The Women’s History of the World. Rosalind Miles

the industrialization of Europe and America in the nineteenth century that improved the material quality of so many people’s lives, itself depended upon the introduction of the ferocious consumerism that more than anything else has devalued women in twentieth-century society.

      The future of the world, then, has to be better than its past. In finding the way to the future, our understanding of our past has a crucial part to play. As Lord Acton observed, ‘history convinces more people than philosophy.’ Historians create explanations, rationales, symbols and stereotypes that guide us from one era to another. Consequently, history will lead us all astray if it continues to look asquint. Women have been active, competent and important through all the ages of man, and it is devastating for us if we do not understand this. But history is also without meaning for men if the centrality of women is denied. Like racist myths, these one-sided accounts of the human past are no longer acceptable: intellectually spurious and devoid of explanatory power, they more and more betray the void of unknowing at their heart.

      Can human beings learn from the lessons that history teaches? To move towards a fairer society in the ideal of full humanity for all, men must be ready to dispense with patriarchy’s rigid orthodoxies and life-denying hierarchical systems. Women in return have to take up their share of the responsibility for the public organization of their societies, and in the private sphere, learn to love men as partners, not in the insulting traditional combination of domineering father and overgrown child. All future developments from now on must be assessed from the perspective of both sexes, since both men and women are equally important to the making of history. The hope for the future, like the triumph of the past, lies in the co-operation and complementarity of women and men.

      ROSALIND MILES

       I

       In the Beginning

      The key to understanding women’s history is in accepting – painful though it may be – that it is the history of the majority of the human race.

      GERDA LERNER

       1

       The First Women

      The predominant theory [of] human cultural evolution has been ‘Man-the-Hunter’. The theory that humanity originated in the club-wielding man-ape, aggressive and masterful, is so widely accepted as scientific fact and so vividly secure in popular culture as to seem self-evident.

      PROFESSOR RUTH BLEIER

      For man without woman there is no heaven in the sky or on earth. Without woman there would be no sun, no moon, no agriculture, and no fire.

      ARAB PROVERB

      The story of the human race begins with the female. Woman carried the original human chromosome as she does to this day; her evolutionary adaptation ensured the survival and success of the species; her work of mothering provided the cerebral spur for human communication and social organization. Yet for generations of historians, archaeologists, anthropologists and biologists, the sole star of the dawn story has been man. Man the Hunter, man the tool-maker, man the lord of creation stalks the primeval savannah in solitary splendour through every known version of the origin of our species. In reality, however, woman was quietly getting on with the task of securing a future for humanity – for it was her labour, her skills, her biology that held the key to the destiny of the race.

      For, as scientists acknowledge, ‘women are the race itself, the strong primary sex, and man the biological afterthought’.¹ In human cell structure, woman’s is the basic ‘X’ chromosome; a female baby simply collects another ‘X’ at the moment of conception, while the creation of a male requires the branching off of the divergent ‘Y’ chromosome, seen by some as a genetic error, a ‘deformed and broken “X”. The woman’s egg, several hundred times bigger than the sperm that fertilizes it, carries all the 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. Historian Amaury de Riencourt sums it up: ‘Far from being an incomplete form of maleness, according to a tradition stretching from the biblical Genesis through Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas, femaleness is the norm, the fundamental form of life.’²

      How are we going to tell Father? For Nigel Calder, ‘the first lords of the universe were globules of coloured slime’³ – they may only have been protoplasmal molecules or start-up bacilli, but they were male. Yet in contradiction to this age-old bias of biology is the recent discovery that every single person on this planet is descended from the same primitive hominid, and that this common ancestor was a woman. Using the latest techniques of gene research into DNA, the molecular structure of gene inheritance, scientists working independently at the Universities of Berkeley, California and Oxford have succeeded in isolating one DNA ‘fingerprint’ that is common to the whole of the human race. This has remained constant for millennia despite the divergence of races and populations throughout the world – and it is incontrovertibly female. This research points directly to one woman as the original ‘gene fount’ for the whole of the human race. She lived in Africa about 300,000 years ago, and her descendants later migrated out of Africa and spread across the face of the globe, giving rise to all the people living today.⁴

      This work on the woman who could have been our grandmother Eve is still in its infancy, and controversial in its implications. Not least of the problems it poses for the sons of Adam is its implicit dismissal of the Christian myth – for the ‘gene fount mother’ necessarily had a mother herself, and the identity or numbers of her sexual partners were irrelevant, since hers was the only cell that counted. Indisputable, however, is the central role of women in the evolution of the species. In terms of the DNA messages that a new individual needs in order to become a human being, the essential genetic information is only ever contributed by and transmitted through the female. In that sense, each and every one of us is a child of Eve, carrying within our bodies the living fossil evidence of the first women who roamed the African plain side by side with their men.

      As this suggests, nothing could be further from the truth of the role played by early woman than the ‘hunter’s mate’ stereotype of the dim huddled figure beside the fire in the cave. From around 500,000 B.C., when femina erecta first stood up alongside homo erectus in some sun-drenched primordial gorge, many changes took place before both together became sapiens. And there is continuous evidence from a number of different sites throughout the Pleistocene age of women’s critical involvement in all aspects of the tribe’s survival and evolution generally thought of, like hunting, as reserved to men.

      The early woman was in fact intensively occupied from dawn to dusk. Hers was not a long life – like their mates, most hominid females, according to scientific analysis of fossil remains, died before they were twenty. Only a handful survived to thirty, and it was quite exceptional to reach forty.⁵ But in this short span, the first women evolved a huge range of activities and skills. On archaeological evidence, as well as that of existing Stone Age cultures, women were busy with and adept in:

       – food gathering

       – child care

       – leatherwork

       – making garments, slings and containers from animal skins

       – cooking

       – pottery

       – weaving grasses, reeds and bark strips for baskets

       – fashioning beads and ornaments from teeth or bone

       – construction of shelters, temporary or permanent

       – tool-making