"Women’s knowledge becomes mere ‘intuition,’ women’s talk becomes ‘gossip.’ Women deal with the irredeemably particular..."

“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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