Розалин Майлз – The Women’s History of the World (страница 2)
Given that men have sought control, why did women let them have it? As with the ‘inevitability’ of male dominance, the explanations interlock. Handed over as children by one man (their father) to another (as husband), they were legally, financially and physically subject to the power of males in its undisguised form for thousands of years – until very recently, men of all cultures had the right to kill a wife they even suspected was adulterous. Backing up physical force, and successfully superseding it as a technique of control, came mental violence. Commandeered in mind as well as body, women have always been subjected to a barrage of psycho-sexual conditioning to shape them up to the demands of their males. As Dora Russell remarked, ‘the astonishing fact of human history is that religion, philosophy, political, social and economic thought have been reserved as the prerogative of men. Our world is the product of male consciousness.’ How then could women think the unthinkable, in Virginia Woolf’s words, of ‘killing the Angel at the Hearth’? Finally, and this cannot be dodged, women have colluded in their own subordination – too comfortable with the accommodations they had made, too locked into the ways they had found to live with men and with themselves, too wedded to their own often pathetically ingenious and resourceful solutions, they have not only helped to sustain the systems of male dominance but have betrayed their children, male and female, into them too.
Yet – and this is the final paradox of women’s history – women have not ultimately been victims either of men or history, but have emerged as strong, as survivors, as invincible. Now, freed at last from the timeless tyranny of enforced child-bearing, they are moving onto the offensive to correct these antediluvian imbalances. For patriarchy has run its course, and now not only fails to serve the real needs of men and women, but with its inalienable racism, militarism, hierarchical structures and rage to dominate and destroy, it threatens the very existence of life on earth. ‘We women are gathering’, declared the American women’s Pentagon Action Group of 1980, ‘because life on the precipice is intolerable.’ As long as women go on allowing men to make history, we are responsible for the material and moral consequences of our evasion.
The effort then must be to free women from their historical shackles – from the tyranny of ancient customs like bride-burning and genital mutilation still horrifically alive in the twentieth century – and to combat those newly minted in our own time. For the struggle to set women free is far from over, as Westerners like to think. In this century, the new technologies, advances in medical science and urbanization have offered women unparalleled freedoms – but each has carried within it the seeds of its use against women, bringing new opportunities for degradation and exploitation, new forms of drudge labour, new attacks on life and hope. The amniocentesis test, for example, devised as a means of promoting the birth of healthy babies, is now widely used to detect the sex of a child as a preliminary to aborting unwanted females: one clinic in Bombay alone performed 16,000 abortions of female foetuses in 1984–5 (
With a subject of this magnitude, there could have been as many different histories as there are women to write them. This book does not try to be comprehensive, nor does it purport to have solved all the problems of writing women’s history. Many people will feel that they could have done better. Please try – we need as much women’s history as we can get. This version makes no pretence to the traditional historical fiction of impartiality. Accordingly, as with any work on women, some good ol’ boy somewhere is bound to object that it is unfair to men. There is no better reply to this than the spirited self-defence of the pioneer women’s historian Mary Ritter Beard: ‘There is sure to be an over-emphasis in places, but my apology is that when conditions have been long weighted too much on one side, it is necessary to bear down heavily on the other.’
It will also be objected that women should not be singled out for special pleading, since both sexes suffered alike. When both men and women groaned under back-breaking labour with the ever-present scourge of famine and sudden death, the women’s afflictions, it is argued, were no worse than those of men. This is another widely held belief that will not stand up to any examination of the real differences between the lives of women and men. The male peasant, however poor and lowly, always had the right to beat his wife; the black male slave, though he laboured for the white master by day, did not have to service him by night as well. Nor have changing social conditions had the same impact on men’s and women’s lives – the industrialization of Europe and America in the nineteenth century that improved the material quality of so many people’s lives, itself depended upon the introduction of the ferocious consumerism that more than anything else has devalued women in twentieth-century society.
The future of the world, then, has to be better than its past. In finding the way to the future, our understanding of our past has a crucial part to play. As Lord Acton observed, ‘history convinces more people than philosophy.’ Historians create explanations, rationales, symbols and stereotypes that guide us from one era to another. Consequently, history will lead us all astray if it continues to look asquint. Women have been active, competent and
Can human beings learn from the lessons that history teaches? To move towards a fairer society in the ideal of full humanity for all, men must be ready to dispense with patriarchy’s rigid orthodoxies and life-denying hierarchical systems. Women in return have to take up their share of the responsibility for the public organization of their societies, and in the private sphere, learn to love men as partners, not in the insulting traditional combination of domineering father and overgrown child. All future developments from now on must be assessed from the perspective of both sexes, since both men and women are equally important to the making of history. The hope for the future, like the triumph of the past, lies in the co-operation and complementarity of women and men.
ROSALIND MILES
The key to understanding women’s history is in accepting – painful though it may be – that it is the history of the majority of the human race.
GERDA LERNER
The predominant theory [of] human cultural evolution has been ‘Man-the-Hunter’. The theory that humanity originated in the club-wielding man-ape, aggressive and masterful, is so widely accepted as scientific fact and so vividly secure in popular culture as to seem self-evident.
PROFESSOR RUTH BLEIER
For man without woman there is no heaven in the sky or on earth. Without woman there would be no sun, no moon, no agriculture, and no fire.
ARAB PROVERB
The story of the human race begins with the female. Woman carried the original human chromosome as she does to this day; her evolutionary adaptation ensured the survival and success of the species; her work of mothering provided the cerebral spur for human communication and social organization. Yet for generations of historians, archaeologists, anthropologists and biologists, the sole star of the dawn story has been man. Man the Hunter, man the tool-maker, man the lord of creation stalks the primeval savannah in solitary splendour through every known version of the origin of our species. In reality, however, woman was quietly getting on with the task of securing a future for humanity – for it was her labour, her skills, her biology that held the key to the destiny of the race.
For, as scientists acknowledge, ‘women are the race itself, the strong primary sex, and man the biological afterthought’.1 In human cell structure, woman’s is the basic ‘X’ chromosome; a female baby simply collects another ‘X’ at the moment of conception, while the creation of a male requires the branching off of the divergent ‘Y’ chromosome, seen by some as a genetic error, a ‘deformed and broken “X”. The woman’s egg, several hundred times bigger than the sperm that fertilizes it, carries all the genetic messages the child will ever receive. Women therefore are the original, the first sex, the biological norm from which males are only a deviation. Historian Amaury de Riencourt sums it up: ‘Far from being an incomplete form of maleness, according to a tradition stretching from the biblical Genesis through Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas,