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

by Rosalind Miles

The woman’s egg, several hundred times bigger than the sperm that fertilizes it, carries all the primary 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.

Of women’s duties, food gathering unquestionably came at the top of the list, and this work kept the tribe alive. At no point in prehistory did women, with or without their children, rely on their hunting males for food.

Working unceasingly during the daylight hours, women regularly produce as much as 80 percent of the tribe’s total food intake, on a daily basis.

It is to early woman that we owe the fact that most of us are right-handed, for instance. As Nigel Calder explains, “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.

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.

Recent commentators have argued that women’s so-called curse operated to cure not only man’s shortage of offspring, but also his primeval mental darkness. In their pioneering work on menstruation, The Wise Wound, Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove stress the connection made in primitive societies between the lunar and menstrual cycles, suggesting that woman first awakened in humankind the capacity to recognize abstracts, to make connections and to think symbolically.

Like Johanson, 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.

the Pleistocene Playmate of the Month.

Haha

Man’s “hunting pedigree” can thus be used to justify every act of male aggression from business chicanery to wife-battering and rape, while the “right to dominate” of “early boss man” has proved far too serviceable to his successors to be cast aside.

Sounds like a design flaw to me.

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.”31

Because group protection was so important a part of man’s work, it is essential to question the accepted division by sex of emotional labor, in which all tender and caring feelings are attributed to women, leaving men outside the circle of the campfire as great hairy brutes existing only to fight or fuck. In reality the first men, like the first women, only became human when they learned how to care for others.

“The Exaltation of Inanna,” is a song of extraordinary power and passion, and it has come down in history as the world’s first known poem. 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.

But both “life” and “death” sides of the Goddess come together without strain in her primary aspect, which is in fact not motherhood pure and simple, but her sexuality.

But not by herself. In every culture, the Goddess has many lovers. This exposes another weakness in our later understanding of her role as the Great Mother. To the children of patriarchy, “mother” always includes “wife”; Mother is the woman who is married to Father. That puts a further constraint on the idea of the good mother. The good mother does not fuck around. She does not even choose the one man she does have, but is chosen by Father. Hence the insoluble paradox of the Goddess for the custodians of succeeding moralities—she was always unmarried and never chaste. Among Eskimos, her title was “She Who Will Not Have a Husband.” But there was more to her sexual freedom than this. As the source and force of life, she was timeless and endless. In contrast males came and went, their only function the service of the divine “womb” or “vulva,” which is the Goddess’s name in most cultures.11

The Greek historian Diodorus records an Egyptian marriage contract in which the husband pledged his bride-to-be: I bow before your rights as wife. From this day on, I shall never oppose your claims with a single word. I recognize you before all others as my wife, though I do not have the right to say you must be mine, and only I am your husband and mate. You alone have the right of departure…I cannot oppose your wish wherever you desire to go. I give you…[here follows an index of the bridegroom’s possessions].27

Men look to destroy every quality in a woman that will give her the powers of a male, for she is in their eyes already armed with the power that brought them forth. —NORMAN MAILER

The sun-moon dualism now becomes extended into a cosmic system of polar opposition; whatever man is, woman is not, and with this imposition of the principle of sexual contrast comes the gradual definition of man as commanding all the human skills and abilities, woman as the half-formed, half-baked opposite.

Agnodice lived to become the world’s first known woman gynecologist.34

Is it perhaps in a spirit of revenge that man has for so many centuries made woman his slave? —Edward Carpenter

The difference was that now each one insisted that he alone was God—he was the One God, the only God, and no one else could play. For within the short millennium or so that separates the forging of Judaism from the birth of Islam, all the world’s major religions made their debut one by one. Immediately each set about the twin tasks of carving out their own community of believers, and annihilating all opposition.

All these systems—Judaism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam—were presented to them as holy, the result of divine inspiration transmitted from a male power to males empowered for this purpose, thereby enshrining maleness itself as power.

Individual patriarchs may indeed wriggle off the charge of woman-hating; the key to the gross inflictions laid on women in their names lies in the nature of the system itself. For a monotheism is not merely a religion—it is a relation of power. Any “One God” idea has a built-in notion of primacy and supremacy; that One God is god above all others and his adherents are supreme over all nonbelievers.

As a power-relation, then, monotheism inevitably creates a hierarchy—of one god over others, of stronger over weaker, of believer over unbeliever. In addition, the new concept of personal relationship between man and his god, since God had chosen to create him in his own image, led to the idea of the Father God as vested in every human patriarch.

Dicotamy

If God was male and woman was not male, then whatever God was, woman was not. St. Augustine spelled it out: “For woman is not the image of God, whereas the man alone is the image of God.” As man stands beneath God in the hierarchy, so the woman, as further removed, comes below him: in practical terms, then, setting every man over every woman, father over mother, husband over wife, brother over sister, grandson over grandmother. In every one of these new systems, God freed man from slavery and took him into partnership for eternity, while women were never even apprenticed to the celestial corporation.

When man made himself God, he made woman less than human.

Within the face woman concealed one of her most potent and treacherous weapons, her tongue. A proverb found in almost all languages nervously insists that “the only good wife is a silent one,” and among the Greeks of Asia Minor, for instance, during many hundreds of years, for a woman “to have a tongue” was held to undermine her chances of a husband. Among Mongolian tribes for over a

In Indian mythology the Vedic goddess Vac means “language”; she personifies the birth of speech, and is represented as a maternal mouth-cavity open to give birth to the living word. The Hindu prayer to Devaki, mother of Krishna, begins, “Goddess of the Logos, Mother of the Gods, One with Creation, thou art Intelligence, the Mother of Science, the Mother of Courage…” In other myths women invent not merely language, but the forms to write it down, as Elise Boulding explains: “Carmenta created a Latin language from the Greek, Medusa gave the alphabet to Hercules, Queen Isis to the Egyptians [while] the priestess-goddess Kali invented the Sanskrit alphabet.”

Pythagoras, for instance, whom every schoolboy knows, was taught by one woman (Aristoclea), married to another, Theano, a leading mathematician and teacher of philosophy when he met her, and influenced by a third, his daughter Dano, who also concerned herself with the question of women’s education.

As to dying, the virgin recluse living a life of quiet contemplation and scholarship had every chance of living for two, three or even four times longer than her married sister; convent records show that nuns very often survived to the age of 80, 90, even 100, while the reality of contemporary childbirth is clearly indicated in the words of Psalm 116, directed for the use of women in labor: “The snares of death compassed me round: and the pains of hell gat hold on me…O Lord I beseech thee, deliver my soul.”

It is one of the ironies of the emergence from the Dark Ages and the world renaissance of learning that, while it freed women from some of the darker fears born of men’s ignorance, it merely served to confirm others. Woman might no longer be stigmatized as a vagabond vulva or captious, capricious, capacious cunt; but she still came forth with all the dignity of one of the favorite freak shows of the Middle Ages, the acephalous monster exposed to public scorn at a fair.

D. H. Lawrence’s pronouncement that “there is no point in work unless it absorbs you / Like an absorbing game”: