From Eve to Dawn, a History of Women in the World, Volume I: Origins: From Prehistory to the First Millennium: 1

363 Pages·2008·10.303 MB·English

by  Marilyn French & Margaret Atwood

F R O M
E V E
T O
D AW N
Other Books by Marilyn French
Fiction
The Women’s Room(1977)
The Bleeding Heart (1980)
Her Mother’s Daughter(1987)
Our Father (1994)
My Summer with George(1996)
Nonfiction
Beyond Power. On Women, Men and Morals (1988)
Women in India (1990)
The War Against Women(1992)
A Season in Hell. A Memoir (1998)
F R O M
E V E
T O
D AW N
A HISTORY OF WO M E N
VOLUME 1: O R I G I N S
M A R I LYN FRENCH
Fo rew o rd by
Ma r g a ret At w o o d
The Feminist Press
at the City University of New York
Published in 2008 byThe Feminist Press at the City University of NewYork
The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406
NewYork, NY 10016
www.feministpress.org
Text copyright © 2002 by Marilyn French
Introduction copyright © 2007 by Marilyn French
Foreword copyright © 2004 by Margaret Atwood
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or used, stored in any information retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy-
ing, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission from The Feminist Press
at the City University of NewYork, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in
critical articles and reviews.
The Library of Congress provided the following Cataloguing-in-Publication Data for
all four volumes of this series:
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
French, Marilyn, 1929-
From eve to dawn / Marilyn French ; foreword by Margaret Atwood.
p. cm.
“Originally published: Toronto : McArthur, 2002.
ISBN 978-1-55861-565-6 (trade paper)
1. Women—History. I. Title.
HQ1121.F74 2008
305.4209—dc22
2007033836
This publication was made possible, in part, by the Lawrence W. Levine Foundation,
Inc., and by Florence Howe, Joanne Markell, and Eileen Bonnie Schaefer.
Cover design by Black Cat Design
Cover illustration by Carole Hoff
Printed on acid-free paper in Canada byTranscontinental
12 11 10 09 08 5 4 3 2
To Barbara Greenberg and Margaret Atwood
C O N T E N T S
FO R EWO R D by Ma r g a ret At w o o d . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i x
IN T RO D U C T I O N . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
PA RT ON E: PA R E N TS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 9
CH A P T E R 1: TH E MOT H E R S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1
CH A P T E R 2: TH E FAT H E R S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5 1
PA RT TWO: TH E RI S E O F T H E STAT E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 7
CH A P T E R 3: STAT E FO R M AT I O N I N PE RU, EG Y P T, A N D SU M E R . . 6 9
CH A P T E R 4: A SE C U LA R STAT E: CH I N A . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 8
CH A P T E R 5: A RE L I G I O U S STAT E: IN D I A . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 4 3
CH A P T E R 6: A MI L I TA R I S T I C STAT E: ME X I C O . . . . . . . . . . . 1 6 5
CO N C LU S I O N: AN AN A LY S I S O F T H E STAT E . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 7 7
PA RT TH R E E: GO D, GLO RY, A N D DE LU S I O N S O F GR A N D E U R . .1 8 9
CH A P T E R 7: JU D A I S M . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 9 1
CH A P T E R 8: GR E E C E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 0 4
CH A P T E R 9: RO M E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 2 3
CH A P T E R 10: CH R I S T I A N I TY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 3 7
CH A P T E R 11: IS LA M . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 5 7
GLO S S A RY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 9 7
NOT E S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 0 1
BI B L I O G R A PH Y . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2 5
IN D E X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 3 9
MA P S:
The Expansion of Ro m e . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 3 0 – 3 1
The Expansion of Is l a m . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 8 4 – 8 5
Map of the World: Peters Pro j e c t i o n . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 3 6 – 3 7
F O R E WO R D
FROM EVE TO DAWN is Marilyn Fre n c h’s enormous four-
volume, nearly two-thousand-page history of women. It
runs from pre h i s t o ry until the present, and is global in scope:
the first volume alone covers Pe ru, Egypt, Su m e r, China,
India, Mexico, Greece, and Rome, as well as religions fro m
Judaism to Christianity and Islam. It examines not only
actions and laws, but also the thinking behind them. It’s
sometimes annoying, in the same way that Fi e l d i n g’s Am e l i a
is annoying—enough suffering!—and it’s sometimes mad-
deningly reductionist; but it can’t be dismissed. As a re f e re n c e
w o rk it’s invaluable: the bibliographies alone are worth the
price. And as a warning about the appalling extremes of
human behavior and male we i rdness, it’s indispensable.
Especially now.There was a moment in the 1990s when,
it was believed, history was over and Utopia had arrived,
looking very much like a shopping mall, and “feminist
issues” were supposed dead. But that moment was brief.
• ix •
F O R E WO R D
Islamic and American right-wing fundamentalists are on the
rise, and one of the first aims of both is the suppression of
women: their bodies, their minds, the results of their
labors—women, it appears, do most of the work around this
planet—and last but not least, their wardrobes.
From Eve to Dawn has a point of view, one that will be
familiar to the readers of French’s best-selling 1977 novel,
The Women’s Room. “The people who oppressed women
were men,” French claims. “Not all men oppressed women,
but most benefited (or thought they benefited) from this
domination, and most contributed to it, if only by doing
nothing to stop or ease it.”
Women who read this book will do so with horror and
growing anger: From Eve to Dawnis to Simone de Beauvoir’s
The Second Sex as wolf is to poodle. Men who read it might
be put off by the depiction of the collective male as brutal
psychopath, or puzzled by French’s idea that men should
“take responsibility for what their sex has done.” (How
responsible can you be for Sumerian monarchs, Egyptian
pharaohs, or Napoleon Bonaparte?) However, no one will be
able to avoid the relentless piling up of detail and event—the
bizarre customs, the woman-hating legal structures, the
gynecological absurdities, the child abuse, the sanctioned
violence, the sexual outrages—millennium after millenni-
um. How to explain them? Are all men twisted? Are all
women doomed? Is there hope? French is ambivalent about
the twisted part, but, being a peculiarly American kind of
activist, she insists on hope.
Her project started out as a sweeping television series. It
would have made riveting viewing. Think of the visuals—
witch-burnings, rapes, stonings-to-death, Jack the Ripper
clones, bedizened courtesans, and martyrs from Joan of Arc
• x •
F O R E WO R D
to Rebecca Nurse. The television series fell off the rails, but
French kept on, writing and researching with ferocious ded-
ication, consulting hundreds of sources and dozens of spe-
cialists and scholars, although she was interrupted by a bat-
tle with cancer that almost killed her.The whole thing took
her 20 years.
Her intention was to put together a narrative answer to
a question that had bothered her for a long time: how had
men ended up with all the power—specifically, with all the
power over women? Had it always been like that? If not,
how was such power grasped and then enforced? Nothing
she had read had addressed this issue directly. In most con-
ventional histories, women simply aren’t there. Or they’re
there as footnotes. Their absence is like the shadowy corner
in a painting where there’s something going on that you can’t
quite see.
French aimed to throw some light into that corner. Her
first volume—Origins—is the shortest. It starts with specu-
lations about the kind of egalitarian hunter-gatherer soci-
eties also described by Jared Diamond in his classic Guns,
Germs and Steel. No society, says French, has ever been a
matriarchy—that is, a society in which women are all-pow-
erful and do dastardly things to men. But societies were once
matrilineal: that is, children were thought to descend from
the mother, not the father. Many have wondered why that
state of affairs changed, but change it did; and as agriculture
took over, and patriarchy set in, women and children came
to be viewed as property—men’s property, to be bought,
sold, traded, stolen, or killed.
As psychologists have told us, the more you mistreat
people, the more pressing your need to explain why your
victims deserve their fate. A great deal has been written
• xi •