Good morning, readers and book lovers, and welcome to another—gulp!—open forum. If a book has changed your life, please kosmail me to say you’ll contribute a diary. Then we can discuss your diary instead of mine. Deal?
Okay, before we get to the discussion we’ll have breakfast. This morning it’s lavender scones with thick cream, clotted especially for you somewhere in Cornwall, and blackcurrant jam, all washed down with lavender Earl Grey tea. Oh, all right, if you really want coffee, there’s Roast American Supremes in the urn in that corner over there, with the usual accompaniments. Summer and lavender seem like soulmates, don’t you agree?
Now, having finished our breakfast, let’s waddle into the salon and plunk ourselves down on the comfortable chairs and sofas to begin our spirited, possibly even contentious, discussion.
As you all know, on Monday, 30 June 2014, five miserable old male gits who will never need the birth control pill or any other form of female contraception, handed down the infamous Hobby Lobby decision. Essentially, this means that a “closely held” company can refuse to provide certain types of contraception in its insurance coverage for female employees. The decision constitutes discrimination against the female sex and therefore ranks as yet another example of what it means to be ruled by patriarchy.
Because ruled by it we are, as indeed most societies have been for the last few thousand years. (I say “most societies” because anyone who’s ever read Leaving Mother Lake knows that patriarchy hasn’t ruled all societies). Patriarchy rules by war and oppression: so inured are we to this fact that our very language reflects it. In our combative everyday parlance we say “I’ll fight for you after you elect me to Congress,” and “We’ll conquer this disease,” and “We will arm ourselves with all the data available before we investigate.” And every time we say “mankind” instead of “humankind” or refer to deity as “he," we perpetuate patriarchy.
Patriarchy pervades every aspect of our lives. It’s why teenaged girls starve themselves so they’ll be “thin enough” to find acceptance in the eyes of patriarchs who view them as playthings. It’s why the sight of a nursing mother feeding her infant is considered obscene, whereas a nearly naked woman in a bikini is considered acceptable. It’s why, until recently, little girls were told they could grow up to be teachers, nurses, and secretaries, but never professors, physicians, astronauts, CEOs, or president of the United States.
So which book first made you aware of patriarchy as the driving force of dominance, oppression, and war? Was it Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade, Merlin Stone’s When God Was a Woman, Sjoo and Mor’s The Great Cosmic Mother, or Mary Daly’s Beyond God the Father and Gyn/Ecology?
For me it was The Chalice and The Blade.
In this book Eisler lays out two models of society: the dominator model, which has existed for the last five thousand years, and the partnership model, which she believes to be much more equitable and desirable. Moreover, she argues that before the Kurgans, sweeping through Asia Minor on horseback in 1200 B.C., bringing their belief in sky gods and dominance with them, most societies were matrifocal. The picture that emerges from the archaeological discoveries of artifacts from Minoan Crete is that of a matrifocal society, perhaps the only society in the ancient world that built its empire through commerce rather than war.
Chalice was an eye opener for me in more ways than one. It had never before occurred to me to think of archaeological discoveries free of patriarchal bias—to think of the rotund little statue known as “the Venus of Willendorf” as an object of worship rather than as an object of patriarchal sexual fantasy. The bare breasts of the priestesses of Minoan Crete argue the existence of a society in which female breasts were viewed not as shameful appendages to be covered up but rather as beautiful body parts to be displayed proudly. In contemplating the nipple jugs in the museum at Fira on Santorini, one has to marvel at the prepatriarchal mind, which viewed the female breast as possessing awesome life-giving properties. That's why the Minoans stored oil, wine, and water in jugs that had nipples carefully molded onto them.
How different we are after five thousand years of patriarchy, in which the sight of an uncovered female breast with a baby attached to its nipple causes the owner of said breast to be ejected from public spaces with contumely!
Reading The Chalice and the Blade led me to the delights of other works of thealogy, such as Sjoo and Mor’s The Great Cosmic Mother.
A quote from the book’s back cover describes its contents: “This classic exploration of the Goddess through time and throughout the world draws on religious, cultural, and archaeological sources to recreate the Goddess religion that is humanity’s heritage. ….this passionate and important text shows even more clearly that the religion of the Goddess—which is tied to the cycles of women’s bodies, the seasons, the phases of the moon, and the fertility of the earth—was the original religion of all humanity."
Years ago I marked this interesting passage from The Great Cosmic Mother, which is pertinent to today's discussion:
Can we really believe that celibate priests care so much about the lives of infants? Or is that their true concern is to maintain absolute control over the bodies of women, since it is upon this control that their entire religion is based. Feminists say: "If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament." Women must understand that because men cannot get pregnant, their next move is to establish patriarchal religion, whose major sacrament is to make childbearing a punishment. A punishment for sex, a punishment for being female. Certainly it was not so in the ancient matriarchies.
If this diary seems to be veering dangerously from a discussion of patriarchy to a discussion of religion, bear in mind that thealogian
Mary Daly argued that patriarchy
is a religion.
Here’s a quote from Wikipedia on Daly’s Gyn/Ecology: "In Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978), Daly argues that men throughout history have sought to oppress women. In this book she moves beyond her previous thoughts on the history of patriarchy to the focus on the actual practices that, in her view, perpetuate patriarchy, which she calls a religion.[12]"
Barbara Walker reinforces this argument in The Skeptical Feminist. After describing a miserable evening spent in the company of a young man from a church group, she goes on to say:
I never saw Randy again but I have long remembered this encounter and what it taught me. It was my first inkling of what I was to observe often in later life: that men are most disturbed by women who deny their God and most disposed to punish such women. The reason is not far to seek. Father God is woman’s internal fetter, more effective than any external chains.
As feminists have recently pointed out, authority relationships between the sexes depend largely on gender concepts of supernatural powers. “A woman can never have her full sexual identity affirmed as being the image and likeness of God, an experience freely available to every man and boy in her culture.” Only a God made in the image of man can successfully convince woman of her inferiority. Without God, woman might even see her own sex as the more significant one, the one that perpetuates the race and is intimately connected with the future; the one that generates all forms of love; the one that despises destructiveness.
No matter how unthinking they may be, sexist males understand on a gut level that God is their primary ally in the effort to control women.
If I were to explore this subject further this diary would be TLTR (too long to read). So why don’t YOU explore it in the comments? Tell us which book opened your eyes to the patriarchal nature of the society we inhabit. Lead on—the floor is yours!