Women’s history by contrast has only just begun to invent itself. Males gained entry to the business of recording, defining and interpreting events in the third millennium B.C.; for women, this process did not even begin until the nineteenth century. Early women’s history was devoted to combing the chronicles for queens, abbesses and learned women to set against the equivalent male figures of authority and ability, creating heroines in the mirror image of heroes: Joan of Arc, Florence Nightingale, Catherine the Great. This pop-up, cigarette-card version of women’s history, though it has some value in asserting that women can be competent and powerful, had two weaknesses – it reinforced the false effect of male domination of history, since there were always many more male rulers and ‘geniuses’ than female; and it failed to address the reality of the majority of women’s lives who had neither the opportunity nor the appetite for such activities.
What then should a women’s history of the world do? It must fill the gaps left by conventional history’s preoccupation with male doings, and give attention and dignity to women’s lives in their own right. Women’s exclusion from the annals represents a million million stifled voices. To recover the female part of what we have called history is no mean achievement. Any women’s history therefore has to be alert to the blanks, the omissions and the half-truths. It must listen to the silences and make them cry out.
The second task is to confront the story of women as the greatest race of underdogs the world has ever known. ‘Women live like bats or owls, labour like beasts, and die like worms,’ wrote an English duchess, Margaret of Newcastle, in the seventeenth century. Both women and men have to accept the violence and brutality of men’s systematic and sustained attacks on the female sex, from wife-beating to witch-hunting, from genital mutilation to murder, as the first step towards righting history’s ancient and terrible wrongs.
As this argues, it is essential to acknowledge that the interests of women have very often been opposed to, and by, those of men. It is no paradox that historical periods of great progress for men have often involved losses and setbacks for women. If there is any truth in Lenin’s claim that the emancipation of its women offers a fair measurement of the general level of the civilization of any society, then received notions of ‘progressive’ developments like the classical Athenian culture, the Renaissance, and the French Revolution, in all of which women suffered severe reversals, have to undergo a radical revaluation: for, as the American historian Joan Kelly drily observes, ‘there was no Renaissance for women – at least in the Renaissance.’
A women’s history, then, must hope to explain as well as narrate, seeking the answer to two key questions: How did men succeed in enforcing the subordination of women? And why did women let them get away with it? At the origin of the species, it is suggested, Mother Nature saddled women with an unequal share of the primary work of reproduction. They therefore had to consent to domination in order to obtain protection for themselves and their children. The historical record shows, however, that women in ‘primitive’ societies have a better chance of equality than those of more ‘advanced’ cultures. In these, male domination has been elaborated into every aspect of life, indeed strenuously re-invented in every epoch with a battery of religious, biological, ‘scientific’, psychological and economic reasons succeeding one another in the endless work of justifying women’s inferiority to men. Traditionalist arguments of masculine supremacy have been remarkably resilient over time – all democratic experiments, all revolutions, all demands for equality have so far stopped short of sexual equality – and women, seen as biologically determined, continue to be denied the human right of full self-determination.
Given that men have sought control, why did women let them have it? As with the ‘inevitability’ of male dominance, the explanations interlock. Handed over as children by one man (their father) to another (as husband), they were legally, financially and physically subject to the power of males in its undisguised form for thousands of years – until very recently, men of all cultures had the right to kill a wife they even suspected was adulterous. Backing up physical force, and successfully superseding it as a technique of control, came mental violence. Commandeered in mind as well as body, women have always been subjected to a barrage of psycho-sexual conditioning to shape them up to the demands of their males. As Dora Russell remarked, ‘the astonishing fact of human history is that religion, philosophy, political, social and economic thought have been reserved as the prerogative of men. Our world is the product of male consciousness.’ How then could women think the unthinkable, in Virginia Woolf’s words, of ‘killing the Angel at the Hearth’? Finally, and this cannot be dodged, women have colluded in their own subordination – too comfortable with the accommodations they had made, too locked into the ways they had found to live with men and with themselves, too wedded to their own often pathetically ingenious and resourceful solutions, they have not only helped to sustain the systems of male dominance but have betrayed their children, male and female, into them too.
Yet – and this is the final paradox of women’s history – women have not ultimately been victims either of men or history, but have emerged as strong, as survivors, as invincible. Now, freed at last from the timeless tyranny of enforced child-bearing, they are moving onto the offensive to correct these antediluvian imbalances. For patriarchy has run its course, and now not only fails to serve the real needs of men and women, but with its inalienable racism, militarism, hierarchical structures and rage to dominate and destroy, it threatens the very existence of life on earth. ‘We women are gathering’, declared the American women’s Pentagon Action Group of 1980, ‘because life on the precipice is intolerable.’ As long as women go on allowing men to make history, we are responsible for the material and moral consequences of our evasion.
The effort then must be to free women from their historical shackles – from the tyranny of ancient customs like bride-burning and genital mutilation still horrifically alive in the twentieth century – and to combat those newly minted in our own time. For the struggle to set women free is far from over, as Westerners like to think. In this century, the new technologies, advances in medical science and urbanization have offered women unparalleled freedoms – but each has carried within it the seeds of its use against women, bringing new opportunities for degradation and exploitation, new forms of drudge labour, new attacks on life and hope. The amniocentesis test, for example, devised as a means of promoting the birth of healthy babies, is now widely used to detect the sex of a child as a preliminary to aborting unwanted females: one clinic in Bombay alone performed 16,000 abortions of female foetuses in 1984–5 (Guardian, 4.11.86).
With a subject of this magnitude, there could have been as many different histories as there are women to write them. This book does not try to be comprehensive, nor does it purport to have solved all the problems of writing women’s history. Many people will feel that they could have done better. Please try – we need as much women’s history as we can get. This version makes no pretence to the traditional historical fiction of impartiality. Accordingly, as with any work on women, some good ol’ boy somewhere is bound to object that it is unfair to men. There is no better reply to this than the spirited self-defence of the pioneer women’s historian Mary Ritter Beard: ‘There is sure to be an over-emphasis in places, but my apology is that when conditions have been long weighted too much on one side, it is necessary to bear down heavily on the other.’
It will also be objected that women should not be singled out for special pleading, since both sexes suffered alike. When both men and women groaned under back-breaking labour with the ever-present scourge of famine and sudden death, the women’s afflictions, it is argued, were no worse than those of men. This is another widely held belief that will not stand up to any examination of the real differences between the lives of women and men. The male peasant, however poor and lowly, always had the right to beat his wife; the black male slave, though he laboured for the white master by day, did not have to service