Розалин Майлз – The Women’s History of the World (страница 15)
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
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
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
. . . 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