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

by Rosalind Miles

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 jackpot,” providing “fun for all…and for herself a maximum of male attention.”22 But oestrus episodes are brief and infrequent—there had to be something more to bring the hunter home from the hill. Accordingly, the first woman learned to convert primate heat into menstruation. This made her sexually available and receptive to man year-round, as a reward for her share of his kill, in history’s first known example of the time-honored convention of quid pro quo.