Розалин Майлз – The Women’s History of the World (страница 1)
HarperCollins
First published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph Ltd 1988
Published by Paladin Books in 1989
Copyright © Rosalind Miles 1988
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780586088869
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2016 ISBN: 9780007571970
Version: 2016-09-13
For all the women of the world who have had no history
Contents
I IN THE BEGINNING
II THE FALL OF WOMAN
III DOMINION AND DOMINATION
8 Revolution, the Great Engine
IV TURNING THE TIDE
Woman
‘What is history?’ brooded Gibbon, the great historian of the Roman Empire. ‘Little more than a register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of men.’ At last the hand that rocks the cradle has taken up the pen to set the record straight. In history, there were women too.
It would be hard to find much support for this proposition from the historical record. When a memorial stone was carved into the quay at Plymouth to commemorate the Founding Fathers who made the historic Mayflower voyage of 1620, there was no mention of the seventeen women who sailed with them to build the new world. In general, the historians of every era have shown little interest in the female sex. In 1238, only one maidservant, ‘awake by night and singing psalms’ saw the assassin who gained entry to the bedchamber of the king of England, knife in hand. She changed the course of history – and the chronicler, Matthew de Paris, did not even get her name.
Yet the women of the world have had a history, and the full story has been far more rich and strange than we are ever led to think. The chief aim of this book is to assert the range, power and significance of women’s contribution to the evolution of the human race, its huge-variety in both the public and the private spheres, and the massive female achievement on every level – cultural, commercial, domestic, emotional, social and sexual. Our world past is packed with countless stories of Amazons and Assyrian war queens, mother goddesses and Great She-Elephants, imperial concubines who rose to rule the world, scientists, psychopaths, saints and sinners, Brunhild, Marie de Brinvilliers, Mother Teresa, Chiang Ch’ing.
The lives of unsung heroines also have the fascination of the greatest story never told. Every historical period and place has brought a new slant on the old saga of the re-creation of the human race. From the empress undergoing a month-long accouchement attended by doctors, midwives, ladies-in-waiting, astrologers and poets laureate, to the peasant field-worker stepping aside to give birth crouched over a hole under a hedge, then returning to work with her new-born child swaddled at her back, the renewal of the species has always been the sole, whole, unavoidable and largely unacknowledged gift to the future of the female sex worldwide.
All this is lost when our view of history concentrates on men only, claiming a universal validity for the actions of less than half the human race. That view is a one-eyed sham – fractured, partial and censored. Historians have made a fetish of ferreting around in pipe rolls and laundry lists to track down the dirty linen of great men in preference to the great deeds of unfamous women. Society has glorified golden balls, orbs, swords and maces as symbols of worshipful masculinity, flashy phallic shows to elevate what men most valued about themselves. Each generation has bamboozled posterity for a thousand years with fancy-dress fictions and hollow bluster; among a forest of historical phallacies, the so-called ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German People’, for instance, was
Women’s history by contrast has only just begun to invent itself. Males gained entry to the business of recording, defining and interpreting events in the third millennium B.C.; for women, this process did not even begin until the nineteenth century. Early women’s history was devoted to combing the chronicles for queens, abbesses and learned women to set against the equivalent male figures of authority and ability, creating heroines in the mirror image of heroes: Joan of Arc, Florence Nightingale, Catherine the Great. This pop-up, cigarette-card version of women’s history, though it has some value in asserting that women can be competent and powerful, had two weaknesses – it reinforced the false effect of male domination of history, since there were always many more male rulers and ‘geniuses’ than female; and it failed to address the reality of the majority of women’s lives who had neither the opportunity nor the appetite for such activities.
What then should a women’s history of the world do? It must fill the gaps left by conventional history’s preoccupation with male doings, and give attention and dignity to women’s lives in their own right. Women’s exclusion from the annals represents a million million stifled voices. To recover the female part of what we have called history is no mean achievement. Any women’s history therefore has to be alert to the blanks, the omissions and the half-truths. It must listen to the silences and make them cry out.
The second task is to confront the story of women as the greatest race of underdogs the world has ever known. ‘Women live like bats or owls, labour like beasts, and die like worms,’ wrote an English duchess, Margaret of Newcastle, in the seventeenth century. Both women and men have to accept the violence and brutality of men’s systematic and sustained attacks on the female sex, from wife-beating to witch-hunting, from genital mutilation to murder, as the first step towards righting history’s ancient and terrible wrongs.
As this argues, it is essential to acknowledge that the interests of women have very often been opposed to, and by, those of men. It is no paradox that historical periods of great progress for men have often involved losses and setbacks for women. If there is any truth in Lenin’s claim that the emancipation of its women offers a fair measurement of the general level of the civilization of any society, then received notions of ‘progressive’ developments like the classical Athenian culture, the Renaissance, and the French Revolution, in all of which women suffered severe reversals, have to undergo a radical revaluation: for, as the American historian Joan Kelly drily observes, ‘there was no Renaissance for women – at least in the Renaissance.’
A women’s history, then, must hope to explain as well as narrate, seeking the answer to two key questions: How did men succeed in enforcing the subordination of women? And why did women let them get away with it? At the origin of the species, it is suggested, Mother Nature saddled women with an unequal share of the primary work of reproduction. They therefore had to consent to domination in order to obtain protection for themselves and their children. The historical record shows, however, that women in ‘primitive’ societies have a better chance of equality than those of more ‘advanced’ cultures. In these, male domination has been elaborated into every aspect of life, indeed strenuously re-invented in every epoch with a battery of religious, biological, ‘scientific’, psychological and economic reasons succeeding one another in the endless work of justifying women’s inferiority to men. Traditionalist arguments of masculine supremacy have been remarkably resilient over time – all democratic experiments, all revolutions, all demands for equality have so far stopped short of sexual equality – and women, seen as biologically determined, continue to be denied the human right of full self-determination.