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January 8, 2022
“What is history? Little more than a register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of men.”
It is a common belief that whatever the situation, both sexes faced it alike. But the male peasant, however cruelly oppressed, always had the right to beat his wife. The black slave had to labor for the white master by day, but he did not have to service him by night as well.
We also need women’s history because so much of women’s participation is frankly denied in the ceaseless effort to assert men’s “natural” superiority at all costs.
Mother Nature having saddled women with an unequal share of the work of reproduction, so the argument goes, women had to consent to male domination in order to obtain protection for themselves and for their children.
In China, India, Africa and the Middle East, to be a woman is to deal on a daily basis with men who truly and deeply believe that women are lesser creatures and should be under their control. They believe this because their God tells them so.
Every one of the “great” belief systems of the world, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Confucianism, insists on women’s inferiority as an article of faith.
Women’s rights have not yet achieved parity with “human rights”; that is, the rights men claim and extend to themselves. Most significant of all, whether through the mass media or through corporate dictatorship of what we wear, eat, read, believe and think, men continue to own and control the ultimate right of all, the right to define.
Only with the understanding that men and women can unite against all that drags us down will we make a stand for our common health and happiness. That is the task ahead, and we must not fail.
Women are the greatest wronged and still-suffering majority in the history of the world, and we can never say that loudly or long enough.
Every gain, every success for women is taken to mean that men are being cheated and denigrated.
Every revolution in the history of the world, every movement for equality, has stopped short of sexual equality.
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
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.
scientists acknowledge, “women are the race itself, the strong primary sex, and man the biological afterthought.
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.”
Women therefore are the original, the first sex, the biological norm from which males are only a deviation.
femaleness is the norm, the fundamental form of life.”
This research points directly to one woman as the original “gene fount” for the whole of the human race. She lived in Africa about 300,000 years ago, and her descendants later migrated out of Africa and spread across the face of the globe, giving rise to all the people living today.4
At no point in prehistory did women, with or without their children, rely on their hunting males for food.
women regularly produce as much as 80 percent of the tribe’s total food intake, on a daily basis. One interpretation of these figures is that in every hunter/gatherer society, the male members were and are doing only one-fifth of the work necessary for the group to survive, while the other four-fifths is carried out entirely by the women.
“Handedness, the typical right-handedness of modern humans, is a female phenomenon.”15 From time immemorial woman has made a custom of carrying her baby on the left side of the body, where it can be comforted by the beating of her heart. This frees the right hand for action, and would have been the spur toward the evolution of predominant right-handedness in later human beings. Support for the “femaleness of handedness,” Calder shows, comes in the fact that to this day infant girls develop handedness, like speech, much more quickly and decisively than boys.
when femina aspiring to be erecta hoisted herself onto her hind legs and walked, the angle of the vagina swung forward and down, and the vagina itself moved deeper into the body. The male penis then echoed the vagina’s steady progress, following the same evolutionary principle as the giraffe’s neck: it grew in order to get to something it could not otherwise reach.
The biology of woman in fact holds the key to the story of the human race.
Menstruation, not hunting, was the great evolutionary leap forward. It was through a female adaptation, not a male one, that “man” throve, multiplied and conquered the globe.
woman first awakened in humankind the capacity to recognize abstracts, to make connections and to think symbolically.
women taught men the principles of numbers, calendar organization and counting: “Every woman had a ‘body calendar’—her monthly menstrual cycle. She would be the first to notice the relationship between her own body cycle and the lunar cycle.”
generations of male commentators have blinded themselves both to the facts and the significant implications of the evolution of early woman. They have insisted instead on rewriting primitive woman as no more than a sexual vehicle for man. “They were fatted for marriage, were these Stone Age squaws,” wrote H. G. Wells. “The females were the protected slaves of the old male, the master of all the women”—a wistful Wellsian fantasy of women on tap.21 For Robert Ardrey, menstruation evolved only as a bonanza for the boys. When a female primate came on heat, burbled Ardrey, she “hit the sexual
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An eighteenth-century trader of the Hudson Bay Company in Canada discovered an Eskimo woman who had kept herself alive for seven months on the mid-winter icecap by her own hunting and snaring “when there was nothing but desolation for 1,000 miles around.”
On the other side of the blade a woman similarly harpooned crawls forward on her hands and knees while a male figure crouches lecherously behind her, clearly intent on sexual penetration from the rear, although the droop of her breasts and the swelling of her belly show that she is pregnant. In a bizarre definition of primitive man’s idea of foreplay, the French anthropologist G.-H. Luquet interprets this gruesome object as a “love charm!”
the role of the first women was wider, their contribution to human evolution immeasurably more significant, than has ever been accepted.
For woman, with her inexplicable moon-rhythms and power of creating new life, was the most sacred mystery of the tribe. So miraculous, so powerful, she had to be more than man—more than human. As primitive man began to think symbolically, there was only one explanation. Woman was the primary symbol, the greatest entity of all—a goddess, no less.
The Mother of songs, the Mother of our whole seed, bore us in the beginning. She is the Mother of all races of men, and all tribes. She is the Mother of the thunder, of the rivers, of the trees and of the grain. She is the only Mother we have, and She alone is the Mother of all things. She alone. —SONG OF THE KAYABA INDIANS OF COLOMBIA
But it has another claim to world attention—both the first God and this first known priest-poet were female.
For in the beginning, as humankind emerged from the darkness of prehistory, God was a woman.
For as poet, priest and prophet of Inanna, Enheduanna was the voice of a deity whose power and worship spanned the whole world and was as old as time itself, the first divinity, the Great Mother.
The power and centrality of the first woman-God is one of the best-kept secrets of history. We think today of a number of goddesses, all with different names—Isis, Juno, Demeter—and have forgotten what, 5,000 years ago, every schoolgirl knew; no matter what name or guise she took, there was only one God and her name was woman.
Later ages dismissed accounts of Goddess-worship as “myths” or “cults.” But since Sir Arthur Evans, discoverer of the lost Minoan civilization at the turn of this century, stated that all the innumerable goddess-figures he had discovered represented “the same Great Mother…whose worship under various names and titles extended over a large part of Asia Minor and the regions beyond,” modern scholarship has accepted that “the Great Goddess, the ‘Original Mother without a Spouse,’ was in full control of all the mythologies” as “a worldwide fact.”
25,000–15,000 B.C.
“the Great Mother…bursts on the world of men in overwhelming wholeness and perfection.”
25000 - 15000 B.C.
7000 B.C.
the first shrines to the Mother Goddess.
4000 B.C.
the first written language appears on the temple of the Goddess
4000 B.C.
A.D. 500
Christian emperors forcibly suppress the worship of the Goddess and close down the last of her temples.
A.D. 500
In fact there was never a time at this stage of human history when woman was not special and magical.
the recurrent and puzzling “double-eye” figure was a symbol of the vulva.
Before the process of reproduction was understood, babies were simply born to women. No connection was made with intercourse
Men, so it seemed, therefore had no part in the chain of generation. Only women could produce new life, and they were revered accordingly: all the power of nature, and over nature, was theirs.
woman was divine, not human, gifted with the most sacred and significant power in the world;
