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SECTION
ONE
A REVISED SURVEY OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
CHAPTER 1
THE
BIRTH OF OPPRESSION
.
. . and you forgot the God who gave you birth.
— Deuteronomy
32:18
The God who gave you birth? Hmm. Obviously God is a woman. Yet women were the first private property—the first slaves. To understand this, one must look beyond histories authored by men. In nearly all instances, women have been excluded because of their sex, and many groups of men have been excluded because of class, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual preference, or any number of other reasons. The world needs revised versions of history to emancipate those who are absent from traditional history. As they existed until very recent times, histories of Western civilization are inadequate not only because they leave out so many people, but because they have been written only from positions of advantage.
To dwell on the “woman as victim”
view, however, seems to be a poor answer. When all of us become aware of the
Great Marginalizing of Groups, the first phase—that of anger—can be directed
to productive action.
History's most important pages may be the first one and the last one.
Much in the middle is redundant, predicated on conditions established in
the beginning. And the last pages of
history are important because they are, by definition, the pages we are writing. The
concern of people alive today is that it is our turn to act—to revise the
histories handed to us, to fill the old spaces between the lines with new words.
A revised survey of civilization must start with the history of oppression.
Until about 6000 years ago—that is,
throughout the tens of thousands of years of prehistory—women seem to have experienced equality. Only now are we beginning to restore this condition.
Lerner (1986) observes:
Men
and women live on a stage, on which they act out their assigned roles.... But
the stage set is conceived, painted, defined by men.
Men have written the play, have directed the show, interpreted the
meanings of the action. They have assigned themselves the most interesting, most
heroic parts, giving women the supporting roles.
As the women become aware of the difference in the way they fit into the play,
they ask for more equality in the role assignments. They upstage the men at
times, at other times they pinch-hit for a missing male performer. The women
finally, after considerable struggle, win the right of access to equal role
assignment, but first they must “qualify.”
The terms of their “qualifications” are again set by the men; men are
the judges of how women measure up; men grant or deny admission. They give
preference to docile women and to those who fit their job description
accurately. Men punish, by ridicule, exclusion, or ostracism, any woman who
assumes the right to interpret her own role or—worst of all sins—the right
to rewrite the script.
It takes considerable time for the women to understand that getting “equal”
parts will not make them equal, as long as the script, the props, the stage
setting, and the direction are firmly held by men. When the women begin to
realize that and cluster together between the acts, or even during the
performance, to discuss what to do about it, this play comes to an end.
Looking at the recorded History of society as though it were such a play, we
realize that the story of the performances over thousands of years has been
recorded only by men and told in their words. Their attention has been mostly on
men. Not surprisingly, they have not noticed all the actions women have taken.
Finally, in the past fifty years, some women have acquired the training
necessary for writing the company’s scripts. As they wrote, they began to pay
more attention to what women were doing. Still,
they had been well trained by their male mentors. So they too found what men
were doing on the whole more significant and, in their desire to upgrade the
part of women in the past, they looked hard for women who had done what men did.
Thus, compensatory history was born.
What women must do, what feminists are now doing, is to point to that stage, its
sets, its props, its director, and its scriptwriter, as did the child in the
fairy tale who discovered that the emperor was naked, and say, the basic
inequality between us lies within this framework. And then they must tear it down.
This passage could be rewritten poising capitalists against the working class, Whites against people of Color, gays against straights, and so on. The crosscurrents of prejudice cut in many directions, making unity among oppressed groups difficult to achieve. A clarifying example: In graduate school I taught English to African-American high school students in a program called Upward Bound. One day during a break one of my female students, on the verge of tears, stormed into my classroom.
"I'm going to get a suntan!" she exclaimed. "My skin is too light and the boys are teasing me!"
I
decided to
stop the train. Whenever I observe a need more important than the subject I am assigned to teach, I stop the train.
Today my students
needed to learn that mocking based on skin color was wrong. They needed to learn
about that more than they needed to learn
about objective case pronouns. When class resumed,
I pointed out that this
teasing had hurt someone's feelings, thus dividing them. I asked if this amounted
to borrowing a tactic from bigoted members of the White majority—division
based on skin tone. The thoughtful responses of those who agreed,
counterpoised with the shouting defensiveness of those who did not, made my point clear.
How did prejudicial behavior move from the individual level to the institutional level? Hominids evolved from primates three million years ago and fully developed humans appeared c. 100,000 BCE. Cave art and goddess sculptures emerged at least as early as 50,000 years ago.
Evidence
indicates that much of this first art was produced by women (Mellaart, 1964,
1966, 1967). Women’s life spans were about 30 years. Several pregnancies were
needed to raise two offspring to adulthood; therefore, women spent their
childbearing years either pregnant or nursing. This fact caused them to
gravitate toward types of labor that were compatible with pregnancy. Men,
unencumbered by a child in the womb or at the breast, went out and hunted.
Thus the first division of labor derived from a then-immutable biological
difference—not men’s greater physical strength, but women’s birth-giving
and nursing.
Shortly after the dawn of civilization
and the consequent birth of history, division
of labor by the biological imperative of sex was replaced by a kind that
appeared equally benign—division based
on gender; that is, on cultural inventions based on, but not required by, sex.
Thus it became the woman's task to rear the children. Rearing children, unlike
childbearing and nursing, is done equally well (or badly) by females and males.
Periods of scarcity caused men to shift their hunting skills to skills of war.
Successful warriors rose to prominence and were able to dominate not only
the women of their tribes, but other men as well. The exchange of women,
however, may be the single greatest cause of patriarchy (Levi-Strauss, 1969). It can take the forms of stealing other tribes’ women, ritual
rape, or negotiated marriages. It is always preceded by taboos on endogamy
and—this is essential—the indoctrination of women to accept their lesser
lot, often with the belief that deities have declared it within the natural
order.
Private property developed with the advent of agriculture. In earlier
hunting/gathering societies, men, women, and children engaged in production.
Little need existed for kinship structures or exchanges among groups.
This model gave way to a horticultural model. The unpredictability of the
harvest made people dependent on hunting. The biological vulnerability of women
as child bearers led tribes to procure other tribes’ women. This led to
intertribal warfare, which created a warrior culture. The horticultural model
gave way to the more labor-intensive agricultural model, which created a
heightened demand for child labor, and therefore for women to ‘labor’ as
well. It is the reproductive capacity of women, rather than women themselves,
that was reified. Women rather than men were exchanged because men did not
produce babies directly.
Private property accrued to males through the development of animal husbandry, which led to surpluses of meat, skins, and livestock. Furthermore, early plow agriculture required male strength. Horticultural activities became the male province. Men used their greater leisure time to create artforms, manage the material wealth generated by agricultural surpluses, form bonding rituals, and develop religions, whereas women’s food preparing and child rearing duties were unrelieved.
Neither determinism nor conscious manipulation was at work. Neither men nor
women could have seen the consequences of these changes. Women likely agreed
with them. By the time awareness of the consequences developed, they had
entwined themselves around the axis of culture. The enslavement of men, which
began at a later date, was not useful at this time, since they were not needed
to reproduce.
Visual images antedate written records by at least 50,000 years.
Artifacts generated at civilization's beginnings recorded the origins of
cultural oppression. Therefore we do well to broaden our
art historical paths to include the stories told by these images. These new paths will be wider than paths of
the past, not only to make room for the art forms of marginalized groups, but to
accommodate side paths into every corner of culture. Art has been defined as if
it were isolated. It is not isolated; it crisscrosses every cultural current.
The potential of art, unrealized in our time, is too great to tolerate such
isolation. A primary means to tap this potential is through art education
programs in our schools.
‘Marginalized groups’ consist of anyone who is not a White male, and many
who are. This definition slices through the domains of sex, class, race, and
religion. During my undergraduate years as an art education major in the 1970s,
the bible of art history was Janson’s History
of Art. Janson’s timeline began at
4000 BCE with pre-dynastic Egypt and ended in 1950 CE. Despite its coverage of
this six-millennium span, the text did not mention a female artist in its 616
pages. As recently as the 1981 edition, Janson revealed further dis-Orientation,
including little or no mention of the art of Eastern cultures—despite
advertising claims that the text deals with the art ‘world’.
Janson is not entirely at fault. Part of the reason for these omissions was lack of available scholarship. Informed studies of the arts of Nonwestern cultures, and of the arts of women within Western cultures, have emerged for the most part since the 1960s. Gadon (1989), in The Once and Future Goddess, includes a timeline that records art history's varying levels of gender awareness.
Gadon’s timeline, which uses art exemplars to illustrate her thesis, traces the concept of the goddess from its widespread acceptance in prehistory (e.g., “The Goddess of Willendorf”) to its replacement by the phallo-theocracy of the West (e.g., “Theotokos (The God Bearer)"—the mother of the deity rather than the deity). It ends with the recent re-emergence in the postmodern West of the notion of a female deity .
This portrayal at once describes the history of art and the history of women. To borrow a phrase, “in the beginning” (that is, during the upper Paleolithic—old stone—age as early as 35,000 BCE) artisans depicted their deities as females more often than male. For tens of thousands of years they remained female. Excavation sites in Southeastern Europe alone number over 3000, and have generated 30,000 goddess sculptures in clay, marble, bone, copper, and gold. Few sculptures depicting male deities have been found. These sculptures invariably emphasize breasts, navel, and vulva, and often position the figure in a squatting position, the common birthing position of this region throughout prehistory.
Examples of the
blending of art with daily life are found in prehistoric vulva symbols. Today such objects are
considered objects of ancient art; yet those who produced such artifacts did not
seek out artists—there were no such people to seek out. Rather, they fashioned
the objects themselves—everyone was an ‘artist’. Art was not
compartmentalized. Art competence was acquired by everyone to at least some
degree, simply to fill the needs of life.1
Figures of the goddess and her synecdoche, the vulva, have been found in the
lowest layers of the Çatal Huyuk excavation in Anatolia (now Turkey), dating to
the seventh millennium BCE. The
goddess did not grow a penis until warlike cultures, loosely labeled
Indo-European, conquered most Eurasian civilizations.
God has existed as a male for a comparatively brief time, and may end up
androgynous or asexual: today’s heightened feminist awareness in fields such
as theology and the arts has given new birth to the goddess theme. This is
expressed in the work of a number of twentieth century artists, both male and
female.
Three slow developments caused patriarchy to become institutionalized:
1) Economic changes such as the notion of private property, which in turn led to class stratification;
2) The establishment of religious/political bureaucracies; and
3) The cosmic shift from earth goddesses to sky gods. This process began in the
Ancient Near East at c. 3000 BCE and ended 2500 years later.
The goddess presented as ‘heraldic woman’ (a woman depicted nude with legs
widespread) is pan-cultural, including examples in Romanesque architecture and
traditional Irish imagery. That these images are found in such widely separated
areas as Luristan, Etruria, New Guinea, New Zealand, and Ecuador speaks to the
ubiquity of the female deity.
The earliest known examples of the heraldic
woman are those of Çatal Huyuk, dating from neolithic times, probably the
seventh millennium BCE (Fraser, 1966). Heraldic flanking (the depiction of
worshipful, mirror-imaged figures, one on each side of the goddess) had not yet
appeared. Flanking emerged both in the proto-literate period of the early bronze
age in ancient Mesopotamia and in the coincident pre-dynastic period in Egypt.
Flanking suggests social stratification since the flanking figures are
subordinated to the central one. Social stratification appears to have emerged
with literacy.
At times the displayed goddess is portrayed in parturition. The dilukai
of Micronesia, goddesses displayed with large pudenda, are flanked by subaltern
figures in profile who extend their penises toward her. She represents cosmic
fertility. Dilukai are placed facing
the rising sun, apparently to represent the solar fertilizing of the earth.
Images such as these have been judged ‘inappropriate’ in the West; yet in
Micronesia they are commonplace. The Micronesians make sex open, literally and
figuratively.
Malta, an archipelago off the island of Sicily, is the site of over thirty of
the earliest temples to the goddess, dating from 3500-2500 BCE. They are the
earliest known free-standing roofed stone buildings. Floor plans of the later
temples are arranged in the shape of the female deity, presaging the
cross-shaped floor plans of Christian monuments of worship. Caves dug beneath
the floors symbolized the womb. Pottery remains found in the temples are
decorated with vulva symbols. Maltese goddess culture ended when the archipelago
was invaded by mainland people with copper daggers and obsidian arrowheads. Gadon writes of the provocative discovery that seldom in excavation
sites of neolithic goddess cultures is found any sign of warfare.
She draws a relationship between goddess religion and peaceful existence.
Apparently neolithic goddess culture was not matriarchal, but
gender-egalitarian.
Silbury, England, is the site of a monument to prehistoric goddess worship. Less widely known than Stonehenge, the Silbury henge includes one of England’s tallest artificial hills and largest prehistoric tombs. The Silbury henge was the gathering place for a seasonal round of festivals celebrating the major events in the goddess’s life—puberty, marriage, childbirth, and death. The earth itself was sculpted into the image of the goddess giving birth. The human-made hill symbolized her womb. This earth sculpture depicts the goddess birthing in a squatting position. Images of the female giving birth in this manner have been found at nearly all Neolithic sites as well as throughout North and South America and in Pacific island cultures. This birthing position, which compresses the sides of the abdomen and makes use of gravity, prevailed until the male-dominated medical establishment in the eighteenth century replaced midwives and promptly moved birthing mothers into supine positions for the convenience of physicians.
To follow the birth of oppression, we look back twelve thousand years. As the ice age ended, farming began to replace hunting and the
Neolithic,
or new stone, age began. Nomadic lifestyles were replaced with the stationary
one of the village. In planting their seeds of grain, these humans planted the
seeds of Western culture. The rise of ‘civilization’ refers to the process
within which these scattered Neolithic villages became agricultural communities, then
urban centers, and finally archaic states. Visual and verbal records reveal that
these states were characterized by social classes, commodity production, distant
trade, military elitism, monarchy, slavery, and patriarchal families. In the ancient near east, these early states also saw female
subordination codified into law, prostitution established, women excluded from
certain kinds of work, the dominance of male gods over female deities, and myths
of human origin which taught male ascendancy.
By
8000 BCE, the transition to an agrarian lifestyle was complete. A trade economy
of private ownership developed, based on husbandry and goods such as pottery,
metalwork, and woven fabric. As humans looked to the earth for sustenance, the
definition of the goddess as cosmic mother spread, and artifacts depicting her became common. However, as animal husbandry spread in Sumerian and
Akkadian cultures, the male role in reproduction acquired greater status. The
female deity still created the universe, but now her male consort played a decisive
role.
The development of private property from agricultural surpluses led to trade economies, which led to systems of numerical notation, which in turn led to writing. Writing with grammatical elements appeared in Sumer shortly after 3000 BCE.
The advent of writing created the need to teach literacy. This was denied to women. By the beginning of the first millennium BCE, women were excluded from all forms of institutionalized formal education. Pantheons of deities of both sexes became well established; however, the development of writing, and hence of recorded history, shifted thought from the observable to the abstract. The symbolic act of ‘naming’ became linked with immortality.
The consequences of naming were enormous. One result was the shift of creation away from the birthing act of women and toward the symbolic act of naming—a task men could perform. This led to the concept of a ‘creative spirit of the universe’, a concept that conflated anthropomorphic gods and goddesses into one spirit god. The emergence of military power and kingship rather than queenship led men to reach for a male god. During the third millennium BCE, the deity segued from dominance by a Creator goddess to dominance by her consort/son, then to the son's emergence into a Creator god, and then to his reign over a pantheon of gods and goddesses. For example, by 2400 BCE in the city-state of Nippur, the hierarchy had become An (god of heaven), Enlil (god of the air), Ninhursag (queen of the mountains), and Enki (lord of the earth). The earth was associated with baseness, and the goddess had been reduced to a queen. Four hundred years later, Ninhursag had traded places with Enki. During the next millennium, this model gave way to the monotheistic god of Western faith who made the earth his pied-a-terre, preferring the more upscale real estate of the kingdom of heaven.
Frederick Engels’ (1972) Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State describes "the world historic defeat of the female sex” as a result of the development of private property. During the tens of thousands of years prior to this development, humans banded together in classless, socialistic bands. The development of private property was followed by the desire to keep this property within familial lines; hence, these community-based groups shifted to a family base. The unequal distribution of private property led to class divisions and eventually to archaic ‘states’. To monitor their lineage in this complex new structure, men sought virgin brides and chaste wives. This limited women to private, home-bound service and created a market for prostitution. In essence the wife had become head servant.
Monogamous
marriage produced the most insidious of class struggles—dominance
over the woman by the man. This dominance is encoded in humanity's earliest
laws. It was assured by: 1) force, 2) economic dependence on husbands, 3) privileges bestowed on
cooperative women, and 4) the
division of women into respectable and non-respectable categories.
Levi-Strauss
(1969) suggests that the incest taboo forms the root of social organization. It only ostensibly
prohibits marriage with the mother,
sister, or daughter on moral grounds; its purpose is to oblige the mother, sister, or
daughter to be given to others. He describes it as “the supreme rule of the
gift.’ The intertribal trading of women was necessary to avoid war, and women’s reproductive capacity
provided the grounds for their exchange. This is how women became the first private property.
Women
also were the first slaves. No record exists of slavery occurring in
hunting/gathering social structures. It appears with the rise of agriculture, private
property, and formation of states. Sources of slavery include capture in war,
punishment for crime, sale by family, and self-sale for payment of debt.
Civilization in its earliest forms rested on slavery. To
accept it, the enslaving group had to convince itself that slavery was moral. This was done by
believing the enslaved deserved their enslavement because they were different
from their owners.
This is most easily done when the enslaved are different in an easily identified
way such as sex or skin color.
Likewise, the enslaved had to be convinced to accept their status.
The subordination of women led to their enslavement. The transition was smoothed by commodifying their reproductive potential. During civilization’s nascence, for a period lasting centuries, male captives, posing a continuing threat to their captors, were killed, mutilated or exiled. Women and children were enslaved.
Why did women
endure this? With the welfare of their children threatened, their men
eliminated, and their homes destroyed, women became dependent on their captors.
When subjected to rape, women sometimes become pregnant and, again to ensure the
welfare of their children, they endured slavery. Lerner contends, “Patriarchy
is a historic creation formed by men and women.... The system of patriarchy can
function only with the cooperation of women.” This cooperation is obtained
through a number of means: by indoctrinating women that their oppression is
‘the will of God’ and therefore a privilege that will yield a heavenly
reward, by denying women educations that give access to property acquisition, by
constructing a history that omits women, by pitting women against themselves
through the creation of competing categories,
by legislative fiat, and by
outright punishment. Under
conditions of oppression, the rational choice for women is to link themselves
with male protectors for their children and themselves.
So long as women offer sexual, economic, political, and intellectual
subordination to men, they are permitted to share the power of men of their
class to exploit men and women of lower classes.
Of
all oppressed groups, only women permeate every social class. People who have some power, however circumscribed,
may not see themselves as
oppressed. This is why theoretical formulations appropriate to other oppressed
groups are inadequate in explaining the oppression of women. Slaves, for
example, can clearly see the difference between their relationships with each other and their
relationships with their
masters. They often share a common prior culture, the one they or their
ancestors enjoyed before bondage. Women have had no such tradition. They have
been told they have no history. Ultimately, men’s control over cultural
symbols has been the most decisive weapon of women’s oppression.
Perched on the tripartite construct of Greek philosophy,
Judeo-Christian-Islamic mythologies, and the Western legal tradition, men
have defined the cosmos.
Gradually
men’s class positions became defined by their relationships to private
property and means of production. The class position of women became defined by
their sexual relationships to men. At the bottom were slave women, whose
sexuality was commodified; next were concubines, whose upward mobility was based
on their sexual performance; and then wives, whose sexual service entitled them to
certain legal rights. A handful of women surpassed the status of wife, usually
by maintaining their virginity within the priestesshood.
The Sumerians developed cuneiform, a pictographic method of writing that coincided with Egyptian hieroglyphics. This ‘picture writing’ and their art document their worship of Inanna, a deity who evolved from the prehistoric goddess. Inanna failed to survive the invasions of male sky gods. Under the ethos of patriarchy, her power became separated from reverence for the earth and ultimately was replaced with contempt for it. At this time intertribal warfare over control of land and goods made its first appearance, making clear that patriarchy and private property can make violent bedfellows. This point was further borne out in the twentieth century when governments run only by males perched humanity on the precipice of a nuclear armageddon. The United States actually plunged over it, including its militarily needless bombing of Nagasaki, Japan, one of the greatest of all crimes against humanity.
Three important law codes emerged in the Ancient Near East: the Codex Hammurabi (engraved on a stele of diorite c. 1750 BCE),
the Middle Assyrian and Hittite Laws (dating from the fifteenth to the eleventh
centuries BCE), and Biblical Covenant law (recorded in the late ninth and early
eighth centuries BCE). They are conceptually
consistent
regarding private
property, the duties of debtors, the control of slaves, and the regulating of
women’s sexual behavior. The lex talionis—the view that a crime must exact an identical
punishment, i.e., an eye for an eye, a
tooth for a tooth—is found throughout. A theme consistent from then to now is that a man’s status is determined by his economic relations and a
woman’s by her sexual relations.
Inanna legend tells of the goddess traveling to the underworld to discover the mysteries of death. The underworld to goddess cultures was the primal womb, the source of life, a place of reverence. Theo-phallic cultures redefined it as hell, an evil place where those who displease God are tormented. Inanna’s early symbol, the tree, was replaced by the throne, which symbolized the felling of the tree and its subjection to the carpenter’s tools. The emphasis on control that characterizes Western religion is manifested in later Inanna worship—nature is ‘tamed’ by humans, and the earth encases hell. This view forms the bedrock of today's environmental unawareness and provides context to the 1982 observation of James Watt, Secretary of the Interior under Ronald Reagan, that we could deplete the earth’s resources at will since Jesus was coming soon.
The Sumerians also transformed the marriage ritual from its original conception
as a symbol of new life into a legalized surrender of female power. In late
Sumerian legend, Inanna transfers her supernatural powers to the god Dumuzi when
she marries him.
Lilith,
a bird-woman deity, exemplifies the new view of women that developed in Sumerian
society. According to late Hebrew legend, she appeared as Adam’s intended
wife, but insisted on equality with him. Unwilling to let him lie above her, she
chose not to mate with him and ran away. Forever banned from human
relationships, she resurfaced in medieval Judaic legends as a nymphomaniacal
demon. Lilith represents one of the first depictions of female sexuality as
evil. The Neolithic bird goddess who created the world, helped women in
childbirth, and nursed infants had, in medieval Judaism, become a pernicious
nymphet who caused children to die in their sleep. The paradigm shift was
complete.
Goody (1976), in an exhaustive study of world marriage models, found that Eurasian societies based on plow agriculture, division of labor, and social stratification developed patriarchal monogamous marriages, homogamy (marriage within one’s class), and emphasis on women’s premarital chastity. The aphorism that prostitution is “the world’s oldest profession” suggests that it resulted logically from early social formations that disempowered women. The continuing presence of prostitution makes clear that thousands of years later these formations remain intact.
In fact, however, prostitution is not culturally universal. In sexually permissive
societies it occurs rarely because it is not necessary. In sexually restrictive
societies, it can be suppressed to a degree of near nonexistence. Promiscuity
was a natural human activity widely practiced by prehistoric peoples, and
prostitution became a substitute for this promiscuity when culture curtailed it
(Bachofen, 1861; Bloch, 1912; Morgan, 1963).
Engels (1972) adds:
Surrender
for money was at first a religious act; it took place in the temple of the
goddess of love, and the money originally went into the temple treasury . . . . With
the rise of the inequality of property . . . wage labor appears sporadically side by
side with slave labor, and . . . the professional prostitution of
free women side by side with the forced surrender of the slave.
Cultic
sexual service (as distinguished from prostitution) by both men and women
probably dates back to Neolithic times and the various cults of the goddess. The
ubiquity of small goddess sculptures, and the fact that they often have been
found in shrine-like settings, are the best evidence of this. This inference is
supported by ample artistic and written evidence of the sexual
worship of goddesses in Ancient Mesopotamia in the neo-Babylonian period.
Fertility was regarded as sacred. The offering of sexual services was a form of
worship. To meet this need, a class of temple hierodules evolved. A separate,
lower class of commercial prostitutes also existed outside the temple.
This class was associated with the temple only logistically; human
traffic was heavy in these locations. The dual emergence of hierodules and
commercial prostitutes makes it unlikely that commercial
prostitution grew out of temple prostitution.
In
the Sumerian and Old Babylonian periods, the high priestesses of Innana and
Ishtar, respectively, were the daughters of kings and other high-ranking rulers.
They participated in the ritual of the Sacred Marriage, on which, it was
believed, depended the fertility of the land and the people. The ritual was widely performed for nearly two
thousand years, reaching to pre-Christian Rome.
Men
who owned means of production dominated men who did not.
The status of women was determined by sexual ties—those with ties to
one man were “respectable”; those with ties to many men (for example,
prostitutes) or to no man (for example, non-clerical celibates or lesbians) were
not. In the neo-Babylonian period, the distinction between sacred sexual ritual
and commercial prostitution began to blur. To receive a portion of the proceeds,
priests may have begun to organize the commercial prostitution that occurred in
the area outside the temple. They also may have engaged their slaves in
commercial prostitution, keeping the proceeds or giving them to the temple. By
the mid-first millennium BCE, both kinds of sexual activities had become commonplace.
One
of the earliest lists of women’s professions of the Old Babylonian period, c.
2400 BCE, includes prostitute, doctor, scribe, barber, and cook.
(Under men’s professions—in this case connected with the cult of
Ishtar—was listed transvestite knife-throwing acts. Now
there’s a show you would hate to have missed.
As
the virginity of upper class daughters became a financial asset, commercial
prostitution became economically necessary. The need arose to distinguish
between ‘respectable’ and ‘nonrespectable’ women. This matter was
legislated under the Middle Assyrian Law, which dictated the veiling of the
wives, widows, and daughters of free men, and concubines when accompanying their
masters or mistresses. Unmarried prostitutes (sacred as well as commercial),
unaccompanied concubines, and slaves were denied the veil.
The law cut across lines of class and bondage—free prostitutes,
including hierodules, were given subaltern status with slaves, while
accompanied concubines were granted the veil. The distinction turned on the
nature of women’s sexual relationships with men. Women under one man’s
sexual control were veiled, hence respectable; others were ‘public women’,
and unveiled. Penalties for violating the law were harsh, and applied with equal
harshness to men who failed to report women who violated the law.
Such legislation is a measure of the degree to which patriarchy had
become perceived as part of the natural order. Judging from the similarity of punishments, a veiled
prostitute was considered as threatening to society as was a mutinous soldier. The dividing
of women into dominant and subservient groups has continued
to the present (often with the enthusiastic cooperation of women in the dominant
groups), and has proved an effective obstacle to the formation of
feminist consciousness.
Another
obstacle has been the ‘Biblical basis’ for phallo-theism. The prehistoric
goddess was earth-centered, but to call her an ‘earth goddess’ is
inaccurate. She represented the
cosmos. She affirmed the body and spiritualized the erotic. The word religion conjures up the Western monotheistic faiths, all of which
are ‘revealed’ traditions. Casual scholars and fundamentalists, using the
Bible as their hypostasis, claim that the ancient
Hebrews believed in a male Yahweh. In fact, God is given male and female characteristics throughout the
Bible. For example, Deuteronomy 32:18 reads, “You were unmindful of the Rock
that begot you and you forgot the God who gave you birth.” (I used the latter
part of this quotation as the subhead to this chapter. In eight words it says
what I am taking over two dozen pages to explicate.) In Isaiah 42:14,
Yahweh cries, “...now I will cry out like a woman in travail, I will gasp and
pant.” Isaiah 66:8-9 describes
God’s creation of the earth and Zion as acts of birth: “Shall a land be born
in one day? Shall a nation be
brought forth in one moment?..... Shall I bring to the birth and not cause to bring forth? says the Lord;
Shall I, who cause to bring forth, shut the womb? says your God.” Verse
13 continues, “As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you; you
shall be comforted in Jerusalem.” Job 38:28-29 continues the depiction of God
as a woman: “From whose womb did the ice come forth, and who has given birth
to the hoarfrost of heaven?” The Judaic god is neither a ‘he’ nor a
‘she’—the Judaic god is an ‘it’.
Judaism began with the Covenant between Yahweh and Abram. This grand stroke raised deity-ordained sexism, racism, economic oppression, and class discrimination in the West to unprecedented positions, matched only arguably by Christianity and Islam. Yahweh accepted the Israelites as his Chosen People, a public relations disaster that, by introducing divine racism and class discrimination to the world, has exacted an unspeakable price on the Jewish people. So long as the Israelites worshipped only him, the deal went, then he would abundantly provide for them, including sending them off to pillage their neighbors. Thus God begat economic oppression, bloodshed and war.
In Genesis 15:4, God reverses
male/female reproductive biology by telling Abram, “He that shall come forth
out of thine own bowels shall be thine heir.” God further transfers
procreativity to Abram through use of the word ‘seed’: He asks Abram to
count the stars and assures him “So shall thy seed be” (15:5), and “Unto
thy seed I have given this land” (15:18). Sarah, otherwise ignored within the Covenant, is described as the bearer
of Abraham’s ‘seed’. Here God gives divine sanction to patriarchy,
foreshadowing the Roman law of paterfamilias.
Four hundred years after the Covenant with Abram (renamed Abraham to
denote his divine linkage), monotheism was formalized with Moses and the
Decalogue. The Book of Genesis portrays women’s sexuality as valuable only
through its reproductive capacity within patriarchy, and
women’s inclusion in the Covenant only through the mediation of men. It
signals the demise of the Mother-Goddess and the ascension of God the Father.
Hebrew men, like the men in other Mesopotamian societies, had a high degree of
sexual freedom. Women, on the other hand, were to be virgins at the point of marriage, and
to be faithful to their husbands thereafter. Men could divorce; women could not.
The institutionalizing of a sexual double standard occurred through the legal
codifying of sexual behaviors. By extending the term ‘man’ to subsume
‘woman’, men constructed a monumental phallus-y. As long as the universe
was perceived as revolving around the earth, it was understood only
incompletely, and as long as half of humanity is perceived as revolving around
the other half, it can be understood only incompletely.
The Bible, which in concert with the artistic record, documents the birth of oppression, combines poetry and prose, some mythical and some folkloric, borrowed from earlier Sumero-Babylonian, Canaanite, and Egyptian cultural materials, and adapted by its writers and redactors. Practices, laws, and customs of the Hebrews and their neighbors are reflected in the narrative as well. The book of Genesis was written over 400 years in three independent phases, all of which drew on older traditions. The earliest, the J phase, emerged from tenth century Judah; the second, the E phase, was developed in Israel; and the third, the P phase, which drew on the J and E phases, was finalized in the seventh century. By the time of its writing, the deity was no longer allied with any female goddess. Oddly enough, there was no longer any maternal source for the Creation.
The J version of the Creation occurs in Genesis 2:18-25. It describes God as creating Eve out of Adam’s rib The later P version occurs in 1:27-29. It states, “male and female created he them.” The P version parallels the Mesopotamian Enuma Elish creation story in details and order of events, which could explain the equal status of the man’s and woman’s creation.
The
Hebrew ‘ha-adam’, meaning
humankind, later became ‘Adam’, based on androcentric assumptions.
Sources of the story include Sumerian elements such as the eating of the
forbidden fruit, the tree of life, and the Great Flood. The Garden of Eden
parallels the Sumerian Garden of Creation, which also was bordered by four great
rivers. According to the Sumerian myth, the Goddess Ninhursag grew eight plants
in the garden, but forbade the gods to eat from them.
When the water-god Enki disobeyed, Ninhursag condemned him to die by
afflicting eight of his organs. The Fox appealed on Enki’s behalf, and the
Goddess acquiesced. She created a
healing deity for each organ. For the rib she created the goddess Ninti. In
Sumerian the word ‘Ninti’ means both ‘female ruler of the rib’ and
‘female ruler of life’. In Hebrew the word ‘Hawwa’ (Eve) means ‘she
who creates life’. This suggests a fusion of the Sumerian Ninti and the
Biblical Eve. The choice of
Adam’s rib as the site of Eve’s creation may reflect the incorporation of
the Sumerian legend.
Israel
existed about 200 years, ending in 722 BCE when Assyrians under Sargon II
captured Samaria, the capital, and deported the population.
Intolerance of other gods was introduced into Judaism by the prophets
Hosea, Amos, and Isaiah. Hosea
offered the metaphor of Israel as the bride of Yahweh. Prophets described
Israel’s sin as “whoring,” for which there is no equivalent male term.
This established a patriarchal sexual metaphor
within religion. Judah lasted until
586 BCE when it was subdued by Babylonians, who destroyed Jerusalem, razed the
temple, and deported the population. This marked the end of Judaic political
institutions. During the Diaspora the Jewish people have resisted absorption through tenacious,
often heroic, adherence to their cultural and religious practices.
A philology of Genesis 2-3, the account of Adam and Eve, (described by
Trible, 1985, as “a love story gone awry”) places women in an egalitarian
relationship with men. Traditional interpretations of the text proclaim male
domination of women as the will of God. This reading has become so canonized
that the cascade of misogyny emerging from it goes unchallenged by those who
abhor it as much as by those who embrace it:
A
male God created man first and woman second—first meaning superior and last meaning subordinate.
Woman
was created so that man would not be lonely.
Contrary
to the natural process, woman emerged from man’s body.
Man
named woman.
Man
left his father’s family to set up another patriarchal unit.
Woman—untrustworthy,
gullible, simpleminded—tempted man to disobey and thus was responsible for sin
in the world.
According
to the original Hebrew account, the first human was neither male nor female. The
Hebrew term for the first human, Ha-adam,
is sex-neutral. Sexual bifurcation
was not created until Ha-adam was
differentiated into Adam and Eve. God concluded that this androgynous progenitor
of humankind needed a companion. The
Hebrew ezer, a term referring to the
woman, was mistranslated to mean ‘helper’, signifying lower status than the
more accurate ‘companion’. In
fact, the Hebrew definition of ezer hardly
denotes secondary status; God is described as ezer
to Israel. Whereas the god of Western religion explicitly gave the human
dominion (in the sense of ‘stewardship’ rather than ‘domination’; cf.
Trible) over animals through the power of naming them, and over the plant world with the
phrase “to till and to keep” (2:15), no parallel statement of dominion was
given for either the newly made male or female:
And
God said:
“Let
us make humankind in our image, after our likeness;
and
let them have dominion
over
the fish of the sea,
over
the birds of the heavens,
over
the domestic animals,
over
all the earth,
and
over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”
(Genesis
1:26)
Only
after the ‘surgery’ did the human refer to itself as ‘man’, (introducing
the Hebrew term is), and to the
companion as ‘woman’ (issa).
Henceforth the term Ha-adam was used
in this new meaning—the name for the male. Although in 2:22 the story introduces the woman first, they are created
simultaneously. Ha-adam, created from
the earth, was given dominion over it. One
might extrapolate from this that issa,
created from the rib of Ha-adam, might
have dominion over him in his new male identity. God issues no such command,
however, and placement of the event in context indicates that their relationship
is one of equality.
When
the woman eats the forbidden fruit, the story is careful to specify that the man
is with her (immah). Yet this
prototype of patriarchy is not the leader; in fact he is silent. The story does
not say she tempted him, and its failure to say she did not does not hardly
justifies the inference that she did.
The linguistic power politics behind the translation of the Creation myth
facilitated the shift to patriarchy to transpire. This translation reads
that one male god created all things, not out of his body, but out of
nothing—he proclaimed, rather than gestated, the universe. He created it once
and for all, rather than through the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. He
created man first, in his own image, and ordered man not to live in harmony with
the earth, but to dominate it. So
that man would not be lonely, he created woman—from man’s rib. This female
creature tempted man to sin. The snake—once an honored symbol in the art of
the goddess—became a symbol of evil. When
man and woman bit the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil, they perceived their
bodies as base and contemptible. In shame, they covered themselves with fig
leaves. God, outraged at man’s and woman’s desire to acquire knowledge,
cursed their home, the earth. It would be covered with thistles. Man would toil
by the sweat of his brow. Woman would give birth in pain. The equal
relationships of man with woman, and human with nature, were replaced by models
of domination and subordination. By
demanding love, God created fear.
Male circumcision marks the covenant between Hebraic males
and their God. This symbolic reference to male fertility displaces the cultural
focus on the life-bearing function of the female, as well as removing the female
herself from the covenant. Even today, orthodox Jewish males thank Yahweh that
they are not born goy, slave, or
woman. However, pantheism, including goddess worship, was widely practiced by
the Hebrews until as recently as the Babylonian exile in the sixth century BCE.
Conversely, no evidence has been uncovered which corroborates the Israelite
exodus from Egypt, the sojourn in the Sinai desert, or other tales of the
patriarchs. Much of the Torah was written later than the artifacts which
document widespread Hebrew worship of the Canaanite earth goddess Asherah and
her son Baal. Asherah, whose symbol
was a tree or pillar, is mentioned over forty times in the Hebrew bible. This
number of references, combined with the fact that almost every mention is
negative, demonstrates that she was a theological force that threatened the
Torah's revisionist authors.
Asherah seems to have been a blend of patriarchy and matriarchy: she was transformed into a masculinized version of the goddess of life and death—a supernatural sylph, a goddess of both life and war. The greatest purge of Asherah worship occurred under the reign of Josiah in the seventh century BCE. Influenced by Jerusalem priests who were losing tithes to Asherah, Josiah ordered the annihilation of the non-Hebrew peoples of Canaan and the destruction of every remnant of Asherah worship.
Deuteronomy 16: 21-22 reads, “You shall not plant for
yourself an Asherah, any tree, beside the altar of Yahweh your god.... Neither
shall you set up a pillar, which Yahweh your god hates.” Yet documentation
from Judea written three hundred years earlier refers to Asherah as Yahweh’s consort.
Apparently, over three centuries the heated romance between Yahweh and
Asherah had cooled.
The fact that such myths were written by ancient power-holders causes one to
hesitate in assuming that they were popularly accepted. They may have been more prescriptive than descriptive, which would explain the
increase of goddess shrines until the middle ages.
The apogee of goddess culture occurred between c. 3000-1500 BCE on the
Mediterranean island of Crete. The goddess permeated Cretan
culture. Brightly colored paintings on the walls of temples celebrated
sexuality and the human body. The
joyous, opulent, and sophisticated qualities of Cretan art were unprecedented.
Art was found everywhere and enjoyed at all levels of culture. The genius of this
civilization lay in its ability to combine its simple worship of the goddess
with a refined artistic sensibility. Art education as we
understand it today would have seemed curious to the people of Crete, who
developed their artistic sense by making it part of daily life. After
flourishing for 1500 years, the peaceful culture of Minoan Crete succumbed to
pantheistic Greek invaders and became absorbed into that culture.
By
1500 BCE, the multi-millennial evolution of theo-phallic belief had reached
maturity in the ancient Near East and Europe. Warlike
Indo-European groups had conquered the last of the Neolithic worshippers of the
goddess. This clash of cultures
initially resulted in a fracturing of both god and goddess into multiple
personalities manifested, for example, in the Greco-Roman pantheons. However,
religious artifacts document the gradual transition from pantheism and goddess
worship to patriarchal monotheism, a transition well under way by the time of
the Hebrew bible. The art record also shows that, despite this development,
goddess worship continued for several centuries, even as patriarchy undermined
and commodified the roles of women. In
total, goddess worship flourished for tens of thousands of years, from its
clouded origins among Paleolithic peoples to its documented practice in early
Christian times. It then began a 1500-year period of dormancy, reemerging in
nineteenth century romantic mysticism. Even the worst example of misogyny in
history—the witch hunts of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries that tortured
or killed people, mostly women, for engaging in practices akin to
goddess worship—did not obliterate it.
Written
by the victors, history portrayed the goddess way of life as 'of the devil’.
Women, linked to the goddess by gender, were redefined as base and weak. This transition was more than cosmic transsexual surgery; it imposed a
new list of truisms that was adopted by both religious and secular
authorities:
A
male god created the world.
Man
has the right to dominate woman.
Humans
have the right to dominate nature.
Au
contraire, as we say in Texas.
Fondness for recording history tailored to one’s theology was widespread
throughout the ancient world. It is not surprising that the archaeological
record of the Hebrews conflicts
with the Torah. The fact that many sections of the Bible
are borrowings from other cultures was inevitable, given that the Bible was
created at the crossroads of the ancient world and that the Hebrews were a
cosmopolitan people. The Old
Testament is more a national than a religious literature (Wolfe, 1992). It is a source
encyclopedia of the cultures of the Ancient Near East. It was canonized based on
language more than any other standard. Only books written in Hebrew were
admitted. The proliferation of documents written in Greek were excluded,
ostensibly because God, not speaking Greek, could not have dictated them. (Speaking in tongues indeed.) This observation explains the
antireligious qualities of some of its books. Ecclesiastes is a cynic’s anthem
(“Futility of futilities, everything is futile.”). The book of Esther has
nothing to do with God or religion. Likewise,
the Song of Solomon never mentions the name of God, which is understandable
given the Hebrews’ belief that sex was evil; the name of God would have
blended awkwardly with the passionate poetry of the Song. In contrast, the New
Testament is religious literature. Early Christians considered the Old Testament
their Bible. The New Testament was added in portions as an appendix and grew
over four centuries into its canonized form.
Both
the Old and New Testaments are assumed by some to be ‘the word of God’.
Let us hope that many of the deeds and attitudes attributed to God on its
pages are false. One presumes that God did not actually call out two she-bears
to mutilate or kill forty-two children because they had called Elijah “bald
head.” Likewise, one
presumes that God did not actually command Joshua to lead the Hebrews to conquer
Palestine by killing every man, woman, and child they encountered. These and
other examples reflect the willingness of Israel’s early leaders to ascribe to
God their own bloodlust. The
Bible is not the word of God; it is the word of certain people about God.
The
view that the Bible is infallible reflects careless scrutiny indeed.
A comparison of the books of Isaiah
and Ezekiel is telling, with Isaiah’s spirituality the more
profound. Hosea compared to Haggai also reveals two different planes, with Hosea
achieving a heightened state of religious comprehension while Haggai never rises
above mere ritual. Amos calls for democratic justice, whereas Obadiah is filled
with xenophobia. And most would agree that Corinthians 1:13 is a better
‘read’ than anything in Leviticus, or that the biblical bon mots of the Sermon on the Mount beat either book of Chronicles.
‘Saved’
individuals who claim to ‘live by the Bible’ perhaps claim more than they
realize. Such a claim reflects lack
of knowledge of the text. In the
Garden of Eden story, as well as in Psalm 51:5 and the writings attributed to
Paul, humans are depraved, worms of the dust, and vile sinners. In Genesis 1,
Psalm 8, and the teachings attributed to Jesus, humans are children of God only
slightly lower than deities. A
theme that runs through the Old Testament is the assertion that the Hebrews were
God’s chosen people; yet Amos and Jonah suggest that God does not choose pets
among nations.
The
god Yahweh (or the mistranslated Jehovah) was the god of the Midianites.
Discovered by Moses, Yahweh was introduced to the Hebrews at Mount Sinai and
became the God of Israel. When the relatively small group of Moses’
followers entered Canaan c. 1200 BCE (at this point led by Joshua), they waged
war in the name of Yahweh, conquering surrounding tribes. The ‘clear’
preference of the Hebrews for worshipping Yahweh rather than the pantheon of the
Canaanites, however, is not supported (Grant, 1984).
A
thesis of the Torah, as well as the New Testament and the Koran, is that a deity that lives in the heavens is superior to
an earth-centered
deity. In fact, the goddess as originally conceived was not an earth deity, but
one who united the earthly and
the cosmic. It is in her diminished identity within the framework of phallo-theocracy that she became identified only with the earth. The prehistoric
deity was deemed female because women, like the earth, brought forth life.
A deity’s phallus makes an effective tool for scratching a line in the cultural sand (presumably a deity's will be long enough to reach) and inviting only the ‘haves’—those similarly endowed—to cross it. The incongruity of ascribing the male sex to a creator god that brings forth life—the province of the female—exposes the opportunism behind it. The patriarchal foundation of Judaism is reborn in its son and grandson, Christianity and Islam. In the case of Christianity, one would presume that when this creator does bring his only begotten child into the world, at least it will be female. When it too is ‘revealed’ as male, what is also revealed is the patriarchal overkill of the Abrahamic faith tradition. It was only reinforced when the Islamic prophet Mohammed mistook his penis for a scimitar. A culture accepting such a system creates a cosmically-ordained, gender-based hierarchy. Embedded within culture by the passage of time, such a hierarchy becomes perceived as natural. This perception tacitly encourages both male and female adherents to denigrate females with the rationale that they are a god-ordained subspecies. Given such insatiable need for control, none of these male-led religions stops there. Each is quick to denigrate—and often bear arms against—the other two. “If you don’t belong to our club, God won’t let you into his clubhouse,” they bellow in ironic unison.
I close this chapter
by glancing toward India, whose Hindus
worship an uncountable pantheon of gods and goddesses. The presence of female deities in a culture seems to make a difference.
Gadon’s (1989) description of a year she spent in Calcutta starkly contrasts
with her experience in the West:
I
could not say just how, and surely not why, but being in a culture so utterly
different from my own, in which the feminine was celebrated everywhere in
sensuous images of great power, both human and divine, was profoundly
unsettling.
[In
India I] experienced myself as sexual, sacred, and powerful in a way no modern
woman in the West can. Our psychological being has been severed from our
biological selves for so long that we are completely cut off from our true
natures. Because I was in touch with this strength, with the celebration and
fullness of my being for even so limited a time, I could never return to my old
ways of seeing the world. When I
left India and returned to the United States, there was a radical rupture in the
fabric of my being. My erotic self, the deep life force within, had been
activated and there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle.