The Women’s History of the World

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Rosalind Miles. The Women’s History of the World

Dedication

Contents

Preface

In the Beginning

The First Women

Hunting was a whole-group activity, not a heroic solo adventure

Hunting did not mean fighting

Men and women relied on each others’ skills, before, during and after the hunt

The Great Goddess

Women held power to which man habitually deferred

Women owned and controlled money and properly

Marriage contracts respected women’s rights as individuals, and honoured them as partners

Women enjoyed physical freedoms

Regiments of women fought as men

Women claimed the ultimate freedom

The Rise of the Phallus

Women could win membership of the ruling élite

Women could excel in political skill

Personal achievement was always possible

The Fall of Woman

God the Father

The fall of woman

Women were stripped of any choice in marriage

Women were denied security within marriage

Women were forced to live within marriage

Women were victimized by patriarchal laws

Women were deprived not simply of human rights, but of humanity

The Sins of the Mothers

Enforced marriage

Child brides

Bride sale

Genital control

Female genital mutilation

The final solution

A Little Learning

Dominion and Domination

Woman’s Work

Provision of food and drink

Making household goods

Doctoring, nursing and midwifery

Revolution, the Great Engine

The Rod of Empire

Turning the Tide

The Rights of Woman

The Body Politic

Daughters of Time

Notes and References

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

About the Publisher

Отрывок из книги

For all the women of the world who have had no history

Title Page

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In fact there is almost no aspect of modern human society, no self-flattering delusion about man’s ‘natural’ instinct to dominate and destroy, that ‘Man the Hunter’ cannot be said to originate and explain. Generations of academics have joined their respectful voices to the paean of praise for him and his pals: ‘our intellects, interests, emotions and basic social life,’ chirped American professors Washburn and Lancaster, ‘all these we owe to the hunters of time past.’ Needless to say, man the hunter did not carry all before him: Donald Johanson has described the hunting hypothesis as the product of Ardrey’s ‘vivid imagination’, and ‘an embarrassment to anthropologists’. In professional circles now the whole theory has been consigned to the wasteland between revision and derision, and psychologist Dr John Nicholson is not the only academic to admit to being ‘still annoyed that I was once taken in by it.’28

But once up and running through the great open spaces of popular belief, man the hunter has proved a hard quarry to bring down, and few seem to have noticed that for millennia he has travelled on through the generations entirely alone. For woman is nowhere in this story. Aside from her burgeoning sexual apparatus, early woman is taken to have missed out completely on the evolutionary bonanza. ‘The evolving male increased in body size, muscular strength and speed, as well as in intelligence, imagination and knowledge,’ pronounced a leading French authority, ‘in all of which the female hardly shared.’29 Countless other historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and biologists worldwide all make the same claim in different ways. Man, it seems, singlehandedly performed all the evolving for the rest of the human race. Meanwhile early woman, idle and dependent, lounged about the home base, the primordial airhead and fully evolved bimbo.

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