in their lives nevertheless.
Not infrequently women’s resistance to masculine control was expressed directly, even violently, as the Roman senators found to their cost in 215 B.C., when to curb inflation they passed a law forbidding women to own more than half an ounce of gold, wear multi-coloured dresses or ride in a two-horse carriage. As the word spread, crowds of rioting women filled the Capitol and raged through every street of the city, and neither the rebukes of the magistrates nor the threats of their husbands could make them return quietly to their homes. Despite the fierce opposition of the notorious anti-feminist Cato, the law was repealed in what must have been one of the earliest victories for sisterhood and solidarity.
For in the game of domination and subordination, women have not always been the losers: the annals of nineteenth-century explorers were rich in accounts of primitive African tribes where the women had fought off the challenge of the phallus and continued to rule the men. Most of these have now vanished, like the Balonda tribe of whom Livingstone noted that the husband was so subjected to his wife that he dared do nothing without her approval. Yet even today records continue to document tribes like that of the cannibal Munduguma of the Yuat River of the South Seas, whose women are as ferocious as their head-hunting men, and who particularly detest having children. This age-old resistance to the traditional wifely role is echoed in a Manus proverb of the same region: ‘Copulation is so revolting that the only husband you can bear is the one whose advances you can hardly feel.’35
As this suggests, women did not fall easily into the subservient supporting role for which the lords of every known phallocracy have insisted they are ‘naturally’ fitted. Many and varied in fact have been the ways that women have found to subvert and convert the power of men, asserting their own autonomy and control as they did so. For the new political systems of male domination were not monolithic nor uniform; there were plenty of cracks through which an enterprising female might slip. In addition, the phallus supreme might count himself king of infinite space, but in real life, willy-nilly, men had to marry and father females. Taken together these factors provided a number of bases from which women could operate in much the same way as men:
Women could win membership of the ruling élite.
This classic route to power derived from access to the men who wielded it, in a direct reversal of the previous rule of the matriarchies. One of the clearest indications of its scope comes from the impressive careers of ‘the Julias’, a powerful female dynasty of two sisters and two daughters who ruled in Rome during the third century A.D. The elder sister, Julia Domna, first struck into Roman power politics when she married the Emperor Severus. After her death in 217, her younger sister Julia Maesa took over, marrying her two daughters, also Julias, with such skill that they became the mothers of the next two emperors, through whom the three women ruled with great effect until 235. Another mistress of this game was the Byzantine Empress Pulcheria (A.D. 399–453). Made regent for her weak-minded brother when she was only fifteen, Pulcheria later fought off a challenge to her supremacy from her brother’s wife, and after his death ruled in her own right, supported by her husband, the tough General Marcian: husband in name only, Marcian was never allowed to break his wife’s vow of chastity which after her death enabled her to be canonized as a saint.
Women could excel in political skill.
As Pulcheria’s story shows, women learned very early on how to operate the machinery of power, how to manoeuvre successfully within frameworks which may have constricted their actions but never prevented them from achieving their deeper goals. So the magnificent Theodora, one-time bear-keeper, circus artiste an
d courtesan who fulfilled every Cinderella fantasy when she married the Prince Justinian, heir to the Byzantine Empire in A.D. 525, proposed her measures to the Councils of State, ‘always apologizing for taking the liberty to talk, being a woman’.36 Yet from behind this façade Theodora pushed through legislation which gave women rights of property, inheritance and divorce, while at her own expense she bought the freedom of girls who had been sold into prostitution, and banished pimps and brothel-keepers from the land.
Unlike Theodora, who used her borrowed power with magisterial altruism, other women displayed an appetite for realpolitik in its cruellest forms. The Roman empresses Drusilla Livia (c.55 B.C.–A.D. 29) and Valeria Messalina (A.D. 22–48) were among many who engaged in endless violent intrigues, including the free use of poison on any obstacles to their designs. Poison was also one of the weapons of the legendary beauty Zenobia. This Scythian warrior queen routed the Roman army, went on to capture Egypt and Asia Minor, and, when finally defeated by the Romans, escaped death by seducing a Roman senator. She later married him, and lived on into a gracious retirement until her death in A.D. 274.
Unquestionably though, the female Bluebeard of dynastic power games must be Fredegund, the Frankish queen who died in A.D. 597. Beginning as a servant at the royal court, she became the mistress of the king, whom she induced to repudiate one wife and murder another. When the sister of the dead queen, Brunhild, became her mortal enemy as a result, Fredegund engineered the death of Brunhild’s husband and plunged the two kingdoms into forty years of war. Fredegund’s later victims included all her stepchildren, her husband the king, and finally her old enemy Queen Brunhild, whom she subjected to public humiliation and atrocious torture in the face of the army for three days before Brunhild’s death put an end to her sport: after which she died at last peacefully in her own bed.
Personal achievement was always possible.
The work of many gifted women known to history by name is a salutary reminder that, as the majority of the human race, women have always commanded over half of the sum total of human intelligence and creativity. From the poet Sappho, who in the sixth century B.C. was the first to use the lyric to write subjectively and explore the range of female experience, to the Chinese polymath Pan Chao (Ban Zhao), who flourished around A.D. 100 as historian, poet, astronomer, mathematician and educationalist, the range is startling. In every field, women too numerous to list were involved in developing knowledge, and contributing to the welfare of their societies as they did so: the Roman Fabiola established a hospital where she worked both as nurse and doctor, becoming the first known woman surgeon before she died in A.D. 399.37 In various fields, too, women emerged not simply as respected authorities, but as the founding mothers of later tradition: Cleopatra, ‘the alchemist of Alexandria’, an early chemist and scholar, was the author of a classic text Chrysopeia (Gold-making), which was still in use in Europe in the Middle Ages, while the Chinese artist Wei Fu-Jen, working like Cleopatra in the third century A.D., is still honoured today as China’s greatest calligrapher and founder of the whole school of the art of writing.
Not all women everywhere were destined to make their mark on history. This does not mean, however, that they were inevitably lost in the great silence of the past. Folk stories from all cultures preserve accounts of the heroines of ordinary life who tamed brutal or stupid husbands, outwitted rapacious lords, schemed for their children and lived to rejoice in their children’s children. Occasionally these tales have a peculiarly personal ring, like the Chinese folk tale of the early T’ang dynasty (A.D. 618–907), in which the little heroine, desperate for education, is presented as setting out for her first day’s schooling disguised as a boy, ‘as happy as a bird freed from its cage’. Even more poignant is the earlier story, ‘Seeking her Husband at the Great Wall’ (c. 200 B.C.), which tells of a wife who succeeded in making a long and terrible journey in order to find her husband, surviving every danger and disaster in vain, since her beloved had been dead all along.38
For there was love between men and women; the new lords of creation may have been engaged in urging that ‘a man is just a life-support system for his penis’,39 but no man is a phallus to his wife. In the mysterious intimacy of the marriage bed, bonds were formed which outlasted time, like this extended grieving epitaph erected by a distraught Roman husband, which almost 2000 years later reads as directly as a letter to his dead wife:
It was our lot to be harmoniously married for 41 years . . . Why recall your wifely qualities, your goodness, obedience, sweetness, kindness . . . why talk of your affection and devotion to your relatives when you were as thoughtful with my mother as with your own family? . . . When I was on the run you used your jewels to provide for me . . . later, skilfully deceiving our enemies, you kept me supplied . . . when a gang of men collected by Milo . . . attempted to break into our house and pillage it, you successfully repulsed them and defended our home . . .40
Set this against the mysogynistic posturing of the majority of Roman commentators, and it is difficult to believe that the subjects under discussion are one and the same creature – woman. It becomes in fact increasingly clear that experience on the micro-level of what real women were doing contradicts the macro-dimension of what men were insisting should and did happen.
Yet there is no denying the growth of the threat to women, as phallus-worship swept the world from around 1500 B.C. The accumulated force of men’s resentment of women, their struggle for significance and the recognition of the male part in reproduction had brought an irresistible attack on women’s former prerogative. The Mother Goddess lost her sacred status and the power that went with it; and in this violent downgrading queens, priestesses and ordinary women at every stage of their lives, from birth to death, shared in the loss of the ‘mother-right’. The phallus now separating out from the rites of mother-worship becomes a sacred object of veneration in itself, then the centre of all creative power, displacing the womb, and finally both symbol and instrument of masculine domination over women, children, Mother Earth and other men. When all life flowed from the female, creation had been a unity; when the elements became separated out, male became the moving spirit, and female was reduced to matter. With this god-idea of manhood, Mesopotamian males fought through their fears of being slaves of the woman-god by destroying her god-head and making slaves of women.
What this meant for women may be illustrated by the story of Hypatia, the Greek mathematician and philosopher. Trained from her birth in about A.D. 370 to reason, to question and to think, she became the leading intellectual of Alexandria where she taught philosophy, geometry, astronomy and algebra at the university. She is known to have performed original work in astronomy and algebra, as well as inventing the astrolabe and the planisphere, an apparatus for distilling water, and a hydroscope or aerometer for measuring the specific gravity of liquids. Adored by her pupils, she was widely regarded as an oracle, and known simply as ‘The Philosopher’ or ‘The Nurse’. But her philosophy of scientific rationalism ran counter to the dogma of the emerging religion of Christianity, as did her womanhood and the authority she held. In a terrorist attack of the sort with which women were to become all too familiar, Cyril, the patriarch of Alexandria in A.D. 415, incited a mob of zealots led by his monks to drag her from her chariot, strip her naked and torture her to death by slicing her flesh from her bones with shells and sharpened flints.41
Hypatia’s infamous murder signified more than the death of one innocent middle-aged scientist. In Cyril and his bigots, every thinking woman could foresee the shape of men to come. The aggressive rise of phallicism had revolutionized thought and behaviour; but it was not enough. Domination was not absolute, systems were imperfect, there was still too much room for manoeuvre – control could not be based on an organ that men could not control. There had to be more – an idea of immanent, eternal maleness that was not physical, visible, fallible; one that was greater than all women because greater than man; whose power was omnipotent and unquestiona
ble – one God, God the Father, who man now invented in his own image.
All men allow women to have been the founders of religion.
STRABO (64 B.C.–A.D.21)
Behind man’s insistence on masculine superiority there is an age-old envy of women.
ERIK ERIKSON
II
The Fall of Woman
Is it perhaps in a spirit of revenge that man has for so many centuries made woman his slave?
EDWARD CARPENTER
4
God the Father
The birth of a man who thinks he is God is nothing new.
TURKISH PROVERB
As a man is, so is his God – this word
Explains why God so often is absurd.
GILES AND MELVILLE HARCOURT, Short Prayers for the Long Day
Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, that Thou hast not made me a woman.
DAILY PRAYER OF HEBREW MALES
‘In the beginning was the Word,’ declared St John, ‘and the word was God.’ In fact the word was a lie. In the beginning, God was not. But as history unfolded in different nations and at different times it became necessary to invent him.
For the assumption of divinity and power from a purely physical base had certain crucial limitations. The human penis, even when inflated to magico-religious status, falls short of godhead. Up to a point, the rising phallocrat had carried all before him. Women’s traditional power based on creation and nature had been systematically whittled away. The Sacred King had stolen from the Great Queen her selective technique of man-management on the Kleenex principle of ‘use and throw away’, and applied it wholesale to the female sex. But brute force could only go so far. So long as women still retained their atavistic power of giving new life, they could not be stripped of all association with the divine.
The Women's History of the World Page 8