whocookedthelastsupper

[whocookedthelastsupper]

“In fact, the human debt to the first women goes on and on, the more we unravel the biological evidence. It is to early woman that we owe the fact that most of us are right-handed, for instance. As Nigel Calder explains, “Handedness, the typical right-handedness of modern humans, is a female phenomenon." From time immemorial woman has made a custom of carrying her baby on the left side of the body, where it can be comforted by the beating of her heart. This frees the right hand for action, and would have been the spur toward the evolution of predominant right-handedness in later human beings. Support for the "femaleness of handedness," Calder shows, comes in the fact that to this day infant girls develop handedness, like speech, much more quickly and decisively than boys.

One last biological legacy of woman to man deserves more gratitude than it seems to have received. At primate level, the male penis is an unimpressive organ. So far from terrorizing any female, the average King Kong can only provoke sympathy for his meager endowment in relation to his vast bulk. Man, however, developed something disproportionately large in this line, and can truly afford to feel himself lord of creation in the penile particular. And he owes it to woman. Quite simply, when femina aspiring to be erecta hoisted herself onto her hind legs and walked, the angle of the vagina swung forward and down, and the vagina itself moved deeper into the body. The male penis then echoed the vagina's steady progress, following the same evolutionary principle as the giraffe's neck: it grew in order to get to something it could not otherwise reach.”

-Rosalind Miles; Who Cooked The Last Supper? The Women’s History of the World

#who cooked the last supper #herstory #womens history #radblr #biology #radfem #radical feminism #radical feminist safe #radical feminists do interact #radical feminists do touch #radical feminists please touch #feminism #feminist literature #radical feminists please interact #radical feminist community #radical feminist literature #radical feminst #radical feminist theory

[whocookedthelastsupper]

“In the course of history, to be a woman had been a sin against nature and a crime against God. Now it has become an ideological deviance in the bargain. Under this system, the woman who dared to question the ideology by which she was judged would find herself among the "daughters of the Devil" whom the men of God, or the God of men, had determined to destroy. For the woman who argued, questioned, challenged, was not a woman. Woman was designed by nature to please and complement man, to love and serve her lord and master. After all, what else are women for?

In this baseline demand lurks the eternal myth of womanhood, and the eternal unsatisfied fantasy of the self-deluded male. To them, the answer was simple-women were for men, and should be grate-ful. Nowhere has this egregious exaction been more visibly expressed, nor more extensively fostered, than in the world's dream factory of the twentieth century, the Hollywood film industry. Hollywood's idiosyncratic vice and overriding obsession, the sexualizing of the female, in fact is wholly characteristic of all the other mass media, and indeed the secret of their commercial success. But although advertising has now taken over as the prime site of sexual stereotyping in the Western industrialized societies, Hollywood led the way. Whatever ideas the inhabitants of the post-war world nurse about male and female, love and work, they will have derived a high proportion of them from the dream-world of Hollywood fiction.

And what did Hollywood have to tell a breathless world through the undying magic of the silver screen? What was the message of the moguls who knew All About Eve, how women became Notorious, feared a Psycho and longed for King Kong and a grapefruit in the face. What else but that there were bad girls and good girls, girls you fucked and girls you married, little women and good wives, and the birth of a nation was man's work (tell the women to boil some water, lots of it). Study on this, sister, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Without knowing how, for it was always very respectful toward religion (Jesus of Nazareth, the Man Born to Be Box-Office), Hollywood became the Church of America, every film the new covenant, every picture told a story and the story was the greatest, oldest, cruelest, dumbest story ever told, the man born to be man.

For boys will be boys, and nowhere more so than in the all-American playground of the Hollywood movie. As film after film rolled off the cameras under the beady scrutiny of the first generation movie-moguls, patriarchs of the purest water to the last man, the father gods must have been hugging themselves with glee. For who needed physical restraints, savage laws, exclusion from education, from work and from society to keep women in their second-rate “sphere" when you could show them a film that did the same job, and sent them away happy into the bargain?

The extent to which the mass media of the twentieth century have served to replace the older instruments of dominance and restraint in the perennial patriarchal work of keeping women subordinate has yet to be fully acknowledged. But in its groping, voyeuristic response to the female, its tireless recycling of the same old female archetypes of mother, maiden, whore, its unreeling of ideal scenarios contrasted with the threatening accounts of the "girls who went wrong," Hollywood has to take its proud place alongside the "morals police" of the Ayatollah Khomeini for its valuable work in keeping women in line and training them to be everything a regular guy could ever hope for as his wife and the mother of his children.

As these pseudomodern industries, the mass media, lead us firmly by the genitals backward into the future, we can recognize the new arena in which the next stage for the freedom and equality of women will be fought out. Over the millennia of civilization, the source and site of women's inferiority has been located in nature, biology religion, physiology, brain size and the female psyche. Women have fought back, for the right to read, to in so mopey, to vote. One by one chose oppressions have gone down in some parts of the world, thereby undermining the "natural" and inevitable status of those that remain. But underlying patterns change slowly. This is in no way to belittle the fruits of the struggle to date. It is simply to insist that in the deeper struggle that feminists worldwide now realize they face, changing the world takes longer.

For there is much to do, amounting in fact to a remaking of modern society. All democratic experiments, all revolutions, all demands for equality have so far, in every instance, stopped short of sexual equality. Every society has in its prestige structures a series of subtle, interacting codes of dominance that always, everywhere, finally rank men higher than women. Nowhere has any society successfully dispensed with the age-old sex-role division of labor and the rewards in goods and power that accompany it. Nowhere do women enjoy the rights, privileges and possibilities and leisure time that men do. Everywhere men still mediate between women and power, women and the state, women and freedom, women and themselves.”

-Rosalind Miles; Who Cooked The Last Supper? The Women’s History of the World

#who cooked the last supper #hollywood industry #objectification in the media #herstory #womens history #womens rights #radblr #radfem #radical feminism #radical feminist safe #radical feminists do interact #radical feminists do touch #radical feminists please touch #feminism #feminist literature #radical feminists please interact #radical feminist community #radical feminist literature #radical feminst #radical feminist theory

[whocookedthelastsupper]

“With sublime unself-consciousness, as if all the years, the work and the successes of the womens movement had never been, Freud brought back the phallus. In reality, of course, the great snake had never been away. But he was beginning to hide his head, as the women's attacks on unbridled masculine sexual prerogative had begun to beat him down. Now though, there was a new play by the new German dramaturg, and he had the principal part.

The plot was simple. A little boy grows up loving his mother. One day he discovers a great wonder, the adult male dong. Regrettably it is not attached to him-small boy collapses in confusion. Meanwhile his sister has also seen this great sight-she too burns with rage because she does not have it. Little brother will at least overcome his parricidal hatred and castration fears, and grow up to get a plonker of his own to play with. Small girl would however be stuck for always in her immature envy of the sacred object. The moral of the Oedipal drama is therefore simple: it is better to be a boy than a girl, and there is nothing in the world so wonderful, powerful, important and worth having as a penis.

From this starting point, there could be no getting away from the logical extension of it: woman as a sex was inferior because of her "poverty of external genitals": simply to be woman was to be defective. Then again, stuck himself at the "mine's bigger than yours" stags of development, Freud could not help but find the "woman's penis" the clitoris, pathetically inadequate. Recognizing that the clitoris is richly sensitive despite its apparently unimpressive size, Freud decided that it was suffering from a kind of retardation, a "childish masculinity." Only if the "excitability" transferred itself from the clitoris to the vagina was a woman sexually mature. The vaginal orgasm was the mark of a real woman, the clitoral meant "go back and start again." The impact of this has been summed up by a modern American biologist:

Freud's theory of the vaginal orgasm required women to deny their own senses and knowledge about their own eroticism in order to be mature and female, a truly debilitating and depressing enterprise. The efiects were profound and far ranging. For many women it was a fruitless effort that only deepened a sense of inferiority, inadequacy and guilt. As a theory to explain and cure "frigidity, it ensures lack of orgasm by requiring women to have sex in precisely the way it is most difficult for them to experience an orgasm... It reinforced the phal-locentricity of sexuality by defining women's sexuality in terms only of the penis.

The legacy of Freud ensured that women's most personal and intimate part, her sex, was from now on to be hijacked by male "experts"—men who, while they never asked women how they thought or felt, nor listened to the evidence women gave anyway, could still have the authority to know better than women what their sex, at every level, was and should be. For men, this was a rich new terrain where old Mother Nature could be brought into the service of the new Father God of science. And screwed out of her skull, what would she do but replay the story as before: man strong, woman weak, man active, woman passive, man dominant, woman submissive, even exquisitely so, as in this description of the "true woman" by one of Freud's female acolytes, the Princess Marie Buonaparte in her work on Female Sexuality:

For the role of everything female, from the ovum to the beloved, is a waiting one. The vagina must await the advent of the penis in the same passive, latent and dormant manner that the ovum awaits the spermatozoon. Indeed, the eternally feminine myth of the Sleeping Beauty is the retelling of our first biological relation.

It was a good trick. And it came just at the right time. With the spread of contraceptive knowledge and techniques, women had been on the brink of taking control of their bodies.”

-Rosalind Miles; Who Cooked The Last Supper? The Women’s History of the World

#who cooked the last supper #sigmund freud #herstory #womens history #womens rights #radblr #radfem #radical feminism #radical feminist safe #radical feminists do interact #radical feminists do touch #radical feminists please touch #feminism #feminist literature #radical feminists please interact #radical feminist community #radical feminist literature #radical feminst #radical feminist theory

[whocookedthelastsupper]

Letters from a War Zone; by Andrea Dworkin.

[whocookedthelastsupper]

“Modern "birth control," as it was called in Margaret Sanger's phrase, became the symbol and center of the campaign for physical emancipation, as the vote was of the clamor for citizenship. Both triggered the same reactions of fury, paranoia and resentment, both called for the same conviction and tenacity in their campaigners. Of the two, though, the question of birth control had the power to touch each individual most intimately, in the heart of their private space; for a couple who could honestly feel that votes for women would make little difference to their existence could hardly hold the same view of something that threatened to change everyone's sex life, for better or for worse, forever.

[…]

In 1877 the British campaigner Annie Besant was sentenced to prison; she escaped jail, but lost custody of her daughter as an "unfit" mother. Ten years later, a British doctor, H. A. Allbutt, was struck off the professional register for writing about birth control in The Wife's Hand-book. But beneath the fury of the aroused patriarchs, the tide was turning. In 1882, Aletta Jacobs, Holland's first woman doctor, opened the world's first birth control clinic. The next generation of women campaigning for this issue, Marie Stopes in Britain and Margaret Sanger in the United States, found the worst force of the opposition spent and victory in sight. The decisive link between sex and reproduction had been broken.”

-Rosalind Miles; Who Cooked The Last Supper? The Women’s History of the World

#who cooked the last supper #herstory #birth control #reproductive rights #radblr #radfem #radical feminism #radical feminist safe #radical feminists do interact #radical feminists do touch #radical feminists please touch #feminist literature #feminism #radical feminists please interact #radical feminist community #radical feminist literature #radical feminst #radical feminist theory

[whocookedthelastsupper]

“Thomas Jefferson in the nineteenth century wrote to his daughter that childbirth was "no more than a jog of the elbow," when his wife had died in childbed, as this daughter was to do two months later. Much more honest was the anxiety evinced by Madame de Sévigné, when her beloved only daughter suffered three pregnancies in the first two years of her marriage, including a severe miscarriage. In a furious letter she warned her son-in-law that "the beauty, the health, the piety and the life of the woman you love can all be destroyed by frequent occurrences of the pain you make her suffer" threatening him, "I shall take your wife from you! Do you imagine I gave her to you so that you might kill her?" Françoise survived this pregnancy, but her mother's fears were not at an end. Immediately after the delivery she dashed off a hasty warning not to rely on breast-feeding to prevent conception:

"if after your periods start again, you as much afarink of making love with M. de Grignan, you may consider yourself already pregnant, and if one of your midwives tells you differently, then your husband has bribed her!"

The position of the husband in this all-too-common situation, caught between the options of lethally selfish sensualist or reluctant celibate, was not a happy one. He would, however, survive his sex life: very many women did not. And as the modern age with its much-vaunted progress and prosperity broke about the ears of women in the West, they had the disconcerting experience of discovering that childbirth became worse, not better; for in one of the decisive power struggles that were to touch all women's lives, men finally won their long fight to take over the management of women in labor. Male attacks on women healers were nothing new —one facet of the witch hunts had been the determination of university-trained male physicians to eliminate the female opposition. But with the advent of drugs, obstetrical forceps, anesthesia and formal medical training, male practitioners were finally able to usurp women's age-old role as birth attendant and present themselves as the chief accoucheur.

Armed with the authority of the expert, the new men had no difficulty putting down the old women, even when they were horribly in the wrong. On his own admission "the great William Smellie," the mold-breaking "Master of British midwifery" when learning his trade once slashed a baby's umbilical cord so clumsily that the child almost bled to death. Smellie informed the suspicious midwife, whom his arrival had displaced, that this was a revolutionary new technique designed to prevent convulsions in the newly born. Privately, though, as he later disclosed, he was never so terrified in all his life.

With the advent of chloroform and disinfectant in the West, medical science began at last to make headway against its own darkest prejudices that the suffering and death of women in childbirth were no more than a "necessary evil" to be seen "even as a blessing of the Gospel," as one leading British gynecologist wrote in 1848. Elsewhere, though, it seemed that nothing could dislodge the fatalistic attitude toward the loss of female life, nor change the habits and customs that promoted those deaths. From India, a British woman surgeon, Dr. Vaughan, sent this despairing report in the last days of the Raj:

On the floor is the woman. With her are one or two dirty old women, their hands begrimed with dirt, their heads alive with vermin... the patient has been in labor for three days, and they cannot get the child out. On inspection, we find the vulva swollen and torn. They tell us, yes, it is a bad case, and they have had to use both feet and hands in their efforts to deliver her... Chloroform is given, and the child extracted with forceps. We are sure to find holly-hock roots which have been pushed up inside the mother, sometimes string and a dirty rag containing quince seeds in the uterus itself... Do not think it is only the poor who suffer like this. I can show you the homes of many Indian men with university degrees whose wives are confined on filthy rags and attended by these bazaar dhais.

With great clarity, Vaughan saw that the root cause of this suffering, infection and death lay not with the dhais who ministered to the women, but in the attitudes of the husbands.”

-Rosalind Miles; Who Cooked The Last Supper? The Women’s History of the World

#who cooked the last supper #reproductive rights #pregnancy #herstory #womens history #womens rights #radblr #radfem #radical feminism #radical feminist safe #radical feminists do interact #radical feminists do touch #radical feminists please touch #feminism #feminist literature #radical feminists please interact #radical feminist community #radical feminist literature #radical feminst #radical feminist theory

[whocookedthelastsupper]

“Since women were seen as reproductive beings, any and every disorder they experienced was treated by treatment of the reproductive organs, Anemia, "hysteria," insanity, “criminality" were treated by sexual surgery, the gynecologists often removing one ovary or fallopian tube at a time, thereby prolonging the patient's original condition, her suffering, and her dependence on the doctor. Performing a dilation and curettage (forcibly dilating the cervix and scraping out the lining of the womb) for "the moral effect" was commonplace. This surgical rape was particularly recommended for unladylike or boisterous girls. Cruelest of all, yet defended as "vivisection of the noble kind, was genital mutilation, the so-called "female circumcision," the excision of the clitoris and external genitalia. Throughout the whole of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, this operation was performed to cure masturbation, hallucinations, "vaginal catarrh," "spinal irritation" and "hysterical mania,” and was particularly recommended for epilepsy. Leading the “advanced" countries in this specialized field of surgery, Britain and America marched complacently backward into the dark ages of the Near and Middle East, where female sexual mutilation continued to be found equally efficacious as a cure for the female condition called womanhood.

Yet a picture of women as eternal victims of their sex would be far from the truth. The historical overview of the whole business of sex, menstruation and reproduction shows how consistently women sought, and how frequently they achieved, a measure of control. This is particularly true of contraception; since childbirth was and remains the most life-threatening physical activity that women naturally undertake, there was always a strong incentive to minimize or avoid it. The staggering range of devices and potions from prehistory to the present day, with women worldwide straining every nerve for non-motherhood, also casts an ironic sidelight on the myth of the "maternal instinct." Anything and everything, it seems, that could possibly have conferred the blessing of infertility was pressed into service.”

-Rosalind Miles; Who Cooked The Last Supper? The Women’s History of the World

#who cooked the last supper #reproductive rights #birth control #herstory #womens history #womens rights #radblr #radfem #radical feminism #radical feminist safe #radical feminists do interact #radical feminists do touch #radical feminists please touch #feminism #feminist literature #radical feminists please interact #radical feminist community #radical feminist literature #radical feminst #radical feminist theory

[whocookedthelastsupper]

“How could it ever have come about, they asked, that men had built a theory of male superiority upon a story that showed Adam as weakly knuckling under to Eve, then whining about it?

Assaults on Christianity for its degradation of women were coming in from all sides, like this onslaught of 1876 from the Roman Catholic heartland of Italy:

“Women must withdraw themselves from the influence of the church, and with a new culture... they will be able to stop believing and making their children believe—thereby stunting the development of their intellects—that rain is sent us by Jesus, that thunder is a sign of divine anger and menace, and that successful crops and a good or bad harvest are to be attributed to the will of Providence.”

But it was from America, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were united in their belief that the Bible had for 2,000 years been the greatest block in the way of women's progress, that the most radical attacks came. To Stanton, the Old Testament was "the mere history of an ignorant, undeveloped people," subsequently manipulated to lend "heavenly authority" to man's demands for women's subjection. Women would not even begin to grasp the nature and extent of this cosmic confidence-trick until they had access to a true version, which, after a mammoth undertaking, The Woman's Bible (1895-1898) eventually provided. For thousands of years, God had given antifeminism its cloak of respectability and divinity. Now the white-bearded old patriarch was shown to be an emperor with no clothes.

The feminist rejection of the low view of women that Christianity had imposed upon so many nations had an important consequence for another of the key issues of the women's rights campaign: the demands for education. The ignorance of women had been bound in with Christian dogma-Eve's sin consisted of reaching out for the tree of knowledge, so her punishment was to be forever deprived of it. Unchallenged for centuries, this attitude produced generations of women doomed to be brought up in mental darkness and then condemned as stupid: "We are educated to the grossest ignorance, and no art omitted to stifle our natural reason," complained Lady Mary Wortley Montagu bitterly in the eighteenth century.”

-Rosalind Miles; Who Cooked The Last Supper? The Women’s History of the World

#who cooked the last supper #religion #patriarchy #radblr #herstory #womens history #womens rights #radfem #radical feminism #radical feminist safe #radical feminists do interact #radical feminists do touch #radical feminists please touch #feminism #feminist literature #radical feminists please interact #radical feminist community #radical feminist literature #radical feminst #radical feminist theory

[whocookedthelastsupper]

“Among the first to force the revolution in thought that had not yet learned to call itself feminism was Mary Wollstonecraft. In outline, Mary's story was no more than might have happened to any other poor and friendles git: employment as the "companion to a lady," an unsuccessful attempt to start a school, travels in France, a love affair with a man who abandoned her with their illegitimate child. But out of this stuff of penny-dreadful romance, Mary Wollstonecraft forged in 1792 one of the most powerful and assured of feminist critiques, her Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

Mary's starting point was her uncontrollable anger at the "baneful lurking gangrene" of "the tyranny of man over woman."21 From this she traced all the social evils she had suffered herself, the lack of education, the denial of fulfilling work, and the sexual double standard that rewarded a man for being "a luxurious monster or fastidious sen-sualist," while making a whore of a woman for one indiscretion. She saw existing relations between men and women as damaging and exploitive —"man taking her body, her mind is left to rust"— and scornfully rejected the conventional ideal of female behavior: "How grossly do they insult us who thus advise us only to render ourselves gentle, domestic brutes!" With its trenchant demands for education, for work and for equal companionship with males, the Vindication both articulated some of the enduring concerns of feminism, and threw down the gauntlet in a way that could not be ignored: for after its dramatic exposé of the vicious stupidity and perverted childishness in which women fretfully languished, few could continue with the fiction that the "members of the fair sex" were happy with the lot enjoined on them by God and man.

The unfair sex, of course, could not be expected to be happy with this wholesale attack upon its power and prerogative, not to mention its manners, morals and mental darkness. No man is a tyrant to him-self, and when Mary Wollstonecraft lifted this stone, there was a violent, often hysterical reaction to what she found under there. To the women, there was a great deal of amusement to be had from "men who cry 'Scandal!' before even examining the question," in the dry summary of one of Wollstonecraft's French disciples, Flora Tristan.

Tristan's own life reads like a handbook of feminist struggle: precipitated into childhood poverty when her father died, she made a brief, unhappy marriage whose consequences darkened the whole of her adult life. Under the Code Napoléon she was unable to obtain a divorce, or any access to her children. When she published her autobiography, Pérégrinations d'un Paria, her husband tried to murder her.

Harassed by the police as an undesirable, she met a premature death in 1844 at only forty-one. As a socialist, Tristan wholeheartedly endorsed Wollstonecraft's demands for education and the right to work. Her additional contribution was her insistence upon "the right to juridical equality between men and women" as "the only means of achieving the unity of humanity." To man, who had always seen himself as humanity and felt himself to be perfectly unified, this suggestion was incomprehensible.”

-Rosalind Miles; Who Cooked The Last Supper? The Women’s History of the World

#who cooked the last supper #herstory #womens history #womens rights #patriarchy #radblr #radfem #radical feminism #radical feminist safe #radical feminists do interact #radical feminists do touch #radical feminists please touch #feminism #feminist literature #radical feminists please interact #radical feminist community #radical feminist literature #radical feminst #radical feminist theory

[whocookedthelastsupper]

“Women […] could not live at ease within the shallow and insulting sketch of womanhood still fervently advocated by the men of their time. Their protest was nowhere better expressed than in this outburst from Tubman's sister-slave and abolitionist Sojourner Truth, speaking at a women's rights convention in 1851:

“That man over there says women need to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages or over puddles, or gives me the best place— and ain't I a woman?

Look at this arm! I have ploughed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me—and ain't I a woman?

I could work as much and eat as much as a man — when I could get it— and bear the lash as well. And ain't I a woman?

I have borne thirteen children, and seen most of 'em sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me—and ain't I a woman?”

In the end, though, it was not the scientists but the legislators whose brutal and bungled attempts to shore up the shifting foundations of patriarchal power triggered the onset of women's revolt. In its essence, the clamor for women's rights to justice, to personal freedom, to full human status, represented the last wave of the great political upheavals of "the century of revolution." In making their claims, women were only following in the steps of men, who had succeeded almost everywhere in the industrialized world in striking out for a new understanding of social participation. By the very nature of the ideal of democracy, what was granted to one could not legitimately be withheld from another citizen group. This did not mean that the power-holders would not try to do so. As governments were driven to redraft older legislation in line with democratic demands, the opportunity was taken, for the first time in history, of deliberately and categorically denying women each and every one of the rights newly won by men. On both sides of the Atlantic, women were forced to confront the fact that "the Rights of Man" would be interpreted to mean precisely and literally that.”

-Rosalind Miles; Who Cooked The Last Supper? The Women’s History of the World

#herstory #womens history #womens rights #who cooked the last supper #radblr #radfem #radical feminism #radical feminist safe #radical feminists do interact #radical feminists do touch #radical feminists please touch #feminism #feminist literature #radical feminists please interact #radical feminist community #radical feminist literature #radical feminst #radical feminist theory #patriarchy

[whocookedthelastsupper]

“With woman's every natural function seen as a life-threatening crisis, the rational scientific male could not repose much confidence in such a frail vessel. Woman, it now emerged under the scrutiny of pseudo-biology, was a creature hopelessly fragile not only in body, but above all in what the craniologists had grudgingly conceded her by way of mind. Nervous disorders and mental instability were her lot, but there could be no hope of remedying her deficiency in the little gray cells by education: any learning for young ladies risked "excessive stimulation" to their feeble mental parts and was incalculably dangerous. The philosopher Herbert Spencer, previously savaged by Carlyle as "the greatest ass in Christendom" for his part in the evolution debate, was foremost among those who took it upon themselves to trumpet the ill-effects of "brain-forcing" upon young women: diathesis (nervousness), chlorosis ("green-sickness" or anemia), hysteria, stunted growth and excessive thinness were the least they, should expect if they so much as touched a copy of Catullus. Nor was this all. Overtaxing the brain, Spencer warned, "produces... flat-chested girls: consequently those who "survive their high-pressure education” could never "bear a well-developed infant."

Spencer was not the only man of his time to fear that the price of rescuing women from their "natural" ignorance would be "a puny, enfeebled and sickly race." Yet the creature who was too weak-minded even to be educated out of it, could hardly be deemed fit for anything else. Women's imputed physical and mental frailty thus became the grounds for refusing her any civil or legal rights, indeed any change from the "state of nature" in which she dwelt. As late as 1907, an English earl blocked a bill to allow women limited and local voting rights in these terms:

“I think they are too hysterical, they are too much disposed to be guided by feeling and not by cold reason, and... to refuse any kind of compromise. I do not think women are safe guides in government, they are very unsafe guides.”

The speaker was suppor wider another of the leading lights of the British aristocracy in the is der terms of naked masculine self interest: “What is to be feared is that if we take away the position which voman has hitherto occupied, which has come to her from no arich cil education but from nature, if we transfer her from domestic into political life... the homes and happiness of every member of the the homes and happiness of every member of the community will be worsened by the transference." Although plainly not overburdened himself with "artificial" or any other kind of education, his lordship was quite clear on the main point at issue: any attempt by women to escape from their enforced inferiority could only damage the fabric of society, and must therefore be resisted.

Yet for a state of nature, women's lowly status and civil death took a good deal of social and cultural force to maintain. Along with the revolution of industrialism and the victory of science over common sense and reason, the nineteenth-century law became the third and most openly oppressive of the enemies of female emancipation.

Nowhere was this process more blatant than in France, where the Code Napoléon was hailed as the most advanced legal monument of its age; history does not record whether this enthusiasm was in ignorance or in recognition of the fact that this was the most comprehensively repressive package of legislation against women of all time. Under the ancien régime, married women had enjoyed wide free-doms, control over their own property, and an influential place in their community, rights that the Revolution had only widened, by facilitating divorce, for example. Now, in his determination to rebuild the laws of France on a Roman, or rather Corsican, moral base, Napoleon firmly legislated to ensure woman's total subordination to man, and her slavish obedience to all his wishes.

There can be no doubt of the personal edge on Napoleon's legislative blade. "Women should stick to knitting," he informed the son of Madame de Staël, who, whatever else, was not famous for her skill with the needles. Napoleon's attitude to women consistently betrayed such narrow, reactionary, crude and sexist views, along with the determination that just as he was to be sole authority in the state, so every male should have total control over his family. Pushing his "reforms" through the council of state Napoleon pronounced, “the husband must possess the absolute power and right to say to his wife, Madam, you shall not go to the theater, you shall not receive such and such a person; for the children you will bear shall be mine.” Equally, every woman "must be made to realize that on leaving the tutelage of her family, she passes under that of her husband."

To this end, the Code Napoléon equipped every husband with extraordinary, unprecedented, indeed despotic powers. He could compel his wife either to reside in or to move to any place he decreed; everything she ever owned or earned became his; in divorce, he kept the children, the house and all the goods, for she had no right in their common property; in adultery, she could be sent to prison for up to two years, while he escaped scot free. Frenchwomen had been better off in the Dark Ages than they were after Napoleon's Civil Code became law in 1804. Their modern tragedy was to be repeated with a Greek inevitability in countless other corners of the globe as the new model code, along with the metric system, swept most of the civilized world.

Yet even as the forces of patriarchy were vigorously regrouping within these very structures of oppression lay the seeds of their eventual defeat. The revolution of industrialization made women's search for a new identity and purpose both urgent and inescapable, it had also unwittingly put into her hands the means by which to achieve it. The very success of the Industrial Revolution in creating wealth, created also the idle wife as the badge of her husband's social succes. The production of surplus goods and surplus money led inevitably to the production of surplus women. It created, too, a concept entirely new in historical terms, the idea that women should be entirely supported by men. Large numbers of the females of the rising bourgeoisie thus found themselves lodged in a limbo somewhere between china doll and household pet, relegated to the classic "little woman" role still recognizable today. Deprived of work and significance, the idle wife was offered instead the newfangled flummery of Mrs. Bee-ton's "domestic arts"" Emily Post on etiquette, and The Language of Flowers.

As time went on, however, "this strange masculine aberration that required women to be useless." in the words of historian Amaury de Riencourt, "proved to be a mistake of the first order": "the historical record shows that women, one way or another, always have to be at the center of things and will not for long stand being made idle or put on the shelf." This enforced inactivity gave the "lady of leisure" the time to question her enervating and demoralizing lifestyle, her dependence on her man for money, status and meaning. When this brutally stupid and unnatural way of life was also forced down women's throats as the highest form of existence any female could hope to attain, the conflict between what life was and what it was supposed to be eventually became unmanageable.

At the other end of the scale, the working woman had no leisure question her lot. Wholly subject to her lord and master, she groaned under the newly emerging "double burden" of working full-time by day, and carrying out the full load of all the household chores in whatever time was left at night.”

-Rosalind Miles; Who Cooked The Last Supper?; Women’s History of the World

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[whocookedthelastsupper]

“Craniology's contribution to the "woman question" was the indisputable proof that the brain of a male is almost always larger than that of a female. The comfort this gave to the cause of male supremacy was, however, short-lived. On sheer brain mass women lost out to men; but in the ratio of brain size to body size, women invariably came out ahead. As the idea of the superior masculine intelligence has been vital to the justification of male supremacy, this caused a severe difficulty. Craniology rose to the occasion; intelligence was located in the frontal lobes, the parietal, the occipital, anywhere in fact where the male brain could be shown to be bigger than the female's. In all this flurry of false scientism, the central question went unaddressed: if the possession of a penis and an outsize brain were the distinguishing marks of the lords of creation, why was the world not ruled by whales?

Whales, though, were not the issue when the rulers of the world were busy proving themselves to be little more than overgrown mon-keys. Once evolution had come to the aid of craniology, the case against female intelligence was complete-Darwin dismissed the "less highly evolved female brain" as "characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilization." As this shows, the arrogant scientism that was so marked a feature of the emerging modern world was routinely employed not in the objective search for new truths, but in the determined recycling of the old lies. In addition, science itself became a new instrument of power; the swift colonization by men of this huge and virgin realm of knowledge placed in their hands the right to define what was, and what should be, what was "normal" and what "natural." The triumph of science completed a process stretching back to the dawn of humankind; the ultimate source of power, significance and creative might, once the miraculous female womb, then the sacred phallus, was now the masculine brain. And by the ultimate perversion of the great mother's supreme function, the scientific mind of man now gave birth to the stunted dwarfish version of woman that still cripples us today.”

-Rosalind Miles; Who Cooked The Last Supper? The Women’s History of the World

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[whocookedthelastsupper]

“In terms of understanding the patriarchal struggle for control of women's bodies, the issue of blood is a major preoccupation. For not only did women bleed every month, from girlhood for all of their adult lives; every stage of their journey as women, every passage from one state to the next (menarche, defloration, childbirth) was also marked by the flow of blood with its frighteningly ambivalent signal of both life and death. The greater the danger, the stronger the taboo. All these "courses" of women's lives have triggered an intricate and often savage set of myths, beliefs and customs in which the containment of cultural fears overrode any personal concern for the female who was ostensibly the cause and center of it all.

So from the introduction of the One God religions down to the twentieth century, the handling of a virgin's first sex experience, for example, focused only on the vagina as "a place of devils," never on the owner of it.”

-Rosalind Miles; Who Cooked The Last Supper? The Women’s History of the World

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[whocookedthelastsupper]

“Why did women's bodies become such a crucial battleground in the sex war? The answer to this lies at the heart of the masculine struggle for supremacy. By denoting women as separate, different, inferior and therefore rightly subordinate, men made women the first and largest out-group in the history of the race. But it is impossible to exclude women totally from all the affairs of men. No other subordinated class, caste or minority lives as closely integrated with its oppressor as women do; the males of the dominant culture have to allow them into their homes, kitchens, beds. Control at these close quarters can be maintained only by inducing women to consent to their own downgrading. Since women are not inferior, they had to be bombarded with a massive literature of religious, social, biological and, more recently, psychological ideology to explain, insist, that women are secondary to men. And to make women believe that they are inferior, what better subject for this literature of religious teaching, cautionary folk tales, jokes and customs, than the female body?

By destroying the basic site of human confidence and sense of self, by dumping in sexual guilt and physical disgust, men could ensure women's insecurity and dependence. There is no mistaking the true nature and purpose of the worldwide, orchestrated, rising crescendo of onslaughts on women during these centuries. Every patriarch fulminating in denigration of the sex was engaged in as brutal a bid for women's abject capitulation as the gang-raping Mundurucu of the South Seas whose tribal boast was, "We tame our women with the banana."

-Rosalind Miles; Who Cooked The Last Supper? The Women’s History of the World

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[whocookedthelastsupper]

WOMEN WERE DEPRIVED NOT SIMPLY OF HUMAN RIGHTS, BUT OF HUMANITY

They were reduced to less than full personhood, systematically defined as inferior, perpetually doomed to adverse comparisons with the masculine norm, the whole, the ideal, the pertect image of the incomparable male, his God. Under Islam women are "mutilated beings," in the phrase of Fatna A. Sabbah; she adds, "I feel nauseated whenever I hear the tedious introductory phrase, 'Since the seventh century Islam has given a privileged place to woman.... You have to be a man to decode the Koranic message as positive to woman." And in Japan, while the wife was accepting with cries of rapture her husband's rape of her anus, her newborn daughter, according to the very same pillow-books, was to be left for three days and three nights untended on the ground, "because woman is Earth and man is Heaven": "This is the law that grants the man, not the woman, the right to have the final word, and to make all the decisions... In the hands of man, the woman is only an instrument. Her submission is total, and will last right up to her death."

What escape was there for the individust Worman trom this vio lent and sustained onslaught of masculine lust for possession and the rage to destroy? The new father gods who arose in the East during the crucial millennium spanning the birth of Christ were very different from their phallic predecessors, though no less equipped with mindless aggression and manic drive. Now God was no longer in the thun-der, or far away in the clouds veiling the peak of the distant mountain range—he was in every male authority figure from priest to judge and king, he was in every woman's father, brother and uncle; he was in her husband, so he was at her board and in her bed. Finally, and most important of all, he was in her head.

For, arraigned at the bar of history, the gods of the patriarchs had many crimes against women to answer for. They had attacked and demolished the worship of the Great Goddess, colonizing only what served their ends, reducing the former Earth Mother to child-bride and exploited virgin. Woman's sexuality had been inverted or denied, her body reduced to a sexual vessel of God's will, belonging to her husband who in his own person was God, and who was therefore to be obeyed and adored. In the first and greatest act of discrimination, of deliberate apartheid in human history, women were made into untermenschen, a separate and inferior order of beings. But worse than all these, they were made to believe in their own downgrading and debasement.

Not every woman submitted to the relentless ideological bombardment of the new patriarchal systems; not every system was as snugly jointed and watertight as those who put to sea in it liked as think. The gods of the patriarchs tightened their grip only slowly, and the gap between what the authorities prescribed and what human beings actually did allowed women of skill and resource more room to maneuver than the historical record has often been prepared to show. But women's resistance henceforth was to be localized, sporadic and all too frequently short-lived. In the struggle for supremacy, the budding ideologies hit upon the happy inspiration of shifting the bat-teground to an area where to this day women feel exposed and vul-nerable— the female body. Viciously attacked for and through their breasts, their hips and thighs and above all for their "insatiable cunt," all too many women were lost beyond all hope of recovery.”

A woman's heaven is under her husband's feet. —BENGALI PROVERB

-Rosalind Miles; Who Cooked The Last Supper? The Women’s History of the World

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[whocookedthelastsupper]

“Men, however, were persecuted for extrinsic reasons, not simply because they were men. And in the nature of things, the system afforded opportunities for them to improve upon, or even reverse, their lowly position in the patriarchal pecking order. Enemies of the faith could convert, and did, in huge numbers, hence the worldwide success of the father god religions. With even less difficulty young men turned into old men; sons became fathers; servants became senior servants; and even slaves could become free. None of these options was open to the female of the species. Under patriarchal monotheism, womanhood was a life sentence of second-order existence.

For woman could never recover from one primal, overwhelming disability— she was not male. The ensuing syllogism represented a triumph of masculine logic. If God was male and woman was not male, then whatever God was, woman was not. St. Augustine spelled it out: "For woman is not the image of God, whereas the man alone is the image of God." As man stands beneath God in the hierarchy, so the woman, as further removed, comes below him: in practical terms, then, setting every man over every woman, father over mother, husband over wife, brother over sister, grandson over grandmother. In every one of these new systems, God freed man from slavery and took him into partnership for eternity, while women were never even apprenticed to the celestial corporation. Man could progress to become each-his-own-paterfamilias while women remained trapped in their perpetual inferiority. Muhammad explained it with his usual clarity, along with the traditional patriarchal penalties for disaffected subordinates:

Men are in charge of women because Allah has made one to exceed the other. So good women are obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah has guarded, As for those from whom you fear rebellion, admonish them, banish them to beds apart and scourge them.

Under the father god, only man attains full adult freedom and con-trol. Woman in diametric contrast is sentenced to a double subordination, to God and to man, as St. Paul instructed the Corinthians; because "man is the image and glory of God, but the woman is the glory of man... neither was the man created for the woman, but the woman for the man."

As this shows, male supremacy does more than imply female inferiority: it demands it. How then was that demand brought home to each and every woman? The first step had to be the eradication of all traces of women's previous superiority. This meant a wholesale onslaught on the worship of the Mother Goddess, on her devotees, and by extension on women's right to rule or command. A laconic account in Il Chronicles gives us a gynoclast at full tilt:

And also concerning Maachah the mother of Asa the king, he removed her from being queen because she had made an idol in a grove: and Asa cut down her idol and stamped on it and burned it at the brook Kidron... and the heart of Asa was perfect all his days.

This was only one of many such attacks on the Goddess, her temples, scriptures, rituals and followers. These are detailed in both Old and New Testaments of the Bible, since Christianity no less than Judaism declared from the outset that the Great Goddess "whom Asia and all the world worshippeth" must be persecuted, "and all her magnificence destroyed" (Acts 19, 27).

The women resisted, of course. Over a thousand years after the events related by the chronicer, Muhammad almost paid with his life for his insistence that his "One God" should usurp "the Lady, "the Queen of Heaven," "the Mother of Life and Death." Indeed, barricaded in his house by a raging mob of Goddess-worshipers, he was favored with the timely revelation that the trinity of the old goddesses Al-Uzza, Al-Manat and Al-Uzzat, the Great Goddess in her threefold incarnation, still existed alongside the new boy, his Allah. As indeed she did—but only for as long as it took Muhammad to regroup his forces, cancel that revelation, and renew the assault.”

-Rosalind Miles; Who Cooked The Last Supper? The Women’s History of the World

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[whocookedthelastsupper]

“In his dealings with the Mother Goddess and her worshipers, Muhammad was content with nothing less than "the historical liquidation of the female element," in the words of the Muslim historian Fatnah A. Sabbah. Even this, though, was not enough to ensure the perpetuation of the father god's victory. Women and men too had to be brought to believe in women's inferiority, to know that her rightful place was, in every sense, beneath the male. Accordingly the patriarchs of the One God embarked on a strenuous and hysterical myth-campaign to account for and enforce the subjection of women. Its essence is neatly summed up by St. Ambrose: "Adam was led to sin by Eve, and not Eve by Adam. It is just and right then that woman accept as lord and master him whom she led to sin."16 Women's world-without-end obligation to pay for the sin of Eve was also enshrined, indeed elaborated, in Islam: the Muslim sage Ghazali declared that "when Eve ate the fruit which He had forbidden to her, the Lord, be He praised, punished her with eighteen things." These included menstruation, childbirth, separation from her family, marriage to a stranger and confinement to her house— plus the fact that out of the 1,000 components of merit, women had only one, while men, however sinful, were gifted with the other 999.

The Adam and Eve myth, possibly the single most effective piece of enemy propaganda in the long history of the sex war, had other crucial implications. It performed the essential task of putting man first in the scheme of things; for in all the father god religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, God creates man first: woman is born after man, framed of an insignificant and expendable lump of his bony gristle, and taken out of him like a child from its mother. Essentially this is just one of the countless attempts of womb-envious men to usurp women's power of birth: with a swift piece of patriarchal prestidigitation, God reverses biology and stands nature on its head with the birth of his man-child, in defiance of evolution, where men and women evolved together, and of life itself, where woman gives birth to man. God now assumed the power of all new life-all the monotheisms taught that God alone created and breathed life into each fetus, using the woman in whom he lodged it simply as an "envelope," in the Islamic phrase.

Yet still the fathers of the early religions were not done with downgrading women. Alongside this notion of women's inferior status flourished a conviction of women's inherent and inescapable inferiority. Among the Jews a husband was felt to be so much at the mercy of his wife's innate baseness that he was empowered to proceed against her any time "the spirit of jealousy come upon him," whether or not he had any evidence of misconduct on her part. Hauling her to the temple, he handed her over to the priest who uncovered her head in token of her humiliation, forced her to drink "bitter water" mixed of the dirt from the temple floor and gall, and cursed her, so that "her belly shall swell and her thigh shall rot. Vindicated, the husband received an unequivocal thumbs-up from God: "then shall the man be guiltless from iniquity, and this woman shall bear her iniquity."' For his part the messenger of Allah received a personal verification of female turpitude in one of his revelations: "I stood at the gate of Hell" he reported. "Most of those who entered there were women.”

-Rosalind Miles; Who Cooked The Last Supper? The Women’s History of the World

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