Who Cooked the Last Supper Quotes

“Yet some would say, why women's history at all? Surely men and
women have always shared a world, and suffered together all its rights
and wrongs? 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. This grim pattern continues to this day, with women bearing an extra ration of pain and misery whatever the circumstances, as the
sufferings of the women of war-torn Eastern Europe will testify. While
their men fought and died, wholesale and systematic rape—often
accompanied by the same torture and death that the men suffered—
was a fate only women had to endure. Women's history springs from
moments of recognition such as this, and the awareness of the difference is still very new. Only in our time have historians begun to look at the historical experience of men and women separately, and to
acknowledge that for most of our human past, women's interests have been opposed to those of men. Women's interests have been opposed by them, too: men have not willingly extended to women the rights and freedoms they have claimed for themselves. As a result, historical advances have tended to be "men only" affairs. When history concentrates solely on one half of the human race, any alternative truth or reality is lost. Men dominate history because they write it, and their accounts of active, brave, clever or aggressive females constantly tend to sentimentalize, to mythologize or to pull women back to some perceived "norm." As a result, much of the so-called historical record is
simply untrue.”
― Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper: The Women's History of the World

“Florence Nightingale was never called “the Lady with the Lamp,” but “the Lady with the Hammer,” an image deftly readjusted by the war reporter of the Times since it was far too coarse for the folks back home. Far from gliding about the hospital with her lamp aloft, Nightingale earned her nickname through a ferocious attack on a locked storeroom when a military commander refused to give her the medical supplies she needed.”
― Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper?: The Women's History of the World

“Every gain, every success for women is taken to mean that men are being cheated and denigrated. To me it’s healthier to turn the question around. While women were straining every muscle, nerve and bone for the last thirty years, while they labored to remake themselves, their lives and the world, what were twentieth-century men doing all this time? And how long will it take them to join in and support us?”
― Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper?: The Women's History of the World

“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.”
― Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper?: The Women's History of the World

“women are the race itself, the strong primary sex, and man the biological afterthought.”
― Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper?: The Women's History of the World

“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. Individual”
― Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper?: The Women's History of the World

“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”
― Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper?: The Women's History of the World

“Women have always fought not just for survival, but for the meaning of the struggle - now, they are organizing, grouping and pushing forward, not merely for new definitions, but for the right to define.”
― Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper: The Women's History of the World

“Since women are not inferior, they had to be bombarded with a massive literature of religious, social, biological and, more recently, psychological ideology to explain, insist, that women are secondary to men. And to make women believe that they are inferior what better subject for this literature of religious teaching, cautionary folk tales, jokes and customs, than the female body?”
― Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper: The Women's History of the World

“If God was male and woman was not male, then whatever God was, woman was not.”
― Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper: The Women's History of the World

“In all this flurry of false scientism, the central question went unaddressed: if the possession of a penis and outsize brain were the distinguishing marks of the lords of creation, why was the world not rules by whales?”
― Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper: The Women's History of the World

“Every revolution is a revolution of ideas-yet to innovate is not reform.”
― Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper: The Women's History of the World

“All democratic experiments, all revolutions, all demands for equality have so far, in every instance, stopped short of sexual equality. Every society has in its prestige structures a series of subtle, interacting codes of dominance that always, everywhere, finally rank men higher than women. Nowhere has any society successfully dispensed with the age-old sex-role division of labor and the rewards in goods and power that accompany it. Nowhere do women enjoy the rights, privileges and possibilities and leisure time that men do. Everywhere men still mediate between women and power, women and the state, women and freedom, women and themselves.”
― Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper: The Women's History of the World

“As the source and force of life, she was timeless and endless.”
― Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper?: The Women's History of the World

“For there is much to do, amounting in fact to a remaking of modern society. All democratic experiments, all revolutions, all demands for equality have so far, in every instance, stopped short of sexual equality. Every society has in its prestige structures a series of subtle, interacting codes of dominance that always, everywhere, finally rank men higher than women. Nowhere has any society successfully dispensed with the age-old sex-role division of labor and the rewards in goods and power that accompany it. Nowhere do women enjoy the rights, privileges, possibilities and leisure time that men do. Everywhere men still mediate between women and power, women and the state, women and freedom, women and themselves.”
― Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper: The Women's History of the World

“For in the beginning, as humankind emerged from the darkness of prehistory, God was a woman.”
― Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper?: The Women's History of the World

“For, as scientists acknowledge, “women are the race itself, the strong primary sex, and man the biological afterthought.”
― Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper?: The Women's History of the World

“In terms of understanding the patriarchal struggle for control of women's bodies, the issue of blood is a major preoccupation. For not only did women bleed every month, from girlhood for all over their adult lives; every stage of their journey as women, every passage from one state to the next (menarche, defloration, childbirth) was also marked by the flow of blood with its frighteningly ambivalent signal of both life and death. The greater the danger the stronger the taboo. All these "courses" of women's lives have triggered an intricate and often savage set of myths, beliefs and customs in which the containment of cultural fears overrode any personal concern for the female who was ostensibly the cause and center of it all.”
― Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper: The Women's History of the World

“Every revolution in the history of the world, every movement for equality, has stopped short of sexual equality. After thousands of years, this era has made a start on changing that. Let us not rest until all of us are free.”
― Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper?: The Women's History of the World

“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.”
― Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper?: The Women's History of the World

“For women, the life choices (which by in large are made for them by their societies) come down to one of two evils - either the overloaded worker / wife / mother with her double burden, or the underoccupied housewife / drone with her half-life of deprivation and despair.”
― Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper: The Women's History of the World

“Women have had to learn, often painfully and always with reluctance, that their freedom will not simply come of its own accord.”
― Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper: The Women's History of the World

“The atmosphere of uncertainty, dissatisfaction and fear, though caused by larger crisis, becomes associated with the fact that women now have jobs or are no longer in the home as a warm and welcoming presence. Identified then with the bad feelings of change, women came to be seen as the cause of the badness. And not only to men - but to women too, these strains and dissatisfactions, and being made to take responsibility for being the cause of them, often seems too high a price to pay for their new freedoms.”
― Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper: The Women's History of the World

“The rights that women had won through the long century and more of struggle were essentially rights of men. Women had had no option but to batter their way into the age-old fortress of male privilege, and storm the citadel where masculine supremacy still held out.”
― Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper: The Women's History of the World

“The feminist rejection of the low view of women that Christianity had imposed upon so many nations had an important consequence for another of the key issues of the women's rights campaign: the demands for education. The ignorance of women had been bound in with Christian dogma - Eve's sin consisted of reaching out for the tree of knowledge, so her punishment was to be forever deprived of it. Unchallenged for centuries, this attitude produced generations of women doomed to be brought up in mental darkness and then condemned as stupid: "We are educated to the grossest ignorance, and no art omitted to stifle our natural reason," complained Lady Mary Wortley Montagu bitterly in the eighteenth century.”
― Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper: The Women's History of the World

“While there was work to be done, women did it, and behind the vivid foreground activities of popes and kings, wars and discoveries, tyranny and defeat, working women wove the real fabric of the kind of history that has yet to receive its due.”
― Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper: The Women's History of the World

“Now knowledge became the high road to control, and for women the pen had one major advantage over the sword; it fitted neatly into a female fist of any size, age, creed or country in the word.”
― Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper: The Women's History of the World

“Within the face, woman concealed one of her most potent and treacherous weapons, her tongue.”
― Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper: The Women's History of the World

“For women were dangerous in every part of their anatomy, from top to toe. Luxuriant hair could excite lust accordingly the Jewish Talmud from A.D. 600 onward allowed a man to divorce a wife who appeared in public with her hair uncovered. While St Paul went so far as to instruct Christians that a woman who came bare headed to church had better have her head shaved. The female face was another Venus's flytrap for helpless males - in a bizarre piece of theology dated from the 3rd Century A.D., the early Christian father Tertullian held that "the blume of virgins" was responsible for the fall of the angels: "so perilous a face, then, ought to be kept shaded when it has cast stumbling stones even so far as heaven.”
― Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper: The Women's History of the World

“For woman was an "intractable animal" and she displayed her brute unreason nowhere more clearly than in her refusable to acquiesce in her own subjection.”
― Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper: The Women's History of the World