The Women's History of the World

by Rosalind Miles

  Even losing in battle could not defeat Khawlah’s spirit. Captured at the battle of Sabhura, near Damascus, she rallied the other female captives with the passionate challenge, ‘Do you accept these men as your masters? Are you willing for your children to be their slaves? Where is your famed courage and skill that has become the talk of the Arab tribes as well as the cities?’ A woman called Afra’ Bint Ghifar al-Humayriah is said to have returned the wry reply, ‘We are as courageous and skilful as you describe. But in such cases a sword is quite useful, and we were taken by surprise, like sheep, unarmed.’ Khawlah’s response was to order each woman to arm herself with her tent-pole, form them into a phalanx, and lead them in a successful fight for freedom. ‘And why not?’ as the narrator of their story concludes, ‘If a lost battle meant their enslavement?’12

  Another woman warrior of Islam, as potent with her tongue as with a sword, was the celebrated ’A’ishah. Although the youngest of the twelve wives of the polygamous prophet, married to the aged Muhammad when she was only nine and widowed before her eighteenth birthday, ’A’ishah became famous for her courageous intelligence and resistance to the subordination enjoined on virtuous Islamic wives. She had no hesitation in opposing or correcting Muhammad himself, arguing theology with him in front of his principal male followers with such devastating logic and intellectual power that Muhammad himself instructed them, ‘Draw half your religion from this ruddy-faced woman.’ Her courage extended even to resisting the will of the Prophet when it came through the hotline of a revelation from Allah himself. When in answer to his desire to take another wife Muhammad was favoured with a new batch of Koranic verses assuring him that Allah permitted his prophet to marry as many women as he wished, she hotly commented, ‘Allah always responds immediately to your needs!’13

  What else would a father god do? And how were women to respond? ’A’ishah, still only a girl of eighteen when Muhammad died, outgrew this rebellion and went on to become a leading figure in Islam, where her active political power and influence on Muslim evolution and tradition were enormous. But the challenge she had thrown down remained unanswered. It could only gain in immediacy and urgency in the years that followed.

  For whatever needs were answered by the new patriarchies as they grew, throve and put on beef, they were not the deeper needs of the female sex. Of course, there were attractions – there had to be, for women to swallow the ideological bait without perceiving either the hook or the poisonous lead weighting it down. None of these systems could have been imposed on women against their will. There had to be consent from the women members of each tribe, township or race proselytized by the zealots of the new gods, at some level. Which of them, though, presented with the first appealing package of function and freedom, could have known what she was consenting to for herself and all her female descendants for the next 2000 years? In the whole of the vast fun-house of history’s jokes and tricks, there can be few greater ironies than the spectacle of women embracing and furthering the systems which would all too soon attack their autonomy, crush their individuality, and undermine the very reason for their existence.

  The fall of woman

  From the unknown moment in history when the secret of birth became known, women were doomed to decline from their goddess-like eminence. But man’s self-elevation to a god did more than cut a woman down to normal human size; it succeeded in subordinating her to a lower form of being. Each in its own way, the five major belief systems of Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity and Islam by their very nature insisted on the inferiority of women and demanded their subjection to values and imperatives devised to promote the supremacy of men.

  How did this come about? Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad and other prophets of the cause in fact taught the love of women – the latter in particular was famous for his enthusiastic interpretation of his revelation from Allah that women were the greatest gift of God to man. Theoretically, too, women were not specifically debarred from the spiritual fruits of the new faiths. Buddha categorically laid down the doctrine that women just as much as men could destroy ‘the five fetters’ of sinful humanity and achieve enlightenment, while the emphasis of Christianity and Islam on the individual soul placed a value upon the youngest child, let alone its mother. Muhammad taught his followers to revere worthy women, and even after his death women continued to command respect: Zubaidah, the glamorous queen of the Thousand and One Nights, in real life saved her country from civil war by her refusal to take revenge after the murder of her son. This, coupled with her pioneer work in civil engineering (she pushed through a continuous water supply on the 900-mile pilgrim route from Iraq to Mecca) made her a national heroine.

  Individual patriarchs may indeed wriggle off the charge of woman-hating; the key to the gross inflictions laid on women in their names lies in the nature of the system itself. For a monotheism is not merely a religion – it is a relation of power. Any ‘One God’ idea has a built-in notion of primacy and supremacy; that One God is god above all others and his adherents are supreme over all non-believers. In a multiple pantheon, by contrast, all jostle for primacy. Even the king of the immortals, Zeus himself, could be challenged or outwitted by his angry wife and jealous sons. The ancient world rejoiced in a plethora of such myths and beliefs whose gods, goddesses and godlets were widely tolerated by rulers throughout Mesopotamia, India, Egypt, Rome and Greece – Alexander the Great exemplified as he so often did his country’s highest form of wisdom in his assertion that no one system, no one god held a monopoly on truth.

  Patriarchy changed all that. With a genuine belief in the One God came the inescapable duty to enforce it upon others; with the claim to a patent on truth came for the first time ideas of orthodoxy, habits of bigotry and the practice of persecution. Any opponents of the born-again zealots were to be destroyed without mercy, as in the covenant of the Jews, ‘that whoever would not seek the Lord God of Israel should be put to death, whether small or great, whether man or woman.’ As the Jews persecuted other tribes and their hated idols who challenged the One God, so Christians were to hound them down the ages. Islam in its turn warred on Jews and Christians alike, Muhammad whipping up to wholesale slaughter bloodthirsty hordes who killed or died equally cheerfully to win the paradise he held out to them. ‘Saracens’ thus joined ‘Israelites’ on Christianity’s hit-list, to be massacred in the name of the Lord our God . . . ah, men.

  As a power-relation, then, monotheism inevitably creates a hierarchy – of one god over others, of stronger over weaker, of believer over unbeliever. In addition, the new concept of personal relationship between man and his god, since God had chosen to create him in his own image, led to the idea of the Father God as vested in every human patriarch. So men suffered in two ways, as enemies and as subordinates: the patriarchal ordinances of Ecclesiasticus prescribe ‘bread, correction and work for a servant’ and unremitting oppression for any sons – ‘bow down their neck from their youth’.

  Men, however, were persecuted for extrinsic reasons, not simply because they were men. And in the nature of things, the system afforded opportunities for them to improve upon, or even reverse, their lowly position in the patriarchal pecking order. Enemies of the faith could convert, and did, in huge numbers, hence the worldwide success of the father god religions. With even less difficulty young men turned into old men; sons became fathers; servants became senior servants; and even slaves could become free. None of these options was open to the female of the species. Under patriarchal monotheism, womanhood was a life sentence of second-order existence.

  For woman could never recover from one primal, overwhelming disability – she was not male. The ensuing syllogism represented a triumph of masculine logic. If God was male and woman was not male, then whatever God was, woman was not. St Augustine spelled it out: ‘For woman is not the image of God, whereas the man alone is the image of God.’ As man stands beneath God in the hierarchy, so the woman, as further removed, comes below him: in practical terms, then, setting every man ov
er every woman, father over mother, husband over wife, brother over sister, grandson over grandmother. In every one of these new systems, God freed man from slavery and took him into partnership for eternity, while women were never even apprenticed to the celestial corporation. Man could progress to become each-his-own-paterfamilias while women remained trapped in their perpetual inferiority. Muhammad explained it with his usual clarity, along with the traditional patriarchal penalties for disaffected subordinates:

  Men are in charge of women because Allah has made one to exceed the other. So good women are obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah has guarded. As for those from whom you fear rebellion, admonish them, banish them to beds apart and scourge them.14

  Under the father god, only man attains to full adult freedom and control. Woman in diametric contrast is sentenced to a double subordination, to God and to man, as St Paul instructed the Corinthians; because ‘man is the image and glory of God, but the woman is the glory of man . . . neither was the man created for the woman, but the woman for the man.’

  As this shows, male supremacy does more than imply female inferiority: it demands it. How then was that demand brought home to each and every woman? The first step had to be the eradication of all traces of women’s previous superiority. This meant a wholesale onslaught on the worship of the Mother Goddess, on her devotees, and by extension on women’s right to rule or command. A laconic account in II Chronicles gives us a gynoclast at full tilt:

  And also concerning Maachah the mother of Asa the king, he removed her from being queen because she had made an idol in a grove: and Asa cut down her idol and stamped on it and burned it at the brook Kidron . . . and the heart of Asa was perfect all his days.15

  This was only one of many such attacks on the Goddess, her temples, scriptures, rituals and followers. These are detailed in both Old and New Testaments of the Bible, since Christianity no less than Judaism declared from the outset that the Great Goddess ‘whom Asia and all the world worshippeth’ must be persecuted, ‘and all her magnificence destroyed’ (Acts 19, 27).

  The women resisted, of course. Over a thousand years after the events related by the chronicler, Muhammad almost paid with his life for his insistence that his ‘One God’ should usurp ‘the Lady’, ‘the Queen of Heaven’, ‘the Mother of Life and Death’. Indeed, barricaded in his house by a raging mob of Goddess-worshippers, he was favoured with the timely revelation that the trinity of the old goddesses Al-Uzza, Al-Manat and Al-Uzzat, the Great Goddess in her three-fold incarnation, still existed alongside the new boy, his Allah. As indeed she did – but only for as long as it took Muhammad to regroup his forces, cancel that revelation, and renew the assault.

  Countless women took up arms against this tyranny. Foremost among them was the Arab leader Hind al Hunnud. Known as peerless, the ‘Hind of Hinds’, she led the opposition of her tribe, the wealthy and powerful Quraish, to the forced imposition of Islam. The climax of her campaign came at the terrible battle of Badr in A.D. 624 where she engaged directly with Muhammad himself, but her father, uncle and brother were killed. For a time she directed a guerrilla war of vengeance against the enemy, but eventually, outnumbered and surrounded, she was compelled to submit and convert to Islam. In her military heyday Hind had been not only a war-leader but a priestess of ‘the Lady of Victory’, inspiring the women to sacred chants for valour and victory. After she bowed to the will of Allah, nothing more was heard of this brilliant and unusual woman.

  In his dealings with the Mother Goddess and her worshippers, Muhammad was content with nothing less than ‘the historical liquidation of the female element’, in the words of the Muslim historian Fatnah A. Sabbah. Even this, though, was not enough to ensure the perpetuation of the father god’s victory. Women and men too had to be brought to believe in women’s inferiority, to know that her rightful place was, in every sense, beneath the male. Accordingly the patriarchs of the One God embarked on a strenuous and hysterical myth-campaign to account for and enforce the subjection of women. Its essence is neatly summed up by St Ambrose: ‘Adam was led to sin by Eve, and not Eve by Adam. It is just and right then that woman accept as lord and master him whom she led to sin.’16 Women’s world-without-end obligation to pay for the sin of Eve was also enshrined, indeed elaborated, in Islam: the Muslim sage Ghazali declared that ‘when Eve ate the fruit which He had forbidden to her, the Lord, be He praised, punished her with eighteen things.’ These included menstruation, childbirth, separation from her family, marriage to a stranger and confinement to her house – plus the fact that out of the 1000 components of merit, women had only one, while men, however sinful, were gifted with the other 999.

  The Adam and Eve myth, possibly the single most effective piece of enemy propaganda in the long history of the sex war, had other crucial implications. It performed the essential task of putting man first in the scheme of things; for in all the father god religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, God creates man first: woman is born after man, framed of an insignificant and expendable lump of his bony gristle, and taken out of him like a child from its mother. Essentially this is just one of the countless attempts of womb-envious men to usurp women’s power of birth: with a swift piece of patriarchal prestidigitation, God reverses biology and stands nature on its head with the birth of his man-child, in defiance of evolution, where men and women evolved together, and of life itself, where woman gives birth to man. God now assumed the power of all new life – all the monotheisms taught that God alone created and breathed life into each foetus, using the woman in whom he lodged it simply as an ‘envelope’, in the Islamic phrase.

  Yet still the fathers of the early religions were not done with downgrading women. Alongside this notion of women’s inferior status flourished a conviction of women’s inherent and inescapable inferiority. Among the Jews a husband was felt to be so much at the mercy of his wife’s innate baseness that he was empowered to proceed against her any time ‘the spirit of jealousy come upon him’, whether or not he had any evidence of misconduct on her part. Hauling her to the temple, he handed her over to the priest who uncovered her head in token of her humiliation, forced her to drink ‘bitter water’ mixed of the dirt from the temple floor and gall, and cursed her, so that ‘her belly shall swell and her thigh shall rot’. Vindicated, the husband received an unequivocal thumbs-up from God: ‘then shall the man be guiltless from iniquity, and this woman shall bear her iniquity.’17 For his part the messenger of Allah received a personal verification of female turpitude in one of his revelations: ‘I stood at the gate of Hell,’ he reported. ‘Most of those who entered there were women.’18

  As this shows, under the rule of the father god the male has become the arbiter, type and supreme exemplum of the human race, the female merely a defective instrument, the vehicle designed by God to carry it on. Yet despite the enormous weight of the propaganda, it must have been hard for individual men to see the women they loved as mere ‘cauldrons’ to ‘contain their hell of lustfulness’, in St Augustine’s phrase. And how readily women took to the Jewish ordinance that they should address their husbands only as ba’al (master) or ’adon (lord) as slaves did, may be gauged from the enormous stress appearing now in all written texts upon women’s silence, obedience and total, passive submission to her husband, as in this rather frantic injunction from the Hindu Kama Kalpa:

  There is no other god on earth for a woman than her husband. The most excellent of all good works she can do is to seek to please him by manifesting perfect obedience . . . Be her husband deformed, aged, offensive, choleric, debauched, blind, deaf or dumb . . . a woman is made to obey at every stage of her existence.19

  Nor was submission merely a spiritual exercise. For a grotesque exercise of obedience to the lord and master, see this ‘Advice to a Wife’ from a Japanese pillow-book of the eighth century:

  The most important thing is the respect that the woman shows her husband . . . She will draw on her imagination for anything that might increase his pleasure, witho
ut refusing him anything. If he has a taste for little boys, let her imitate them by kneeling down so that he can take her from behind. Let her not forget that the man does not realize the delicate nature of a woman’s anus, and will try to enter with as much vigour as usual. She had better prepare herself slowly and use sizishumi cream . . .20

  Afterwards, whatever her condition, the Japanese wife had not concluded her obligations: ‘You will always say of his membrum virile that it is huge, wonderful, larger than any other; larger than your father’s when he used to go naked to take his bath. And you will add, “Come and fill me, O my wonder!”, and a few other compliments of the same kind.’21

  This blind obedience and dumb submission became, in the eyes of the patriarchs, the only way that a woman could atone for her existence. The Koran makes it clear that the only virtuous woman was a mother: ‘When a woman conceives by her husband, she is called in Paradise a martyr, and her labour in child-bed and her care of her children protect her from hell-fire.’22 Woman, once sacred for her mysterious power of life, is now reduced to nothing more than an obliging uterus; once the Mother of all, she is now a mere container; and the Great Goddess, ‘She of the Thousand Lovers,’ is forced to present an obliging orifice to every conscienceless cock.

  Yet by a bizarre and limiting paradox, the emphasis on women’s duty of procreation carries no connotations of female sexuality. As women were denied any full part in the process of reproduction, so they were likewise denied any pleasure of participation in the act. In fact, the less they knew about sex, the better, decreed their fathers and keepers; and thus in another reversal of the old mother-centred ways of thought, the highest value shifted from adult womanhood and the pride of fecundity to maiden ignorance. Now the child-bride, the unspoiled female, not-yet-woman, became the finest type; and a small film of atavistic membrane, the hymen, casually deposited by evolution in the recess of every woman’s body, was discovered to be her prize possession. Virginity came in with a vengeance as every budding patriarch suddenly realized his divine right to a vacuum-sealed, factory-fresh vagina with built-in hymeneal gift-wrapping and purity guarantee.