The Natural Superiority of Women (13 page)

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Authors: Ashley Montagu

Tags: #Social Science, #Anthropology, #Cultural, #Women's Studies, #test

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protein every day and hunt frequently. Women make their own bows, though projectile points are a male craft. Men and women hunt together or alone. Women also fish. Girls start hunting shortly after puberty, and postmenopausal women hunt into old age. Among other things, women generally carry the carcasses of the animals they have killed, no mean feat, for the bodies of wild pigs and deer are quite heavy. Finally, Agta society is completely egalitarian.

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As the Griffins point out, the probabilities are high that women were hunters in prehistoric times, and that the custom continued into relatively recent times. The striking egalitarianism and cooperation between the sexes among the Agta is in keeping with modern anthropological findings that gatherer-hunting peoples are for the most part all egalitarian and that egalitarianism and cooperation was the rule among early humankind.
Professor Richard Borshay Lee, our greatest authority on the Bushman of the northwest corner of Botswana, has shown
5
that "the nature of early society can never be constructed with complete confidence, nevertheless, the hunter-gatherer data should make us view with suspicion any theory that seeks to
prove
that the male dominance in our present social order is a part of our evolutionary heritage."
6
As among the Agta, men and women in early societies very probably had a partnership in marriage. There was no supremacy of one sex over the other. Women were characterized by several biological advantages which the male lacked; for example, women replenished the group by having babies; they breast-fed the babies for about four years or more and cared for them for years thereafter. Furthermore, a bond was created between mother and child, which constituted, as it still does, the basic family unit.
The general myth is that the male provides most of the food in gatherer-hunter societies, but the truth is that some 80 percent or more is provided in most societies by the female. For that reason such societies should be called gatherer-hunters rather than hunter-gatherers. (And, we may remark in passing, even in terminological matters women have been denied their wellearned rights!)
In some early societies there may have been some division of labor between the sexes based on such biological differences as greater male physical strength and women's ability to bear

 

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babies. Males may have been perceived as more active than females. At all ages males are on average taller than females, by about 2 percent of total body height until puberty, and between 5 and 8 percent taller in adult life. Males cross-culturally have a higher metabolic rate, some 5 to 7 percent greater than females, apparently correlated with their continuous greater expenditure of energy.

7
The suggestion is that males seem to be operating like an engine at higher levels of speed-both producing and requiring greater levels of energy. But even here we cannot be certain that such differences are not, at least to some extent, culturally influenced. However that may be, even if the higher energy levels of the male are biologically determined, that does not mean males are therefore designed to be hunters, any more than the fact that women bear babies has biologically caused them to be more sedentary. The truth is that, whatever the biological influences, we are dealing with the assignment of roles and statuses, which is a cultural practice and not a biological effect.
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Role and status are socially imposed, and in this way frequently serve to emphasize the character of social expectations as well as control the nature of the responses made to them. Activity differences between the sexes do exist, though they are secondary differences,
not
primary ones.
At this point, before continuing with a discussion of the biological facts, let us attempt to answer the question posed at the beginning of this chapter: How did it come about that women, with all the biological advantages we today know they possess, have for so long been subordinated to men?
Scientific studies during the last sixty years or more have increasingly yielded evidence that in prehistoric societies women not only played a much more important role than would have been possible for them in male-dominated societies, but that from very early times they represented a powerful political and social force. Furthermore, the pantheon of the gods was perceived as mainly feminine, the natural mothers of god and humankind as well as of animals. There were indications of such preexisting institutions, but they were not really understood for many years for what they were. It was not until women scholars began to look into these arcane matters that progress in accurately interpreting them began to be made.
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It would seem evident that, in virtually every society, pregnancy and childbirth would come to be regarded as something of a miracle, supernatural, and that woman, the giver of life, sustenance, warmth, and caring, should come to occupy a central position in symbolism and religion. Birth is an epiphany, a manifestation of woman's mystery and supernatural art, the most powerful and creative living presences. The long extended experience of the nurturing mother would have created a reverence for motherhood in which everyone shared. By extension it was the nurturing being who was most valued, and following that model, women would have chosen as their mates men of nurturing disposition, both for their children and for themselves.
As Ranier Maria Rilke, the great poet, put it, "The deepest experience of the creator is feminineit is the experience of receiving and bearing." The miracle of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood inspired the birth of creation mythsreligious beliefsand constituted the most powerful influence upon the cultural development of the human mind and of society.

10

With the progressive development of culture, from foraging and gathering to gathering and hunting, together with its associated development of elaborate tools, art, and sculpture, we for the first time had tangible evidence of woman as goddess. That evidence for the idolization of women emerges from a period late in the development of humankind, roughly about thirty thousand years ago, but that regard is surely much older than that.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century the first statuettes and figurines of remarkably stylized figures of generally bigbreasted corpulent women were discovered in Paleolithic sites dating back some thirty thousand years. During the twentieth century many more such art works of femalesof stone and wood, incised carvings and sculptureshave been discovered. The figurines are especially interesting, for in addition to large breasts, the abdomen of pregnancy is enlarged, as are the hips and buttocks. The abdomen shows the navel, and frequently a swelling extending to the mons, suggestion the imminence of birth, in some cases actually showing birth in process. The external genitalia were carefully modeled. These anatomical structures formed what the late Marija Gimbutas, archaeologist and professor of European archaeology at the University of

 

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California, Los Angeles, called "the pubic triangle," elaborations of which are found on many artifacts. The usually faceless heads of each of these figurines are topped by stylized coiffures, while halfway below the knees the legs and feet are frequently truncated or fused and tapered to a point.
For many years these statuettes of mostly gravid females of somewhat exaggerated corpulence were held to be fertility figures. Most of them, if not all, undoubtedly were, but they were much more than that: They were goddesses.
Marija Gimbutas, in her magnificent book,
The Language of the Goddess
(1989), dealt fully with this subject. The period in which these artifacts occur is known as the Neolithic, or New Stone Age. It is a period associated with the beginning of early agriculture in Europe, beginning some nine thousand years ago. After more than twenty years of study of the statuettes and numerous other objects, Gimbutas has shown that these artifacts, the so-called fertility figures, were, in fact, representations of goddesses. This had been glimpsed and suggested by a number of earlier workers, but it was Gimbutas who led the field and established the facts.

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The evidence indicates that there existed a whole pantheon of goddesses, each presiding over some vital activity: Giver of Life, Wielder of self-generating (parthenogenetic) life, Regeneratrix, Earth Mother, and Fertility Goddess. "The goddess-centered art, with its striking absence of images of warfare and male domination, reflects a social order in which women as heads of clans or queen priestesses played a central role."
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That Old Europe and Anatolia, as well as Minoan Crete, were gylanies,
13
that is, nonpatriarchal and nonmatriarchal balanced social systems that were egalitarian, is revealed by studies of religion, mythology, folklore, and the social structure of Old European and Minoan cultures. All of these reflect the continuity of a matrilineal system in which descent is reckoned through the female line, as in ancient Greece, Etruria, Rome, and among the Basque and other European societies.
What Gimbutas is saying is not that there ever was a society governed by women, a matriarchate, but there were many societies (if not all) that were gylanic, where women and men shared an equal partnership, and that the deities these societies celebrated were predominantly feminine.

 

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The striking fewness of male figurines and the overwhelming number of female ones suggests the powerful role women played in prehistoric societies. Finally it seems clear that such societies were characterized by peace, cooperation, and freedom. An outstanding example of such a society is the Minoan culture of ancient Crete. In that land women played a central role in the functioning of society, and complete equality existed between the sexes. Descent appears to have been reckoned in the female line; in other words, Crete was an egalitarian matrilineal society. For fifteen hundred years, its people pursued the even tenor of their way, without war or conflict of any kind.
The distinguished archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley described the Minoan way of life as ''the most complete acceptance of the grace of life the world has ever known . . . like the enchantment of a fairy world." Another archaeologist, Nicholas Platon, said that it was a society in which "the fear of death was almost obliterated by the ubiquitous joy of living." Riane Eisler, much influenced by Gimbutas, has beautifully described all this in her memorable book,
The Chalice and the Blade
(1988).
How, then, did it come about that the gylanic cultures of Old Europe were destroyed and replaced by male-dominated, patriarchal, warlike peoples? The answer to that question is also the answer to the question: How, when, and where did the subjection of women occur? It is Gimbutas who offers the clear and unequivocal answer. She writes,
While European cultures pursued a peaceful existence and reached a true florescence and sophistication of art and architecture in the fifth millennium B.C., a very different Neolithic culture with the domesticated horse and lethal weapons emerged in the Volga basin of South Russia, and after the middle of the fifth millennium even west of the Black Sea. This new force inevitably changed the course of European prehistory. I call it the
Kurgan
culture
(kurgan
meaning barrow in Russian) since the dead were buried in round barrows that covered the mortuary houses of important males.

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It was by these kurgan invasions that gylanic societies were overturned and replaced by patriarchal dominator cultures in which women were subjugated by men.
The culture of Crete lasted from about 3000 B.C. to 1500 B.C. During that period its influence, maintained mainly through the

 

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