“The
Creation of Patriarchy” | Gerda Lerner
[Abridged Version]
From Women
and History. Vol. 1 The Creation of Patriarchy. OUP, 1986.
Introduction
Women’s
History is indispensable and essential to the emancipation of women. After
twenty-five years of researching, writing, and teaching Women’s History, I have
come to this conviction on theoretical and practical grounds.
I have observed
profound changes in consciousness which students of Women’s History experience.
Women’s History changes their lives. Even short-term exposure to the past
experience of women, such as in two-week institutes and seminars, has the most
profound psychological effect on women participants.
Women:
Central to the Making of Society and the Building of Civilisation
Like men, women
are and have been central, not marginal, to the making of society and to the
building of civilization. Women have also shared with men in preserving
collective memory, which shapes the past into cultural tradition, provides the
link between generations, and connects past and future.
This oral tradition was
kept alive in poem and myth, which both men and women created and preserved in
folklore, art, and ritual.
Women:
‘Outside’ of the Making of History [History-making]
History-making,
on the other hand, is a historical creation which dates from the invention of
writing in ancient Mesopotamia. From the time of the king lists of ancient
Sumer on, historians, whether priests, royal servants, clerks, clerics, or a
professional class of university-trained intellectuals, have selected the
events to be recorded and have interpreted them so as to give them meaning and
significance.
Until the most recent past, these historians have been men, and
what they have recorded is what men have done and experienced and found
significant. They have called this History and claimed universality for it.
What women have done and experienced has been left unrecorded, neglected, and
ignored in interpretation.
Towards
Creating a Feminist Theory of History
Assuming
civilization to have begun with the written historical record, my inquiry had
to begin in the fourth millennium B.C. This is what led me, an American
historian specializing in the nineteenth century, to spend the last eight years
working in the history of ancient Mesopotamia in order to answer the questions
I consider essential to creating a feminist theory of history.
What
Women ‘Ought to Do’ to the Recorded History of Society
Looking at
the recorded History of society as though it were such a play, we realize that
the story of the performances over thousands of years has been recorded only by
men and told in their words. What women must do, what feminists are now doing
is to point to that stage, its sets, its props, its director, and its
scriptwriter, as did the child in the fairy tale who discovered that the
emperor was naked, and say, the basic inequality between us lies within this
framework. And then they must tear it down.
Writing
of History Without the Umbrella of Dominance
What will
the writing of history be like, when that umbrella of dominance is removed and
definition is shared equally by men and women? We will simply step out under
the free sky. We may, after all, see with greater enrichment.
We now know that
man is not the measure of that which is human, but men and women are. Men are
not the center of the world, but men and women are. This insight will transform
consciousness as decisively as did Copernicus’s discovery that the earth is not
the center of the universe.
Patriarchy:
A Historical Creation of 2500 years
Patriarchy
is a historical creation formed by men and women in a process which took nearly
2500 years to its completion. The basic unit of its organization was the
patriarchal family, which both expressed and constantly generated its rules and
values.
The ‘Reification’
of Women: Claude Levi-Strauss
The
development of agriculture in the Neolithic period fostered the inter-tribal “exchange
of women,” because societies with more women could produce more children. In
every known society it was women of conquered tribes who were first enslaved,
whereas men were killed.
The product of this commodification of women - bride
price, sale price, and children - was appropriated by men. It may very well
represent the first accumulation of private property.
Claude Levi-Strauss, to
whom we owe the concept of ‘the exchange of women,’ speaks of the reification
of women, which occurred as its consequence. But it is not women who are
reified and commodified, it is women’s sexuality and reproductive capacity
which is so treated. The distinction is important. Women never became ‘things,’
nor were they so perceived.
Sustaining
of Patriarchy in the Past through the Cooperation of Women
The system
of patriarchy can function only with the cooperation of women. This cooperation
is secured by a variety of means: gender indoctrination; educational
deprivation; the denial to women of knowledge of their history.
Women have for
millennia participated in the process of their own subordination because they
have been psychologically shaped so as to internalize the idea of their own
inferiority.
Taking
the Half for the Whole: Inability to Describe Reality Accurately
By taking
the half for the whole, they have not only missed the essence of whatever they
are describing, but they have distorted it in such a fashion that they cannot
see it correctly. As long as men believed the earth to be flat, they could not
understand its reality, its function, and its actual relationship to other
bodies in the universe.
As long as men believe their experiences, their
viewpoint, and their ideas represent all of human experience and all of human
thought, they are not only unable to define correctly in the abstract, but they
are unable to describe reality accurately.
The
Functions of History: Preserving the ‘Collective Past’
History
gives meaning to human life and connects each life to immortality, but history
has yet another function. In preserving the collective past and reinterpreting
it to the present, human beings define their potential and explore the limits
of their possibilities.
Simone de
Beauvoir’s The
Second Sex
ignores History
In her
brilliant work The Second Sex, she described man as autonomous and
transcendent, woman as immanent. But her analysis ignored history. Explaining “why
women lack concrete means for organizing themselves into a unit” in defense of
their own interests, she stated flatly: “They [women] have no past, no history,
no religion of their own”.
Simone De Beauvoir is right in her observation that
woman has not ‘transcended,’ if by transcendence one means the definition and
interpretation of human knowledge. But she was wrong in thinking that therefore
woman has had no history.
Two decades of Women’s History scholarship have
disproven this fallacy by unearthing an unending list of sources and uncovering
and interpreting the hidden history of women.
A Tiny
Minority of Privileged Women: Who Gave us an Alternative to Androcentric
Thought
Yet there
have always existed a tiny minority of privileged women, usually from the
ruling elite, who had some access to the same kind of education as did their
brothers. From the ranks of such women have come the intellectuals, the
thinkers, the writers, the artists. It is such women, throughout history, who
have been able to give us a female perspective, an alternative to androcentric
thought.
They have done so at a tremendous cost and with great difficulty.
However, those academically trained women, have first had to learn ‘how to
think like a man.’
In the process, many of them have so internalized that
learning that they have lost the ability to conceive of alternatives. The way
to think abstractly is to define precisely, to create models in the mind and
generalize from them. Such thought, men have taught us, must be based on the
exclusion of feelings.
Women:
Mistrust their Own Experience & Hence Devalue It
Living in a
world in which they are devalued, their experience bears the stigma of
insignificance. Thus, they have learned to mistrust their own experience and
devalue it. What wisdom can there be in menses?
Women’s knowledge becomes mere ‘intuition,’
women’s talk becomes ‘gossip.’ Women deal with the irredeemably particular:
they experience reality daily, hourly, in their service function (taking care
of food and dirt); in their constantly interruptable time; their splintered
attention.
Historically, thinking women have had to choose between living a
woman’s life, with its joys, dailiness, and immediacy, and living a man’s life
in order to think.
Entering
the ‘Historical Process’: Men vs Women
Women and
men have entered ‘historical process’ under different conditions and have
passed through it at different rates of speed.
If recording, defining, and
interpreting the past marks man’s entry into history, this occurred for males
in the third millennium B.C. It occurred for women (and only some of them) with
a few notable exceptions in the nineteenth century.
Until then, all History was
for women pre-History. Women's lack of knowledge of our own history of struggle
and achievement has been one of the major means of keeping us subordinate.
Lack of
Knowledge of Female Past: Deprived Us of Female Heroines
Moreover,
each emergent woman has been schooled in patriarchal thought. We each hold at
least one great man in our heads.
The lack of knowledge of the female past has
deprived us of female heroines, a fact which is only recently being corrected
through the development of Women’s History. So, for a long time, thinking women
have refurbished the idea systems created by men, engaging in a dialogue with
the great male minds in their heads. Kate Millet argued with Freud, Norman
Mailer, and the liberal literary establishment; Simone de Beauvoir with Sartre,
Marx, and Camus; all Marxist-Feminists are in a dialogue with Marx and Engels
and some also with Freud.
In this dialogue woman intends merely to accept
whatever she finds useful to her in the great man’s system. But in these
systems woman - as a concept, a collective entity, an individual - is marginal
or subsumed. In accepting such dialogue, thinking woman stays far longer than
is useful within the boundaries or the question-setting defined by the ‘great
men.’ And just as long as she does, the source of new insight is closed to her.
The Shift
in Consciousness: Leaving Patriarchal Thought Behind
Revolutionary
thought has always been based on upgrading the experience of the oppressed. The
peasant had to learn to trust in the significance of his life experience before
he could dare to challenge the feudal lords.
The industrial worker had to
become ‘class-conscious,’ the Black ‘race-conscious’ before liberating thought
could develop into revolutionary theory. So with women. The shift in
consciousness we must make occurs in two steps: we must, at least for a time,
be woman-centered. We must, as far as possible, leave patriarchal thought
behind.
Stepping
Outside of Patriarchal Thought
To step
outside of patriarchal thought means: Being skeptical toward every known system
of thought; being critical of all assumptions. Testing one’s statement by
trusting our own, the female experience.
Since such experience has usually been
trivialized or ignored, it means overcoming the deep-seated resistance within
ourselves toward accepting ourselves and our knowledge as valid. It means
getting rid of the great men in our heads and substituting for them ourselves,
our sisters, our anonymous foremothers.
Perhaps the greatest challenge to
thinking women is the challenge to move from the desire for safety and approval
to the most ‘unfeminine’ quality of all - that of intellectual arrogance, the
supreme hubris which asserts to itself the right to reorder the world. The
hubris of the godmakers, the hubris of the male system-builders.
Conclusion
The system
of patriarchy is a historic construct; it has a beginning; it will have an end.
Women’s History, is the essential tool in creating feminist consciousness in
women. A feminist world-view will enable women and men to free their minds from
patriarchal thought and practice and at last to build a world free of dominance
and hierarchy, a world that is truly human.
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