Читать книгу The Women’s History of the World - Rosalind Miles - Страница 26

The work of many gifted women known to history by name is a salutary reminder that, as the majority of the human race, women have always commanded over half of the sum total of human intelligence and creativity. From the poet Sappho, who in the sixth century B.C. was the first to use the lyric to write subjectively and explore the range of female experience, to the Chinese polymath Pan Chao (Ban Zhao), who flourished around A.D. 100 as historian, poet, astronomer, mathematician and educationalist, the range is startling. In every field, women too numerous to list were involved in developing knowledge, and contributing to the welfare of their societies as they did so: the Roman Fabiola established a hospital where she worked both as nurse and doctor, becoming the first known woman surgeon before she died in A.D. 399.³⁷ In various fields, too, women emerged not simply as respected authorities, but as the founding mothers of later tradition: Cleopatra, ‘the alchemist of Alexandria’, an early chemist and scholar, was the author of a classic text Chrysopeia (Gold-making), which was still in use in Europe in the Middle Ages, while the Chinese artist Wei Fu-Jen, working like Cleopatra in the third century A.D., is still honoured today as China’s greatest calligrapher and founder of the whole school of the art of writing.

Not all women everywhere were destined to make their mark on history. This does not mean, however, that they were inevitably lost in the great silence of the past. Folk stories from all cultures preserve accounts of the heroines of ordinary life who tamed brutal or stupid husbands, outwitted rapacious lords, schemed for their children and lived to rejoice in their children’s children. Occasionally these tales have a peculiarly personal ring, like the Chinese folk tale of the early T’ang dynasty (A.D. 618–907), in which the little heroine, desperate for education, is presented as setting out for her first day’s schooling disguised as a boy, ‘as happy as a bird freed from its cage’. Even more poignant is the earlier story, ‘Seeking her Husband at the Great Wall’ (c. 200 B.C.), which tells of a wife who succeeded in making a long and terrible journey in order to find her husband, surviving every danger and disaster in vain, since her beloved had been dead all along.³⁸

For there was love between men and women; the new lords of creation may have been engaged in urging that ‘a man is just a life-support system for his penis’,³⁹ but no man is a phallus to his wife. In the mysterious intimacy of the marriage bed, bonds were formed which outlasted time, like this extended grieving epitaph erected by a distraught Roman husband, which almost 2000 years later reads as directly as a letter to his dead wife:

It was our lot to be harmoniously married for 41 years . . . Why recall your wifely qualities, your goodness, obedience, sweetness, kindness . . . why talk of your affection and devotion to your relatives when you were as thoughtful with my mother as with your own family? . . . When I was on the run you used your jewels to provide for me . . . later, skilfully deceiving our enemies, you kept me supplied . . . when a gang of men collected by Milo . . . attempted to break into our house and pillage it, you successfully repulsed them and defended our home . . .⁴⁰

Set this against the mysogynistic posturing of the majority of Roman commentators, and it is difficult to believe that the subjects under discussion are one and the same creature – woman. It becomes in fact increasingly clear that experience on the micro-level of what real women were doing contradicts the macro-dimension of what men were insisting should and did happen.

Yet there is no denying the growth of the threat to women, as phallus-worship swept the world from around 1500 B.C. The accumulated force of men’s resentment of women, their struggle for significance and the recognition of the male part in reproduction had brought an irresistible attack on women’s former prerogative. The Mother Goddess lost her sacred status and the power that went with it; and in this violent downgrading queens, priestesses and ordinary women at every stage of their lives, from birth to death, shared in the loss of the ‘mother-right’. The phallus now separating out from the rites of mother-worship becomes a sacred object of veneration in itself, then the centre of all creative power, displacing the womb, and finally both symbol and instrument of masculine domination over women, children, Mother Earth and other men. When all life flowed from the female, creation had been a unity; when the elements became separated out, male became the moving spirit, and female was reduced to matter. With this god-idea of manhood, Mesopotamian males fought through their fears of being slaves of the woman-god by destroying her god-head and making slaves of women.

What this meant for women may be illustrated by the story of Hypatia, the Greek mathematician and philosopher. Trained from her birth in about A.D. 370 to reason, to question and to think, she became the leading intellectual of Alexandria where she taught philosophy, geometry, astronomy and algebra at the university. She is known to have performed original work in astronomy and algebra, as well as inventing the astrolabe and the planisphere, an apparatus for distilling water, and a hydroscope or aerometer for measuring the specific gravity of liquids. Adored by her pupils, she was widely regarded as an oracle, and known simply as ‘The Philosopher’ or ‘The Nurse’. But her philosophy of scientific rationalism ran counter to the dogma of the emerging religion of Christianity, as did her womanhood and the authority she held. In a terrorist attack of the sort with which women were to become all too familiar, Cyril, the patriarch of Alexandria in A.D. 415, incited a mob of zealots led by his monks to drag her from her chariot, strip her naked and torture her to death by slicing her flesh from her bones with shells and sharpened flints.⁴¹

Hypatia’s infamous murder signified more than the death of one innocent middle-aged scientist. In Cyril and his bigots, every thinking woman could foresee the shape of men to come. The aggressive rise of phallicism had revolutionized thought and behaviour; but it was not enough. Domination was not absolute, systems were imperfect, there was still too much room for manoeuvre – control could not be based on an organ that men could not control. There had to be more – an idea of immanent, eternal maleness that was not physical, visible, fallible; one that was greater than all women because greater than man; whose power was omnipotent and unquestionable – one God, God the Father, who man now invented in his own image.

All men allow women to have been the founders of religion.

STRABO (64 B.C.–A.D.21)

Behind man’s insistence on masculine superiority there is an age-old envy of women.

ERIK ERIKSON