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Rosalind Miles

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“All democratic experiments, all revolutions, all demands for equality have so far, in every instance, stopped short of sexual equality. Every society has in its prestige structures a series of subtle, interacting codes of dominance that always, everywhere, finally rank men higher than women. Nowhere has any society successfully dispensed with the age-old sex-role division of labor and the rewards in goods and power that accompany it. Nowhere do women enjoy the rights, privileges and possibilities and leisure time that men do. Everywhere men still mediate between women and power, women and the state, women and freedom, women and themselves.”

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Book:Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
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“The atmosphere of uncertainty, dissatisfaction and fear, though caused by larger crisis, becomes associated with the fact that women now have jobs or are no longer in the home as a warm and welcoming presence. Identified then with the bad feelings of change, women came to be seen as the cause of the badness. And not only to men - but to women too, these strains and dissatisfactions, and being made to take responsibility for being the cause of them, often seems too high a price to pay for their new freedoms.”

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“The feminist rejection of the low view of women that Christianity had imposed upon so many nations had an important consequence for another of the key issues of the women's rights campaign: the demands for education. The ignorance of women had been bound in with Christian dogma - Eve's sin consisted of reaching out for the tree of knowledge, so her punishment was to be forever deprived of it. Unchallenged for centuries, this attitude produced generations of women doomed to be brought up in mental darkness and then condemned as stupid: "We are educated to the grossest ignorance, and no art omitted to stifle our natural reason," complained Lady Mary Wortley Montagu bitterly in the eighteenth century.”

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“As this shows, under the topsy-tervy conditions of revolution, women found themselves once again serving as soldiers in the front line. The last known female regular soldier had been abolished in Ireland in the seventh century A.D., but the tradition, stretching all the way back to the old matriarchies, had never entirely disappeared.”

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“Since women are not inferior, they had to be bombarded with a massive literature of religious, social, biological and, more recently, psychological ideology to explain, insist, that women are secondary to men. And to make women believe that they are inferior what better subject for this literature of religious teaching, cautionary folk tales, jokes and customs, than the female body?”

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Book:Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
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“In terms of understanding the patriarchal struggle for control of women's bodies, the issue of blood is a major preoccupation. For not only did women bleed every month, from girlhood for all over their adult lives; every stage of their journey as women, every passage from one state to the next (menarche, defloration, childbirth) was also marked by the flow of blood with its frighteningly ambivalent signal of both life and death. The greater the danger the stronger the taboo. All these "courses" of women's lives have triggered an intricate and often savage set of myths, beliefs and customs in which the containment of cultural fears overrode any personal concern for the female who was ostensibly the cause and center of it all.”

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“Domination was not absolute, systems were imperfect, there was still too much room to maneuver - control could not be based on an organ that men could not control. There had to be more - an idea of imminent, eternal maleness that was not physical, visible, fallible; one that was greater than all women because greater than man; whose power was omnipotent and unquestionable - one god, God the father, who man now invented in his own image.”

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“To women, therefore, the effect was broadly the same, however the message of male supremacy came packaged. All these systems - Judaism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam - were presented to them as holy, the result of divine inspiration transmitted from a male power to males empowered for this purpose, thereby enshrining maleness itself as power.”

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“For whatever needs were answered by the new patriarchies as they grew, throve and put on beef, they were bot the deeper needs of the female sex. Of course, there were attractions - there had to be, for women to swallow the ideological bait without perceiving either the hook or the poisonous lead weighing it down. None of these systems could have been imposed on women against their will. There had to be consent from the women members of each tribe, township or race proselytized by the zealots of the new gods, at some level. Which of them, though, presented with the first appealing package of function and freedom, could have known what she was consenting to for herself and all her female descendants for the next 2,000 years?”

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“The attack on women's bodies that was one of the most marked consequences of the imposition of patriarchal monotheism has no convenient onset or conclusion - but it was a principle determining factor of every woman's history over an extended period of time. It signaled, precipitated even, the decline of women into their long night of feudal oppression and grotesque persecution.”

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“For women were dangerous in every part of their anatomy, from top to toe. Luxuriant hair could excite lust accordingly the Jewish Talmud from A.D. 600 onward allowed a man to divorce a wife who appeared in public with her hair uncovered. While St Paul went so far as to instruct Christians that a woman who came bare headed to church had better have her head shaved. The female face was another Venus's flytrap for helpless males - in a bizarre piece of theology dated from the 3rd Century A.D., the early Christian father Tertullian held that "the blume of virgins" was responsible for the fall of the angels: "so perilous a face, then, ought to be kept shaded when it has cast stumbling stones even so far as heaven.”

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Book:Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
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