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

by Rosalind Miles

Women therefore are the original, the first sex, the biological norm from which males are only a deviation.

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

Only women could produce new life, and they were revered accordingly: all the power of nature, and over nature, was theirs.

Customs varied from country to country and tribe to tribe, but it is evident that women at the birth of civilization generally enjoyed a far greater freedom from restraint on their “modesty” or even chastity than at any time afterward.

At every level women made their mark,

These were real women, then, vividly alive even at the moment of death: women who knew their strengths. These strengths were recognized in the range of social customs and legal rights known to be women’s due from a mass of historical evidence: physical and sexual freedom,

access to power, education, full citizenship, the right to own money and property, the right to divorce, custody of children and financial maintenance.

All women’s earlier hard-won skills of cultivation became useless when the tribe was on the move.

even under the most adverse circumstances, women have never been wholly subordinate.

When all life flowed from the female, creation had been a unity; when the elements became separated out, male became the moving spirit, and female was reduced to matter.

In the whole of the vast fun-house of history’s jokes and tricks, there can be few greater ironies than the spectacle of women embracing and furthering the systems that would all too soon attack their autonomy, crush their individuality and undermine the very reason for their existence.

Woman, once sacred for her mysterious power of life, is now reduced to nothing more than an obliging uterus; once the Mother of all, she is now a mere container;

The Reformation therefore did not reform very much at all for the women: the Renaissance was no rebirth for those born already into the wrong bodies.

No one who understands the feminist movement, or who knows the soul of a real new woman would make the mistake of supposing that the modern woman is fighting for the vote, for education, and for economic freedom, because she wants to be a man.

Woman is fighting today, as she has all the way up through the ages, for the freedom to be a woman.