Just the Facts, Ma'am

...Brother, Can You Spare a Dime...

...The Elizabeth Kristol is executive director of the Institute for International Health and Development in Washington, D.C...

...But it's probably best not to tell them that...

...The persecution of witches in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is, for feminist historians, evidence of the degree to which post-Neolithic men have been threatened by women's powers—especially their reproductive and sexual powers...

...You can hear the wheels spin: The resolution of the "difference dilemma" comes neither from ignoring nor embracing difference as it is normatively constituted...

...And how was your day...

...There is no question that had this material been written by a man and been published in any other than textbook form, it would be dismissed as pornography...

...There is a scholarly dispute over whether the Great Goddess was bisexJUST THE FACTS, MA'AM A HISTORY OF THEIR OWN, VOL...

...For 30,000 years there was a nonstop celebration of menstruation, pregnancy, and childbirth...

...Whether Ur Not Glory days had to flow from such auspicious beginnings...

...Thirty thousand years of being overshadowed by women and their accomplishments THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1989 39 ual or merely lesbian...

...Marxists wrested history away from extraordinary individuals and great events in order to give voice to the downtrodden—a belated vote to the disenfranchised...

...And in truth, women are making far too much of history...

...40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1989 From the historian's point of view, though, there are distinct tactical advantages to jazzing up history...

...Phallic worship, interestingly enough, had been invented by the Great Goddess for her own private purposes, but men soon turned it to their advantage so that, after a while, the worship of the phallus became confused with worship of the male, which paved the way for the eventual subjugation of the female as exists in all Western nations today...

...But for feminist historians, these watery years are a source of immense comfort, and the subject of much scholarship...

...Instead it seems to me that the critical feminist position must always involve two moves: the first systematic criticism of the operations of categorical difference, exposure of the kinds of exclusions and inclusions—the hierarchies—it constructs, and a refusal of their ultimate "truth...

...That the Great Goddess existed for centuries before God was just a gleam in man's eye has in recent years been asserted in even the most mainstream of feminist publications...

...29 THE GREAT COSMIC MOTHER: REDISCOVERING THE RELIGION OF THE EARTH Monica SjtiO and Barbara Mor/Harper & Row/501 pp...

...The master of the house had his carved chair with cushions...

...Is it possible to think about difference without reference to a standard or norm, without establishing a hierarchical ordering...

...after all, it is only with the greatest of patience—and because one has a genuine involvement with the person sitting across the dinner table—that one can actually bear to listen to the details of another human being's day: "I handed in my report, but Steve made me revise the section on micro-management initiatives, and then, I couldn't believe it, but that new secretary still hasn't learned to use the Apple, and she forgot to set the tab marks and all the paragraphs got screwed up and the whole thing had to be reprinted and recollated...

...The momentum generated by such relentless superiority spun out of control...

...Wanna step outside...

...The shift in emphasis, notes Joan Wallach Scott in her Gender and the Politics of History, has been immensely useful to feminist historians...

...There is a turf battle being waged on the history front, and the turf is no less than the origins of the universe and the evolution of the human species...

...Too many contradictions is usually a sign of trouble, the sheer nervous collapse of an argument being pushed beyond its limits...

...Her chapter on "The Politics of Work and Family in the Parisian Garment Trades in 1848" is far more readable than it sounds, by virtue of the questions she raises concerning the labor movement, economic competition, and shifting political identifications—issues which are significant in their own right...

...where for eons the Great Goddess had been egalitarian—in that pagan way She had—monotheism brooked no equals...

...Actually, SjOO and Mor's numbers are a little high...

...And, in fact, although prehistoric woman may not have had a long life (she usually died before the age of twenty), ironically enough, it offered a richness and satisfaction that has yet to be equalled...

...Her concern is strictly political: she isn't worrying whether some of the feminist research being undertaken isn't intellectually marginal but only that it might be perceived as marginal, thereby diminishing women's power...

...Scott, more an intellectual historian than a strictly social historian, is careful to keep larger points in sight...

...this is definitely not a book you would want to fall into the wrong hands...

...It is intimately linked with the creative forces that brought it into being...

...There is no question women's histories are capable of being imaginative...

...As it happens, that is a real route to power...

...Things were still harmonious when earth was formed 5 billion years ago, since there was a sense of connectedness between cells and stars...

...It is best not to mention what Casanova did with a half-lemon, to what purpose certain wives put the left testicle of a weasel taken alive before the sun went down, the subtle nuances in chastity belt design, exactly what happened to child brides, or the many, many, many methods of female circumcision...

...The recent focus on Stone Age women, sixteenth-century midwives, or Welsh schoolchildren is the result of a very deliberate regrinding of the lens of history...

...Her "Remembrance of the Holocaust of Women," loosely modeled after All-Saints Day, includes a lengthy litany of witches persecuted and killed (with details of the precise methods of torture), followed by a more general Litany of the Oppressed (to be recited antiphonally), and concluding with all members of the congregation eating apples...

...History isn't linear, but all life stems from an original female life-form, and everything follows from this fact...

...Yo, Mama "God was female for at least the first 200,000 years of human life on earth...

...During the centuries the Goddess held sway, the theory goes, women were not just taken care of, they were affirmed on every deepest level...

...Truth is, says Miles, women back then "had a better chance of freedom, dignity and significance than many of their female descendants in more 'advanced' societies...

...Joan Wallach Scott devotes large parts of her book to examining how one can write women's history without becoming marginal, and how it can be arranged for men and women to be, not equal to each other, not different from each other, but—well, some new transcendence of opposites...

...Eating utensils now included plates, cups or goblets, forks and spoons...

...Feminists are navigating tricky waters between asserting equality with men and declaring their difference (difference being a double-edged sword, conferring both privilege and discrimination...

...Her-story,' " writes Scott, "developed in tandem with social history...

...16.95 paper Elizabeth Kristol Stone Age sponsored an elaborate continuing ed program, with course offerings in all levels of cooking, pottery, weaving, and jewelry-making...

...Every single person alive today, these authors tell us, is descended from a single female DNA ancestor...

...The magazine's classified section announces Goddess-oriented workshops, conferences, retreats, calendars, gift items, and author queries (e.g., "Wanted: Great Goddess Experiences—Bay Area writer seeks true stories of actual experiences with the Great Goddess for forthcoming book...

...One would exaggerate it if one felt there was a chance to capture it and make it one's own...

...This helps explain the disturbing necrophiliac tendencies in much of feminist history, as authors rush to embrace the very concepts they have just killed off...

...The surfeit of detail supplied makes some of these chapters read like a how-to manual...

...Scott is aware that a similar problem plagues women's history: it deliberately sets itself up as an alternative, but this permits the historical establishment to dismiss it as marginal...

...But mainly, according to these books, Neolithic women were inventors, producers, scientists, physicians, lawgivers, and artists...

...On the other hand, sometime back in the fourteenth century, a burgher's wife had a good day, because she "no longer had to fold and store the furniture...

...Then What Happened...

...To do anything else is to buy into the political argument that sameness is a requirement for equality, an untenable position for feminists (and historians) who know that power is constructed on, and so must be challenged from, the ground of difference...

...Those historians who do notice the contradictions within their work have a hard time digging themselves out...

...What would be truly creative, at this point, is if feminist historians permitted their gazes to drift away from the "power structures" they so covet and allow them to fall on historical topics that are genuinely in need of attention and illumination...

...There is another time-honored way of making things more interesting, which is to sensationalize...

...But tragedy struck...

...Anderson and Zinsser are good social historians...

...All have encountered the same obstacle...

...Scott's dilemma is that, morally, she cannot countenance opposing equality, but she is shrewd enough to sense that the route to power lies with difference...

...And though Marxist men—worse yet, British Marxist men—invented social history, it is women who have made out like bandettes...

...From the feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether to the pages of the radical feminist/New Age magazine Woman of Power, we see women harkening back to their prelapsarian days, by paying homage to the "Original Mother without a Spouse...

...Women also ran food co-ops and day-care centers...

...So closely is today's wiccan movement allied with the larger Goddess movement in theology that the editor of Woman Power can simply refer to upcoming articles on "the Wiccan/Nature/Goddess traditions"—that whole neopagan thing...

...Women felt so comfortable with themselves back then, in fact, that they invented tools, agriculture, spoken language, textiles, tampons, fire, the calendar, the alphabet, and abstract thought...

...18.95 GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF HISTORY Joan Wallach Scott/Columbia University Press/231 pp...

...But it is not nearly so powerful a discipline as feminist historians insist...

...Wait a second—what was that part about the goblets again...

...The "wiccan nature" which emanated from her over the centuries is, by this account, "the original nature of all women...

...Woman was everything...

...She was "black, bisexual, a warrior, a wise and strong woman, also a midwife, also a leader of the tribe...

...they are careful to present their material unlaced with polemics and ideological cant...

...And that's the people we love...

...An ideological lens inevitably introduces distortion, but the reader is tempted to strike a faustian bargain if a small dose of ideology promises to make the detritus of other people's lives more interesting...

...Rosalind Miles's book is dizzyingly entertaining, but only in the guilt-ridden way that one stares, mesmerized, at a bad accident on the road, knowing that if one had better character one would avert one's gaze...

...Your back aches and your feet grow heavy...

...This raises the interesting question: Why would one exaggerate the power of the enemy...

...But the consensus among feminist theologians is that the Great Goddess, as she has persisted until today, is fundamentally a triple goddess: virgin/mother/crone ("crone" being, in the feminist lexicon, a positive term referring to a "wise one...

...The large rectangular table remained standing in front of the fireplace...

...was more than the creature with the puny chromosome could take...

...Not only that—and this is no idle locker-room talk—the female X-chromosome is three to four times longer than the male Y-chromosome, and a single egg is several hundred times bigger than a sperm...

...Sji5O and Mor believe that the Great Goddess and the original witch share a common spiritual source...

...Rosemary Radford Ruether, in her 1985 book Women-Church, presents a number of new liturgies and religious rites...

...This is a conservative estimate...

...and (2) the precise components that account for the disgustingness...

...Altogether up to 400,000 seedlings are pulled up from each hectare," she reported...

...Contemporary women are fully justified in revolting against 4,000 years of oppression, but men had no right to rise up against 30,000 years of oppression (200,000, if you accept SW and Mor's estimate...

...Oh Gross...

...27.50 THE WOMEN'S HISTORY OF THE WORLD Rosalind Miles/Salem House/249 pp...

...he rose up in rebellion, a rebellion that persists to this very day...

...It must be martyrdom when women historians pursue what amounts to a canonization of the nonevent...

...The story of the human race begins with the female," echoes Rosalind Miles in the opening of her Women's History of the World...

...A bit wordy, but the message is clear—and honest...

...They offered "real healing through anciently tested herbal knowledge" and had a keen social conscience besides: "Their covens were correctly suspected to be meeting places for revolutionary peasants...

...Men weren't insecure in those days, so they weren't threatened by women's survival skills, and they felt no need to boss women around or take away their property or tell them whom they could have that newfangled frontal sex with...

...And from the first the weeds have to be pulled up...

...Biology isn't destiny, but you wouldn't believe how long the female chromosome is...

...A glance at any one of a number of works on women's history reveals that women—or at least slimy female life forms—got there first...

...Of course the writing of history is important, as are the concepts and terms history introduces into common parlance...

...But crocheting pasts is a far cryfrom creativity...

...I: FROM THE PREHISTORY TO THE PRESENT Bonnie S. Anderson and Judith P. Zinsser/Harper & Row/588 pp...

...In a desperate effort to lash out at women, men began to bombard them with images of an all-powerful phallus, to change agriculture from a sweet and gentle nurturing of the land to a coarse exploitation of the soil using harsh tools, and to invent monotheism...

...Chests, stools, chairs, and benches were arranged along the walls...

...Rosalind Miles maintains that the "gynocide" of the late Middle Ages was a direct response to the "astonishing upsurge of women's political power worldwide"—a phenomenon for which she provides a time-line of fairly unconvincing examples...

...Part of the appeal of Goddess worship seems to be a hope that earthbound women would be better off with a female goddess at the helm...

...Social history, when done correctly, is incredibly boring...

...A refusal, however, not in the name of an equality that implies sameness or identity but rather (and this is the second move) of an equality that rests on differences—differences that confound, disrupt, and render ambiguous the meaning of any fixed binary opposition...

...It also causes us to lower our guard against generalizations...

...Flour Power "Behind the vivid foreground of popes and kings, wars and discoveries, tyranny and defeat, working women wove the real fabric of the kind of history that has yet to receive its due...

...Monotheism, invented about 3,000 years ago, was an especially cruel trick, since it introduced into the universe the notion of hierarchy...

...It would be enough, for example, to know that Arctic women cured leather...

...A recent issue of the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Woman Power contains nine articles dealing with Goddess worship...

...Sometime earlier this century, in the Soviet Union, a beet-grower had a bad day...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1989 41...

...many witches, apparently, were simply healers ("shamans") and midwives...

...Reading their research, though, bears an eerie resemblance to suffering a stroke, as first one limb then another slowly goes numb...

...Today's `civilized' sisters of these 'primitive' women could with some justice look wistfully at this substantial array of the basic rights of women," concludes Miles...

...But power isn't like a currency that can be passed from hand to hand—let alone be stolen...

...For one thing, it is difficult for a reader to be prurient and critical at the same time...

...often too much for their own good...

...We know this because she went on record...

...Her technique is simple: she tells us (1) every disgusting thing women have ever been made to do...

...This news may be of limited relevance to most contemporary women, many of whom are too lazy to date their prehistories any further back than junior high...

...All Together Now The world is a rich and varied place, but not so rich as to encompass the factual and philosophical contradictions that exist in women's history: • There is no such thing as God, but she is female...

...indeed, it often took its lead from the methods and conceptions developed by social historians...

...Instead we are informed that "women chewed the raw pelts of dead birds to soften them for wearing next to the skin...

...Is it possible, she wonders, to create a notion of difference that will be kept on such a tight leash—a woman's leash, needless to say—that it will never work against women's advantage...

...Even before the galaxy went coed, female-type creatures were blissed out and full of pride...

...By the sixteenth century, chests had evolved into cabinets for storing linens and clothing...

...Such historical diligence applied to sexual topics produces awesome results...

...This is complicated by the fact that, in ancient artistic renditions of her, she is often portrayed as a hermaphrodite, making it theoretically possible that she could be any combination of things...

...Life got slightly more complicated when the first penis made his appearance 200 million years ago, but the assorted life forms around at the time managed to adapt to this novelty, and for the next 199,996,000 years things cruised along pretty happily until the Bronze Age...

...Incredibly, the original witch embodied some of the very same subject categories under which a scholar living in the latter part of the twentieth century is most likely to receive an NEA grant...

...Still reeling from a spellbinding tale, we are unfazed, for example, when Rosalind Miles casually mentions that "these individual tragedies are merely representative of thousands upon thousands more...

...Having for years craved "a room of their own" (Scott, Anderson, and Miles all make use of Virginia Woolf's image), feminist historians have pooled their intellectual savings and are busy furnishing this room to the hilt, each adding her own decorative touch...

...An Embarrassment of Witches Hand in hand with Goddess worship in contemporary feminist thought is the increasingly dominant wiccan movement...

...Miles's observation may have held some truth twenty years ago, but the sort of history she describes has since received its due many times over...

...And no wonder: they had been running the show for a couple of billion years...

...most feminist theologians place Her age at a trim 25,000-30,000...

...That is not its fault...

...In the beginning . . . was a very female sea," Monica Sjiiti and Barbara Mor begin their Great Cosmic Mother (it is from them we learn the shelf life of the penis...

...you don't choose immediately as if one were as good as another...

...And you have to bend over every one of them, have a good long look at some of them...

...A typical entry reads: "1028: Asma, the ruling queen of the Yemen, succeeded by Queen Arwa, her daughter-in-law, bypassing the Sultan, Al-Mukarram, with his consent...

...It was nothing less than a revolution: of the weak against the strong, of the oppressed against their oppression, of value structures and habits of thought...

...The same phenomenon occurs when feminists take on language and religion, and for the same reason: women recognize that these three realms wield the greatest political and social power, and they thereforeassume these realms confer the greatest power...

...Facts are the meaningless creation of men intent on imposing a false order on a naturally fluid universe, but it is important to remember that in eighteenth-century Sologne, bolsters, covers, and featherbeds accounted for 40 percent of the family's assets...

...Why such do-gooders routinely found themselves stretched on a rack or used for kindling SjOii and Mor explain: "Witches were independent of mind, they were of the people, and they served the God-dess, the native Goddess of Neolithic Europe, not a male god imposed by Roman imperialism...

...It was too much," writes Miles...

...The Goddess was loving, nurturing, and scrupulously egalitarian, but under her rule, men rebelled with such a vengeance that they are still seething 4,000 years later...

...The current view of witches places them somewhere in the camp of social workers, except not quite so evil...

...They also cured larger hides by rotting them till the putrid blubber and hair could be scraped off easily, sousing them in urine to clean them, then massaging them with animal brains as dressing...

...In fifteenth-century Italy, glass and ceramic became cheaper than metal, and different kinds of tableware began to multiply...

...In her conclusion to Gender and the Politics of History, Scott offers up her solution: historians and political scientists and philosophers should work together to redefine the words "difference" and "equality" so that they don't contain any contradictions any more...

...man] was nothing...