The Women's History of the World

by Rosalind Miles

  22Diner, p. 169.

  23Diner, p. 169.

  24Melanie Kaye, ‘Some Notes on Jewish Lesbian Identity’, in Nice Jewish Girls, ed. Evelyn Torton Beck (Mass., 1982), pp. 28–44.

  25John Ferguson, The Religions of the Roman Empire (1970), p. 14.

  26Charles A. Seltman, Women in Antiquity (1956), p. 82; C. Gascoigne Hartley, The Position of Women in Primitive Society (1914), p. 206–7; and Boulding, p. 186.

  27Diner, p. 170.

  28Diner, p. 170.

  29The Oxford Classical Dictionary (Oxford, 1970), p. 254.

  30For Tamyris, see The Macmillan Dictionary of Women’s Biography, ed. Jennifer S. Uglow (1982), p. 457; and Eilean Ní Chuilleanáin (ed.), Irish Women: Image and Achievement – Women in Irish Culture from Earliest Times (1985), p. 14.

  31Ní Chuilleanáin, p. 14.

  32Nora Chadwick, The Celts (1970), p. 50.

  33The Athenian festival of Boedromion, for example, was held to commemorate the defeat of the Amazons by Theseus, and the ceremonial ritual in honour of the dead at Panopsion was believed to honour the fallen Amazons. But see G. D. Rothery, The Amazons (1910), for the kind of unhistorical treatment that undermined the whole concept.

  34Macmillan Dictionary of Biography, pp. 459–60, and Oxford Classical Dictionary, p. 1041.

  35Diner, p. 172.

  36Chadwick, p. 55.

  37Boulding, p. 318.

  38The Cogul figures are described by James (1959), p. 21, and the females of ancient Britain in Seltman, p. 37.

  39Harding, p. 135.

  40Stone, pp. 168–78.

  41Hilary Evans, The Oldest Profession: An Illustrated History of Prostitution (1979), p. 33.

  42John Langdon-Davies, A Short History of Women (1928), p. 141.

  Chapter 3 The Rise of the Phallus

  1Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (2 vols, 1960), I, p. 28. See Marilyn French, Beyond Power: Men, Women, and Morals (1985), p. 49 ff. Gerda Lerner, in The Creation of Patriarchy (New York and Oxford, 1986), p. 146, reports that over 30,000 Mother-Goddess figurines have been found in 3000 sites in south-east Europe alone. For the Winnepagos, see Harding, p. 117.

  2Shuttle and Redgrove, p. 66; de Riencourt, p. 30.

  3Shuttle and Redgrove, p. 139; E. O. James, Sacrifice and Sacrament (1962), passim.

  4Farb, p. 72. ‘Sub-incision’ is also discussed by Freud and Bettelheim, among others.

  5Ian D. Suttie, The Origins of Love and Hate (1960), p. 87.

  6Margaret Mead, Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World (New York, 1949), p. 98.

  7Joseph Campbell (ed.), Papers from the Eranos Year Books, Vol. V, Man and Transformation (1964), p. 12.

  8Jean Markdale, Women of the Celts (Paris, New York and London, 1982), p. 14.

  9Lee Alexander Stone, The Story of Phallicism (first published 1879; Chicago, 1927 edition), p. 12–13; and G. R. Scott, Phallic Worship: A History of Sex and Sex Rites in relation to the Religion of all Races from Antiquity to the Present Day (New Delhi, 1975).

  10Gould Davis, p. 98. For further details of the numerous and varied Indian rites of phallus-worship see Edwardes, pp. 55–94.

  11Edwardes, pp. 72–5.

  12Gould Davis, p. 99.

  13Lee Alexander Stone, p. 75.

  14The phases of the dispossession of the Great Goddess are described by Joseph Campbell in The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology (New York, 1970).

  15Graves (1960), pp. 58–60.

  16Ní Chuilleanáin, p. 16; James (1959), p. 53.

  17Calder, p. 160.

  18For a wider discussion of these key historical developments of the agricultural revolution and the massive migration of peoples over all the known world from about 3000 B.C. onwards, see The Times Atlas of World History (revised edition, 1986); and J. M. Roberts, The Hutchinson History of the World (1976).

  19Fisher, p. 122.

  20Geoffrey Parrinder, Sex in the World’s Religions (1980), pp. 105–6.

  21De Riencourt, p. 35 and p. viii.

  22Macmillan Dictionary of Biography, p. 54. According to some sources (the later Graeco-Roman historians Appian of Alexandria, and Porphyry), Ptolemy succeeded in marrying Berenice in 81 B.C., and killed her 19 days after the wedding.

  23Fisher, pp. 206–7.

  24Boulding, p. 20.

  25Julia O’Faolain and Laura Martines, Not In God’s Image: Women in History (1973), p. 57; and see Livy’s History, Book 34.

  26Plutarch, Dialogue on Love.

  27Farb, p. 42.

  28O’Faolain and Martines, p. 62.

  29The Illustrated Origin of Species, ed. Richard A. Leakey (1979), p. 58.

  30‘Kingsworthy: a Victim of Rape’ describes the excavations at Worthy Park, Kingsworthy, Hampshire, England, by Sonia Chadwick Hawkes of Oxford University, and Dr Calvin Wells for the Department of the Environment. It is reported in Antiquity and The Times, 23.7.75.

  31James (1962), pp. 80–1.

  32C. P. Fitzgerald, China: A Short Cultural History (1961) p. 52.

  33Lynn Thorndike, A Short History of Civilization (1927), p. 148.

  34For Agnodice’s story, see the Macmillan Dictionary of Biography, p. 7.

  35Mead, p. 206.

  36Macmillan Dictionary of Biography, p. 464.

  37It is only fair to the unknown band of female medics who practised before Fabiola to stress that she is the first woman doctor to be known by name. Women were practising medicine as early as 3000 B.C. in Egypt, where an inscription on the medical school of the Temple of Sais, north of Memphis, records: ‘I have come from the school of medicine at Heliopolis, and have studied at the Women’s School at Sais, where the divine mothers have taught me how to cure disease.’ In addition, the Kuhn medical papyri of c.2500 B.C. established that Egyptian women specialists diagnosed pregnancy, treated infertility and carried out all branches of gynaecological medicine, while women surgeons performed caesarean sections, removed cancerous breasts, and operated on broken limbs – see Margaret Alic, Hypatia’s Heritage: a History of Women in Science from Antiquity to the late Nineteenth Century (1986).

  38Wu Chao (ed.), Women in Chinese Folklore, Women of China Special Series (Beijing, China, 1983), p. 91, and pp. 45–60.

  39Joe Orton, the Guardian, 18.4.87.

  40Marcel Durry (ed.), Eloge Funèbre d’une Matrone Romaine: Eloge dit de Turia (Collection des Universités de France, 1950), p. 8ff.

  41For Hypatia’s work and death, see Alic, pp. 41–7. See also the novel by Charles Kingsley, better known as the author of The Water Babies (1863). His Hypatia (1853) presents a sympathetic portrait of its heroine, contrasting her subtle and humane intelligence with the vicious bigotry of the early Christian Fathers.

  Chapter 4 God the Father

  1For a detailed investigation of the anti-feminism of Christianity, see the work of Mary Daly, The Church and the Second Sex (1968) and Beyond God the Father: Towards a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (1973).

  2The Story of Felicitas is to be found in Herbert Musurillo (ed.), The Acts of the Christian Martyrs (1972), pp. 106–31.

  3Karen Armstrong, The Gospel According to Woman (1986), p. 256.

  4Jeremiah 7,17–18.

  5For the ancient Chinese power-shift from Mother Earth –> phallus –> abstract male power, see C. P. Fitzgerald, China: A Short Cultural History (1961), p. 44 and pp. 47–8. For the worldwide usurpation of Goddess worship, see Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess (New York, 1967); the work of Merlin Stone (q.v.); and John O’Neill, The Night of the Gods (2 vols, 1893), for the continued existence of the Great Goddess’s symbolism from Persian horned moons to Roman Catholic veneration of Mary as ‘Our Lady’ and ‘the Queen of Heaven’.

  6R. F. Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (2 vols, 1885–6), II, p. 161.

  7For the full story of the Ka’aba at Mecca, see Harding, p. 41, and O’Neill, I. p. 117.

  8Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, and its Connection with Politi
cal and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (1946), p. 336.

  9For the role of women in the early church see the discussion by the Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of London, The Times, 1.11.86; Boulding, p. 360; and J. Morris, The Lady was a Bishop (New York, 1973).

  10Julia Leslie, ‘Essence and Existence: Women and Religion in Ancient Indian Texts’, in Holden (q.v.), pp. 89–112.

  11Nawal El Saadawi, ‘Women in Islam’, in Azizah Al-Hibri, Women and Islam (1982), pp. 193–206.

  12Azizah Al-Hibri, ‘A Study of Islamic Herstory, or, How Did We Ever Get Into This Mess?’, in Al-Hibri (1982), pp. 207–19.

  13El Saadawi, p. 197.

  14Fatnah A. Sabbah (pseud.), Woman in the Muslim Unconscious (London and New York, 1984), pp. 104–6.

  15II Chronicles 15,16–17.

  16E. L. Ranelagh, Men on Women (1985), p. 49.

  17Numbers 5, 14–31.

  18Sabbah, p. 108.

  19Edwardes, p. 32.

  20Gabriel Mandel, The Poem of the Pillow: The Japanese Methods (Fribourg, 1984), pp. 17–18.

  21Mandel, p. 77 and p. 78.

  22Edwardes, p. 50.

  23Armstrong, p. 43 and p. 23.

  24Fitzgerald, pp. 48–9.

  25De Riencourt, p. 82; and see Sara Maitland, A Map of the New Country: Women and Christianity (1983), where Maitland argues that Christianity divides creation into a dualistic opposition of ‘good’ (spirit) and ‘bad’ (flesh), and that such dualistic splits are the root cause not only of sexism, but also of racism, classism and ecological destruction.

  26Ní Chuilleanáin, p. 14.

  27Sabbah, p. 5 and p. 110.

  28Sabbah, p. 13.

  Chapter 5 The Sins of the Mothers

  1D. Martin Luther, Kritische Gesamtausgabe Vol. III, Briefwechsel (Weimar, 1933), pp. 327–8.

  2O’Faolain, p. 134.

  3Mead (1949), p. 343.

  4Chaim Bermant discusses the Talmudic prescriptions in The Walled Garden: The Saga of Jewish Family Life and Tradition (1974), p. 60; for St Paul, see I Corinthians, 11, 5.

  5Armstrong, p. 56. It is noteworthy that the patriarchal religions did not invent these new stringencies increasingly applied to women from Christian times onwards; as early as 42 B.C. a Roman husband, C. Sulpicius Gallus, had divorced his wife because she was seen out of doors with her face unveiled. But this procedure was condemned by his own contemporaries as ‘harsh and pitiless’ (see Valerius Maximus, Facta et Dicta Memorabilia). We know too from other sources that the vast majority of Roman women suffered no such restrictions.

  6Renée Hirschon describes the Greeks in ‘Open Body/Closed Space: The Transformation of Female Sexuality’, and Caroline Humphrey the Mongolians in ‘Women, Taboo, and the Suppression of Attention’; both in Shirley Ardener, Defining Females: the Nature of Women in Society (1978).

  7Christopher Hibbert, The Roots of Evil: A Social History of Crime and Punishment (Penguin, 1966), p. 45.

  8Gallichan, p. 42.

  9Sabbah, p. 36.

  10All these quotations are taken from Shaykh Nefwazi’s The Perfumed Garden, translated by Sir Richard Burton (originally published 1876; this edition 1963), p. 201, p. 191, p. 72.

  11Jacob Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches) (1484); Armstrong, p. 100.

  12Gladys Reichard, Navajo Religion: A Study of Symbolism (New York, 1950), p. 31.

  13The deep suspicion that at bottom men are better off without access to or reminder of women’s sex organs is evident in the Islamic teaching that when Allah ordained paradise and houris to attend on the valiant faithful, he made them without vaginas. Many cultures have ritual expressions of their fears of women stealing men’s power via their sexual emissions, in the form of taboos on intercourse before major or sacred undertakings – a process not unknown to certain twentieth-century sportsmen and others even today: cf. modern Australian jockspeak, ‘Bum to mum tonight, boys!’

  14Edwardes, p. 23.

  15Some idea of the range of menstruation taboos, many much more horrific, painful and dangerous than these, can be gained from Frazer, pp. 595–607. For the native American customs, see Lowe and Hubbard, p. 68.

  16Bermant, p. 129.

  17Edwardes, p. 24.

  18Edwardes, as above.

  19The delegation to an older man of the danger of deflowering the virgin bride is the atavistic origin of the custom of droit de seigneur, not as is widely believed, the lord’s demand to exercise his rights of possession over his female serfs. The latter became in time an accepted ‘explanation’ of what time had rendered inexplicable, then passed into social expectation and even into the law itself in some countries: see the Anglo-Saxon tax called legerwite (literally, ‘payment for lying down’), payable by every bride to her liege lord from the earliest times in England up to the Middle Ages. In effect, it compensated him for the loss of her virginity to another (Katherine O’Donovan, Sexual Divisions in Law, 1985, p. 34). Originally though, the lord was conferring, not receiving a benefit (Langdon-Davies, p. 99 and p. 118). For the Turkish and Arab brutality on defloration, plus their freedom with the jus primae noctis, see Edwardes, pp. 38–9.

  20The Confessions of Lady Nij, translated by Karen Brazell (1975), p. 9.

  21Angela M. Lucas, Women in the Middle Ages: Religion, Marriage and Letters (1983), p. 101; Katharine Simms, ‘Women in Norman Ireland’, in Margaret MacCurtain and Donncha Ó’Corrain (eds) Women in Irish Society: the Historical Dimension pp. 14–25.

  22For British Army reports on child-brides, see Katherine Mayo, Mother India (1927), p. 61; also Pramatha Nath Bose, A History of Hindu Civilization during British Rule (3 vols, 1894), I, 66–7; and H. H. Dodwell (ed.), The Cambridge History of India (6 vols, Cambridge and New York, 1932), VI, 128–31.

  23Joseph and Frances Gies, Life in a Medieval Castle (New York, 1974), p. 77.

  24Pierre de Bourdeille, Abbé de Brantôme, Les Vies des Dames Galantes (1961), p. 86. See also Gould Davis, pp. 165–7, and Eric Dingwall, The Girdle of Chastity (1931).

  25Edwardes, p. 186–7.

  26Scilla McLean, ‘Female Circumcision, Excision and Infibulation: the Facts and Proposals for Change’, Minority Rights Group Report No. 47 (December, 1980). See also Fran Hosken, The Hosken Report – Genital and Sexual Mutilation of Females (Women’s International Network News, Autumn 1979, 187 Grant Street, Lexington, Mass. 02173, USA). Note that this practice continues in use today. Over ninety per cent of all Sudanese women are still mutilated, despite legislation oudawing it over thirty-five years ago. Female genital mutilation has indeed spread to the West in the wake of globalization, and all European capitals now boast a surgeon who will perform this operation at the demand of expatriate parents. In 1986 the British Parliament refused to pass a bill oudawing this practice in Britain, on the grounds that it would not intervene to restrict the rights of parents.

  27Jacques Lantier, La Cité Magique (Paris, 1972), cited by McLean, p. 5.

  28For the Chinese practice of infanticide, see Lisa Leghorn and Katherine Parker, Woman’s Worth: Sexual Economics and the World of Women (1981), p. 163, and de Riencourt, p. 171. For India, see Bose, Vol. III, and Dodwell VI, 130–1. Even today, argues Barbara Burke, there is worldwide ‘a relative neglect of girls, through poorer nutrition and general care, which means that mortality rates for females, who are actually hardier than boys at birth, exceed those for males in Bangladesh, Burma, Jordan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Lebanon and Syria. In parts of South America, mothers wean girls earlier than boys because they fear that nursing them too long will make them unfeminine. Less well nourished, the girls then tend to succumb to fatal diseases’ – ‘Infanticide’, Science 84, 5:4 (May 1984), 26–31.

  29Koran LXXXI 1, 8–9,14.

  30Lesley Blanch, Pavilions of the Heart: The Four Walls of Love (1974), p. 102.

  31Geoffrey of Tours, Historia Francorum Libri Decem, Bk 6, Chapter 36. It is possible that some of the rage directed at this woman
may have been due to her wearing men’s clothing, something regarded with particular abhorrence in Western Europe for many centuries by church and laity alike – as late as the seventeenth century one Ann Morrow was blinded by missiles thrown by an unusually vicious crowd when she was pilloried for wearing men’s clothing, for the purpose of inducing women to marry her (Hibbert, pp. 44–5). Note that the offence was the same as Joan of Arc’s in 1428, i.e., wearing male apparel only, not, in this case, trying to contract a false marriage.

  32Cambridge History, VI, 132. Note that in the standard way of euphemizing these practices, disguising their hideous cruelty and sadistic barbarity under obscure and little-understood Latinisms, wife-burning is usually described as ‘self-immolation’. Hardly hurts at all, does it?

  33Cambridge History, VI, 134.

  34This and the details of the English legislation are taken from E. J. Burford, Bawds and Lodgings: a History of the English Bankside Brothels c. 100–1675 (1976), p. 26, p. 56, p. 73.

  35Master Franz Schmidt, A Hangman’s Diary, ed. A. Keller, trans. C. Calvert and A. W. Gruner (1928), passim.

  36Susan Rennie and Kirsten Grimstad, The New Woman’s Survival Sourcebook (New York, 1975), p. 223.

  37Hibbert, p. 45.

  Chapter 6 A Little Learning

  1Armstrong, p. 82.

  2Joseph Campbell, pp. 22–3.

  3Diane Bell, ‘Desert Politics’, in Women and Colonisation: Anthropological Perspectives, (eds.) Mona Etienne and Eleanor Leacock (New York, 1980).

  4Lewenhak, p. 32.

  5Basil Davidson, Africa in History: Themes and Outlines (1968), p. 119.

  6The sisterhoods of these religions are described in the work of Julia Leslie (q.v.). In Buddhism, although Buddha attacked the idea of women joining male orders, he expressly taught in the Mahjung Nikaya, for example, that women could attain enlightenment in their own disciplines. Within Islam, the position of female religious is even more interesting, according to Anne-Marie Schimmel: ‘History indicates that some women were known as benefactors of Sufi khanqahs which they endowed with money or regular food radons . . . These activities were not restricted to a particular country: we find women patrons of Sufis in India and Iran, in Turkey and North Africa.’ In medieval Egypt (and possibly other areas) even special khanqahs were erected where they could spend either their whole life or a span of time. Nor was it unknown in Islam for women to lead religious groups which also included or even consisted entirely of men: ‘We know the names of some shaykas in such places as medieval Egypt. We also know the name of an Anatolian woman who . . . was head of a dervish tekke and guided the men (‘Women in Mystical Islam’ in Al-Hibri (q.v.), p. 146 and p. 148).