The Women’s History of the World

Puvi made the country the first time. The sea was all fresh water. She made the land, sea and islands . . . Puriti said, ‘Don’t kill our mother.’ But Iriti went ahead and killed her. He struck her on the head. Her urine made the sea salty and her spirit went into the sky . . .19

In other versions of the story, the Great Goddess is defeated, but lives. Celtic folk myth relates how the Three Wise Ones (the Goddess in her triad form), Emu, Banbha and Fódla, meet the sons of Mil the war god in battle, but after many violent clashes are subdued and humbled to the power of the invader. Whatever form it takes, the fundamental power-shift from female to male is reflected in all mythologies. Among the Greeks, Apollo took over the Goddess’s most sacred oracle at Delphi; the Kikuyu of Africa still relate how their ancestors overthrew their women by ganging up in a scheme to rape all their women on the same day, so that nine months later they could overmaster the pregnant women with impunity; while for the Aztecs, Xochiquetzel the Earth Mother gave birth to a son Huitzilopochtli, who killed her daughter the Moon Goddess and took her place as the ruler of heaven, killing and scattering all her other children in his rage for domination.

This pattern of defeat and partial survival finds a frequent expression in the motif employed here, the victory of the sun god over the moon, who is always female. In the Japanese version, the goddess Ama-terasu, the supreme deity of the Shinto pantheon, is attacked by the god Susa-nu-wo, who destroys her rice fields and pollutes her sacred places with faeces and dead flesh. Although she fights him, he ‘steals her light’, and she only regains half her previous power, and so may only shine by night.20 Just as in the historical shift from horticulture to agriculture, this apparently natural development masked some profound and irreversible changes in the relations between men and women, even in the ways of thought:

The divinity of the sun, lord of time and space, was essentially masculine – the phallic sunbeams striking down on Mother Earth – a maleness whose rays impregnate the earth and cause the seeds to germinate. From Spain to China, the prehistoric sun stood for maleness, individual self-consciousness, intellect and the glaring light of knowledge, as against the moon ruler of the tide, the womb, the waters of the ocean, darkness and the dream-like unconscious . . . solarization, the victory of the male sun god over the female moon goddess . . . implied the collapse of the female-oriented cyclical fertility cults and the rise to supremacy of the male concept of linear history, consisting of unrepeatable events . . .21

Nor was the overthrow of the female simply a mythological theme. Women of power in real life came under attack, as men sought to wrest from them their authority in a number of different ways. Where royalty passed through the female line, a bold adventurer could commandeer it by enforcing marriage on the queen, or seizing possession by rape – Tamyris the Scythian ruler fought off a ‘proposal’ of this sort from Cyrus the Great of Persia in the sixth century B.C. Others were not so lucky. When Berenice II of Egypt refused to marry her young nephew Ptolemy Alexander in 80 B.C., he had her murdered. The violence of this outrage is demonstrated by the fact that the loyal Alexandrians then rose up and killed him.22 But in general kings were more successful in retaining the powers they usurped. From this period of aggressive male encroachment on female prerogative comes the introduction of royal incest, when the king who was unwilling to vacate the throne on the death of his wife, would marry the rightful heir, her daughter. Alternatively, he would marry one of his sons to the new queen; this had the double benefit of keeping the monarchy under male control, and by degrees weaving sons into the fabric of inheritance until their right superseded that of any daughter.

Under these circumstances, ruling women rapidly became pawns in male power-games, their importance only acknowledged by the lengths men went to to possess or control them. Galla Placida, daughter of the Roman Emperor Theodosius the Great, was captured by the Visigoth Alaric at the sack of Rome, and after his death taken over by his brother. On the murder of the brother, she was handed back to the Romans, and forcibly married to their victorious general Constantius, who designated her Augusta, and as ‘Augustus’ ruled as her co-emperor. When Constantius died, her brother exiled her to Constantinople and took the throne, and only when her son became emperor in 425 A.D. did she achieve any peace or stability.

There are countless historical examples from all countries of royal women, through whom inheritance or claim to the throne would pass, being exploited as pawns in the power game, and then disposed of. A classic story is that of Almasuntha, queen of the Ostrogoths: made regent on behalf of her son when her father King Theodoric died in A.D. 526, Almasuntha was forcibly married by the late king’s nephew when her son died, and then, as soon as the usurper had secured his power, put to death.

Women of royal blood were not alone in experiencing men’s rage to dominate, to downgrade and destroy. With written records come the first in a series of orchestrated attacks on women’s nature, their rights in their children, even their right to full human existence. The sun-moon dualism now becomes extended into a cosmic system of polar opposition; whatever man is, woman is not, and with this imposition of the principle of sexual contrast comes the gradual definition of man as commanding all the human skills and abilities, woman as the half-formed, half-baked opposite. By the fourth century B.C., Aristotle’s summary of the sexual differences in human nature said no more than any man or woman of his age would have accepted as fact:

Man is active, full of movement, creative in politics, business and culture. The male shapes and moulds society and the world. Woman, on the other hand, is passive. She stays at home, as is her nature. She is matter waiting to be formed by the active male principle. Of course the active elements are always higher on any scale, and more divine. Man consequently plays a major part in reproduction; the woman is merely the passive incubator of his seed . . . the male semen cooks and shapes the menstrual blood into a new human being . . .23

Once articulated, the denigrations of women flood forth unchecked as war-leaders, politicians and historians like Xenophon, Cato and Plutarch worry away at the ‘woman problem’:

The gods created woman for the indoors functions, the man for all others. The gods put woman inside because she has less tolerance for cold, heat and war. For woman it is honest to remain indoors and dishonest to gad about. For the man, it is shameful to remain shut up at home and not occupy himself with affairs outside.24

You must keep her on a tight rein . . . Women want total freedom, or rather total licence. If you allow them to achieve complete equality with men, do you think they will be any easier to live with? Not at all. Once they have achieved equality, they will be your masters . . .25

I certainly do not give the name ‘love’ to the feeling one has for women and girls, any more than we would say flies are in love with milk, bees with honey, or breeders with the calves and fowl they fatten in the dark . . .26

As Plutarch here reminds us, for the Greeks there was ‘only one genuine love, that which boys inspire’. The homosexuality of ancient Greece in fact institutionalized the supremacy of the phallus, denying women any social or emotional role other than childbearing. But to the emerging male, newly born into consciousness and thinking with his phallus, it seemed inescapable that such a creature should have as little part as possible in his children: and in the famous ‘Judgement of Apollo’ at the climax of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, the sun god obligingly pronounced:

The mother is not the parent of that which is called her child: but only nurse of the newly planted seed that grows. The parent is he who mounts.

In this simple, brutal diktat phallic thought reversed the primeval creation beliefs of thousands of years. Woman was no longer the vessel of nature, creating man. Now man created woman as a vessel for himself. As the sun overthrew the moon, the king beat down the queen, so the phallus usurped the uterus as the source and symbol of life and power.

Under the new dispensation women’s rights went the way of their rites, and in cities and states from Peking to Peru women dwindled into little more than serfdom. They became property; and found that truly property was theft. The new social and mental systems robbed them of freedom, autonomy, control, even the most basic right of control over their own bodies. For now they belonged to men – or rather, to one man. At some unidentified but pivotal point of history, women became subjected to the tyranny of sexual monopoly – for once it was realized that one man only was necessary for impregnation, it was a short step to the idea of only one man.

Yet the exclusive possession of a woman and the monopoly of her sexual service could always be waived when a greater need arose. In Eskimo tribes, for instance, wife-lending is endemic. For the Eskimo husband, this is ‘a wise investment for the future, because the lender knows he will eventually be a borrower’, when he needs a woman who ‘makes the igloo habitable, lays out dry stockings for him . . . and is ready to cook the game he brings back’. Nor was this all – the extent of the obligations of the borrowed wife can be judged from the special term by which Eskimo children refer to any man who does business with their father: ‘he-who-fucks-my-mother’.27

As their property, women of these early societies were at the disposal of men; and when women were no longer the struggling tribe’s prime resource, nor the sacred source of life and hope for the future, nothing inhibited men’s use of force against them in the struggle for control. Among the ancient Chinese, the Greek writer Posidippus noted in the second century A.D., ‘even a poor man will bring up a son, but even a rich man will expose a daughter.’28 On the other side of the world, a chieftain of Tierra del Fuego told Darwin during the voyage of The Beagle that to survive in a famine they would kill and eat their old women, but never their dogs.29 From written records, epics and chronicles, and from anthropological and archaeological evidence, come countless examples of sexual hostility in action, frequently carried to extremes: women are traded, enslaved, ravished, sold in whoredom, slaughtered on the death of their lord or husband, and in every way abused at will.

One poignant story from an Anglo-Saxon settlement of pagan England puts some flesh on the bones of this stark generalization. Two female skeletons of the pre-Christian period were discovered lying together in one pit grave. The older woman, in her late twenties, had been buried naked and alive; the position of the skeleton after death showed that she had tried to raise herself as the earth was thrown on to her. The younger of the two, a girl about sixteen years old, had previously sustained injuries ‘typically the result of brutal rape, which was strongly resisted by the victim’, including a cavity in the bone behind her left knee where she had been prodded with a dagger to make her draw her legs up for the rapist. She had survived for about six months after the attack, and the fact that she was buried naked, bound hand and foot and possibly alive like her sister-inhabitant of the same grave suggests that her death was the result of her unchastity coming to light, most probably through pregnancy, as the archaeologists conclude:

We can only guess what crime and punishment enmeshed the older woman . . . But for the young girl, naked, bound, lacerated and perhaps still alive, with the howl of human jackals in her ears, her passport to a merciful oblivion is likely to have been the slime and mire of this chalky trench.30

No longer sacred, women became expendable. One Aztec ceremony of death was indeed a direct mockery of women’s former power; every December a woman dressed up as Ilamtecuhtli, the Old Goddess of the earth and corn, was decapitated and her head presented to a priest wearing her costume and mask, who then led a ritual dance of celebration followed by other priests similarly attired. This was only one of a number of Aztec rituals of this kind. Every June a woman representing Xiulonen, Goddess of the young maize, was similarly sacrificed, while in August a woman representing Tetoinnan, Mother of the Gods, was decapitated and flayed, her skin being worn by the priest who played the role of the Goddess in the ensuing ceremony. The ‘strike-the-mother-dead’ motif is even clearer in one detail of this grisly procedure – one thigh of the woman victim was flayed separately, and the skin made into a mask worn by the priest who impersonated the son of the dead ‘mother’.31 But similar customs obtained worldwide – in pre-feudal China a young woman was annually selected to be ‘the Bride of the Yellow Count’, and after a year of fattening and beautifying, was cast adrift to drown in the Yangtse Kiang (Yellow River).32 From ritual sacrifice to the enforced suttee of unwanted child-brides, the destruction of women spread like a plague virus through India, China, Europe and the Middle East to the remotest human settlements – anywhere in fact where the phallus held sway.

As societies evolved, male control through brutal force was gradually supplemented by the rule of law. In Rome, the paterfamilias held undisputed power of life and death over all members of his family, of which he was the only full person in the eyes of the law. In Greece, when Solon of Athens became law-giver in 594 B.C., one of his first measures was to prohibit women leaving their houses at night, and the effect of this was to confine them more and more to their homes by day. In ancient Egypt, women became not simply the property but legally part of their fathers or husbands, condemned to suffer whatever their male kindred brought down on their heads. As the horrified Greek historian Diodorus recorded in his World History (60–30 B.C.), innocent women even swelled the ranks of the pitiful slaves whose forced labour built the pyramids:

. . . bound in fetters, they work continually without being allowed any rest by night or day. They have not a rag to cover their nakedness, and neither the weakness of age nor women’s infirmities are any plea to excuse them, but they are driven by blows until they drop dead.33

Not all women, however, lived as victims and died as slaves: it would be historically unjust as well as inaccurate to present the whole of the female sex as passive and defeated in the face of their oppressions. Even as Aristotle was earnestly discoursing to his students on the innate inferiority of women, a woman called Agnodice in the fourth century B.C. succeeded in penetrating the all-male world of learning. After attending medical classes she practised gynaecology disguised as a man, with such success that other doctors, jealous of her fame, accused her of seducing her patients. In court she was forced to reveal her sex in order to save her life, at which new charges were brought against her of practising a profession restricted by law to men alone. Eventually acquitted of this, too, Agnodice lived to become the world’s first known woman gynaecologist.34

As this suggests, even under the most adverse circumstances, women have never been wholly subordinate. As a sex, the female of the species has taken a lot of treading down, and the greater the efforts of the emerging phallocrat, the more resourceful and sustained was the resistance he produced. It did not take much female ingenuity, for example, to subvert the systems that men had themselves set up: the worldwide system of menstrual taboo, for instance, by which menstruating women were excluded from society so that they should not infect men, pollute food, or, as Aristotle believed, tarnish mirrors with their breath, in fact provided ample and perfect opportunity for women to develop alternative networks of power, all the more effective for being invisible, unseen. What went on in the menstrual huts or women’s quarters when the women foregathered to bring food, news or messages to a menstruating sister would be beneath the ken of the males; but it would make itself felt in their lives nevertheless.

Not infrequently women’s resistance to masculine control was expressed directly, even violently, as the Roman senators found to their cost in 215 B.C., when to curb inflation they passed a law forbidding women to own more than half an ounce of gold, wear multi-coloured dresses or ride in a two-horse carriage. As the word spread, crowds of rioting women filled the Capitol and raged through every street of the city, and neither the rebukes of the magistrates nor the threats of their husbands could make them return quietly to their homes. Despite the fierce opposition of the notorious anti-feminist Cato, the law was repealed in what must have been one of the earliest victories for sisterhood and solidarity.

For in the game of domination and subordination, women have not always been the losers: the annals of nineteenth-century explorers were rich in accounts of primitive African tribes where the women had fought off the challenge of the phallus and continued to rule the men. Most of these have now vanished, like the Balonda tribe of whom Livingstone noted that the husband was so subjected to his wife that he dared do nothing without her approval. Yet even today records continue to document tribes like that of the cannibal Munduguma of the Yuat River of the South Seas, whose women are as ferocious as their head-hunting men, and who particularly detest having children. This age-old resistance to the traditional wifely role is echoed in a Manus proverb of the same region: ‘Copulation is so revolting that the only husband you can bear is the one whose advances you can hardly feel.’35

As this suggests, women did not fall easily into the subservient supporting role for which the lords of every known phallocracy have insisted they are ‘naturally’ fitted. Many and varied in fact have been the ways that women have found to subvert and convert the power of men, asserting their own autonomy and control as they did so. For the new political systems of male domination were not monolithic nor uniform; there were plenty of cracks through which an enterprising female might slip. In addition, the phallus supreme might count himself king of infinite space, but in real life, willy-nilly, men had to marry and father females. Taken together these factors provided a number of bases from which women could operate in much the same way as men:

Women could win membership of the ruling élite.

This classic route to power derived from access to the men who wielded it, in a direct reversal of the previous rule of the matriarchies. One of the clearest indications of its scope comes from the impressive careers of ‘the Julias’, a powerful female dynasty of two sisters and two daughters who ruled in Rome during the third century A.D. The elder sister, Julia Domna, first struck into Roman power politics when she married the Emperor Severus. After her death in 217, her younger sister Julia Maesa took over, marrying her two daughters, also Julias, with such skill that they became the mothers of the next two emperors, through whom the three women ruled with great effect until 235. Another mistress of this game was the Byzantine Empress Pulcheria (A.D. 399–453). Made regent for her weak-minded brother when she was only fifteen, Pulcheria later fought off a challenge to her supremacy from her brother’s wife, and after his death ruled in her own right, supported by her husband, the tough General Marcian: husband in name only, Marcian was never allowed to break his wife’s vow of chastity which after her death enabled her to be canonized as a saint.

Women could excel in political skill.

As Pulcheria’s story shows, women learned very early on how to operate the machinery of power, how to manoeuvre successfully within frameworks which may have constricted their actions but never prevented them from achieving their deeper goals. So the magnificent Theodora, one-time bear-keeper, circus artiste and courtesan who fulfilled every Cinderella fantasy when she married the Prince Justinian, heir to the Byzantine Empire in A.D. 525, proposed her measures to the Councils of State, ‘always apologizing for taking the liberty to talk, being a woman’.36 Yet from behind this façade Theodora pushed through legislation which gave women rights of property, inheritance and divorce, while at her own expense she bought the freedom of girls who had been sold into prostitution, and banished pimps and brothel-keepers from the land.

Unlike Theodora, who used her borrowed power with magisterial altruism, other women displayed an appetite for realpolitik in its cruellest forms. The Roman empresses Drusilla Livia (c.55 B.C.–A.D. 29) and Valeria Messalina (A.D. 22–48) were among many who engaged in endless violent intrigues, including the free use of poison on any obstacles to their designs. Poison was also one of the weapons of the legendary beauty Zenobia. This Scythian warrior queen routed the Roman army, went on to capture Egypt and Asia Minor, and, when finally defeated by the Romans, escaped death by seducing a Roman senator. She later married him, and lived on into a gracious retirement until her death in A.D. 274.

Unquestionably though, the female Bluebeard of dynastic power games must be Fredegund, the Frankish queen who died in A.D. 597. Beginning as a servant at the royal court, she became the mistress of the king, whom she induced to repudiate one wife and murder another. When the sister of the dead queen, Brunhild, became her mortal enemy as a result, Fredegund engineered the death of Brunhild’s husband and plunged the two kingdoms into forty years of war. Fredegund’s later victims included all her stepchildren, her husband the king, and finally her old enemy Queen Brunhild, whom she subjected to public humiliation and atrocious torture in the face of the army for three days before Brunhild’s death put an end to her sport: after which she died at last peacefully in her own bed.

Personal achievement was always possible.

The work of many gifted women known to history by name is a salutary reminder that, as the majority of the human race, women have always commanded over half of the sum total of human intelligence and creativity. From the poet Sappho, who in the sixth century B.C. was the first to use the lyric to write subjectively and explore the range of female experience, to the Chinese polymath Pan Chao (Ban Zhao), who flourished around A.D. 100 as historian, poet, astronomer, mathematician and educationalist, the range is startling. In every field, women too numerous to list were involved in developing knowledge, and contributing to the welfare of their societies as they did so: the Roman Fabiola established a hospital where she worked both as nurse and doctor, becoming the first known woman surgeon before she died in A.D. 399.37 In various fields, too, women emerged not simply as respected authorities, but as the founding mothers of later tradition: Cleopatra, ‘the alchemist of Alexandria’, an early chemist and scholar, was the author of a classic text Chrysopeia (Gold-making), which was still in use in Europe in the Middle Ages, while the Chinese artist Wei Fu-Jen, working like Cleopatra in the third century A.D., is still honoured today as China’s greatest calligrapher and founder of the whole school of the art of writing.

Not all women everywhere were destined to make their mark on history. This does not mean, however, that they were inevitably lost in the great silence of the past. Folk stories from all cultures preserve accounts of the heroines of ordinary life who tamed brutal or stupid husbands, outwitted rapacious lords, schemed for their children and lived to rejoice in their children’s children. Occasionally these tales have a peculiarly personal ring, like the Chinese folk tale of the early T’ang dynasty (A.D. 618–907), in which the little heroine, desperate for education, is presented as setting out for her first day’s schooling disguised as a boy, ‘as happy as a bird freed from its cage’. Even more poignant is the earlier story, ‘Seeking her Husband at the Great Wall’ (c. 200 B.C.), which tells of a wife who succeeded in making a long and terrible journey in order to find her husband, surviving every danger and disaster in vain, since her beloved had been dead all along.38