Autocratic candidates and the threat of turning back the clock on women's rights
Thinking about women's History Month
Considering that women make up slightly more than half of the U.S. population, it seems odd that we are still treating them like second-class citizens. We create special months for minority groups in the hopes people will take a little time out to reflect on what the group, and individuals within that group, accomplished. What might a historian make of our recent Women's History Month?
If we go back to the dawn of humanity, we’ll find ourselves living in tiny hunting and gathering bands. Back then, the connection between sexual activity and childbirth wasn’t understood. With a bit of luck and a lot of goodwill, sex happens frequently, while childbirth happens only a few times in a woman's life. Why would we have automatically connected the two? Well, we didn't. Every woman was a little goddess. Periodically, they performed a miracle that they couldn't even explain to themselves, let alone to men.
Then, the Agricultural Revolution took hold. The seed, finally understood, became the dominant metaphor for agricultural life. Turns out, men had the seed — and seeds were the key to everything. From being the Little Goddess, women were reconsidered as, essentially, flowerpots into which the magical seeds of men were planted. It was all about the men — their fields, their crops, their women and their babies.
Meanwhile, in Heaven, Ishtar, Isis and Innunu — who had given birth to the world and then, as mothers do, loved it and nourished it — were replaced by male sky gods, bearded and muscled with lightning bolts lying on their laps. As above, so below.
Along the old Tigris and Euphrates rivers, we'll find the world's oldest writing. Imagine an ancient play, a street scene. The curtain opens to find men and women conducting business deals, buying and selling properties. But then in the oldest writing in the world, on clay tablets, new laws are announced. If a woman does a business deal with a man without her husband's written permission, both she and the person she makes the deal with shall be put to death. So much for independent women in business.
A little later, we find new laws. If a woman disrespects her husband in public, “Her teeth shall be bashed in with bricks.” Bashed in with bricks. My ancient history students would just look at me. There's such hatred in the language — and brutal specificity. Who could possibly hate women so much as to write such laws, and why? As cities all over the world sprang up, to a greater or lesser degree, women were driven off the stage, out of the public square.
In India's ancient Laws of Manu, you'll find a quote a feminist could love. “Where women are honored, there the gods are pleased.” Now we're getting somewhere! But then we keep reading. Women are to be controlled by their fathers when young, by their husbands ever after and by their sons if the father dies. “A woman is never fit for independence,” summarizes the law.
We do get some queens in antiquity. Egypt’s queen Nefertiti was mostly good looking, but Queen Hatshepsut built ships and sent them on bold voyages of trade the length of Africa and, with no wars necessary, made Egypt rich. But once Thutmose III got on the throne, he immediately took his country to war and, during his spare time, had Hatshepsut’s name chiseled off of every monument he could find.
I could go on, but you get the idea. Women in America only got the vote about 100 years ago. The idea of women being co-creators with men of our life on earth is a very new idea and still not universally accepted.
You'll notice that whether it's al Qaeda, ISIS, or among Jewish and Christian traditionalists, one value they all hold in common is that modernity is an insult to the almighty God and that women need to be stuffed back into place. And what is one of the developments that freed women to take their equal places in modern society? Having control of their own reproductive capacities.
If today's Supreme Court is going to base Constitutional law on the traditional values held by the framers over 200 years ago, not only abortion but contraception will be at risk — certainly if how the colonials viewed “women's rights” is to be taken as their guide. There were no women's rights.
The fundamental civil right in modern democratic society is the chance to participate equally in framing the law.
In our coming election and in elections all over the world where autocratic candidates are running, the future of women's history is on the ballot. If we're not careful, unhappy men may happily return the world to the Iron Age where “Men were men, and women didn't mind.” We'd better be very, very careful.
Lawrence Brown is a columnist for the Cape Cod Times. Email him at columnresponse@ gmail.com.
Get the Cape Cod (sports/politics/news alerts) that matters delivered to your inbox. Sign up for our free (sports/politics/news alerts) newsletter.
This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Future of women's history is on the ballot
