Marilyn French - From Eve to Dawn : A History of Women. Volume 2. The Masculine Mystique

FROM

EVE

TO

DAWN

Other Books by Marilyn French

Fiction

The Womens Room (1977)

The Bleeding Heart (1980)

Her Mothers 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)

FROM

EVE

TO

DAWN

A HISTORY OF WOMEN

VOLUME 2:
THE MASCULINE MYSTIQUE

MARILYN FRENCH

Foreword by
Margaret Atwood

The Feminist Press

at the City University of New York

Published in 2008 by The Feminist Press at the City University of New York

The Graduate Center

365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406

New York, 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, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission from The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 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 978-155861-621-9 (trade paper)

1. WomenHistory. I. Title.

HQ1121.F74 2008

305.4209dc22

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

12 11 10 09 08 5 4 3 2 1

As if from Eve to Dawn Your own name changes.

BARBARA GREENBERG

To Barbara Greenberg and Margaret Atwood

CONTENTS

F ROM EVE TO DAWN is Marilyn Frenchs enormous four-volume, nearly two-thousand-page history of women. It runs from prehistory until the present, and is global in scope: the first volume alone covers Peru, Egypt, Sumer, China, India, Mexico, Greece, and Rome, as well as religions from Judaism to Christianity and Islam. It examines not only actions and laws, but also the thinking behind them. Its sometimes annoying, in the same way that Fieldings Amelia is annoyingenough suffering!and its sometimes maddeningly reductionist; but it cant be dismissed. As a reference work its invaluable: the bibliographies alone are worth the price. And as a warning about the appalling extremes of human behavior and male weirdness, its 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. 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 laborswomen, it appears, do most of the work around this planetand last but not least, their wardrobes.

From Eve to Dawn has a point of view, one that will be familiar to the readers of Frenchs best-selling 1977 novel, The Womens 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 Dawn is to Simone de Beauvoirs 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 Frenchs 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 eventthe bizarre customs, the woman-hating legal structures, the gynecological absurdities, the child abuse, the sanctioned violence, the sexual outragesmillennium after millennium. 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 visualswitch-burnings, rapes, stonings-to-death, Jack the Ripper clones, bedizened courtesans, and martyrs from Joan of Arc to Rebecca Nurse. The television series fell off the rails, but French kept on, writing and researching with ferocious dedication, consulting hundreds of sources and dozens of specialists and scholars, although she was interrupted by a battle 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 powerspecifically, 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 conventional histories, women simply arent there. Or theyre there as footnotes. Their absence is like the shadowy corner in a painting where theres something going on that you cant quite see.

French aimed to throw some light into that corner. Her first volumeOriginsis the shortest. It starts with speculations about the kind of egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies also described by Jared Diamond in his classic Guns, Germs and Steel. No society, says French, has ever been a matriarchythat is, a society in which women are all-powerful 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 propertymens property, to be bought, sold, traded, stolen, or killed.