SECOND INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

"HIERARCHY AND POWER IN THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATIONS"

July 4-7, 2002, Saint Petersburg, Russia

SESSION ON “PREHISTORIC” SOURCES OF ASSUMPTION OF MALE SUPERIORITY OVER FEMALES AS THE MODEL UPON WHICH HIERARCHY AND POWER HAVE BEEN BASED IN WORLD CIVILIZATIONS

Robert S. McElvaine

Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts & Letters

Professor of History

Millsaps College

Jackson, Mississippi 39210 USA

mcelvrs@millsaps.edu

ABSTRACT

Based on the new book, Eve’s Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History (McGraw-Hill, 2001), this paper argues that the deep source of hierarchy, power, and authority in world civilizations is to be found in events that occurred before the point at which we conventionally begin history.

The invention of agriculture, which is now widely believed to have been accomplished by women, began a mega-revolution that drastically altered the environment in which humans have lived throughout recorded history. Changes that followed from the invention of methods to produce food had established, before writing was invented, what people have taken to be the givens of human existence, but in fact are the consequences of (pre)historical developments.

One of the most important consequences of these “prehistoric” developments was that, as a result of the acceptance of the extremely misleading metaphor of a seed being planted into the furrowed earth being analogous to a man “planting” a “seed” in the furrowed vulva of a woman, men had come to be seen as the possessors of procreative power. The seed metaphor reversed earlier understandings of reproductive power and reduced women from the all-powerful creators to dirt. This, I shall argue, is the basis of the concept of authority and so of hierarchy.

As is suggested by the fact that the root of the word authority is author, it is the false idea that men are the “authors” – the creators – that has formed the largely unspoken but pervasive basis for male authority throughout history. A clear example is the patria potestas that gave an ancient Roman man the power to “dispose of” his children. A father was thought to be the creator of “his” children and so he was granted the right to take away the life he was supposed to have given.

The belief that procreative power is male led inevitably to the belief that the Ultimate Creator – God – must also be male. The combination of the belief that God (or the god who is the ultimate creator) is male with the notion that humans are created in God’s image yielded the inescapable conclusion that men are closer than women to godly perfection. This, in turn, established a concept of hierarchy: God above men, men above women.

Finally, the belief that men are superior to women provided the model on which systems of dominance and hierarchy among men could be established. A man asserts his dominance over another man by claiming that he is to the second man as a man is to a woman. This basis for dominance and hierarchy can be seen in the language men use when asserting their superiority over other men. Such language invariably contains sexual images that translate to something like: I am sufficiently dominant over you that I can symbolically treat you as if you were a woman. The vulgar language that men so often employ in “putting down” other men is, in fact, the equivalent of the ceremonial mounting of a subordinated male by a dominant male that is seen in many animal species. Accordingly, this human practice may be seen as “verbal mounting.”

In my paper I shall give examples of this deep basis for dominance and hierarchy from a wide variety of civilizations across a wide span of history.

At this point I do not have other participants in mind to form a panel. I would welcome suggestions. One possibility would be that I could present a fairly long paper and two or three scholars from different disciplines and nations could give responses.