by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched the first two episodes of a four-part British TV
series called The Ascent of Woman that
was being presented on PBS, hosted by a powerful personality named Amanda
Foreman who turns out to have been the daughter of High Noon screenwriter Carl Foreman. She also turns out to
have been the person behind the rediscovery of Duchess Georgiana, an 18th
century woman in England, wife of the Duke of Devonshire and an accomplished
writer, musician, linguist and political campaigner for the Whig Party;
Foreman’s 1998 biography of Georgiana was filmed in 2008 as The
Duchess, with Keira Knightley as Georgiana
(though, being me, in my blog post on the movie I wrote, “I couldn’t help but
think what a 1930’s version with the young Katharine Hepburn as Georgiana might
have been like”). One imdb.com reviewer faulted Foreman for endorsing the
“great man” — or, in her case, the “great woman” — theory of history other
feminists have tried to debunk, but her agenda was basically to identify famous
women who had openly challenged the gender orthodoxies of older civilizations
and risen to positions of power. Her first great woman was Enhedduana (I think I wrote that down right), the daughter of a
Babylonian monarch and the first person of either sex to write a work of literature that survives. One
of Foreman’s points was that it was not inevitable that civilization would impose a patriarchal order on
society, with men at the top and women’s position varying from being grudgingly
given some protections but no real rights, to being treated almost solely as
man’s property — in her discussion of Athens in ancient Greece, she notes the
irony that despite their city being named after a female deity, really existing
women in Athens were treated much the way women were treated in Afghanistan
under the Taliban. Not only did they have no political rights, they couldn’t
even go out of the home without strict supervision from men, their husbands
could have sex with them any time they wanted to (though as I’ve noted in these
pages before, it wasn’t until 1977
that in California it finally became illegal to rape your wife), and if a woman
was raped she was considered to have brought dishonor to her family.
The
history of women in ancient cultures Foreman tells is a bit more complicated
than the one in Frederick Engels’ The Origin of Family, Private
Property and the State — Engels argued that
civilization created surplus value and also a warrior class to protect it from
other states seeking to seize it in war, and that was the reason the matriarchal power structures of
pre-civilized humans were replaced by patriarchal ones, with the classic
“double standard” (men could play around, women couldn’t) imposed because the
men wanted to make sure that whatever children their wives produced were theirs. Foreman notes that there were actually cultures in
the ancient world, including the nomads who lived across what is now southern
Russia and the successor states to the Soviet Union — at their height they
inhabited a band of territory stretching from the Ukraine to Mongolia — who
gave women the opportunity for real power and authority. She’s able to tell
this because of the discovery of quite elaborately equipped tombs and burial
sites honoring women, and she ironically notes that for centuries these
lavishly equipped corpses were assumed to be male until the ancient bones
started to be given DNA tests which revealed that their original owners had
been female. She also noted that in the first Mesopotamian culture, Sumer,
women had far more rights than they did in later Babylonia (where the Code of
Hammurabi offered protections for women but no real rights) and Assyria (a
warrior culture that kept all the restrictions on women from Hammurabi’s Code
but got rid of the protections). She briefly mentioned ancient Egypt as a
society in which women got a somewhat better deal than they did in Mesopotamia
(modern-day Iraq); she noted that there were at least six documented women
Pharoahs, though the only one she specifically mentioned is the well-known
Hatshepsut (who took power in the first place only as regent for a baby king),
and she noted that after Hatshepsut’s death her male successor tried to wipe
her out of the historical record, a recurring pattern in these histories.
Exactly why the idea of women
wielding state power is considered such a threat that men in culture after
culture felt compelled not only to resist women seeking power but to wipe the
women who achieved it out of the record is something Foreman never quite
discusses — though she makes the point that there was nothing “inevitable”
about “civilized” humanity being dominated by men, the stories she tells show
the pattern of male dominance recurring again and again in cultures that had no
contact with each other. All that was mentioned in her first episode,
“Civilization,” which focused on what is now the Middle East — and I found
myself amazed at how wretchedly the ancient Greeks, who in my own school days I
was taught to admire as the cradle of democracy and the ancient world’s most
enlightened and rational people, come off in her story (just as they came off
badly in the documentaries on Jewish history I’ve seen — in which Jews were
given rights under the Persian Empire but lost them big-time when Alexander the
Great conquered it and established Hellenistic rule over most of the Middle
East). Part two, “Separation,” was about the rights of women (or lack thereof)
in China, Viet Nam and Japan, and her principal bad guy in this show was
Confucius. Apparently Confucius’ own writings interpreted the principle of yin and yang
not as a union of equals but as one in which the male yang spirit was dominant over the female yin — and other commentators on Confucius, including a
woman who wrote a book called The New Ji telling other women it was their role to be subservient to men (sort
of the Phyllis Schlafly of ancient China), hardened that into orthodoxy.
Foreman notes that Chinese attitudes towards women softened somewhat when
Buddhism came to China and preached a message of human equality that countered
Confucianism’s emphasis on classes with different social roles and everybody
knowing and being content with their “place.” She tells the story of the Trung
Sisters, who a century after China had conquered Viet Nam led a rebellion against
their authority that was briefly successful before being suppressed, and she
showed footage of a modern Viet Namese ceremony honoring their historical
memory.
Perhaps the most fascinating character in “Separation” is Chinese
Empress Wu Zetian, who rose from being a concubine of one emperor to marrying
his son and successor (and she notes that the very idea that she had sexual
relationships with both father and son would have been considered incestuous)
and holding power in her own right. Predictably, her male successors tried to
erase her from the historical record — the stele on her tomb is blank, even
though she wrote an 80,000-character eulogy for her ineffectual husband that
survives, and in Chinese depictions of her she’s shown as a bloodthirsty bitch
who smothered her son almost as soon as he was born because she didn’t want to
be succeeded by a man. (This view of Wu is illustrated in Foreman’s documentary
by clips from a remarkable-looking 1939 Chinese film about her that looks like
its director had seen and been strongly influenced by The Scarlet
Empress, Josef von Sternberg’s marvelously
stylized 1934 biopic of Catherine the Great of Russia, with Marlene Dietrich
playing her.) The denunciations of Wu as a woman in league with dark powers who
hypnotized her husband and everyone else around her into letting her have her
way had an oddly familiar sound — we heard a lot of it directed against Hillary
Clinton in the recent Presidential campaign (and one reason she lost is that a lot of men out there felt deeply threatened by the idea
of a woman in the White House — and a woman who had arguably slept her way to
the top, at that — in ways they didn’t by the idea of an African-American man
as President). Foreman then traced the influence of Chinese culture on Japan,
where there was actually a more egalitarian tradition before the samurai clan took over Japan and, like the Assyrians,
imposed a harsh regime of male dominance on the country’s women (once again,
Foreman never quite comes up with an explanation for why this keeps happening — why, especially in cultures
that glorify war and the military, any rights or protections for women are
collateral damage — we can agree with her that there’s nothing innate in the
nature of the human species that requires males to be dominant, but the fact
that it’s so often worked out that way in practice requires some sort of explanation) that once again literally kept them indoors — with the result, she argues,
that in order to have some contact with nature Japanese women (at least the
ones high up enough in the class system that they could afford it) built their
own gardens and miniaturized the natural world (her explanation for the
existence of bonsai).
She also
mentions writer Murasaki Shikibu, who in the 11th century wrote The
Tale of Genji, which is often considered
the first true novel, a work with multidimensional characters that attempted
psychological realism. The Wikipedia page on The Tale of Genji rather diplomatically states, “While regarded as a
masterpiece, its precise classification and influence in both the Western and
Eastern canons has been a matter of debate.” Set during Murasaki’s time, the
Heian period of Japanese history, The Tale of Genji is about a Don Juan-esque prince who sleeps his way
through the Heian court and ruins just about every woman he has sex with. In
the most compelling scene in the two episodes (of a total of four) we’ve seen
so far, Foreman is shown Murasaki’s inkwell, preserved in a Japanese museum,
and practically goes into orgasm over being able to see, touch and photograph
the implements with which The Tale of Genji was written — much the way a modern literature
devoté might gaze awestruck at a typewriter known to have been used by
Hemingway (I was about to write “or Fitzgerald,” but Fitzgerald actually wrote
in longhand). Foreman argues that Japanese Buddhism took an even more
egalitarian cast than it had in China, mainly because the Japanese merged it
with their own indigenous religion, Shinto, in which the principal deity is
female — though once again Japan “evolved” into a heavily male-dominated
society as it went through various changes — the rule of the samurai, the Shogun period (in which the emperor became
largely a figurehead), the imperial restoration and the Japan the U.S. fought
during World War II, in which their soldiers were indoctrinated into the idea
that they had a duty to fight and die for their Emperor (while the actually
existing Emperor, Hirohito, was a rather befuddled young man kept away from any
real political involvement — which he wasn’t interested in, anyway; all he
really wanted was to be left alone to pursue the one passion in his life,
marine biology).
Amanda Foreman’s The Ascent of Woman is alternately inspiring and depressing — inspiring
in telling the tales of powerful women who have challenged the male dominance
of most of “civilization,” depressing in the extent to which it documents how
men always seem to have come out on top long-term, outlasting their female
opponents and consigning their historical memories to oblivion as much as
possible. (One of Foreman’s most chilling points is that aside from a few minor
domestic paintings, the Athenians didn’t depict really existing women in their
art at all: a powerful indication
of the extent to which they devalued women and wiped them out of their race
memories.) Her shows also mention that the veil is not specifically a Muslim
invention; women were forced to wear face coverings and, in some cases, burka-style whole body coverings, as early as ancient
Babylonia, and in Japan it took the form of stark white rice-powder makeup and
up to 50 layers of kimono so no hint of a woman’s actual shape could penetrate
her clothing (and Foreman also notes that women changed the color of the
clothes they wore to match the seasons they weren’t allowed to experience
directly because they were almost never allowed outside). Especially given the
outcome of the last Presidential election — in which American voters were asked
if they were ready for a woman President and (even though more people voted for
Hillary Clinton than for Donald Trump) enough of them said “no” that she lost —
despite major social advances (at least for Western women), women remain a
pointlessly oppressed and devalued class despite the utter absurdity of consigning
the talents, skills and intelligences of over half the human race to
second-class status.
