The Women's History of the World

by Rosalind Miles

  Additionally, with the discovery of agriculture and the consolidation of tribes into townships, human societies became increasingly sophisticated, requiring structures, systems and administration. Once survival was assured, surplus became property, and man awoke to the glory of being lord and master. To secure ownership and protect rights of inheritance in a more complex society called for something subtler than the indiscriminate deployment of man’s bluntest instrument. And with the increase of organizational structures came greater opportunities for subversion or resistance; every tribe, township, throne-room or temple held women of ingenuity and resource eager to demonstrate that, whatever men’s claim to power, it would not automatically be accepted. These women could not all be destroyed like Berenice or Boudicca, thrown to the dogs and ravens, or hurried to unmarked graves. Achieving power, man reached out for the secret of control; and as he began to look beyond the end of his penis, he found a stronger lord, a greater master – God.

  Male divinity, of course, was nothing new. Isis had her Osiris, and Demeter had been forced to bow to the vengeance of the Lord of the Underworld. Indeed, as phallomania swept the world, male godhead found a new measurement in lost maidenhead; Zeus, king of the immortals, demonstrated his supremacy by the numbers of young women he raped. The new gods of power were equally aggressive and rapacious. The difference was that now each one insisted that he alone was God – he was the One God, the only God, and no one else could play.

  For within the short millennium or so that separates the forging of Judaism from the birth of Islam, all the world’s major religions made their début one by one. Immediately each set about the twin tasks of carving out their own community of believers, and annihilating all opposition. Where other male deities were targeted for extinction, what price female divinity? Walking in the garden that had been Eden, Mother Nature met Father God and her doom. In the duel for possession of the soul of humanity she lost her own, as the father god, in Engels’ phrase, brought about, ‘the world historic defeat of the female sex’.

  Not all these new religions were god-systems. Judaism offered the paternalistic prototype, once it had succeeded in elevating the petty tribal godlet Yahweh into quite a different order of being after the trauma of the Exile just before 600 B.C. Islam likewise patented the slogan ‘There is no God but God’ following the birth of its prophet Muhammad just before A.D. 600. And straddling the period between the two, lodged at its pivotal mid-point, was the reformed Judaism called Christianity formulated when the old God of the Jews gave birth to a son in whom, as a junior version of himself, he was naturally well pleased.1

  Equally important, though, to India and China respectively, were Buddhism and Confucianism, both of which arose with the birth of their human founders and spread far and fast from these deceptively modest origins. Neither Buddha nor Confucius ever claimed to be divine, and their teachings are properly understood as value-systems rather than as religions proper. But the foundation of their beliefs was uncompromisingly patriarchal; the founders themselves have been worshipped as gods by their followers throughout history; and the ideologies of both these systems have had a remarkably similar impact on women’s lives to that of religions organized around a central concept of a Father God. To women, therefore, the effect was broadly the same, however the message of male supremacy came packaged. All these systems – Judaism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam – were presented to them as holy, the result of divine inspiration transmitted from a male power to males empowered for this purpose, thereby enshrining maleness itself as power.

  Historians, both male and female, have not always resisted the temptation to see the rise of monotheism as a plot against women, since the after-effects have been so uniformly disastrous for the female sex. But attractive though the notion of a cosmic conspiracy is to women’s learned feelings of weakness and helplessness, it overlooks the fact that many of the elements of these early religions held a strong appeal for both sexes, and often for women in particular. Organized religion may have been a root cause of the historic defeat of womankind – Eve did not fall, she was pushed – but it did not begin with that aim. Seen in the wider context of the struggle of human beings of different races towards a deeper understanding of the meaning of their lives and of their growing spirituality, these five patriarchal systems readily reveal why in the first instance they were so attractive.

  To begin with, each offered a clarity, a certainty, a synthesized world view that carried a fresh and profound conviction after the pluralistic muddle and overlap of the old gods, and of goddess-worship too. An Athenian woman in labour praying for a safe delivery in the fifth century B.C., for example, had to choose between the Great Mother Cybele, Pallas Athene, or even the virgin huntress Artemis (Diana to the Romans), all of whom had a special care of women in childbirth. Her husband, sacrificing for the birth of a son, could propitiate Ares for a little warrior or Apollo for a poet or musician, but neglected Zeus the king of the gods at his peril. Once all these rival divinities had been caught up into one all-powerful father, whose eye was on every sparrow let alone each of his human creations, or into a firm framework of ‘the Enlightenment’, ‘the One Path’, there was a security that had previously been sought in vain.

  For the newcomers were wonderfully confident. ‘I am the Lord your God,’ Jehovah told the Jews, ‘and thou shalt have none other gods before me’ – the same message, delivered with the same assurance, as that of the gods of Christianity and Islam. But this apparent simplicity masked a rich complexity that succeeded in harmonizing the universe, offering its believers a patterned metaphysical framework in which each individual, however lowly, was guaranteed their own snug niche. In this confidence, not previously available to them, women could find a terrible strength. The Christian slave Felicitas, martyred with her mistress Perpetua in the Roman persecutions of A.D. 203, on the night before her ordeal gave birth to a baby in prison. When she cried out in labour, the guards mocked her with the taunt, ‘You suffer so much now – what will you do when you are tossed to the beasts?’ But when Felicitas faced the lions in the amphitheatre the next morning she was calm, even joyful, and died without a sound.2

  As this shows, these early believers could find through pain and suffering an answer to the pain of the human predicament itself, a meaning to the apparent meaninglessness of life. With belief came, therefore, an enhanced sense of self as the faithful were liberated from being the helpless slaves either of the Mother Goddess or of her phallic supplanters, the petty, disputatious male divinities. Now the individual mattered, to a god who cared about her and her potential: ‘I am thy God’, declared Jehovah, ‘walk before me and be thou perfect.’ And for the believer – but only for the believer – the reward was nothing less than paradise. This is the triumphant boast of the virgin martyr Hirena in a play of the First European dramatist, the Saxon writer Hrotsvitha, who as a woman seems to identify strongly with her tough, jeering heroine:

  Unhappy man! Blush, blush Sisinnius, and groan at being vanquished by a tender little girl . . . You shall be damned in Tartarus; but I, about to receive the palm of martyrdom and the crown of virginity, shall enter the etherial bedchamber of the eternal king.3

  This combination of revenge psychology with the satisfaction of sublimated sensuality must have been intensely comforting to downgraded women. In a reward-and-punishment system, too, the more women submitted and suffered, the greater the final pay-off.

  Interestingly, the more sophisticated of the women under the early monotheisms speedily grasped that her God in fact offered a post-dated cheque, and no one had ever come back to complain that it had bounced. Consequently they plunged into less-than-godly behaviour with extraordinary vigour, only making sure to build into their lives a final phase of high-profile godliness to ensure their passage to eternity. Mistress of this technique was the Russian Queen Olga. Becoming regent after the assassination of her husband Igor I, she first instituted a reign of terror in revenge for his murder, scald
ing the leading rebels to death and executing hundreds of others. After twenty years of iron-hearted cruelty she devoted herself to Christianity with such good effect that she became the first saint of the Russian Orthodox church.

  The confidence with which the women of the early churches adopted, even manipulated, the dictates of the new patriarchies provides another pointer to the reason for their success. At their origins, they were all only a breath or two away from the goddess-religions they had usurped, and there is abundant evidence that for many hundreds of years women worshippers of the Father Gods continued with their traditional female rituals alongside the new observances. The prophet Ezekiel, a founder of the elevation of Judaism from its scattered tribal beginnings, was horrified to witness Jewish women of the fifth century B.C. ‘weeping for Tammuz’, mourning the death of the sacrificial king, who as Tammuz, Attis or Adonis was remembered every year on the Day of Blood at the end of March (later colonized by Christianity as Good Friday). And not only the women: to the scandalized eyes of the prophet Jeremiah, every man, woman and child was guilty of the same offence:

  Seest thou not what they do in the cities of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem? The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead their dough to make cakes to the Queen of Heaven [the Great Goddess] that they may provoke me to anger.4

  All patriarchies, in fact, only succeeded by colonizing, indeed cannibalizing the forms, emblems and sacred objects of the Goddess they were purporting to root out. Much recent theological scholarship has been devoted to recovering what in ages past every schoolgirl knew: that the Great Goddess in her three-fold incarnation (maiden, mother and wise woman) lies behind the Christian trinity, that her immature aspect of moon maiden became the Virgin Mary, and so on. To this day modern events like May Day and Lady Day commemorate her special festals, especially the first, when at the celebration of the vernal equinox, maidens wreathed in flowers symbolizing the Earth Mother’s powers of fecundity and growth dance round a maypole, a phallic evocation of the boy-king/sacrificial lover of the woodland (Tammuz, Attis, Adonis, Virbius) who has been cut down. This continuity is even to be observed in the ethical systems that make no overt use of the Father God; the Chinese character denoting ‘ancestor’ had an earlier meaning of ‘phallus’ which, even earlier, found on the most ancient and sacred bronzes and oracle bones, had meant ‘earth’. Chinese ancestor-worship, then, embodying patriarchal supremacy (only a son can perform the ritual sacrifices which set his father’s soul free to join his ancestors) grows out of the Great Goddess/Mother Earth worship which promoted fertility and secured offspring for the first male ‘ancestors’.5

  Of all religions, however, Islam most clearly reveals this hijacking process at work. From the crescent moon on its flag to the secret of its most sacred shrine, the Goddess is omnipresent, as Sir Richard Burton observed on his travels:

  Al-Uzza, one aspect of the threefold Great Goddess of Arabia, was enshrined in the Ka’aba at Mecca, where she was served by ancient priestesses. She was the special deity and protector of women. Today the Ka’aba still survives and is the most holy place of Islam.6

  Even when the priestesses of the Great Goddess were replaced by priests, her power lingered on. These male servitors were called Beni Shaybah, which means ‘Sons of the Old Woman’, one of the Great Mother’s more familiar nicknames. In an even clearer link, what they guard is a very ancient black stone, sacred to Allah, and covered with a black stuff pall called ‘the shirt of the Ka’aba’. But underneath the ‘shirt’ the black stone bears on its surface a mark called ‘the impression of Aphrodite’, an oval cleft signifying the female genitals: to one eye-witness ‘it is the sign of . . . the Goddess of untrammelled sexual love, and clearly indicates that the Black Stone at Mecca belonged originally to the Great Mother.’7 When her women worshippers knew that ‘the Lady’ was still in her stone, and her stone was still in her shrine, it would not at first have mattered that she gained another name, she who had 10,000 appellations, nor that now she was served by different acolytes. In embracing the new father gods, therefore, women did not have to abandon all contact with their first mother, and this undoubtedly enabled the struggling patriarchies to consolidate their hold.

  In these early struggles of each of the male-centred systems lies another reason for their initial success with women. In the fight for recognition and survival, any ideology seizes on and makes use of whatever recruits come to hand – it is no accident that the first devotees of both Buddha and Muhammad were their wives. Women were, as a result, well to the fore in all these foundations, which offered them a central role and opportunity. It seems clear, for instance, that Khadijah, the brilliant businesswoman and prominent member of the leading Meccan tribe of the Quraish, actually discovered Muhammad when at the age of forty she gave the ill-educated, epileptic shepherd boy of twenty-five regular employment, took him as her husband and encouraged his revelations.

  The early annals of Judaism are similarly stiffened with strong-minded women, even in extremes of terror, pain and loss. A well-known figure is that of the mother of the Maccabees, who stood by her seven sons while each in turn was tortured and burned to death in the holocaust of 170 B.C., urging them to stand firm. But for this, it is agreed, the God of the Jews could have been wiped out: ‘the blood of the Maccabean martyrs . . . saved Judaism’.8 In early Christianity likewise, women found not merely a role, but an instrument of resistance to male domination; in choosing to be a bride of Christ they inevitably cocked a snook at lesser male fry. Thousands of young women helped to build the church of God with their body, blood and bones when frenzied fathers, husbands or fiancés preferred to see them die by fire, sword or the fangs of wild beasts rather than live to flout the duty and destiny of womanhood.

  Just as important as the fearless witness of the virgin martyrs was the work of the women who put their time, their money, their enthusiasm, their houses and their children freely at the disposal of the struggling founders. Even St Paul, later the unregenerate prophet of female inferiority, was forced to acknowledge the help he received from Lydia, the seller of purple dyes in Philippi. Indeed the very first Christian churches in Rome and elsewhere were houses donated by wealthy widows, and all the Christian communities in the Acts of the Apostles are recorded as meeting under a woman’s roof: ‘the church in the house of Chloe, in the house of Lydia, in the house of Mary, the mother of Mark, in the house of Nympha, in the house of Prisca . . .’ Most significant of all, as a leading theologian shows, of the common offices of the church in its pioneer days (teaching, prayer and prophecy, thanksgiving over bread and wine, and administering the gifts and discipline of the faith), ‘there is none that a woman could not do.’9

  Early Christianity, in fact, claimed through its prophets that it liberated women from their traditional subservience and gave them complete sexual equality with men. ‘In Christ,’ wrote St Paul, ‘there is neither bond nor free, neither male nor female . . .’ Buddhism, too, at its beginnings held out to its female adherents a delusive promise of equality; the threefold reality, ‘all is suffering, all is impermanence and there is no soul’, was as available to women as it was to men. Additionally, Buddha taught that life, or form, was only one of twenty-two faculties that composed a person; sex, therefore, was of minimal importance. And, like Christianity, Buddhism also had its early heroines, idealized examples of passion, purity and sublime faith:

  Subh puts the thought [of Buddha] into action [when] a rogue inveigles her into the forest and tries to seduce her. Subh responds by preaching the doctrine to him. But the rogue sees only the beauty of her eyes and ignores her lofty words. So to demonstrate the irrelevance of both her beauty and sex to the inner life, Subh plucks out one of those lovely eyes and offers it to him. He is converted at once . . .10

  Of all the early patriarchies, though, perhaps the most surprising in its attitude to women is Islam; the gross oppressions which later evolved like veiling, seclusion, and genital mutilation (th
e so-called ‘female circumcision’) were brought about in the teeth of the far freer and more humane regime of former times. From pre-Islamic society, for instance, women had inherited the right to choose their own husbands – husbands in the plural, for the old ‘mother-right’ still flourished throughout the tribes and townships of the Arab states, as the feminist historian Nawal El Saadawi explains:

  Before Islam a woman could practise polyandry and marry more than one man. When she became pregnant she would send for all her husbands . . . Gathering them around her, she would name the man she wished to be the father of her child, and the man could not refuse . . .11

  When a Bedouin woman wanted to divorce one of these spare husbands, she simply turned her tent around to signal that her door was no longer open to him. In later generations Muslim women must have considered folk tales or memories of those freedoms either a cruel joke or the purest fantasy. Yet the proof that they existed lies in the marriage story of the founder of Islam, the prophet Muhammad himself. When the self-assured Khadijah wanted him, she despatched a woman with instructions for Muhammad to propose to her – and he did.

  Even more remarkable than this free right of sexual choice was the readiness with which the women of early Islam took up arms and fought in pitched battles alongside the men. One honoured heroine and war-leader was Salaym Bint Malhan, who with an armoury of swords and daggers strapped round her pregnant belly fought in the ranks of Muhammad and his followers. Another is credited with turning the tide in a fierce fight against the Byzantines, when the wavering forces of Islam were rallied by a tall knight muffled in black and fighting with ferocious courage. After the victory, the ‘knight’ was reluctantly exposed as the Arab princess Khawlah Bint al-Azwar al-Kindiyyah.