The Women's History of the World

by Rosalind Miles

  So powerful was this fetish of virginity that a new ideal gathered momentum, that of preserving it in perpetuity. One early Christian father, St Jerome, was active in persuading fathers to dedicate their daughters to nunneries at birth, while another, St Martin of Tours, constantly compared the ‘pure ungrazed field of virginity’ to ‘the field of marriage torn up by the pigs and cattle of fornication’. As this shows, the Christian church had from its origins a particular problem with women’s sexuality: ‘to embrace a woman,’ wrote Odo of Cluny in the twelfth century, ‘is to embrace a sack of manure’. The ‘sack of manure’ metaphor for women’s bodies was an obsession with the early Christians: ‘If a woman’s bowels were cut open,’ pronounced the monk Roger de Caen, ‘you would see what filth is covered by her white skin. If a fine crimson cloth covered a pile of foul dung, would anyone be foolish enough to love the dung because of it?’23

  Yet Christ was born of woman. The solution to this embarrassment was found only after protracted doctrinal councils, when the gruesome hilarity of debating how the divine seed could penetrate the Virgin’s hymen, or how Christ could have emerged from her uterus without rupturing the said hymen with his sacred infant feet, appears to have gone unnoticed. But one thing was clear. Our Lord, the Son of God, the Redeemer of Man, could not have been born from a sack of shit. The Christian fathers had to protect Mary’s purity in order to protect his. The Blessed Virgin Mary, it was decreed, remained a virgin not only before the birth of Christ, but afterwards as well. She Was unravaged by the bloody mess and pain of childbirth; He was hermetically sealed off from any contact with her filthy and disgusting innards. Nor was this merely a Christian perversion. The compulsive drive of the patriarch not simply to occupy and possess a pure and unspotted vagina but also to emerge from one may be demonstrated from the fact that in addition to Jesus, Buddha, Plato, Quetzalcoatl, Montezuma and Ghenghis Khan all claimed to be virgin-born.

  With womanhood reduced to its most immature aspect, man therefore saddles himself with the problem of her regulation and control. What this boils down to, in every case, is a withdrawal of the previous freedoms of adult women, which then traps them in a permanently arrested state of adolescent dependency and as such fulfils all the prescriptions of the patriarch. Confucianism, spreading rapidly through China and the Far East after the death of its founder K’ung Fu-tsze, ‘the master king’, in 478 B.C., is a case in point. In feudal times, the people of China celebrated an annual spring festival when young men and women from the surrounding villages met in a woodland hung with wine gourds and refreshments, to play the time-honoured game known in Shakespeare’s England as ‘making green backs’. These uncomplicated sexual liaisons were only translated into marriage in the autumn if the girl became pregnant and wanted a husband: and her free right of choice in the whole process is illustrated by this girl’s song composed around 800 B.C. in the feudal state of Chen:

  On the heath there is creeping grass,

  Soaked in heavy dew

  There was a handsome man

  With clear eyes and a fine brow

  We met by chance

  And my desire was satisfied

  We met by chance

  And together we were happy.24

  Chinese history also records countless women of power, like the seventh-century Empress Wu of the T’ang dynasty. An imperial concubine at thirteen, Wu Chao ruled China for over half a century, in A.D. 696 proclaiming herself ‘supreme god’. Many ordinary women throughout China worked as merchants, traders, farmers and manufacturers, as women have always done, everywhere. Yet when the ‘great sage’, Confucius, drew up his ‘five fundamental relationships, which together compose ‘the order of natural harmony’ (the relationship between a man and his wife, between father and son, between older and younger brother, between friend and friend and between sovereign and minister), women were excluded from every single one except the first.

  The achievement of patriarchy, as here, is the creation of a system in which women are excluded by divine warrant from everything that counts, for ever. All monotheisms are built on the idea of men and women as two complementary opposites, forming two sides of one coin. In this lies the very root of women’s inequality – for if males embody one set of characteristics, and if with characteristic modesty they arrogate to themselves all the strength and virtues, then women are necessarily opposite and lesser creatures: weak where men are strong, fearful where men are brave, and stupid where men are intelligent. This dualistic opposition is neatly summed up in the teaching of Zoroaster:

  The two primal spirits who revealed themselves in vision as the twins are the Better and the Bad, in thought, word and action. And between these two, the wise knew to choose aright, the foolish not so.25

  Translated into human terms, the impact of this on women is summed up in the laconic Arab proverb, ‘Man is heaven, woman is hell’ The effect has been to constitute the whole race of women as an out-group in perpetuity, the largest and most long-standing out-group in the history of the human race. A summary of the disabilities imposed on women in the name of these false gods fatuously posturing as loving fathers can hardly do justice to their crippling nature or extent:

  Women were stripped of any choice in marriage.

  Where previously the Mother had chosen freely her many lovers, now throughout all of India and China, as well as the lands under the sway of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the woman became a passive participant, chosen by her husband, given in marriage by her male guardian.

  Women were denied security within marriage.

  Like choice, divorce became a solely male prerogative, to be evoked at will, as in the contemptuous Islamic formula. Another innovation to promote insecurity and deny women any chance of an equal partnership in marriage was polygamy.

  Women were forced to live within marriage.

  Access to the world outside the home was banned: women were confined to a permanent house arrest, intensified in the Eastern religions by the imposition of veiling, seclusion, purdah, and the harem or zenana battery-hen existence. In the West, women were frozen out of any public activity: Irish laws against using women in military operations of the seventh century overthrew a Celtic tradition of female fighters going back at least 3000 years.26

  Women were victimized by patriarchal laws.

  All so-called ‘laws of God’ express in reality the will of man. In a worldwide blitz of new legislation males became the owners and holders of everything, including women and their children. Women now lost rights of property and inheritance; even the right to control their own bodies or to have any stake in their offspring. In a famous Chinese test-case of the ninth century, a woman had been left seven-tenths of her father’s estate, on condition that she reared the lesser beneficiary, his little son. The state intervened to reverse the will, leaving the daughter with only three-tenths – plus the task of rearing the boy who had supplanted her.

  Women were deprived not simply of human rights, but of humanity.

  They were reduced to less than full personhood, systematically defined as inferior, perpetually doomed to adverse comparisons with the masculine norm, the whole, the ideal, the perfect image of the incomparable male, his God. Under Islam women are ‘mutilated beings’, in the phrase of Fatna A. Sabbah; she adds, ‘I feel nauseated whenever I hear the tedious introductory phrase, “Since the seventh century Islam has given a privileged place to woman . . .” You have to be a man to decode the Koranic message as positive to woman.’27 And in Japan, while the wife was accepting with cries of rapture her husband’s rape of her anus, her new-born daughter, according to the very same pillow-books, was to be left for three days and three nights untended on the ground, ‘because woman is Earth and man is Heaven’: ‘This is the law that grants the man, not the woman, the right to have the final word, and to make all the decisions . . . In the hands of man, the woman is only an instrument. Her submission is total, and will last right up to her death.’28

  What escape was there
for the individual woman from this violent and sustained onslaught of masculine lust for possession and the rage to destroy? The new father gods who arose in the East during the crucial millennium spanning the birth of Christ were very different from their phallic predecessors, though no less equipped with mindless aggression and manic drive. Now God was no longer in the thunder, or far away in the clouds veiling the peak of the distant mountain range – he was in every male authority figure from priest to judge and king, he was in every woman’s father, brother and uncle; he was in her husband, so he was at her board and in her bed. Finally, and most important of all, he was in her head.

  For, arraigned at the bar of history, the gods of the patriarchs had many crimes against women to answer for. They had attacked and demolished the worship of the Great Goddess, colonizing only what served their ends, reducing the former Earth Mother to child-bride and exploited virgin. Woman’s sexuality had been inverted or denied, her body reduced to a sexual vessel of God’s will, belonging to her husband who in his own person was God, and who was therefore to be obeyed and adored. In the first and greatest act of discrimination, of deliberate apartheid in human history, women were made into Untermenschen, a separate and inferior order of beings. But worse than all these, they were made to believe in their own downgrading and debasement.

  Not every woman submitted to the relentless ideological bombardment of the new patriarchal systems; not every system was as snugly jointed and watertight as those who put to sea in it liked to think. The gods of the patriarchs tightened their grip only slowly, and the gap between what the authorities prescribed and what human beings actually did allowed women of skill and resource more room for manoeuvre than the historical record has often been prepared to show. But women’s resistance henceforth was to be localized, sporadic and all too frequently short-lived. In the struggle for supremacy, the budding ideologies hit upon the happy inspiration of shifting the battleground to an area where to this day women feel exposed and vulnerable – the female body. Viciously attacked for and through their breasts, their hips and thighs and above all for their ‘insatiable cunt’, all too many women were lost beyond all hope of recovery.

  A woman’s heaven is under her husband’s feet.

  BENGALI PROVERB

  5

  The Sins of the Mothers

  Three things are insatiable – the desert, the grave and a woman’s cunt.

  ARAB PROVERB

  The body of a woman is filthy, and not a vessel for the law.

  BUDDHA

  We are dealing with an existential terror of women . . . men have deep-rooted castration fears which are expressed as horror of the womb . . . These terrors form the substrata of a myth of feminine evil which in turn justified several centuries of gynocide . . .

  ANDREA DWORKIN

  When man made himself God, he made woman less than human. ‘A woman is never truly her own master,’ argued Luther. ‘God formed her body to belong to a man, to have and to rear children.’ In the grand design of the monotheistic male, woman was no more than a machine to make babies, with neither the need nor the right to be anything else: ‘Let them bear children till they die of it,’ Luther advised. ‘That is what they are for.’1 But this reduction of the whole sex to the one basic function of child-bearing did not make women more acceptable to the patriarchal opinion-makers. On the contrary, downgraded from human being, woman stood revealed as ‘a most arrogant and intractable animal’2 – and this monster, born of the father gods’ sleep of reason, came to threaten their days and haunt their nights for a thousand years and more. The consequent campaign of hate against women’s animal physicality, pursued from the dawn of Judaism to the birth of the early modern world, has now emerged as one of the most decisive historical facts in the story of women.

  For women’s history is not composed of the history of external events in linear progression. Wars, dynasties and empires have come and gone within a shorter span of time, and with less impact on women’s lives, than the practice of menstrual taboos, for instance, or female infanticide. Such themes shape women’s lived experience far more than dates and deeds; and the patterns they create are continuous, circular, unchanging over many generations. The attack on women’s bodies that was one of the most marked consequences of the imposition of patriarchal monotheism has no convenient onset or conclusion – but it was a principal determining factor of every woman’s history over an extended period of time. It signalled, precipitated even, the decline of women into their long night of feudal oppression and grotesque persecution. Only the accelerating descent to the lowest pitch of physical misery could produce the momentum required for the slow climb back to full humanity.

  Why did women’s bodies become such a crucial battleground in the sex war? The answer to this lies at the heart of the masculine struggle for supremacy. By denoting women as separate, different, inferior and therefore rightly subordinate, men made women the first and largest out-group in the history of the race. But it is impossible to exclude women totally from all the affairs of men. No other subordinated class, caste or minority lives as closely integrated with its oppressor as women do; the males of the dominant culture have to allow them into their homes, kitchens, beds. Control at these close quarters can only be maintained by inducing women to consent to their own downgrading. Since women are not inferior, they had to be bombarded with a massive literature of religious, social, biological and, more recently, psychological ideology to explain, insist, that women are secondary to men. And to make women believe that they are inferior, what better subject for this literature of religious teaching, cautionary folk tales, jokes and customs, than the female body? By destroying the basic site of human confidence and sense of self, by dumping in sexual guilt and physical disgust, men could ensure women’s insecurity and dependence. There is no mistaking the true nature and purpose of the worldwide, orchestrated, rising crescendo of onslaughts on women during these centuries. Every patriarch fulminating in denigration of the sex was engaged in as brutal a bid for women’s abject capitulation as the gang-raping Mundurucu of the South Seas whose tribal boast was, ‘We tame our women with the banana.’3

  Yet the sheer volume of prescriptive material, the huge battery of devices aimed against women, while they argue the high level of male anxiety, imply too the strength of women’s resistance. For woman was an ‘intractable animal’, and she displayed her brute unreason nowhere more clearly than in her refusal to acquiesce in her own subjection. The violence and continuance of the denunciations imply a consistency and continuance of the prohibited behaviour that made all the prescriptions necessary in the first place. The battery of social and legal controls also indicate the exact areas of masculine anxiety; and there was no part of the female body that did not in some way give rise to panic, fear, anger, or deep dread.

  For women were dangerous in every part of their anatomy, from top to toe. Luxuriant hair could excite lust; accordingly the Jewish Talmud from A.D. 600 onwards allowed a man to divorce a wife who appeared in public with her hair uncovered, while St Paul went so far as to instruct Christians that a woman who came bareheaded to church had better have her head shaved.4 The female face was another Venus fly-trap for helpless males – in a bizarre piece of theology dating from the third century A.D., the early Christian father Tertullian held that ‘the bloom of virgins’ was responsible for the fall of the angels: ‘so perilous a face, then, ought to be kept shaded when it has cast stumbling stones even so far as heaven.’5

  Within the face woman concealed one of her most potent and treacherous weapons, her tongue. A proverb found in almost all languages nervously insists that ‘the only good wife is a silent one’, and among the Greeks of Asia Minor, for instance, during many hundreds of years, for a woman ‘to have a tongue’ was held to scupper her chances of a husband. Among Mongolian tribes for over a thousand years, women were tabooed the utterance of a wide range of words that only men were allowed to speak.6 Further west under Islam, the worst vice of a wife was
‘shaddaka’, ‘talk-a-lot’.

  This Semitic obsession with the gagging of women had emerged as early as the Jewish law of Moses at the birth of Judaism: ‘Women are to remain silent.’ Unmodified, it resurfaced as a Christian commandment in the Pauline requirement of all women: ‘silence and all subjection’. Tongue-tying women as a precondition of their subjection was not confined to the Near and Middle East. In the Japanese Shinto teaching, woman spoke first at the dawn of the world, and her offspring was a monster as a result. The first man, her mate, recognized this as a message from the gods that man should always do the talking, and thus it has been ever since.

  By the early modern period in Europe, the persecution of women who denied the demand for silence had taken on a ferocious brutality with the use of the device known as the ‘scold’s bridle’. In the North of England, for example, from the seventh to the seventeenth centuries ‘chiding and scoulding women’ suffered this torture: led around the street on a rope, ‘wearing an engine called “the branks”, which is like a crown, it being of iron, which was muzzled over the head and face, with a great gag or tongue of iron forced into the mouth which forced the blood out’. Also provided for ‘scolds’ was the ducking or cucking stool, a wooden chair fixed on the end of a long pole at the water’s edge, in which women were repeatedly immersed in water, mud or slime until they not infrequently drowned.7