Who Cooked the Last Supper?: The Women's History of the World

by Rosalind Miles

“a house does not need a wife any more than it needs a husband,”

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, Theodosia, Hypatia, Wu Chao, Victoria Claflin Woodhull, Hind al Hind.

But the survival of the human race proves that every one of these hidden lives was a kind of unsung triumph in its way.

Hundreds of thousands of spectacular stories still remain to be excavated from the sands of time, from the women rulers of Europe’s “age of queens” to the sturdy female farmers, brewers, market traders and village wisewomen who have held their communities together all over the world and, in so doing, kept the human race alive.

No other subordinated class, caste or minority lives as closely integrated with its oppressor as women do; the males of the dominant culture have to allow them into their homes, kitchens, beds.

For the African delight at the birth of a daughter, for the African woman’s freedom to come and go as she pleased, to meet her friends in the marketplace for the cheery gossip so frowned on by Ibn Batuta, and to play a leading role in the life of her family and group, the European or Asian woman denied all of these might well have questioned which of these societies was the more primitive.

Nuns were also, in the words of Mary Ritter Beard, more than political figures: [They] were remarkable businesswomen. They were outstanding doctors and surgeons. They were great educators. They were feudal lords operating self-sustaining estates, and directing the manifold activities involved in producing goods, settling controversies as lawyers and judges settle them today, governing and participating in all the arts of social living.12