The Women’s History of the World. Rosalind Miles

text, The Institutes of Mana from around A.D. 100, makes plain: ‘The woman is considered in law as the field and the man as the grain.’ Where the Goddess had been the only source of life, now woman had neither seed nor egg; she was the passive field, only fertile if ploughed, while man, drunk with the power of his new-found phallocentricity, was plough, seed, grain-chute and ovipositor all in one.

      As planned husbandry and domestication of land replaced casual cultivation, the more the role of the male strengthened and centralized. Paradoxically, this was also true of those groups who failed to produce enough from the land to live on. For those tribes, any shortage or failure of crops brought enforced migration, which also necessarily involved warfare, as groups already established on fertile territory banded together to resist the invaders.¹⁸ Both in the group’s nomadic wanderings and in any fighting which resulted, men had the advantage, as they had superior muscle power and mobility, over women encumbered with children. All women’s earlier hard-won skills of cultivation became useless when the tribe was on the move. Meanwhile, men driven by the darker side of phallicism seized the upper hand through aggression and military organization. As these clashes of force inevitably produced dominant and submissive groups, winners and losers, determining rank, slavery and subjection, it was not possible for women to escape from this framework. Caught between the violence of ploughshare and sword, women had to lose.

      There could be only one outcome. However, wherever, and whenever it came in the millennia immediately before the birth of Christ, all the mythologies speak of the overthrow of the Great Mother Goddess. In the simplest version of the story, like that of the Semitic Babylonians, the god-king Marduk wages war on Ti’amat, the Mother of All Things, and hacks her to pieces. Only after her death can he form the world, from the pieces of her body, as it rightfully should be. This motif is astonishingly consistent through a number of widely separated cultures, as witness this Tiwi creation myth from central Africa:

      Puvi made the country the first time. The sea was all fresh water. She made the land, sea and islands . . . Puriti said, ‘Don’t kill our mother.’ But Iriti went ahead and killed her. He struck her on the head. Her urine made the sea salty and her spirit went into the sky . . .¹⁹

      In other versions of the story, the Great Goddess is defeated, but lives. Celtic folk myth relates how the Three Wise Ones (the Goddess in her triad form), Emu, Banbha and Fódla, meet the sons of Mil the war god in battle, but after many violent clashes are subdued and humbled to the power of the invader. Whatever form it takes, the fundamental power-shift from female to male is reflected in all mythologies. Among the Greeks, Apollo took over the Goddess’s most sacred oracle at Delphi; the Kikuyu of Africa still relate how their ancestors overthrew their women by ganging up in a scheme to rape all their women on the same day, so that nine months later they could overmaster the pregnant women with impunity; while for the Aztecs, Xochiquetzel the Earth Mother gave birth to a son Huitzilopochtli, who killed her daughter the Moon Goddess and took her place as the ruler of heaven, killing and scattering all her other children in his rage for domination.

      This pattern of defeat and partial survival finds a frequent expression in the motif employed here, the victory of the sun god over the moon, who is always female. In the Japanese version, the goddess Ama-terasu, the supreme deity of the Shinto pantheon, is attacked by the god Susa-nu-wo, who destroys her rice fields and pollutes her sacred places with faeces and dead flesh. Although she fights him, he ‘steals her light’, and she only regains half her previous power, and so may only shine by night.²⁰ Just as in the historical shift from horticulture to agriculture, this apparently natural development masked some profound and irreversible changes in the relations between men and women, even in the ways of thought:

      The divinity of the sun, lord of time and space, was essentially masculine – the phallic sunbeams striking down on Mother Earth – a maleness whose rays impregnate the earth and cause the seeds to germinate. From Spain to China, the prehistoric sun stood for maleness, individual self-consciousness, intellect and the glaring light of knowledge, as against the moon ruler of the tide, the womb, the waters of the ocean, darkness and the dream-like unconscious . . . solarization, the victory of the male sun god over the female moon goddess . . . implied the collapse of the female-oriented cyclical fertility cults and the rise to supremacy of the male concept of linear history, consisting of unrepeatable events . . .²¹

      Nor was the overthrow of the female simply a mythological theme. Women of power in real life came under attack, as men sought to wrest from them their authority in a number of different ways. Where royalty passed through the female line, a bold adventurer could commandeer it by enforcing marriage on the queen, or seizing possession by rape – Tamyris the Scythian ruler fought off a ‘proposal’ of this sort from Cyrus the Great of Persia in the sixth century B.C. Others were not so lucky. When Berenice II of Egypt refused to marry her young nephew Ptolemy Alexander in 80 B.C., he had her murdered. The violence of this outrage is demonstrated by the fact that the loyal Alexandrians then rose up and killed him.²² But in general kings were more successful in retaining the powers they usurped. From this period of aggressive male encroachment on female prerogative comes the introduction of royal incest, when the king who was unwilling to vacate the throne on the death of his wife, would marry the rightful heir, her daughter. Alternatively, he would marry one of his sons to the new queen; this had the double benefit of keeping the monarchy under male control, and by degrees weaving sons into the fabric of inheritance until their right superseded that of any daughter.

      Under these circumstances, ruling women rapidly became pawns in male power-games, their importance only acknowledged by the lengths men went to to possess or control them. Galla Placida, daughter of the Roman Emperor Theodosius the Great, was captured by the Visigoth Alaric at the sack of Rome, and after his death taken over by his brother. On the murder of the brother, she was handed back to the Romans, and forcibly married to their victorious general Constantius, who designated her Augusta, and as ‘Augustus’ ruled as her co-emperor. When Constantius died, her brother exiled her to Constantinople and took the throne, and only when her son became emperor in 425 A.D. did she achieve any peace or stability.

      There are countless historical examples from all countries of royal women, through whom inheritance or claim to the throne would pass, being exploited as pawns in the power game, and then disposed of. A classic story is that of Almasuntha, queen of the Ostrogoths: made regent on behalf of her son when her father King Theodoric died in A.D. 526, Almasuntha was forcibly married by the late king’s nephew when her son died, and then, as soon as the usurper had secured his power, put to death.

      Women of royal blood were not alone in experiencing men’s rage to dominate, to downgrade and destroy. With written records come the first in a series of orchestrated attacks on women’s nature, their rights in their children, even their right to full human existence. 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. By the fourth century B.C., Aristotle’s summary of the sexual differences in human nature said no more than any man or woman of his age would have accepted as fact:

      Man is active, full of movement, creative in politics, business and culture. The male shapes and moulds society and the world. Woman, on the other hand, is passive. She stays at home, as is her nature. She is matter waiting to be formed by the active male principle. Of course the active elements are always higher on any scale, and more divine. Man consequently plays a major part in reproduction; the woman is merely the passive incubator of his seed . . . the male semen cooks and shapes the menstrual blood into a new human being . . .²³

      Once articulated, the denigrations of women flood forth unchecked as war-leaders, politicians and historians like Xenophon, Cato and Plutarch worry away at the ‘woman problem’:

      The gods created woman for the indoors functions, the man for all others. The gods put woman inside because she has less tolerance for cold, heat and war. For woman it is honest to remain indoors and dishonest to gad about. For the man, it is shameful to remain shut up at home and not occupy himself with affairs outside.²⁴

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