Link to WW ’05 Home, with Congress
Video & Theme Song
Eve’s
Seed:
The Deep History
that has Shaped the World of Women and Men
Robert S. McElvaine
Department of History
The argument of
this lecture is based on my book, Eve’
Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History (McGraw-Hill, 2001),
which has been very well received by women’s groups. A Chinese edition of the book has just been
published by Horizon Media Co., Ltd (
The lecture focuses on the ways in which this basic male insecurity has influenced many historical and current situations, from the Torah to the Taliban, and on two very powerful metaphors that have dramatically misshaped both language and history: semen ~ seed , therefore men have creative power; and man = master and woman = subordinate. The latter is reflected in virtually all the vulgar language that men use to “put down” other men. The assumed superiority of man to woman is the model upon which all other domination / subordination relationships, including colonialism, racism, slavery, class, West-over-East, North-over-South, etc., are based.
Although men often claim that women are “by nature” inferior, many men really fear that women are, in certain respects, by nature superior. Such men seek to make women “by culture” inferior and exclude them from certain roles: In order to compensate for what men cannot do, they tell women that they may not do other things.
Pregnancy, birthing and nursing have always constituted a “no-man’s land.” Accordingly, insecure men throughout history and across cultures set up “no-woman’s lands”: war, politics, clergy, business, men’s clubs, and so forth. The deep underlying reason for such exclusions is an American Catholic bishop’s revealing 1992 statement: “a woman priest is as impossible as for me to have a baby.”
Men have defined male roles in terms of opposition to what women do. “Being a man” has, across almost all cultures, been seen as being as different as possible from “being a woman.” Thus the small genuine differences between the sexes are magnified to the point where we think in the very misleading terms of “opposite sexes.” Woman is established as the thesis and man is seen as its antithesis: female is the standard, and male is the negative of female. The name for man could be notawoman. Few people like to think of themselves in negative terms, so to make the negative notawoman positive, men had to turn woman into a negative. This would make man the negative of a negative, and so positive.
The most tragic consequence of the notawoman definition is that because woman is defined as the “giver of life,” seeing man as its antonym makes the word mean “taker of life.”
All of this has been the case throughout human existence, but specific historical events—the consequences of the invention of agriculture—greatly worsened the problems stemming from these definitions.
Women invented agriculture (I’ll explain how the story of Adam and Eve is an allegory for this development) and as a result, the traditional male roles, particularly hunting were devalued. The effects on history throughout the time since writing began can be summarized by the statement: “Hell hath no fury like a man devalued.”
When men eventually took up the “woman’s work” of farming and began to use the plow, an irresistible metaphor arose—one that seems so obvious that it appears to have developed independently wherever plow agriculture was practiced. This metaphor has been a major basis for male power and domination throughout recorded history. Belief that seed planted in the furrowed soil is analogous to a man planting a “seed” in the furrowed vulva of a woman totally reversed the view of which sex has procreative power.
This misconception about conception elevated men from bystanders to the all-powerful creators and reduced women from the all-powerful creators to the soil in which men plant their seeds. Or, to put it less politely, women were reclassified as dirt. Women still had all the work of reproduction, but men now took all the credit.
It is the false assumption that males are the authors or creators of new life that has provided one of the most important bases of male authority.
The belief in male procreative power inevitably led to the conclusion that the supreme Creative Power must also be male. The combination of the belief that God is male with the notion that humans are created in God’s image led to the inescapable inference that men are closer than women to godly perfection.
The belief—given its classic expressions by Aristotle, Aquinas, and Freud—that women are deformed or “incomplete” men, followed logically.
The rest is history—just about all of it.