Currently its most venerable member, I am delighted to learn that the Georgetown Club has at last burst gloriously into, let us say, the 20th century and admitted women as full members. It seems decades ago that I participated in that fight and thought at the time it was won only to have entrenched male stupidity mount a last long campaign of delay against equality. That absurdity is now corrected and I like to think that the first women directors of the club will soon follow.
Well, the history of the world reminds us that women tend to suffer discrimination because of what they are, regardless of ability, aptitudes, experience, character or what they believe in. This is a sad thought and the truth of it should be enough to fill all men with sympathy and shame. It may be uncomfortable to some, but it is surely a universal good, that we are living in an era when women are refusing to go on being martyred in the same old way.
They are also, more and more, refusing to accept the world view of women that men have been able to impose over the centuries. A good example of this revolt comes in a recently reissued and updated book by Rosalind Miles, called The Women’s History of the World which, for a start, debunks the various arrogant ideas promulgated by man about women’s place in history.
It upsets the absurd idea that only men won battles or were philosophers or inventors or leaders. Aspatia of Miletos, “the first lady of Athens,” was Plato’s principal teacher. Aristoclea taught Pythagoras. Astemesia, in command of the fleet, defeated the Athenians in a famous battle near Salamis. In 4th century Alexandria the great scientist, thinker and astronomer Hypatia invented the astrolobe and hydroscope. The list of examples is long and surprising, extending to such remarkable women as Mary Reiby, transported to Australia in 1790 at the age of 13 for stealing a horse, who became that continent’s leading entrepreneur, shipping magnate, hotelier, and property developer in the first part of the 19th century. Men tend to forget or ignore or disparage the likes of her.
However, according to Ms Miles, the place of women in the history of mankind has been even more fundamentally miscalculated and underestimated. The fact is that for 25,000 years woman was revered as “the keeper of all life’s mysteries.” Priesthoods were predominantly female. Women held both spiritual and economic power from the Russian steppes to Africa, Asia, and Australia. The dramatic shift, argues Ms Miles, took place when men discovered the role of sperm and understood that men, too, had an active role in procreation. This revelation coincided with a period when large-scale agriculture was replacing horticulture. Small plots had been controlled and owned by women. Large-scale agriculture became the domain of men. Men controlled the surpluses which flowed from the new farming and inherited the power that flowed in turn from the surplus wealth.
Then the arrival of the great religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – all male and closed shop – was devastating for women. These religions, in which God became purely male, are, says Rosalind Miles, “the inventions of phallocrats.” Hypatia’s philosophy of scientific rationalism, for instance, ran so counter to the emergent Christian religion that Cyril, the patriarch of Alexandria, incited a mob of zealots to murder her. Her flesh was sliced from her body with shells. Hypatia’s dismal end signified more than the death of an outstanding female scientific genius. “In Cyril and his bigots, every thinking woman could foresee the shape of men to come.”
However, Ms Miles’ book is not really anti-male. It is more an effort to explain how gender is manipulated by the forces of power. She believes, and surely she is right, that men have hijacked history. They dominate it because they write it.
And this suggests a valuable thought in Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting in which the author reminds us that “The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten.” Women lost that fight for thousands of years. But gradually, gradually, the tide is turning.
At the Georgetown Club there has been a minute victory in the grand scheme of things. But it all adds up. Multiply such advances ten thousand fold in country after country and perhaps in a decade or two the world will be a better and more sensibly governed place.
