A World More Human

...If I were compelled to find any fault with Lerner's study, which is the first of a projected two volumes, it might be that the wealth of historical detail she provides is sometimes tediously—though understandably—repetitious, and that changes in economic systems as well as technological advances might have been given more consideration as facilitators for raised consciousness...

...Lerner emphasizes that women and children were the first slaves, taken by conquering tribes who killed adult males (only in later times taking male captives as slaves), or offered as mollifying gifts or in trade by fathers, brothers, uncles, or even husbands whose "property" they had become...

...With a study as richly mined as this one, which Lerner—a historian, but not of ancient times—spent some five years researching, it seems almost insulting to try to summarize it in these few paragraphs...

...Excluded from male-recorded history, they have been unaware of their own past...

...Thus, sexual divisions of labor developed, and these appear to have been "separate but equal," with no stigma attached...

...She might have laid more stress on the increasing role of mind over muscle in bringing human beings into a potentially more equitable era...

...The intervening chapters in which Lerner meticulously leads the reader through centuries of patriarchal reinforcement are sometimes heavy going, especially for the lay reader...

...Finally, she says, "A feminist world-view will enable women and men to free their minds from patriarchal thought and practice and at last to build a world free of dominance and hierarchy, a world that is truly human...

...All of this seemed so inevitable, Lerner argues, that we tend to assume it is the natural order of things, as God or Nature intended...

...Reviewed by Ann Morris sett Davidon The fact that women have been generally subordinated to men throughout Western history is the starting point of Gerda Lerner's complex and detailed investigation into how this came about—and how it might be changed...

...However, when kinship tribes began to interact—and conflict—with others, sexual roles (which Lerner distinguishes from biological sex functions), having developed traditionally rather than innately, led to the male consideration of women as property that could be seized or exchanged...

...The physical superiority of men and their ability to rape women were factors in this subjugation of women, but the female role of nurturing, of becoming attached to offspring, also tended to make women more adaptable and flexible in captivity, the negative side of which could be weakness, passivity, and acceptance of victimization...

...Since women's thought has been imprisoned in a confining and erroneous patriarchal framework, the transforming of the consciousness of women about ourselves and our thought is a precondition for change...

...Women who consider themselves emancipated have only to look at who makes wars and weapons, who runs most countries, businesses, institutions, even human services and the arts (and most liberal magazines, I would add) to recognize how far women have yet to go...

...Certainly women's vulnerability to physical coercion and rape has been crucial, but additionally women have been deprived of education, led to believe in their own inferiority, and separated by rank and degrees of privilege from other women...

...If the patriarchal system developed as a result of specific historical circumstances, why can't other historical events—such as the relatively recent rise of feminist consciousness—change the system that still prevails...

...In this she diverges from Engels's assumption that the beginning of private property preceded the consideration of women as property, and that Ann Morrissett Davidon is a free-lance writer, a part-time teacher, and a peace activist...

...Developing from pre-Christian cultures through many millennia, gradually subsuming the varieties of gods (especially the female ones), Mesopota-mian civilization culminated in the male-god monotheism that has since dominated Western civilization, consolidating the patriarchal model from the family through the state to religious concepts of the universe...

...Lerner sees this as the real beginning of the subjugation and objedification of women, laying the groundwork for slavery, class structure, and private property as states developed...

...Men are not the center of the world," Lerner writes...

...Regardless of whether qualities such as aggressiveness or nurturance are genetically or culturally transmitted, it should be obvious that the aggressiveness of males, which may have been highly functional in the Stone Age, is threatening human survival in the nuclear age...

...She finds evidence, rather, for egalitarian communal systems in primitive societies—mother-dependent only in that they tended to be matrilineal and matrilocal rather than matriarchal...

...Yet men pride themselves on taming and changing nature through all the advances of civilization...

...Lerner does not answer this question as blithely as some feminists might: Her probing analysis discards easy assumptions of matriarchal patterns in prehistory that might be used to justify any "natural" superiority of women whose hegemony has been thwarted by men...

...Systems that developed historically can be changed historically, Lerner insists—despite all the evidence she has produced for the all-but-universal entrenchment of patriarchy...

...the abolition of private property would liberate women...

...now that women are no longer necessarily and exclusively bound to a life of childbearing and childrearing, why do we persist in patriarchal structures and thinking...

...Lerner traces the roles of women at different levels of society—privileged wives, priestesses, concubines, prostitutes, servants, peasants, and slaves—as they are reflected in archaeological sites and in the Code of Hammurabi, in Hittite and Middle Assyrian laws, and in the Covenant of the Hebrews...

...Women's collaboration in their own subordination is another touchy issue Lerner deals with forthrightly...

...BOOKS A World More Human THE CREATION OF PATRIARCHY by Gerda Lerner Oxford University Press...

...Men and women are...

...they were sustained more by foraging and horticulture, in which women and children participated, than by seasonal big game...

...Lerner does not attempt to explore Egyptian, African, and Asian civilizations, where similar patterns have existed but were not such direct influences on the Greco-Judeo-Christian West...

...In her chapter on Origins she writes, "The qualities which may have fostered human survival in the Neolithic are no longer required of modern people...

...She seeks neither to excuse nor to blame, but to find reasons...

...Yet hunting, as Lerner points out, was not the mainstay of primitive groups...

...In her last chapter, Lerner concludes: "Today, historical development has for the first time created the necessary conditions by which large groups of women—finally, all women—can emancipate themselves from subordination...

...Even in these relatively egalitarian groups, however, the biological fact of sex largely determined the roles that kept most women—probably voluntarily—nurturing rather than hunting...

...Given—or insisting on—the chance, women now have the possibility not only of effectively doubling the available brain power and providing the broader and deeper perspective of two views over one, but of demonstrating and demanding that this power be used compassionately for the survival and empowerment of everyone, rather than for overpowering large parts of humanity...

...Obviously, she wanted to leave no loopholes that would let scholars of ancient history dismiss the validity of her research and the logic of her deductions (though some may do so in any case...