“The story of the human race begins with a female.”
Quickly, without giving it too much thought, name ten famous historical women. Got them? Right. Probably you’ve all gone for the same ones. Joan of Arc, Elizabeth I, maybe Victoria, possibly Marie Curie, Jane Austen, Florence Nightingale? Emmeline Pankhurst?
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OK, now name ten more. Who’ve we got this time? Cleopatra? Boadicea? Mary Seacole, Amelia Earhart, Harriet Tubman? Not so easy that time, was it?
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Now do it again. Struggling? Horrendously, so was I. And yet if I’d asked you to name fifty historical men, you might not have even had to pause for a moment, reeling off a checklist of men from Alexander the Great to Winston Churchill. Why, then, is it so hard to quickly recall even a handful of history’s greatest women? Simply, because men wrote the history books and have edited them ruthlessly.
In Rosalind Miles’ book, Who Cooked The Last Supper?, she laments this lack of women throughout history, pointing out that wherever men were, women had to be there too, usually being treated far worse and often without much public outcry. Her story begins in the caves of old, where women gathered most of the food for their tribes and leads us through history up to the last century where women fought for their rights to suffrage, contraception and independence.
Along the way, she talks about the hypocrisy of men as they struggled to keep women under their thumbs, deciding almost arbitrarily that women are weaker and more stupid, making them unable to do the jobs that men could do, despite the fact that women had been doing them for centuries before. She covers every horror that women have faced over the advancing millennia, from rape and slavery, to genital mutilation and the punishments doled out for having the audacity to menstruate. Women had originally been worshipped as goddesses, creators who gave life to everything, but as soon as men realised that they had something to do with childbirth too, then that was that. Woman’s fate was sealed and the phallus was held up as the greatest thing on the earth.
There are tales of genuine horror in here, such as the trials of female coal miners, the sex slavery that most women endured, and the horrendous, almost vomit-inducing tortures forced upon those women who dared to step outside of the norm.
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Miles pulls no punches here, never for a minute accepting that men weren’t at fault here. She is out to redress history and show that women have been there all this time, even if the history books so often don’t show that. There are stories of great women in history who worked as laborers, soldiers, teachers, scientists, writers and doctors, only to have most of their achievements blasted out of history by men. But women are responsible for some of the biggest leaps forward in humanity’s history. The first novelist was a woman, and so was the inventor of calligraphy, and thus the art of handwriting. Female gynecologists ruled the wards of Ancient Greece, and there’s always been women willing to go out and teach others.
It’s an interesting book and will make you look at history in a completely different way, but I warn you now that this is at heart an academic text, and Miles is an academic, so it’s fairly dry in some places. With such a seemingly frivolous title, I expected it to be a bit lighter, but it was not to be so. Also, there are a few tales of famous women who should be remembered better, but few of them are much fleshed out, and it would have been interesting to read more of these.
In any case, it’s a stark reminder that men did not build this world alone, and that some backwards thinking people may continue with their beliefs that women are lesser than them, but they are wrong. Of course women should have equality, but it’s been a long, torturous process to get to the point we’re at now, and we’ve still got further to go.
An important read for men and women alike.
Source: https://t-tees.com
Category: WHO
