The Women's History of the World

by Rosalind Miles

  Genital control

  Among the indignities that de Breauté might well have visited upon his wife was the barbarous device known as the ‘chastity belt’. These vile contraptions made their way into Europe from the Semitic East in the wake of the Crusades against the Holy Land from the eleventh century onwards. Like other instruments and techniques of genital control, the ‘chastity belt’ was a far more substantial and horrific thing than its euphemistic tide would suggest. It consisted in fact of an iron or silver corset welded tightly to the woman’s flesh, with a metal bar passing between her legs; equally close fitting, this had two narrow slits edged with sharp teeth for bodily evacuation. Wearing one of these, a woman could not wash genitals condemned to be perpetually befouled, as the iron between the legs impeded and retained her urine, menstrual discharge, and bowel movements. As they also made normal locomotion extremely difficult, their use was not general. But the widespread interest in the mechanics of genital control may be gauged from the instant fame won by the Provost of Padua in the Middle Ages, who invented an iron version encasing the whole of the lower part of a woman’s body. As late as the sixteenth century, the Abbé de Brantôme recorded ironmongers at a fair selling ‘a dozen contraptions for bridling up women’s parts’, while subsequent excavations, particularly in Germany have shown that it was not unknown for women to be buried in them.24

  Genital control in this form was a latecomer to the West; in the East it had been a fact of life time out of mind, with the first action of any slave-owner being the insertion of one or more rings through the labia majora of all female slaves to prevent unwanted pregnancy or despoilation. Slave women, already suffering a double subjection to their masters, were particularly vulnerable to forms of genital control almost amounting to rape and torture, as this account makes clear: ‘In Sudanese harems, following defloration by the master, women . . . were protected from lustful eunuchs by a thick, twelve-inch bamboo staff thrust a third of the way into the vagina and strapped about the waist and thighs, with a woven straw shield in front to cover the vulva.’25 What was new in the wake of the establishing of the patriarchal religions was the extension of the severest forms of control to all women via a technique which betrays a conscious determination to deal with the ‘problem’ of women’s sexuality by destroying it wholesale.

  Female genital mutilation

  As with the ‘chastity belt’, the true nature of this practice has been obscured by its more familiar name of ‘female circumcision’. In reality this mutilation of women, which involves the amputation of all the external female sex organs, bears no relation to the removal of the male foreskin. The operation on women’s genitals that spread so widely through the Middle East in the wake of Islam and on down through Africa, where it continues to this day, is so appalling that its survival can only be explained by a general, total ignorance.26

  The facts are these. In a private ceremony of women, the traditional female practitioner or ‘circumcisor’, chanting ‘Allah is great and Muhammad is his prophet: may Allah keep away all evils,’ operates on a girl child anywhere between the ages of five and eight, with a sharpened stone, iron blade or piece of glass. In the first stage, the whole of the clitoris and its sheath are cut away, then the labia minora are scraped off, followed by most of the inside flesh of the labia majora. The flaps of skin that remain are then pulled together and pinned with thorns, thus obliterating the vaginal opening except for a very small aperture kept open with a minute splint of wood or a reed, to allow for the passage of urine and menstrual blood. As the work proceeds the mother and the other female guests ‘verify’ the work, putting their fingers into the wound, along with the earth and ashes used to staunch the bleeding. When it is over the girl’s legs are tied together from hip to ankle for 40 days, to ensure that the stitched skin heals together and will not re-open. Throughout all this, the child is held down by her female relatives and is fully conscious.

  The consequences of this procedure, usually undertaken by an aged woman with defective vision and unsteady hands on the floor of a poorly Ut tent or mud hut, can readily be imagined: haemorrhaging, infection, slashing of the urethra, bladder and anus, vulval abcessing and incontinence. Medical practitioners were only engaged if the scar formation on the vulva was so severe as to prevent walking. In later life girls could suffer retention of menstrual blood (one French military doctor operated on a sixteen-year-old Djibouti girl to release 3.4 litres of black and decayed menstruum), sterility, and intense pain during intercourse and childbirth.

  Neither intercourse nor childbirth could in any case be undertaken without severe pain in the first instance, since the original stitching up (painlessly dismissed as ‘infibulation’ by those who have never experienced it) is deliberately designed to render a woman quite unable to accept a penis. One authority described the ritual of the wedding night in Somalia, when the husband, having beaten his wife with a leather whip, uses his knife to ‘open’ her. He then has ‘prolonged and repeated intercourse with her for the next three days’:

  This ‘work’ is in order to ‘make an opening’ by preventing the scar from closing again . . . The morning after the wedding night, the husband puts his bloody dagger on his shoulder and makes the rounds in order to obtain general admiration, while the wife stays in bed and moves as little as possible in order to keep the wound open.27

  If intercourse results in pregnancy, the woman may have to have further surgery of this primitive nature to open her further, since the first wound is only large enough to admit the penis. Ideally she labours until delivery and is not opened further, regardless of any rupturing of the perineum. If she has to be opened in order to release her baby, she will be re-sewn immediately after delivery, which with high childbirth and child mortality rates, could be as many as twelve times or more.

  The final solution

  Genital amputation was and remains a serious but localized practice. Not confined to any one place or period has been the use of the ultimate sexual violence against women: murder. Under patriarchy, being female was a life sentence, but many women never lived to serve it; in these raw times it was often a death sentence too. For female infanticide was pandemic. From the earliest existence of historical records down to the present day, to be born female in India, China or the Arab states, indeed anywhere between Morocco and Shanghai, was extremely dangerous. In pre-revolutionary China, childbirth preparations for thousands of years included the provision of a box of ashes next to the birthing bed, to suffocate a girl child as soon as she was born. Throughout India, methods of killing little girls took ingenious new forms in each different place: they were strangled, poisoned, thrown into the sea, exposed in the jungle, fed to sharks as a sacrifice to the gods, or drowned in milk with a prayer that they would come again as sons. As late as 1808 a British political commission found only half a dozen houses in the whole of Cutch where the fathers had not had all daughters born to them killed at birth.28

  In each case the victim died by order of her father because she had no future outside marriage and motherhood: he therefore faced ruinous expense if he succeeded in marrying her, or public dishonour if he failed. But high dowry expenses alone do not explain the pandemic of female infant slaughter in which the sins of the mothers were truly visited on their daughters, when reproducing their own kind was for women in the cruellest sense labour in vain. The daughters were killed in a planned and sustained campaign to reduce the numbers of females in the world; in the face of their systematic programmes of gynocide the patriarchs’ bleating about dowry expenses and too many mouths looks like transparent motive-hunting. It was attacked as such even in its own time, as the Koran made clear:

  When the sun shall be folded up . . .

  And when the female child that has been buried alive shall be asked For what crime she was put to death . . .

  Then every soul will know what it did.29

  As the patriarchs stood by to block a woman’s right of entry to this world, so they invoked the power to
precipitate her out of it; and since in almost every country of the world a man was lord, guardian and sole custodian of his womenfolk, for the woman there was no appeal, and no escape. History holds only the scantest record of the millions of nameless women who died under the fists, boots, belts and cudgels of their men. But social position did not necessarily afford any more protection; even her royal blood was not enough to save the Princess Dolguruky of Russia when her husband Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’) ordered her to be drowned because she failed to give satisfaction.

  Ivan had learned this particular technique of wife-disposal from a near neighbour, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, where unwanted females were traditionally sewn into weighted sacks and cast off Seraglio Point into the Bosphorus.30 For women were disposable, and even in the West, which prided itself on its Christian morality and superiority to ‘the lustful Turk’, their value throughout the whole of the early modern period was low. In addition, if a woman had in any way compromised her one true function of child-bearing, her life was worthless, while a man’s, whatever his transgression, was inherently more valuable. This story of a French woman of the early Middle Ages and her lover, the priest of Le Mans, as related by the chronicler Geoffrey of Tours, illustrates this point with brutal clarity:

  [The priest] often debauching himself with a woman of free status and good family, he cropped her hair, dressed her up as a man, and led her off to another town, hoping to dispel the suspicion of adultery [fornication] by going to live among strangers. When some time afterwards her relatives discovered what had happened, they rushed to revenge the family’s disgrace . . . the woman they burned alive, but being driven by the greed for gold they decided to ransom the priest . . . Hearing of the case, Bishop Aetharius took pity on the man and snatched him from certain death by paying 20 solidi of gold for him.31

  Presumably a priest could be recycled; but this woman’s sexual sin annihilated her as a human being. Yet sinfulness is not the real issue here. The key to the destruction of her body lies in the fact that she could no longer fulfil her ordained role of wife and mother, once she had been contaminated by illicit sex; and without function, she was as disposable as any odalisque of the sultan’s seraglio. And certainly she could not be allowed to survive as a living proof that women could manage as free individuals, outside the framework of the patriarchal society. Again, function is the key – a woman who is not locked into that chain of command between her husband and his children is a dangerous threat to the stability of the society, and to herself. Worse, like the Frenchwoman whose sinfulness put her beyond the pale, she was no use to anybody any more. In these harsh times, it was only a short step to the belief that she was better off dead.

  Something of this sort seems to underlie the Indian custom of wife-destruction called sati or suttee. By Hindu custom enshrined in law from early days, when a husband died his wife had no further need of life on her own account; as the law book of the Hindus makes clear, ‘No other effectual duty is known for virtuous women after the deaths of their lords, except casting themselves into the same fire.’32 The simple difference was that the dead husband was unlikely to feel the flames of his funeral pyre while the living wife had to be terrorized, drugged and finally pinned down to undergo the dreadful death of being burned alive because she had outlived her use and purpose, as this eye-witness report of one eighteenth-century sati in Bengal makes clear:

  The relation whose office it was to set fire to the pile led her six times round it . . . she lay down by the corpse and put one arm under its neck and the other over it, when a quantity of dry cocoa leaves and other substances were heaped over them to a considerable height, and then ghee, or melted preserved butter, poured on the top. Two bamboos were then put over them and held fast down, and the fire put to the pile, which immediately blazed very fiercely . . . No sooner was the fire kindled than all the people set up a great shout . . . It was impossible to have heard the woman had she groaned or even cried aloud on account of the mad noise of the people, and it was impossible for her to stir or struggle on account of the bamboos which were holding her down like the levers of a press. We made much objection to their way of using these bamboos, and insisted it was using force to prevent the woman from getting up when the fire burned her. But they declared it was only done to keep the pile from falling down. We could not bear to see any more, but left them, exclaiming loudly against the murder, and full of horror at what we had seen.33

  This sense of outrage, transparently genuine and doubtless the only comfort to be derived in a situation of such overwhelming powerlessness, consistently marks European responses to Eastern social practices. Yet it is noteworthy that the witness records the victim as being serene and acquiescent in her own death. This effect, of supreme importance to the sanctity of the proceedings, was achieved by a combination of techniques combining brutal bullying and drugging on the day with lifelong ideological manipulation – victims were taught from infancy that a sati (faithful) widow earned herself and her husband thirty-five million years of heavenly bliss, while a refuser plunged to the lowest depths of the reincarnation spiral, to be returned to earth again in the most disgusting and despised form. In addition, the Indian custom of child-marriage meant that many of these widows were in no position to decide for themselves; there are countless recorded incidents of the burning of child-widows of ten, nine, eight and younger.

  European moral outrage at this custom, however, sits uneasily with Europe’s own record of female disposal – this eye-witness account was made in 1798, only a decade or two after the European ‘witch’ was burned alive. Witches, like sati women, were unwanted, anomalous, often widows, or in some way threatening outsiders to the patriarchal rule of order. For as the historical record shows, in no country, at no period of time, were women safe from the supreme sexual violence, the insistence that their bodies existed only in relation to man, for his pleasure and progeny. Once beyond that framework of justification for their existence, whatever the reason, they were at best surplus to establishment, at worst lepers, pariahs, criminals too – and either way, the fathers of church and society knew how to handle them.

  ‘Look well then unto the sins of the daughters . . .’ Perhaps the ultimate example of the disposable woman is the one who is, in every sense of the word, fair game for men – the prostitute. Called into being by man’s lust, then punished for pandering to it, the prostitute expressed through her body the eternal sexual tension between pleasure and danger, while her trade was the battleground where male desire and contempt for women met head on. First one won, then the other, in an unchanging pattern of use and abuse from the earliest days. Even the briefest historical survey, however, shows the situation of prostitutes worsening during the 1000 years that separated the rise of the father gods from the birth of the modern state; paradoxically, as wives, mothers and ‘virtuous’ women became more restricted, more subject to oppressive controls, and more heavily punished for any deviance, so too did their illicit sisters, the daughters of the game.

  This is abundantly clear from the general increase in the severity of the penalties for ‘harlots and whoors’ over the centuries that elsewhere saw the emergence from barbarism, and the mitigation of the worst of the judicial inflictions for other crimes. One of the earliest-known of sexual laws, that of the Visigoths around 450, provided that whores should be publicly scourged, and their noses slit as a mark of their shame.34 By the twelfth century in England, a whore was defined by the statutes of King Henry II as a creature so vile and unwomanly, that in addition to the penalties above, she was forbidden to have a lover on pain of a fine, three weeks in prison, once on the cucking-stool, and banishment from the city. Two hundred years later, in the reign of King Edward III, like the niddah of Jewry, the prostitute had to wear a special badge or hood, ‘to set a deformed mark on foulness, to make it appear more odious’. Finally, as puritanism tightened its grip throughout Europe, the women’s punishments reached an unprecedented peak of sadism and savagery, and the public
executioner was stretched to the fullest extent of his repertoire, as this record shows:

  Mary Kürssnerin, a young prostitute . . . Mary’s ears were cut off, and she was hanged.

  Anna Peyelstainin of Nuremberg, because she had intercourse with a father and son . . . and similarly with 21 men and youths, her husband conniving, was beheaded here with the sword, standing.

  Ursala Grimin, landlady . . . a prostitute, bawd and procuress . . . was stood in the pillory, flogged as far as the stocks, there branded on both cheeks, and afterwards whipped out of town.

  Magdalen Fisherin . . . an unmarried servant . . . had a child by father and son . . . beheaded with the sword here as a favour.35

  The favour referred to here in his private diary by Franz Schmidt, the public executioner of Nuremberg from 1573 to 1617, was the substitution of the relatively milder death by decapitation for the horror of slow strangulation at the end of a rope. Doubtless the victim or some belated benefactor would have paid handsomely for this ‘favour’, but at the end, with a baying mob of respectable citizens come to make a holiday of her doom, it was all the mercy she would get. This poor young woman, of whom nothing is known except her name and her ‘offence’, stands for all the magdalens of the world who, finding themselves outside the prescribed role of wife and motherhood, were cast away – in the classic formula of pornography, dying for sex.

  Under these harsh laws, men suffered too. Their own sexuality was inevitably tainted by association with that of the female ‘animal’. To play by their own rules meant denying themselves any possibility of sex for fun; while as wives, mothers, daughters, lovers, women commandeered the affections of men constantly under standing orders to hate, fear and subordinate them. Other men paid in other ways for failing to live up to the rules. The witch-hunting of homosexuals has been documented elsewhere. But the severe punishment of males who transgressed the restriction of sex to heterosexual coupling links them with women who similarly defied patriarchal definitions. When a woman was to be burned as a witch at the height of that terror in Europe, men accused of homosexuality were bound and mixed with the faggots of brushwood and kindling round her feet, ‘to kindle a flame foul enough for a witch to burn in’.36 A male, however, did not have to finish up as a faggot; women had almost no chance of escaping the odium that attached to her whole sex, and with it the underlying rage to degrade and destroy.