The Women’s History of the World

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Interestingly, the more sophisticated of the women under the early monotheisms speedily grasped that her God in fact offered a post-dated cheque, and no one had ever come back to complain that it had bounced. Consequently they plunged into less-than-godly behaviour with extraordinary vigour, only making sure to build into their lives a final phase of high-profile godliness to ensure their passage to eternity. Mistress of this technique was the Russian Queen Olga. Becoming regent after the assassination of her husband Igor I, she first instituted a reign of terror in revenge for his murder, scalding the leading rebels to death and executing hundreds of others. After twenty years of iron-hearted cruelty she devoted herself to Christianity with such good effect that she became the first saint of the Russian Orthodox church.

The confidence with which the women of the early churches adopted, even manipulated, the dictates of the new patriarchies provides another pointer to the reason for their success. At their origins, they were all only a breath or two away from the goddess-religions they had usurped, and there is abundant evidence that for many hundreds of years women worshippers of the Father Gods continued with their traditional female rituals alongside the new observances. The prophet Ezekiel, a founder of the elevation of Judaism from its scattered tribal beginnings, was horrified to witness Jewish women of the fifth century B.C. ‘weeping for Tammuz’, mourning the death of the sacrificial king, who as Tammuz, Attis or Adonis was remembered every year on the Day of Blood at the end of March (later colonized by Christianity as Good Friday). And not only the women: to the scandalized eyes of the prophet Jeremiah, every man, woman and child was guilty of the same offence:

Seest thou not what they do in the cities of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem? The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead their dough to make cakes to the Queen of Heaven [the Great Goddess] that they may provoke me to anger.

All patriarchies, in fact, only succeeded by colonizing, indeed cannibalizing the forms, emblems and sacred objects of the Goddess they were purporting to root out. Much recent theological scholarship has been devoted to recovering what in ages past every schoolgirl knew: that the Great Goddess in her three-fold incarnation (maiden, mother and wise woman) lies behind the Christian trinity, that her immature aspect of moon maiden became the Virgin Mary, and so on. To this day modern events like May Day and Lady Day commemorate her special festals, especially the first, when at the celebration of the vernal equinox, maidens wreathed in flowers symbolizing the Earth Mother’s powers of fecundity and growth dance round a maypole, a phallic evocation of the boy-king/sacrificial lover of the woodland (Tammuz, Attis, Adonis, Virbius) who has been cut down. This continuity is even to be observed in the ethical systems that make no overt use of the Father God; the Chinese character denoting ‘ancestor’ had an earlier meaning of ‘phallus’ which, even earlier, found on the most ancient and sacred bronzes and oracle bones, had meant ‘earth’. Chinese ancestor-worship, then, embodying patriarchal supremacy (only a son can perform the ritual sacrifices which set his father’s soul free to join his ancestors) grows out of the Great Goddess/Mother Earth worship which promoted fertility and secured offspring for the first male ‘ancestors’.

Of all religions, however, Islam most clearly reveals this hijacking process at work. From the crescent moon on its flag to the secret of its most sacred shrine, the Goddess is omnipresent, as Sir Richard Burton observed on his travels:

Al-Uzza, one aspect of the threefold Great Goddess of Arabia, was enshrined in the Ka’aba at Mecca, where she was served by ancient priestesses. She was the special deity and protector of women. Today the Ka’aba still survives and is the most holy place of Islam.

Even when the priestesses of the Great Goddess were replaced by priests, her power lingered on. These male servitors were called Beni Shaybah, which means ‘Sons of the Old Woman’, one of the Great Mother’s more familiar nicknames. In an even clearer link, what they guard is a very ancient black stone, sacred to Allah, and covered with a black stuff pall called ‘the shirt of the Ka’aba’. But underneath the ‘shirt’ the black stone bears on its surface a mark called ‘the impression of Aphrodite’, an oval cleft signifying the female genitals: to one eye-witness ‘it is the sign of . . . the Goddess of untrammelled sexual love, and clearly indicates that the Black Stone at Mecca belonged originally to the Great Mother.’

When her women worshippers knew that ‘the Lady’ was still in her stone, and her stone was still in her shrine, it would not at first have mattered that she gained another name, she who had 10,000 appellations, nor that now she was served by different acolytes. In embracing the new father gods, therefore, women did not have to abandon all contact with their first mother, and this undoubtedly enabled the struggling patriarchies to consolidate their hold.

In these early struggles of each of the male-centred systems lies another reason for their initial success with women. In the fight for recognition and survival, any ideology seizes on and makes use of whatever recruits come to hand – it is no accident that the first devotees of both Buddha and Muhammad were their wives. Women were, as a result, well to the fore in all these foundations, which offered them a central role and opportunity. It seems clear, for instance, that Khadijah, the brilliant businesswoman and prominent member of the leading Meccan tribe of the Quraish, actually discovered Muhammad when at the age of forty she gave the ill-educated, epileptic shepherd boy of twenty-five regular employment, took him as her husband and encouraged his revelations.

The early annals of Judaism are similarly stiffened with strong-minded women, even in extremes of terror, pain and loss. A well-known figure is that of the mother of the Maccabees, who stood by her seven sons while each in turn was tortured and burned to death in the holocaust of 170 B.C., urging them to stand firm. But for this, it is agreed, the God of the Jews could have been wiped out: ‘the blood of the Maccabean martyrs . . . saved Judaism’.

In early Christianity likewise, women found not merely a role, but an instrument of resistance to male domination; in choosing to be a bride of Christ they inevitably cocked a snook at lesser male fry. Thousands of young women helped to build the church of God with their body, blood and bones when frenzied fathers, husbands or fiancés preferred to see them die by fire, sword or the fangs of wild beasts rather than live to flout the duty and destiny of womanhood.

Just as important as the fearless witness of the virgin martyrs was the work of the women who put their time, their money, their enthusiasm, their houses and their children freely at the disposal of the struggling founders. Even St Paul, later the unregenerate prophet of female inferiority, was forced to acknowledge the help he received from Lydia, the seller of purple dyes in Philippi. Indeed the very first Christian churches in Rome and elsewhere were houses donated by wealthy widows, and all the Christian communities in the Acts of the Apostles are recorded as meeting under a woman’s roof: ‘the church in the house of Chloe, in the house of Lydia, in the house of Mary, the mother of Mark, in the house of Nympha, in the house of Prisca . . .’ Most significant of all, as a leading theologian shows, of the common offices of the church in its pioneer days (teaching, prayer and prophecy, thanksgiving over bread and wine, and administering the gifts and discipline of the faith), ‘there is none that a woman could not do.’

Early Christianity, in fact, claimed through its prophets that it liberated women from their traditional subservience and gave them complete sexual equality with men. ‘In Christ,’ wrote St Paul, ‘there is neither bond nor free, neither male nor female . . .’ Buddhism, too, at its beginnings held out to its female adherents a delusive promise of equality; the threefold reality, ‘all is suffering, all is impermanence and there is no soul’, was as available to women as it was to men. Additionally, Buddha taught that life, or form, was only one of twenty-two faculties that composed a person; sex, therefore, was of minimal importance. And, like Christianity, Buddhism also had its early heroines, idealized examples of passion, purity and sublime faith:

Subh

puts the thought [of Buddha] into action [when] a rogue inveigles her into the forest and tries to seduce her. Subh

responds by preaching the doctrine to him. But the rogue sees only the beauty of her eyes and ignores her lofty words. So to demonstrate the irrelevance of both her beauty and sex to the inner life, Subh

plucks out one of those lovely eyes and offers it to him. He is converted at once . . .

Of all the early patriarchies, though, perhaps the most surprising in its attitude to women is Islam; the gross oppressions which later evolved like veiling, seclusion, and genital mutilation (the so-called ‘female circumcision’) were brought about in the teeth of the far freer and more humane regime of former times. From pre-Islamic society, for instance, women had inherited the right to choose their own husbands – husbands in the plural, for the old ‘mother-right’ still flourished throughout the tribes and townships of the Arab states, as the feminist historian Nawal El Saadawi explains:

Before Islam a woman could practise polyandry and marry more than one man. When she became pregnant she would send for all her husbands . . . Gathering them around her, she would name the man she wished to be the father of her child, and the man could not refuse . . .

When a Bedouin woman wanted to divorce one of these spare husbands, she simply turned her tent around to signal that her door was no longer open to him. In later generations Muslim women must have considered folk tales or memories of those freedoms either a cruel joke or the purest fantasy. Yet the proof that they existed lies in the marriage story of the founder of Islam, the prophet Muhammad himself. When the self-assured Khadijah wanted him, she despatched a woman with instructions for Muhammad to propose to her – and he did.

Even more remarkable than this free right of sexual choice was the readiness with which the women of early Islam took up arms and fought in pitched battles alongside the men. One honoured heroine and war-leader was Salaym Bint Malhan, who with an armoury of swords and daggers strapped round her pregnant belly fought in the ranks of Muhammad and his followers. Another is credited with turning the tide in a fierce fight against the Byzantines, when the wavering forces of Islam were rallied by a tall knight muffled in black and fighting with ferocious courage. After the victory, the ‘knight’ was reluctantly exposed as the Arab princess Khawlah Bint al-Azwar al-Kindiyyah.

Even losing in battle could not defeat Khawlah’s spirit. Captured at the battle of Sabhura, near Damascus, she rallied the other female captives with the passionate challenge, ‘Do you accept these men as your masters? Are you willing for your children to be their slaves? Where is your famed courage and skill that has become the talk of the Arab tribes as well as the cities?’ A woman called Afra’ Bint Ghifar al-Humayriah is said to have returned the wry reply, ‘We are as courageous and skilful as you describe. But in such cases a sword is quite useful, and we were taken by surprise, like sheep, unarmed.’ Khawlah’s response was to order each woman to arm herself with her tent-pole, form them into a phalanx, and lead them in a successful fight for freedom. ‘And why not?’ as the narrator of their story concludes, ‘If a lost battle meant their enslavement?’

Another woman warrior of Islam, as potent with her tongue as with a sword, was the celebrated ’A’ishah. Although the youngest of the twelve wives of the polygamous prophet, married to the aged Muhammad when she was only nine and widowed before her eighteenth birthday, ’A’ishah became famous for her courageous intelligence and resistance to the subordination enjoined on virtuous Islamic wives. She had no hesitation in opposing or correcting Muhammad himself, arguing theology with him in front of his principal male followers with such devastating logic and intellectual power that Muhammad himself instructed them, ‘Draw half your religion from this ruddy-faced woman.’ Her courage extended even to resisting the will of the Prophet when it came through the hotline of a revelation from Allah himself. When in answer to his desire to take another wife Muhammad was favoured with a new batch of Koranic verses assuring him that Allah permitted his prophet to marry as many women as he wished, she hotly commented, ‘Allah always responds immediately to your needs!’

What else would a father god do? And how were women to respond? ’A’ishah, still only a girl of eighteen when Muhammad died, outgrew this rebellion and went on to become a leading figure in Islam, where her active political power and influence on Muslim evolution and tradition were enormous. But the challenge she had thrown down remained unanswered. It could only gain in immediacy and urgency in the years that followed.