The Women's History of the World

by Rosalind Miles

  The head was at least the seat of whatever reason a woman might have. From there down her body was nothing but ‘the devil’s playground’. ‘Whenever a woman enters the Bath,’ Muhammad pronounced, ‘the devil is with her.’8 As this shows, by assuming control over women’s bodies, men laid themselves open to the unforeseen but logical outcome: that women could not be trusted to show any control over themselves. For they had none: they were seen as empty vessels drifting at will, moved only by the muscles that throbbed between their legs, as in this violent medieval denunciation of Arab womanhood:

  Women are demons, and were born as such;

  No one can trust them, as is known to all . . .

  They do not recoil to use a slave in the master’s absence,

  If once their passions are aroused and they play tricks

  Assuredly, if once their vulva is in rut,

  They only think of getting some member in erection.9

  Arab literature is shot through with this paranoid fear of woman’s ‘insatiable cunt’ – the Arab word for the female genitals is al-farj, ‘slit, crevice, crack’, an opening that may look small, but into which a man could disappear without trace. ‘I saw her vulva!’ laments one terrorized lover in the fifteenth-century erotic masterwork, The Perfumed Garden: ‘It opened like that of a mare at the approach of a stallion.’ That was not the worst of what an Arab male had to fear, as the author warned his readers: ‘Certain vulvas, wild with desire and lust, throw themselves upon the approaching member’. Raging for intercourse, a woman’s sex organ, ‘resembles the head of a lion. Oh, vulva! How many men’s deaths lie at her door?’10

  This rabid dread of the voracious vagina reached epidemic proportions among the Arab nations, and can hardly have been allayed by the Islamic institution of polygamy – there is an inherent conflict between the notion of the insatiable woman, and the demand that she be satisfied with only a quarter of a husband. But other cultures, too, evolved their own version of the vampire-vagina (‘the Devil’s gateway’). This produced some highly ingenious castration fantasies in the process, like this Walt Disney image of what the boys lost dreamed up by the Dominican monk and witch-finder Jacob Sprenger in fifteenth-century Germany:

  And what, then, is to be thought of those witches who in this way sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird’s nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members and eat corn and oats as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report.11

  Interestingly, it is not only within the highly organized framework of Eastern patriarchal religions that this theme of the omni-sexual woman threatening male dominance with her ‘insatiable cunt’ is to be found. Among the Navajo people of New Mexico this story evolved to explain why men had to rule over women:

  First Man taunted his wife with being interested in sex alone. His rebuke gave rise to a quarrel in which she said that women could get along without men. To prove the challenge, the men moved across the river and destroyed the rafts that carried them. As years went by the women grew weaker; they needed the men’s strength to produce food, and they became maddened with desire. As a result of self-abuse they gave birth to monsters . . . The men too practised perversion, but from their excesses no evil survived. After many had died and great suffering had ensued, the women yielded and begged the men to take them back. They did so and all agreed that henceforth the man should be the leader since he belonged to the stronger sex.12

  The stronger sex? These centuries of strenuous myth-making in fact reveal the very opposite, the atavistic fear of the weakness that women caused in men, but never had to share. The very power of this historical propaganda, amounting at certain times in certain places to a campaign of hate, evokes a world subject to the tyranny of female desire, where man is fragile, woman unwearied in strength. For in sex, while women bloom, men wilt. Man enters the vagina hard, erect, at the height of his potency; he emerges drained, drooping, spent. Women by contrast are the recipients of man’s potency, his essence, his best self. The vagina therefore is the source and centre of incessantly renewed energy, the penis fallible, inadequate, finite. Man, giving his all, was unmanned by woman, and could not summon his manhood again at will. Small wonder then that he should hate and fear the creature who robbed him of a power that none of his gods of power could restore.13

  Nor was this all that a man risked in the arms of the rapacious ‘woman-crack’. To penetrate the ‘place of devils’, to ‘feed the animal between a woman’s legs’, was to jeopardize not merely body, but soul too. Hardening into certainty, then into religious orthodoxy during this time, was the hysterical preoccupation with women’s bodies as sources of pollution, infecting and contaminating men. What were the historical roots of this damaging and enduring attack on women’s citadels of self, their bodies? The answer to this conundrum brings us to the central issue: the issue of blood.

  ‘A woman in her courses’ . . . the female’s body made her not simply less than human but worse than animal. Of all human substances, blood is the most highly charged with power and danger – see the dietary prohibitions against eating blood in force from Jews to Sioux to Hindus. Menstruation is mysterious blood, dangerous, unclean and threatening:

  A menstruous woman is the work of Uhremaun, the Devil. A woman in her courses is not to gaze upon the sacred fire, sit in water, behold the sun, or hold conversation with a man.14

  Menstruation taboos like those prescribed here by the Parsi sage Zoroaster meant that for a quarter of their adult lives, one week in every four, the women of earlier times were regularly stigmatized and set apart, disabled and debarred from the life of their society. The operation of this system of apartheid was at its most visible in primitive societies like the Kafe of Papua New Guinea; when a girl began to menstruate she was shut in a darkened hut for a week, deprived of food, and taught that she was dangerous to herself and to others if she failed to abide by the ritual restrictions: her body and blood would make a man vomit, turn his blood black, corrupt his flesh, addle his wits and waste him to death. These beliefs and taboos can be duplicated throughout all primitive societies, often in forms which clearly indicate the nature of the dominance-subordination struggle involved: the early native Americans of the Dakota territory believed that the wakan (sacredness or power) of a menstrual woman could weaken the wakan of all masculine objects of power, both of war and peace.15

  Whatever the nature of the taboos, their strength demonstrates the high level of fear and danger associated with women’s primitive blood-mystery and its uncontrollable nature: any woman breaking the taboos risked sudden violent death. In societies developing under more rigid patriarchal organization, menstrual taboos were less visible, but not less severe. The gods of the Middle East, speaking through Judaism, Christianity and Islam, were especially harsh. In Judaism, rabbinical elaboration of the biblical texts like Leviticus branded a woman niddah (impure) for the twelve days during, before and after her period, and the ferocious penalties imposed on a niddah were re-stated in the sacred law-book, the Shulchan Aruch, as late as 1565, where a niddah was forbidden to:

  sleep in the same bed as her husband

  eat with her family at mealtimes

  occupy the same room as anyone else

  light the Sabbath candles

  enter the synagogue

  touch her husband, or even pass him anything.

  As a final stroke, in a grim foreshadowing of what the future held in store for the Jews, the niddah had to wear special clothing as a badge of her separate and despised status. Effectively, a woman became a non-person, when all her human rights were so regularly and frequently withdrawn: as Chaim Bermant explains, ‘She was regarded as the ultimate in corruption, a walking, reeking, suppurating presence . . . one could not stop to inquire after her health, for her breath was poisonous, her glance was harmful, and she polluted the very air about her.’16

  Both Christianity and Islam borrowe
d heavily from Judaism in laws of their own which instituted the primitive tribal taboos of Palestine as religious fact. All three strictly forbade any access of males to women ‘in their sickness’, and from earliest days custom hardened along the lines laid down in the Koran: ‘They will ask thee also concerning the courses of women; answer, they are a pollution; therefore, separate yourselves from women in their courses and go not near them till they be cleansed.’ It is worth noting that Muhammad as an individual sought to reverse this attack on women at the very source and site of their womanhood – he would make a point of honouring his wife in front of his disciples during her period, receiving even his prayer mat from her hand, and drinking from the same cup, saying, ‘Your menstruation is not in your hand, it is not in your cup.’ But this honourable effort to teach his followers that women were not more dangerous nor infectious at this time, any more than they were themselves when they ate, slept or evacuated, was a historical failure.

  In terms of understanding the patriarchal struggle for control of women’s bodies, the issue of blood is a major preoccupation. For not only did women bleed every month, from girlhood for all of their adult lives; every stage of their journey as women, every passage from one state to the next (menarche, defloration, childbirth) was also marked by the flow of blood with its frighteningly ambivalent signal of both life and death. The greater the danger, the stronger the taboo. All these ‘courses’ of women’s lives have triggered an intricate and often savage set of myths, beliefs and customs in which the containment of cultural fears overrode any personal concern for the female who was ostensibly the cause and centre of it all.

  So from the introduction of the One God religions down to the twentieth century, the handling of a virgin’s first sex experience, for example, focused only on the vagina as ‘a place of devils’, never on the owner of it. This organ was seen as most dangerous when first penetrated; the task accordingly was to protect the man, who in rupturing a woman’s hymen plunged his most vulnerable part into what Leviticus called ‘the fountain of her blood’. For many centuries it was thought prudent to devolve this risk:

  From ancient Egypt to surviving cults in modern India and Persia . . . every virgin before wedlock was made to sit up on the golden phallus of the sun-god so that ruptured and bled her. Hymeneal blood, otherwise deemed foul, was thereby hallowed; and no decent youth would marry a girl who was not thus consecrated.17

  Alternatively, a human instrument could be used, and ‘the taking of maidenhead was regarded as porter’s work in many parts of the East’; high-caste males in particular would ‘sooner penetrate the bride with an iron rod, or command a black slave to deflower her, than defile themselves in the act.’18 In other countries, particularly those of Northern Europe, the risk was taken for the bridegroom by an older man whose superior strength and status, taken with his personal lack of interest in the virgin concerned, was held to be his protection against her evil. The surrogate male could be the groom’s father, uncle, older brother or feudal lord. If the young man was a member of a military organization, the droit de seigneur naturally went to his superior officer. Comradely generosity was known to override husbandly consideration on these occasions – in one episode of the ceremony known to the Turkish army as ‘opening the cabinet’, a virgin bride underwent intercourse with 100 men of the groom’s regiment in one night. Not surprisingly, a number of the Arab countries of Asia Minor have a version of the Arabic word seyyib, which denotes a woman who suffered such brutality during defloration that she fled from her groom in a state of shock. After experiences like these of a husband’s freedom with or overestimation of the juice primae noctis, most seyyib were never seen alive again.19

  In the nature of things, historical accounts of these events from a female point of view are few and far between. For most women reared in ignorance of what to expect, unacquainted with the man in question, and scarcely out of childhood, if that, the induction to sexual experience must have been traumatic. One worm’s-eye view of the process was recorded by the Japanese aristocrat Lady Nijõ, who in 1271 at the age of fourteen was given by her father to the Emperor GoFukasaka. The first Nijõ knew of this was awakening to find the aged GoFukasaka in her bedchamber, where ‘he treated me so mercilessly,’ she wrote in her diary, that ‘I had nothing more to lose, I despised my own existence.’20

  Sexual violence, not least within the supposed safe stronghold of marriage, has been a commonplace of women’s experience throughout history. Exalted for motherhood, they were despised for the process that made them mothers; defined and confined by their sex, they were punished through their sexuality by a range of techniques devised to control all use and disposal of female bodies by males.

  Enforced marriage

  Throughout the known world both legislation and social custom enshrined the power of a father to marry his daughter where he chose, and to take any steps necessary to ensure that his choice was obeyed. When the young Elizabeth Paston refused an elderly, deformed, but rich suitor as a husband, her father ‘mewed her up’ in a dark room without food or any human contact to make her change her mind. She was beaten once or twice a week, ‘and some tyme twyes on one day, and hir hed broken in to or thre places.’ Elizabeth held out, and went on to make not one but two happy marriages which made her one of the richest women in medieval England. Others were not so lucky. Over the water in Ireland in the same period it took three men to drag one poor girl, Isabella Heron, half a mile to the church door, after which her father beat her and forced her inside. Nor were fathers the only offenders. At the betrothal of Catherine McKesky in the same church her mother beat her with ‘a bed-oak’ so grievously that she broke it – ‘after which her father beat her to the ground.’21

  Child brides

  An Indian father, however, never ran these risks of recalcitrant daughters, since his system ensured that every woman was safely married before she knew she was one. Since, throughout Europe, the age of sexual consent for a girl was twelve, this might seem young enough for marriage, sexual intercourse and all its consequences. But an Indian girl right up to and including the period of the British Empire commonly looked for motherhood nine months after reaching puberty (in the subcontinent, any time after eight or nine years old), and she would have been married well in advance of that; the prudent husband had his child-wife well broken in to regular intercourse before she began to menstruate, in order to take advantage of her ‘first fruits’.

  Under these circumstances he often failed of his harvest. Child marriage all too readily reveals itself as a sophisticated form of female infanticide, for millions of these girls died from gynaecological damage, or in childbirth, every year. As late as 1921, the British Government Official Census of India recorded that 3,200,000 child-brides had died during the previous twelve months, under circumstances recorded by British Army doctors: ‘A. Aged 9. Day after marriage. Left femur dislocated, pelvis crushed out of shape. Flesh hanging in shreds. B. Aged 10. Unable to stand, bleeding profusely, flesh much lacerated. C. Aged 9. So completely ravished as to be almost beyond surgical repair. Her husband had two other living wives, and spoke very fine English. I. Aged 7. Living with husband. Died in great agony after three days. M. Aged about 10. Crawled to hospital on her hands and knees. Has never been able to stand erect since her marriage.’ All the more reason, then, the sages insisted, to catch them young before they succumbed to the weakness of women. ‘Early to marry and early to die is the motto of Indian women,’ ran the proverb. ‘The life of a wife is two monsoons.’22

  Bride sale

  Under these circumstances, fortune may have favoured the little wife whose experience of marriage was so nasty, brutish and short. A curious footnote to the history of enforced marriage is provided by the ‘bride-sales’ of early modern Europe, in which a rich young heiress would be bartered to the highest bidder in a transaction of naked commercialism. For although under much contemporary legislation a woman could hold land, inherit, sell it or give it away, in practice her lif
e was spent under the guardianship of a man, not simply her father or husband, but also the feudal lord of her father or husband. An heiress was simply part of his patrimony: in 1185 King Henry II of England had all the heiresses inventoried like cattle, no matter how small their holdings were:

  One Alice de Beaufow, widow of Thomas, is in the gift of the lord king. She is twenty and has one son as heir, who is two. Her land is worth £5 6s 8d, with this stock, namely two ploughs, a hundred sheep, two draught animals, five sows, one boar and four cows.23

  Alice of course was ‘a ploughed field’, and encumbered with a living heir she would not have been a prime target for a fortune hunter. For a virgin, vacuum-sealed and factory-fresh, the price was higher in a rising market – one three-month old girl sold for £100 was rated at £333 as she outlived her babyhood and became a marriageable proposition. What this meant for the women involved may be inferred from one example, when in 1225 King John gave the young Lady Margaret, widow of the Earl of Devon’s heir, as a prize to his leading captain of mercenaries Falkes de Breauté. This union of an English lady with a French thug struck the scandalized chronicler Matthew de Paris at the time as ‘nobility united to meanness, piety to impiety, beauty to dishonour’. Margaret endured this marriage for nine years before her husband’s fall from royal favour enabled her to win an annulment. At this, de Breauté went instantly to Rome to lodge a claim to possession of his ex-wife’s patrimony. In a clear sign from Heaven, so it was said by contemporaries, he died there before the Holy Father could pronounce on his case.