Lilith: the rebel between the texts

The ‘Queen of the Night’ relief from the
British Museum, identified by some
scholars as Lilith. Old Babylonian,
1800-1750 BCE.

One of the Hebrew Bible’s many inconsistencies gave rise to an intriguing and powerful myth: Adam had a first wife called Lilith, who left the garden of Eden rather than submit to her husband.

In Chapter 1 of Genesis, Adam is created with a partner from the outset:

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (1:27)

(The word ‘man’ used in this ESV translation should be understood in the sense of ‘humankind’.) In the next chapter, by contrast, Adam is created alone (verse 7) and there is a considerable delay before a female companion is created for him (verses 21-22).

To explain contradictions like this in the Tanakh, Jewish scholarship developed a system of interpretation known as the midrash, a form of rabbinic literature which used great ingenuity to resolve gaps and problems in the text. The midrash scholars felt an explanation was needed for the differing accounts above, so they proposed additional elements to the creation story. The Genesis Rabbah, a midrash of uncertain date (possibly the 5th century CE) offering interpretations of the text of Genesis, says that Eve was not Adam’s first wife. God creates a woman simultaneously with Adam as related in Genesis 1:27, but Adam finds her ‘full of discharge and blood’, so God removes her and tries again. When Cain and Abel fight, one rabbi proposes the cause of their quarrel was ‘the first Eve’.

In the Talmud, a rabbinic commentary on Judaism completed in about the 5th century CE, a character called Lilith appears, incidentally, like someone who needs no introduction. She is a succubus with long hair and wings, who steals sperm from Adam while he sleeps to sire evil demons.

The only mention of Lilith in the Bible is a single verse from the book of Isaiah which may or may not mention her, depending upon your translation. The NRSV says:

Wildcats shall meet with hyenas, goat-demons shall call to each other; there too Lilith shall repose, and find a place to rest. (Isaiah 34:14)

The Hebrew word is liyliyth, and this is its only appearance in the Bible. Scholars don’t agree on what it means. It may refer to the Mesopotamian demon, lilitu. Other translations render it ‘screech owl’ (KJV), or varieties of night creature – ‘night hag’ (RSV), ‘night creatures’ (NIV) or ‘night bird’ (ESV) – because of the word’s similarity to the Hebrew word for ‘night’. Whatever is intended, it is very unlikely to be a reference to a supposed first wife of Adam.

The association of Lilith with the ‘first wife’ originates centuries later in the Alphabet of Ben Sira, an anonymous compilation of proverbs and stories probably dating to somewhere between 700-1000 CE. The cause of the couple’s problems was Adam’s insistence that Lilith submit to his authority:

After God created Adam, who was alone, He said, ‘It is not good for man to be alone’ (Genesis 2:18). He then created a woman for Adam, from the earth, as He had created Adam himself, and called her Lilith. Adam and Lilith immediately began to fight. She said, ‘I will not lie below,’ and he said, ‘I will not lie beneath you, but only on top. For you are fit only to be in the bottom position, while I am to be in the superior one.’ Lilith responded, ‘We are equal to each other inasmuch as we were both created from the earth.’ But they would not listen to one another. When Lilith saw this, she pronounced the Ineffable Name [the true name of God] and flew away into the air.

This is the first identification of Lilith as the rebel first wife of Adam.

Adam complains to God, who sends three angels to fetch Lilith back. They tell her that if she does not return, one hundred of her children will die every day. She retorts that harming newborns was the reason why she was created, but agrees not to harm any infants wearing amulets with the names or images of the three angels. God then creates Eve as a more agreeable partner for Adam. She is more subservient, for she was created from Adam’s side, not from the earth as Lilith was.

Amulet for protection against Lilith,
18th century

The Alphabet is not midrashic literature but popular entertainment: a satire that parodies Biblical characters and rabbinic lore, possibly to entertain the rabbis themselves. The key to understanding its incidental reference to Lilith may lie in the mention of the amulets. To keep child-stealing demons at bay, incantation bowls with protective inscriptions would be buried in the ground, and amulets hung round the necks of pregnant women, so the Alphabet passage may have been an irreverent attempt to explain this old practice. Whatever the truth, the story seems to have made an impression on the medieval Jewish imagination, and Lilith became part of folk tradition.

Lilith also appears in Kabbalistic literature. In the 13th century CE she appears in the Zohar, a set of commentaries on the Torah. This was presented as a discovery by the Spanish rabbi Moses de León, but the likelihood is that he wrote it himself, and that he was aware of the Alphabet. The Zohar reprises the familiar Lilith story, showing her in all three of her aspects: as primitive Eve, child-harmer and succubus. It also associates her with the serpent who tempts Adam and Eve, and thus with Satan. This folktale may have inspired the medieval and Renaissance depictions of the serpent with a female head and/or body, though it’s possible this imagery was instead intended as a comment upon Eve, implying she is a temptress by association.

The demon

The Alphabet’s author begins by reference to the existing tradition of the prototype first wife, then feeds in the Talmudic references to Lilith as a demon. This characterisation evokes earlier Sumerian-Babylonian myths about winged spirits who lurked in deserted places and preyed on humans during the night. The Sumerian lilitu and the Babylonian Lamashtu killed infants and threatened women and babies during pregnancy and childbirth. The first literary mention of Lilith may occur in the Epic of Gilgamesh by way of the poem Gilgamesh and the Huluppu Tree, though whether it refers to Lilith is disputed, and the ancient Israelites could easily have come into contact with such stories via the hegemony of Assyria and Babylon. The character of the Jewish Lilith therefore could be a mixture of the ‘first wife’ theory with ancient Mesopotamian superstition.[1]

We may interpret these female demons in a couple of ways. Firstly, like other gods, spirits and myths, they offered ancient people an explanation for things that happened in their lives. Why are children sometimes born dead, or suffer ‘cot death’? Why do women die in childbirth? By inventing malicious demons, people identified a cause and, reassuringly, made it possible to take action: protective objects like amulets provided a sense of control in the face of frightening and mysterious forces.

The other role of the female demons is as symbols of lust. Not only is Lilith a killer, she is a seductress. Male priests and scribes seem to have projected some of their sexual fantasies into their picture of Lilith as a femme fatale. What modernity understands simply as wet dreams were explained by superstition as the work of a female night demon or succubus, seducing men in their sleep. Through devilish intercourse, Lilith gave birth to a hundred demon children every day, populating the world with evil. This layer of negative sexual meaning has tended historically to drown out the legend’s positive aspect of female empowerment. If Lilith turned evil when she stood up to Adam, any woman who does not accept male authority could end up the same way.

Wild-haired, naked, and
intimate with a phallic
serpent – John Collier’s
19th century Lilith.

Some writers enjoy ascribing this hostility to a psychological ‘male fear of female sexuality’ but the ultimate origins of inequality are more material. During the Neolithic Revolution, men acquired a disproportionate control over social resources that were rapidly growing thanks to new techniques of farming and domestication. However, even when women are oppressed, they can still exert power over heterosexual men through sexuality – sex is an instinct with no respect for societal constructs of class and gender. Thus female sexuality has been a source of suspicion for centuries, as a weapon women can use to subdue men. The Talmudic references to Lilith’s long hair may be significant in this context, since during the Middle Ages keeping the hair covered was a convention for married Jewish women: Maimonides and the Zohar for example stress its importance. Loose, long hair has often been a symbol of sinful female sexuality.

In the 19th century, Lilith enjoyed a new phase of interest as a sexual fantasy. She made her first significant literary appearance since the Zohar in Goethe’s Faust, followed a few years later by Keats’ Lamia. In these poems she is a mysterious figure of beauty and seduction, with some of her darker behaviours removed, a trend that continued forty years later when she was painted as a luxuriantly haired narcissist by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. This incarnation of a more modern Lilith, with the supernatural horror eased out for the comfort of Victorian gentlemen, opened the doors for more positive interpretations of the character.

Ironically, God’s famous exhortation to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ in Genesis Chapter 1, the first thing he says to the new couple, indicates he doesn’t have a problem with sex. Chapter 2 tells us “a man shall… hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh”, another strong indication that for the Bible, sex is part of human nature from the outset.[2]

The feminist

In the 20th century, the myth entered another new phase, as feminists – playing down her demonic aspect – began to claim Lilith for their own. It is not difficult to see why. Lilith is an assertive and sexually independent woman who refuses to submit to a social order defined by men. She assumes she has the right to equality with Adam, and when this is denied she insists on her independence. She escapes to the Red Sea, symbolically retreading Moses’ path to freedom, and becomes the opposite of the stereotypical supportive mother.

In 1976 a group of Jewish feminists took her as an inspiration when creating the magazine Lilith; one of its co-founders, Aviva Cantor, wrote about her in very positive terms as a role model for Jewish women:

Lilith is a powerful female. She radiates strength, assertiveness; she refuses to cooperate in her own victimisation. By acknowledging Lilith’s revolt and even in telling of her vengeful activities, myth-makers also acknowledge Lilith’s power.[3]

Cantor points out that Lilith is the ‘negative, shadow role, the flip side’ of Eve, who appears as Adam’s helper and is a more acceptable female archetype than a woman who insists on equality.

In creating the Lilith shadow role, men are telling a woman that if she is independent, assertive, free, as Lilith was, she’ll end up a frigid nymphomaniac childless witch. 

We pointed out in our previous article that Eve too was viewed as morally suspect, blamed for humanity’s fall from grace and for original sin. But Lilith was far more powerfully associated with wayward female sexuality than Eve. Various cultures have made comparisons between a ‘negative’ feminine and a ‘positive’ feminine, the Judaeo-Christian tradition included. In Christianity, all women, including Eve the sinner, were given the impossible task of living up to the example of the flawless virgin, Mary. In the Zohar Lilith is contrasted, as an unholy harlot, with the holy and wholesome Shekhinah, the divine presence of God in female manifestation.

It may seem paradoxical that a myth so adaptable to feminism was written by men. But society consists of both sexes and multiple viewpoints, and sexism is therefore never unchallenged. Contrary to the simplistic view, men are not uniformly hostile to women, and women are not uniformly submissive to men. Women of all historical periods are active members of society in spite of sexism, and the ‘rebel wife’ aspect of Lilith may be a manifestation of independent-minded women who could be found in the ancient Near East like they could everywhere else.[4]

Between the texts

The Torah was put together from a variety of source texts, and when sources are pasted together with little or no editorial smoothing-over, it can create problems. The Biblical scholar Richard Elliott Friedman however points out that the Bible is more than the sum of its parts. The juxtaposing of texts created meanings that neither the original writers nor the redactors foresaw.

In Who Wrote The Bible?, Friedman gives the example of the Bible’s conception of God. The God of J, E and D tends to be seen in personal ways, walking in Eden and talking directly, even debating, with human beings. The God of P is very different: he tends to be remote and transcendent, and doesn’t make physical appearances or chat with his followers. The combination of these two conceptions of God, the personal and the transcendent, inadvertently created a new kind of deity: a cosmic god who could be experienced in very personal ways.

It was not planned by any of the authors. It was probably not even the redactor’s design. It was so embedded in the texts that the redactor could not have helped but produce the new mixture as long as he was at all true to his sources.

Similarly, the juxtaposition of the ‘God of mercy’ pictured by J, E and D with the ‘God of justice’ pictured by P leads to a new conception, in which justice and mercy are in tension or balance. Like a parent, God is sometimes loving, sometimes angry; he is sometimes intimate, sometimes remote. Friedman concludes:

The mixing of the sources into one text enriched the interpretive possibilities of the Bible for all time.

In a different way, Lilith too is an unforeseen consequence of the Bible’s process of construction. The mismatch of chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis was essentially an accident that arose from the combination of two independent texts. But it opened a space which Lilith stepped in to fill, thanks largely to the imagination, ingenuity and sexual hang-ups of male writers in the ensuing centuries.

Whatever the precise origins of the Lilith myth, this fiction has acquired a life of its own. The prototype wife of the Genesis Rabbah – already an unattractive image of women – developed into an evil succubus, then recently became a feminist icon. The story can serve two completely different communities equally well. On the one hand, she is the first feminist, a woman who refuses to accept being treated as Adam’s unequal. On the other, she is a patriarchal warning against women who get above themselves. There is no ‘correct’ Lilith, only a multitude of Liliths, in different times and places, making her difficult to pin down. (This may contribute to her popularity in mysticism and New Ageism, which thrive upon smoke and mirrors.) Like any product of the symbolic imagination, she can become whatever successive generations want her to be.

Further reading

Aviva Cantor Zuckoff, ‘The Lilith Question’, 1976.
Amy Scerba, Changing Literary Representations of Lilith and the Evolution of a Mythical Heroine on the Feminism and Women’s Studies website, 1999.

---

[1] This sinister ancestry has informed more recent versions of Lilith. Through Lamashtu’s habit of sucking the blood of men and bringing nightmares, Lilith entered into vampire myth as well, appearing for example as a vampire goddess in the TV series True Blood.
[2] The image of course is heterosexual. We shall look at the Bible’s attitude to homosexuality another time.
[3] Aviva Cantor Zuckoff, ‘The Lilith Question’, 1976.
[4] Karl Marx once observed that the progress of a society could be measured by the status of its women: hopefully one day men and women will be able to relate to each other without the stupidity of sexism and superstition.

Antigone, Lysistrata and Medea: Feminism in Classical Greece

It seems a paradox, given the breadth of popular political rights under democracy, that women had fewer rights and less freedom in most Greek cities than in contemporary Egypt and Persia. In the fiercely masculine world of ancient Greece, only males were educated and allowed to vote. The Greek love of athletics and physical perfection, worshipped in the gymnasium and on the Olympic field, was limited to the male body. In Sparta women enjoyed relatively more independence, partly because men spent so much time in barracks: Spartan women competed in gymnastics, could own land and divorce their husbands, and held influence in community matters. Nonetheless, the Greeks’ celebrated thought and inquiry hit a brick wall where gender was concerned.

Though the realities of life meant that lower class women might work – and slaves certainly would – wealthier Greek women were expected to stay in domestic isolation, limited to childbearing, weaving and managing the household. They had no choice in marriage, becoming an object of exchange between the father and bridegroom, and had little control over property. Greek houses had an andron or men’s room, equipped with a door to the street so that no woman need pass through; here men would recline on seats to sing, drink and talk politics, as recreated in Plato’s Symposium. But the only women permitted in these discourses were servants, entertainers or hetairai (prostitutes).

Women were the targets of various hostile ideas: they were high-pitched, polluting creatures, inferior imitations of men. It was a woman, Pandora, who in Greek mythology was responsible for opening a jar and releasing evil into the world [1]. Aristotle held many sexist views, arguing for example that the female character was “a sort of natural deficiency”. The historian Xenophon wrote that women should “see and hear as little as possible, and ask the fewest possible questions”.

There is always a difference between the world of such statements and life as it was actually lived, but we would not expect female characters and deeds to be celebrated in such an atmosphere. It is typical of the wonderful contradictoriness of real life that in spite of all this misogyny, classical Greek theatre provides us with arguably the world’s first ‘feminist’ plays. Here we shall pick out three outstanding texts: Antigone, Lysistrata and Medea.

Antigone

Sophocles’ drama Antigone, written around 441 BCE, is one of his three ‘Theban plays’ that chronicle the dark fortunes of the house of Oedipus, king of Thebes. After Oedipus’ death, there is a struggle over the kingship between his two sons Eteocles and Polyneices. The army of Polyneices marches on Thebes and is defeated, but both brothers are killed in the battle. The new ruler, Creon, decrees that whereas Eteocles will be buried with full honours for defending the city, the rebel Polyneices must be denied holy rites and left to rot in the field.

Shortly afterwards, a sentry runs in, reporting that someone has disobeyed and performed a burial. The guards exhume the body and watch from a distance in the hope that the culprit will return. Their trap succeeds and they arrest the rebel trying to rebury the body. She is Antigone, sister of Polyneices and Eteocles, and niece of Creon.

Antigone (right) presented to Creon (seated) by a guard.
Athenian vase painting by the Dolon Painter,
ca. 380-370 BCE.

Antigone raises several key questions around the relationship between human beings and the gods and the nature of kingship. However, one of the play’s most interesting features for a modern audience is its embryonic feminism. Antigone takes centre stage, showing us that not all the rebels in her family are men.

In the opening scene of the play, Antigone tries to win her sister Ismene’s help in burying their brother. Ismene refuses, taking the traditional, perhaps stereotypical, female role:

Now we two [are] left; and what will be the end of us,
If we transgress the law and defy our king?
O think, Antigone; we are women; it is not for us
To fight against men; our rulers are stronger than we
And we must obey in this, or in worse than this.
May the dead forgive me, I can do no other
But as I am commanded; to do more is madness.[2]

When Antigone is brought before Creon, she does not deny what she has done, even though the admission means a death sentence, and she shows no fear of Creon, the dominant male of the drama. Instead she directly challenges him for putting his own human law before that of the gods.

CREON: Did you know the order forbidding such an act?
ANTIGONE: I knew it, naturally. It was plain enough.
CREON: And yet you dared to contravene it?
ANTIGONE: Yes.
That order did not come from God. Justice,
That dwells with the gods below, knows no such law.
I did not think your edicts strong enough
To overrule the unwritten unalterable laws
Of God and heaven, you being only a man.

Religion offered women one of their few public roles. Priestesses managed funding of temples, held the keys to temple wealth, and helped society to function through the performance of ritual. It is probably no coincidence therefore that it is a woman who performs the ritual burial and shows the greatest concern for religious correctness.

Creon is unbending and orders Antigone to be shut into a cave to slowly die. The reason for this harshness partly lies in his anger at Polyneices’ attack and in his belief in the importance of strong kingship. But it is also explicitly because Antigone’s rebellion threatens the sexual hierarchy of ancient Greece, in which women’s proper place is to be kept indoors – “we’ll have no woman’s law here, while I live.” As he later explains to his son Haemon:

...I hold to the law,
And will never betray it – least of all for a woman.
Better be beaten, if need be, by a man
Than let a woman get the better of us.

When the blind prophet Teiresias warns Creon that the gods are angry at his treatment of Polyneices’ corpse, the king is shaken. He orders the body to be buried and tries to release Antigone, but it is too late – she has already taken her own life in despair. Haemon, who was Antigone’s betrothed, has done the same; and when she hears of her son’s death, Creon’s wife Eurydice adds her own suicide to the bodycount.

In the debate over the correct treatment of a dead rebel, both Antigone and Creon have valid arguments, but Sophocles chooses to vindicate Antigone, who is brave enough to defy the king to do what she thinks is right. She loses her life, but it is Creon who is punished by the gods. If Creon represents human law, Antigone represents divine law, which is infinitely greater.

Lysistrata

Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata concerns an extraordinary plan to put an end to the Peloponnesian War. When the play was written in 411 BCE, the Athenian empire and an alliance led by Sparta had for twenty years shed one another’s blood, destroyed cities, and devastated the countryside. The war eventually exhausted Athens and brought the ‘golden age’ of Classical Greece to an end.

An Athenian named Lysistrata (‘Liquidator of Armies’) calls a meeting of women from across Greece – from Thebes, Corinth, even the arch-enemy Sparta – and persuades them to refuse sex until the men agree to stop fighting. Their abstinence is all the more heroic when we consider that the Greeks thought women were the more lascivious of the sexes. The women seize the Acropolis, where the treasury is kept, and bar the doors to stop the men taking it back. When elders, magistrate and constables turn up, the women respond with bad language and violence, ranging from hurling water to pitched fisticuffs.

Lysistrata explains to the magistrate that women know everything that is going on, but when they complain about the men’s mistakes they are told to keep quiet by their husbands. “Quite right too,” says the magistrate.

LYSISTRATA: Right? That we should not be allowed to make the least little suggestion to you, no matter how much you mismanage your affairs? But now every time two men meet in the street, what do they say? ‘Isn’t there a man in the country?’ And the answer comes, ‘Not one.’ That’s why we women got together and decided to unite and save Greece… So let’s make a deal. You listen to us – and it’ll be good advice we give – listen to us and keep quiet, like you made us do, and we’ll set you to rights.[3]

Women, too, argues Lysistrata, have made sacrifices in the war, watching their sons and husbands leave to fight. Their demand that the men come home so both sexes can live in peace is both legitimate and reasonable.

Eventually the sex strike takes its effect and the increasingly frustrated men meet with the women to negotiate. Lysistrata introduces a female companion, Reconciliation, and lectures the delegates on the common culture and interests of the warring Greek sides, and how they have come to each other’s aid in the past. Beguiled by Reconciliation, the delegates come to terms, and when the women agree to resume sexual activity the play closes with garlands and dancing. The women have succeeded in forcing peace.

In ancient Greece women played very little political role. The one example of a female ‘tall poppy’, Pericles’ partner Aspasia, appears to have been intelligent, witty and cultured, exercising political influence at the highest level in Athens – and she attracted loathing, political attacks and gossip. Plutarch wrote:

Aspasia, as some say, was held in high favour by Pericles because of her rare political wisdom. Socrates sometimes came to see her with his disciples, and his intimate friends brought their wives to her to hear her discourse.[4]

By contrast, he goes on to claim she ran a brothel – it’s impossible to know if this is true, or mere slander. Aristophanes himself, in The Acharnians, accuses Aspasia of being responsible for the Peloponnesian War, much as another woman, Helen of Troy, was often blamed for the Trojan War. Yet the loud, brash women who take the destiny of their nations in their hands in Lysistrata would be remarkable characters in any literature.

Critics may point out that the female characters are simply using their sexuality to gain their ends, that Aristophanes views the empowerment of women as comical, or that he exploits female stereotypes. The women’s goal is a return to the pre-war way of life, not a sexual revolution. But the play remains highly subversive. Lysistrata explicitly argues for greater respect for women’s opinions and abilities. When we watch her outshining the Magistrate in argument, or watch the women outfighting the men, Aristophanes is allowing, whatever his other intentions, that women can act on an equal basis with men.

Medea

Euripides’ tragedy Medea, written in about 431 BCE, tells how a woman takes terrible revenge on her husband when he betrays her for another woman.

The hero Jason (of Argonauts fame) married Medea after she helped him win the Golden Fleece, and they fled together to Corinth after bringing about the death of King Pelias of Iolcus. But Jason, to make an alliance and guarantee the future of his two sons, marries Glauce, the daughter of the King of Corinth. Medea – “a frightening woman” as her slave nurse warns us – is devastated: weeping, refusing to eat, and barely able to look at her sons. After the initial paroxysm of grief she becames cooler and plots her revenge.

Cruel, dangerous and fierce-willed, Medea could easily be a one-dimensional harridan.Yet despite the crimes she is about to commit, Euripedes allows her considerable sympathy, as when she laments the situation of women:

Surely, of all creatures that have life and will, we women
Are the most wretched. When, for an extravagant sum,
We have bought a husband, we must then accept him as
Possessor of our body. This is to aggravate
Wrong with worse wrong. Then the great question: will the man
We get be bad or good? For women, divorce is not
Respectable; to repel the man, not possible.[5]

Her difficulties are aggravated by her foreign birth – Medea is from Colchis on the Black Sea, in modern-day Georgia.

She goes on:

...If a man grows tired
Of the company at home, he can go out, and find
A cure for tediousness. We wives are forced to look
To one man only. And, they tell us, we at home
Live free from danger, they go out to battle: fools!
I’d rather stand three times in the front line than bear
One child.

The king of Corinth comes to Medea to order her into immediate exile, fearful of her reputation and what she might do. Medea persuades him to allow her one more day so she can make arrangements for her sons, a concession that will prove fatal for the king. When Jason pleads his case with her, Medea shows none of the submission we might expect from a traditional Greek wife. She calls him a ‘filthy coward’ who has abandoned her sexually and remarried behind her back, reminding him of the lengths she went to so he might win the Golden Fleece – including murdering her brother to delay pursuers, and convincing Pelias’ daughters to boil their father alive.

Medea begins her revenge by securing asylum from the unsuspecting Aegeus of Athens. Then, feigning contrition, she makes a gift to Glauce of a dress and coronet treated with poison. Her most dreadful plan however is to break Jason’s heart by murdering their two children.

Medea killing her son. Vase by Ixion Painter,
ca. 330 BCE.

Medea is not entirely cold-hearted, and understands perfectly what she is about to do. As Jason talks about what his sons will be like when they are fully-grown, she breaks down and weeps, and in a moment of doubt it seems that perhaps she won’t be able to go through with it. But once Glauce and her father have died in agony from poison – described for us in ghastly detail by an eye-witness – there is no turning back, as the boys would be hunted down anyway by the vengeful Corinthians.

Medea is guilty of one of the most unacceptable crimes: a mother killing her own children. Yet she is also an incredibly willful woman with a sense of honour as strong as any Greek hero. “Yes, I can endure guilt, however horrible; / The laughter of my enemies I will not endure.” And in a remarkable conclusion, her actions go unpunished. As Jason bursts in seeking his children, Medea is lifted aloft by a chariot drawn by dragons, sent by her grandfather, the sun god Helios. She has won her revenge against Jason by slaying his new bride and his children, and instead of being struck down for daring to stand up to her husband and perverting the norms of womanhood, she is carried off to sanctuary in Athens. The gods – themselves fickle and vengeful beings – actually appear to vindicate her behaviour.

The Chorus of women of Corinth sum up Medea’s impact thus:

Legend will now reverse our reputation;
A time comes when the female sex is honoured;
That old discordant slander
Shall no more hold us subject.
Male poets of past ages, with their ballads
Of faithless women, shall go out of fashion...
We’d counter with our epics against man.

This challenging subject matter may explain why Euripedes came third out of three in the tragedy competition of 431 BCE. If the Athenian judges didn’t like the play, posterity has a different view. Of course, we may interpret Medea as a hysterical female, a warning of what women are capable of if not held in check. But Euripedes’ work is more complex than this. Medea is always articulate and human, and she cannot be explained away by casual sexism or xenophobia. In the male-dominated world of ancient Greece, Euripedes has created a woman whose sex drive is more powerful than her maternal instincts, and done so triumphantly.

Conclusion

Even the female parts in Greek theatre were played by males, and it is uncertain whether they were even allowed to attend performances. Given the origins of theatre in ritual, a thoroughly female social activity, it would be strange if women were forbidden to attend. But even if they did, the target audience was generally assumed to be male. There is no evidence that women played any part in the writing, production or judging of plays.

It is unlikely therefore that any of these three plays was intended as a ‘feminist’ text. Antigone, Lysistrata and Medea were all written by aristocratic men, many centuries before a coherent body of feminist theory began to be assembled.

Yet there are always contradictions between cultural conventions – such as ‘women are born inferior to men’ – and the richness of actual lived experience. This creates opportunities for artists to develop an awareness that goes beyond stereotypes, and write characters or discourses that run against the societal norm even without intending it. We can stage convincingly feminist interpretations of these plays today because the opportunities are in the texts themselves; strong female characters shine through despite the misogyny of the culture. The best Classical Greek writers were engaging dynamically with one of the first truly literate societies, and infused their work with the stuff of real life – including in the relations of men and women.

---

[1] Unwittingly, it must be said.
[2] Quotes from Sophocles’ Antigone are from E.F. Watling’s translation in Penguin Classics.
[3] Quotes from Aristophanes’ Lysistrata are from Alan Sommerstein’s translation in Penguin Classics.
[4] Plutarch, Lives, ‘Pericles’ v24.
[5] The ‘extravagant sum’ refers to a dowry. Quotes from Euripedes’ Medea are from Phillip Vellacott’s translation in Penguin Classics. 
 

Early civilisation: Women in art

The enormous social changes of early civilisation influenced women’s role in art.

It isn’t always possible to distinguish between women and men in prehistoric and ancient art. When it is, a society’s artistic depictions of men and women’s behaviours and activities, along with the archaeological contexts, provide valuable evidence about gender roles.

Women had been relatively equal to men under primitive communism, but suffered, in Engels’ words, a ‘world-historical defeat’ [1] with the advent of class society. We have already outlined the roots of the oppression of women, and shan’t repeat those arguments here. The degree and forms of this oppression varied from civilisation to civilisation – they had more rights in Egypt than in Greece, for example – but wherever class society existed they were pushed into a subordinate relationship with men. The situation is summed up in Genesis when God casts Adam and Eve out of Eden, and tells Eve: “thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee” [2]. In the ancient world, it was mostly assumed that men should administer society and control its wealth. This had an inevitable influence upon the arts.

The inequality of the sexes has been universal in class society, to the point that it became thought of as innate to human nature. Yet as Rosalind Miles argued in her book The Women’s History of the World, “Women have been active, competent and important through all the ages of man.” Even though women were subordinated to men, they still lived, worked, and contributed to society and culture, and many succeeded in carving out significant roles for themselves. There have always been women who managed to overcome the obstacles placed in their way.

Images of women, possibly also by women, take an immense variety of forms after the Paleolithic, far more than we can examine here. We could mention votive statuettes of women worshippers from Mesopotamia; statuettes of ageing midwives or codex drawings of the exploits of Lady Six Monkey, from Mesoamerica; clay figurines of women by the Jōmon culture of Japan; fresco paintings of ladies from the Minoan culture of Crete; and much more. Many forms, such as textiles or tattooing, are much less durable than others, so as ever we are restricted by what archaeological evidence happens to have come down to us – we must also practice caution in our interpretations.

Neolithic art

As we have discussed, images of women are predominant in the Paleolithic, mostly in the form of figurines.

Female figurine from the Cycladic
culture of the Aegean. White marble,
ca. 3000 BCE.

The creation of female figurines persists into the Neolithic, with a geographical shift towards the Mediterranean and a much greater diversity of forms, commensurate with a higher level of development and a wider variety of societies. Their purpose is often unclear: their diversity across time and space means that however tempting it may be to seek a single interpretation, we must consider each culture independently. Archaeologists have suggested that they are images of deities or of esteemed ancestors, magic tools aimed at helping women conceive, or even toys for the dead.

One of the most popular theories about Neolithic images of women is that they represent a universal ‘mother’ or ‘fertility’ goddess. Such claims are difficult to prove. There is documented evidence of a fertility goddess cult from Anatolia which post-dates the region’s figurines but does suggest that they might be early forms of such a cult. Cases like this cannot be put forward as an explanation for such images across all Eurasia, especially in the early Neolithic when religion is likely to have focused on spirits and natural forces rather than humanised deities; nor does it explain the male figurines that are often found at the same sites. Archaeologists and other commentators are sometimes too quick to label a female representation as a ‘fertility’ figure, as if that explains everything, or as an incarnation of the ‘great goddess’. In reality each culture and/or region has to be considered upon its own evidence.

It was between the early Neolithic and the rise of literate society that women lost their relative importance in food production and became increasingly subordinated to men. As gatherers, it was probably women who took the decisive steps towards agriculture, but with the advent of more intensive farming techniques – above all the introduction of the plough – the food surplus became an increasingly male sphere. It may be no coincidence that these enigmatic works of art disappear over the same period.

Gordon Childe raised the likelihood that several Neolithic crafts – pot-making, spinning, weaving – were the invention of women, and noted for example that a temple in Lagash listed female spinners and weavers amongst its considerable staff.[3] Pottery, one of the most distinctive Neolithic art forms, was largely made by women as a public and collective activity. When the wheel was introduced, pottery production became faster and more regular: “the making of pots by hand is a domestic craft plied by the women, whereas manufacture on the wheel is a specialised trade reserved to men” (Childe).[4] Thus pottery became an increasingly male art as it gained in status.

Weaving, which began with the making of baskets and mats, is one of the most ancient arts, often associated with women in tradition and mythology. The discovery of silk-making in ancient China (around 2700–2650 BCE) is credited by tradition to a woman named Lei-tzu, also known as ‘Si Ling-Chi’ or ‘Lady of the Silkworm’. Male weavers did exist – we see them in images from the New Kingdom in Egypt, for example – but the loom, one of the great inventions of agricultural society, was predominantly worked by women. Used to produce linens for clothing, household items and funerary goods, the loom used yarn created above all from cotton and wool. Ancient looms were mostly made of wood, so little has survived of them besides spindle whorls and weights. The vast majority of the textiles created are also lost (one finely preserved exception is the set of clothes found with the body of a girl at the Egtved site in Denmark). But we get an insight into their aesthetics from images such as wall-paintings that record decorative textiles and fashions [5].

Fresco image of a woman,
from Knossos, Crete. Mid-second
millenium BCE.

It is likely these were also designed by the women who made them.

In Greek mythology, it was seen as a sexual humiliation for Herakles to have to assist Omphale with her spinning. The story reminds us of the loss of status suffered by women and the activities associated with them – despite women’s indispensable role in food production, child-rearing, toolmaking and many other skills both before and after the Neolithic Revolution, ‘women’s work’ became a perjorative term.

A key expression of this loss of status is the movement away from ‘mother right’. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Friedrich Engels discusses the transition to monogamous marriage and its role as the core of the nuclear family, in which the woman and children were dependent upon the man. Developing alongside class society, this saw the replacement of matrilinearity or ‘mother right’ with ‘father right’ – measuring the line of descent through the father. Engels proposed an example of how this was later expressed in literature:

Bachofen [6] interprets the Oresteia of Aschylus as the dramatic representation of the conflict between declining mother-right and the new father-right that arose and triumphed in the heroic age. For the sake of her paramour, Aegisthus, Clytemnestra slays her husband, Agamemnon, on his return from the Trojan War; but Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and herself, avenges his father’s murder by slaying his mother. For this act he is pursued by the Furies, the demonic guardians of mother-right, according to which matricide is the gravest and most inexpiable crime... Apollo now comes forward in Orestes’ defence; Athena calls upon the Areopagites – the Athenian jurors – to vote; the votes for Orestes’ condemnation and for his acquittal are equal; Athena, as president, gives her vote for Orestes and acquits him. Father-right has triumphed over mother-right, the “gods of young descent,” as the Furies themselves call them, have triumphed over the Furies; the latter then finally allow themselves to be persuaded to take up a new office in the service of the new order.[7]

There is no need to jump to ancient Greece to see the effect of women’s falling status on their representation in the arts.

The early civilisations

After the Urban Revolution, the Stone Age emphasis on women in art faded away as the predominance of males became established in most societies. In the schematic art of early civilisation, males become prominent, engaging in dynamic deeds such as hunts or battles. Renfew and Bahn pointed out:

Three new dominant themes appear: weaponry, especially males with daggers; hunting images, particularly stags identified by antlers; and plowing, with oxen identified by horns. This consistent association of male form with male cultural icon – men/daggers; stags/antlers; oxen/horns – builds a symbolic system used to enact and express male gender from which an ideology of male power and vitality is created.[8]

From the Bronze Age there is an increasingly clear social distinction between the sexes, which laid the basis for a division that persists to this day. (The Egyptian practice of representing wives on a smaller scale than their husbands sums it up.) Instead of being equally respected, women were seen as ornaments, breeders, or objects of sexual pleasure. This was particularly true of ruling class women, who despite their material privileges were broadly sheltered from wider society. Women in the toiling classes, by contrast, were essential to production and so had a different experience of oppression – not least a long series of pregnancies to reproduce labour and sustain the household income.

Various cultures are held up as exceptions to this pattern. One was the diverse Iron Age Celtic culture of north-western Europe, which we shall return to when we discuss the Roman Empire and its contemporaries. Another was the Minoan culture which flourished on Crete from about 2700–1450 BCE. The Minoans were a highly civilised trading people, who created very beautiful works of art [9]. These include murals of bull-leaping where women participate alongside men on an apparently equal footing, and put a disproportionate emphasis upon female deities and priestesses; the Grand Fresco from the palace of Knossos portrays a large number of men (painted red) together with a smaller number of women (painted white) who seem to have the best seats. Such works have been cited by archaeologists and feminists as evidence that Minoan women enjoyed equal or even superior status.

Snake goddess figurine from
the palace of Knossos. Photo: Chris 73.

Some of the most regularly reproduced works are the so-called ‘snake goddess’ figurines which have been found at various Minoan sites. These terracotta statuettes, of bare-breasted women in long skirts with snakes curling around their hands, seem to be religious in purpose, perhaps representing priestesses or goddesses. Depictions in frescos show figures like these being venerated, mostly by women.

However, the anthropologist Margaret Ehrenberg sounded a note of caution about overstating the status of women because of Minoan art:

The frescos certainly show women involved in a wide variety of activities, some physical... There may well be some connection here with religious ritual, in which women, in the form either of goddesses or of cult leaders or priestesses, or both, certainly appear to predominate. But it is important to bear in mind that all the evidence comes from the palaces, which clearly were primarily occupied by the wealthy or higher strata of society, and that the frescos presumably reflect the interests of these people. Taken at face value, it certainly seems that elite women may have had more status and participated in a wider range of activities than women in many other societies. But the question of how relevant the frescos and other evidence are to the lives of most women living in Crete during the Minoan period remains unclear.[10]

The degree of oppression of women in the early civilisations varied a great deal. It seems likely that women held a respected place in Minoan society. But an emphasis upon women in art, and their likely predominance in religion, does not by itself prove they enjoyed pre-eminence in politics. To claim matriarchy existed in the Minoan culture or any other is, on the evidence, unsustainable.

Ruling class women

Given the disproportionate control of material and human resources enjoyed by the ruling class, it is no surprise that the most accomplished images portray elite women.

Disc from Ur portraying the priestess Enheduanna.
Alabaster, ca. 3rd millennium BCE.
Photo: University of Pennsylvania Museum.

One of the most significant is an alabaster disc found in the residence of a priestess in Ur. The front shows four figures approaching a ziggurat, the second of whom wears the headgear of a priestess. A cuneiform inscription mentions Enheduanna, princess of Akkad and priestess of the moon god Nanna, whom we have mentioned briefly before. Enheduanna is one of the most prominent figures from ancient Mesopotamia, and as the author of several hymns she is the earliest ever literary figure known by name. This ten-inch disc is a relative rarity in the ancient world because it honours a woman.

More impressive again are the images of female royalty. The most famous female image of the ancient period is probably Thutmose’s bust of Queen Nefertiti. But there are other lesser known works, such as the life-size bronze and copper statue of the Elamite queen Napir-Asu or the carved wooden head of Queen Tiye. One of the most interesting cases is that of the female Pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, Hatshepsut.

Limestone sculpture of Hatshepsut.
The queen is recogniseably female, although
dressed as a king. Photo: Postdlf.

Hatshepsut occupies an unusual place in ancient history. She was exceptional in being a female Pharaoh, but she was not unique – Cleopatra VII is the most famous of the others, but we could also mention such figures as Merneith (whether she was actually a Pharaoh is unclear), Sobeknefru and Twosret. Archaeologists believe that Hatshepsut acted as regent during the minority of Thutmose III and was accepted as Pharaoh, reigning for roughly twenty-one years. Only upon her death in 1458 BCE did Thutmose take power.

One product of Hatshepsut’s very successful reign was the production of a great deal of building and statuary, including of course images of herself. The great architectural achievement of her reign is the remarkable mortuary temple at Deir el Bahari, designed by her architect Senenmut, where relief sculptures unusually tell the story of the birth of a female Pharaoh.

As Pharaoh, Hatshepsut adopted the regalia associated with kings, such as the khat headcloth and even the traditional false beard. As Gay Robins observed:

The majority of Hatshepsut’s images show her as a male king in male dress and without female breasts. A few, however, show her in female dress. It is possible that when she proclaimed herself king, artists tried to reconcile her biologically female sex with what was traditionally a male gender role. The result may have been felt to be unsatisfactory, since for most of her reign Hatshepsut was represented by the conventional image of a male king.[11]

Whether Hatshepsut wore male clothing in real life is not as important as the fact that over time she felt an increasing need to adopt a more masculine appearance in art to legitimise herself as a ruler.

Female Pharaohs were very exceptional cases, of course. Here is Gay Robins again to put it into context:

Women could not hold office and benefit from its privileges, so that their status accrued mainly from that of their parents or their husbands. The male monopoly of office is reflected in the art through the far greater number of monuments owned by men than women, and through the gender hierarchy that privileged husbands over wives by generally giving them the primary position in both two- and three-dimensional compositions. Nevertheless, the frequent inclusion of wives, mothers and other female relatives on the monuments of men suggests they had a salient role within society. The nature of their contribution is indicated by the idealised female image used to depict women of all ages. As well as embodying an aesthetic concept of feminine beauty, the youthful image that frequently reveals the form of the body stresses the role of women as potential child-bearers, on whom the continuity of the family and society depended.

Some of the best images of lower class women are also from Egypt. They were not created because artists had a documentary interest in depicting workers. Rather, they take the form of ‘servant statuettes’ buried in tombs so that nobles would still be provided for after death.

Woman making bread. Photo: Einsamer Schütze.

Made of stone and later increasingly of wood, many of these illustrate women baking, brewing, carrying baskets, grinding grain and carrying out other day-to-day work, and have a directness and realism at odds with the idealised images of aristocratic women.

Egyptologist Jaromir Malek commented: “Women were involved in the manufacture of everyday objects such as textiles and pottery, which form some of the most attractive products of ancient art” [12]. But there is little evidence, across all the ancient world, of women participating in large-scale works of art or in workshops as professional craftspeople or artists.

Fertility and sexuality

Regarding the figurines of the Stone Age, we have advised a cautious approach to their proposed role in ‘fertility’ cults or rituals. The early civilisations, by contrast, devised many deities responsible for pregnancy, birth and reproduction both in humans and in nature as a whole. The cult of fertility made particular reference to women, not least because of their role in childbirth, and perhaps also their likely role in the discovery of agriculture.

Fertility was important firstly because of the reproduction of the species, itself tied to the compelling subject of sex. It was also a key theme in agricultural societies whose wealth was hard-won from the soil and who lived in fear of famine. Animal fertility was important for replenishing a community’s livestock, and it was women who bore the main burden of producing more hands to work the land. In the ancient world it was considered women’s duty to bear children, leading to a pregnancy rate significantly higher than that under primitive communism. Eleanor Leacock was not just speaking for the modern world when she wrote: “In some ways it is the ultimate alienation in our society that the ability to give birth has been transformed into a liability.”[13]

A variety of goddesses relating to the earth, fertility and birth can be found in the ancient world – such as the Egyptian Isis or the Greek Gaia – who appear in creation stories and a wide variety of other works of art. In Mesopotamia, the most important figure connected to fertility was a goddess known as Inanna to the Sumerians, Ishtar to the Babylonians.

Babylonian relief of Ishtar, ca. 1700 BCE.
Photo: seriykotik1970.

Inanna was also responsible for sexual love and, curiously given its male-dominated nature, also for warfare [14]. Among her artistic incarnations are the Warka vase, on which she is depicted in an agricultural context receiving gifts; the female poet Enheduanna’s hymn, the Nin-me-sara, or ‘Exhaltation of Inanna’; and her role in the Ur III poem Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta.

Goddesses were essential in the ancient pantheons, but they tended to become objects of beauty and motherhood/fertility. There are few male equivalents for such female deities of beauty and sex as Inanna, Aphrodite/Venus, and Astarte. The trend was for the old goddesses to be gradually demoted and made subordinate to ruling male deities. An example of this is the overthrow of Tiamat by Marduk in Tablet IV of the Babylonian creation epic, the Enuma Elish:

He seized the spear and burst her belly,
He severed her inward parts, he pierced her heart.
He overcame her and cut off her life;
He cast down her body and stood upon it.

When the single deity of the Abrahamic religions became ascendant in the Middle East, he was created in a male image.

As women lost status relative to their husbands, their sexuality too became male property, something which should be constrained to guarantee the legitimacy of the husband’s children. The term ‘patriarchy’ – rule of the father over the household – is often misused, but in the ancient world it actually prevailed.

This had a strong influence upon representations of female sexuality. Women tend to be presented in terms of their physical attractiveness to men. We could take countless examples of this. One is the way female garments in art tend to reveal the body shape underneath (as in the less well-known image of Nefertiti here), along with a tendency to expose the breasts and clearly delineate the pubic area. Or to take a literary example, in the Epic of Gilgamesh the two main female characters are both seen in sexual roles. Not only does Ishtar tempt the hero, but a harlot seduces his companion Enkidu and acclimatises him to human culture against the animals with whom he used to live, in an equation of prostitution with civilisation:

Shamhat unclutched her bosom, exposed her sex, and he took in her voluptuousness.
She was not restrained, but took his energy.
She spread out her robe and he lay upon her,
she performed for the primitive the task of womankind.
His lust groaned over her;
for six days and seven nights Enkidu stayed aroused,
and had intercourse with the harlot
until he was sated with her charms.[15]

But there was more to it than that – sexuality potentially gave women the ability to overturn the ‘normal’ power balance between the sexes, and was viewed with deep suspicion. The Sumerian deity Lilith, a demon who appears from around 4000 BCE, and for whom there is again no male equivalent, was not only lascivious and a prostitute but was also associated with bringing disease and death.[16] The Hebrew story of Salome is a classic example of a woman portrayed as using her sexuality to bring ruin upon a man (John the Baptist).

The sexualisation of women has been characteristic in class society, because when women became subordinate to men it was possible to exploit them. In the early civilisations we can see the birth of stereotypes that in more recent times have given us the academic nude and the fashion model. It would be wrong to claim that women of that period never had any ability to determine their own lives. But just as the ruling class has always had the greatest power to define the form and content of art, so too have men broadly been able to define the representation of women.

Conclusion

We have here only offered a few snapshots of the changing representation of women in art, and risk, as in any short survey, over-simplifying an immense and complex subject.

It is only in the last fifty or so years that the study of the particular experience of women has been taken seriously. The traditional approach of seeing art as the product of ‘Great Men’ has been consistently challenged and exposed, especially by feminists, and today has generally been abandoned by serious academics.

Reconstructing what works of art meant at the time they were created, without the distorting prism of modern Western values, styles and assumptions, is perhaps impossible. Archaeological evidence is incomplete, and much of what survives, such as literary records, will have been written by men. There are all sorts of reasons why ancient evidence cannot necessarily be taken at face value as representations of women, their lives and their contribution to culture. Some of the love poems of ancient Egypt for example are written in a female voice, which invites speculation that they were also written by women, but there is no way of knowing that they are not examples of males writing from female viewpoints [17]. There is also great diversity in how different societies across the world responded to social and historical change. The subordination of women did not follow a smooth, linear pattern, or one that can be easily applied to every culture. We must also remember that ruling class women had a different experience of oppression to that of women of the toiling classes.

It would be completely wrong to see all women post-Neolithic Revolution as passive victims of male oppression, and there is often a big gap between what a dominant ideology declares about a society and how that society actually is. However, we can assert that from the advent of class society there was a sexual division of labour, and a relative inferiority of social status for women, that greatly influenced how women were portrayed in art.

Further reading

An interesting article on the Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives blog about Cleopatra, archaeology and gender.

---

[1] Engels, 3. ‘The Pairing Family’ from Chapter 2 of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884).
[2] Genesis, 3:16. This book is believed to have been written in the 10th century BCE, with additions by subsequent writers. Another of the many examples of profound misogyny in the Bible is that Eve is created from the rib of Adam: the male is thus the basic human being, the female a mere derivative form. Biologists could argue, with reference to our chromosomes, that the reverse is true.
[3] V. Gordon Childe, What Happened in History (1942).
[4] V. Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself (1936).
[5] Fashion is a fascinating art form in itself – one I hope to examine another time.
[6] Swiss anthropologist Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–1887). His seminal work Mother Right was a ground-breaking study of prehistoric sexual relations – however Engels criticises him for considering religion rather than concrete social conditions as the “decisive lever in world history”.
[7] Friedrich Engels, Preface to the fourth edition (1891) of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
[8] Renfew and Bahn, Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice (2008).
[9] Note however that this art has been heavily restored. See for example Mary Beard, ‘Knossos: Fakes, Facts, and Mystery’, New York Review of Books (August 2009).
[10] Margaret Ehrenberg, Women in Prehistory (1989).
[11] Gay Robins, The Art of Ancient Egypt (2008).
[12] Jaromir Malek, Egyptian Art (1999).
[13] Eleanor Leacock, Introduction (1972) to Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
[14] The period of growth culminating in the harvest must co-exist with the barren periods of the year. The many female deities with responsibility for war – the Greek Athena, the Persian Anahita, the Egyptian Menhit, etc – may have their roots in an ancient interest in the cycle of life/birth and death. A female deity could embody the first and then, through identification with the destructiveness of war, its state of contradiction with the second.
[15] The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet 1.
[16] She later appears in alternative Christian mythology as the supposed first wife of Adam.
[17] See Gay Robins, Women in Ancient Egypt (1993).

The origins of women’s oppression

The Neolithic Revolution introduced many profound changes into human society. We have yet to consider one of the most important: the dominance of men over women.

This has been expressed differently across cultures, but the general pattern is true everywhere and persists today: most of the powerful positions in politics and the economy are occupied by men, who also have majority control of wealth both in society in general and within the family. Women are still expected to carry most of the burden of childcare and housework, and are disproportionately subject to physical assault and to sexual and economic exploitation.

This situation has prevailed for only a small portion of humanity’s existence, but it has had enormous consequences for women’s participation and representation in art. Before we discuss that, we need to understand its causes.

One of the most substantial contributions to understanding women’s inequality was made by the founders of Marxism, mainly outlined in Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. This has become dated in some respects, but its basic argument remains sound and has been expanded upon by subsequent generations. The explanation of the origins of sexual inequality has to be based not on mythology or speculation but on anthropological evidence. Only when we understand the causes of inequality can we propose ways of solving it.

Women in prehistory

The Marxist first premise is that the inequality of the sexes is not eternal and inevitable, but is rooted in material conditions. The alternative is to believe that males and females are born unequal, for which there is no evidence.

For ninety per cent of its existence, the human race lived in a more or less egalitarian society. This view, shared by Marx and Engels, has been confirmed by a great deal of archaeological and anthropological research. Early humans lived in loose groupings, in which – though there is no direct evidence for this – labour was probably divided according to sex. It’s likely that men went hunting for big game, while women foraged for plant foods such as fruit, berries and nuts, caught small animals and reared children. (This should not be seen rigidly – the women of the Agta in the Philippines, for example, are skilled hunters of game animals, although they hunt less than men. If they can do it, so could women in prehistoric communities.) Although there was a division of labour, there was no social basis for either sex to oppress the other. Inequality in the distribution of power and resources is not possible until society is producing more than is necessary for subsistence alone. As it was, food and other resources had to be distributed equally to keep everyone alive.

Likewise, we do not know if tool-making was divided according to sex, but there is no reason why both sexes could not have made them.

In this context, women’s contribution would have been essential. Whereas the stereotype is of male hunters bringing home game that fed the tribe, the truth was probably rather different. The anthropologist Kristen Hawkes, studying the hunter-gatherer Aché Indians of Paraguay in the 1980s, found that men’s hunting success was very variable. As summarised by Jared Diamond:

The first surprising result from the studies by Hawkes and her colleagues concerned the difference between the returns achieved by men’s and women’s strategies. Peak yields were, of course, much higher for men than for women, since a man’s daily bag topped 40,000 calories when he was lucky enough to kill a peccary. However, a man’s average daily return of 9,634 calories proved to be lower than that of a woman (10,356) and a man’s median return was much lower (4,663 calories per day) was much lower. The reason for this paradoxical result is that the glorious days when a man bagged a peccary were greatly outnumbered by the humiliating days when he returned empty-handed.[1]

Given the vagaries of hunting, prehistoric women were actually more consistently productive in calorie terms than men were. In a subsistence society, it is highly unlikely that this contribution would have been undervalued. In fact, many anthropologists believe that it was initially women who were in charge of planting and cultivating. The archaeologist Margaret Ehrenberg argued that women’s foraging role meant that they were particularly aware of where plants grew, their life cycle, how they responded to sun and rain, and so on:

The discovery of farming techniques has usually been assumed to have been made by men, but it is in fact very much more likely to have been made by women. On the basis of anthropological evidence for societies still living foraging lifestyles and those living by simple, non-mechanical farming, taken in conjunction with direct archaeological evidence, it seems probable that it was women who made the first observations of plant behaviour, and worked out, presumeably by long trial and error, how to grow and tend crops.[2]

This command of resources gave women considerable control over the decisions of the tribe, including the ability to veto wars they didn’t approve of.[3]

Some archaeologists, in particular Marija Gimbutas, have proposed that in prehistory women were worshipped and dominated society. A belief in prehistoric matriarchy has even been ascribed to Engels, whereas Origin states that prehistoric women were relative equals, supreme only in the household; lines of descent went through the female line, yet matrilineality is not the same thing as matriarchy. The theory has more to do with wishful thinking than reality, as the evidence is unconvincing. Under a subsistence economy it is unlikely that any group could universally exert authority at the expense of others.

The advent of sexual inequality

The exact steps by which sexual inequality emerged are still unclear, but the general pattern is not. The key advance of the Neolithic Revolution was to greatly increase productivity, and this favoured those who had the greatest control of that production. This affected women in two ways.

Paleolithic women’s food-gathering role would have posed no problems for their other major social function, the bearing of children. Nor would childbearing have dominated women’s lives to the extent that it did, for example, in 19th century Europe. Nomadic people are limited to the number of children they can carry with them, which imposes a four-year interval between births until a child can learn to walk by itself; in addition there is no incentive to reproduce more mouths than the subsistence economy can support.

In Neolithic society, beginning around 12–10,000 years ago, these conditions changed. Sedentary agriculturalists can give birth more often, and valued larger families because they increased the amount of available labour. This put a heavier burden of childbearing upon women.

After the technical innovations of ploughing and herding, the heavy work that was necessary for the cultivation of crops and the domestication of animals was much less compatible with childbearing than Paleolithic gathering had been. Men were already in charge of cattle, because of their history of hunting such animals; now they took on more responsibility for agriculture too. Childe wrote:

The plough changed farming from plot cultivation to agriculture (the tillage of fields)… It relieved women of the most exacting drudgery but deprived them of their monopoly over the cereal crops and the social status that conferred. Among barbarians, whereas women normally hoe plots, it is men who plough fields. And in even the oldest Sumerian and Egyptian documents the ploughmen really are males.[4]

Ancient Egyptian mural painting of a man plowing, from the tomb of Sennedjem, ca. 1200 BCE.

So, as a result of the shift to a new economy, women were gradually excluded from the area of production in which the most dramatic productive advances were being made. As productivity increased, so did the wealth and importance of men relative to women in society. At the same time, the increased productivity of labour meant increased pressure on women’s reproductive role as childbearers. The great advance for humanity represented by the Neolithic Revolution was thus accompanied by a huge step backwards for women, who gradually became subordinated to men. Women were more and more confined to the household, while economic power was moving in the opposite direction.

The second way in which women were affected was the rise of class society and the development of the family within it. The anthropologist Eleanor Leacock made a key point:

It is crucial to the organisation of women for their liberation to understand that it is the monogamous family as an economic unit, at the heart of class society, that is basic to their subjugation.[5]

The production of a surplus after the Neolithic Revolution meant that a minority in society began to acquire a disproportionate control over resources, and therefore also of power. This ruling class used its control to organise society in a way that entrenched and extended its privileges.

One expression of this was the shift from the loose, collective pairing of hunter-gatherer society to a new form of family, in which the male and female partners were strictly tied to one another and property rights were held by the male. This family form was necessary to the ruling class as it allowed wealth to be inherited within the family, i.e. it allowed the ruling class to reproduce and perpetuate itself. The woman was little more than her husband’s servant, expected to rear children and perform domestic chores. In Origin, Engels wrote:

The modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife, and modern society is a mass composed of these individual families as its molecules.[6]

This took a variety of forms across different cultures, but the assumed inferiority of women is universal outside of surviving hunter-gatherer societies. Thus the ruling class that emerged from the Neolithic Revolution was also a male-dominated ruling class.

To take one example of how this was expressed, human lineage in prehistoric society was often – it is impossible to be sure of the extent – measured through the mother. A child’s maternity was incontestable, whereas paternity was always open to doubt (not least because many early societies practiced much looser forms of marriage). This practice of matrilinearity, or ‘mother right’, came into conflict with the principle of male dominance. Engels explained:

Thus, on the one hand, in proportion as wealth increased it made the man’s position in the family more important than the woman’s, and on the other hand created an impulse to exploit this strengthened position in order to overthrow, in favour of his children, the traditional order of inheritance... Mother right, therefore, had to be overthrown, and overthrown it was.[7]

Lineage through the mother was replaced by lineage through the father, but this was not enough. To guarantee that he was indeed the father of his wife’s children, a man had to exert considerable sexual control over her, and a monogamous family arose in which female sexuality became taboo. Centuries of sexual repression and hypocrisy have resulted. Engels concluded:

The overthrow of mother right was the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children.

Out of this concrete social relationship rose ideologies seeking to reinforce inequality by making it seem inevitable. Ideas went into circulation that are still current: men are by nature more aggressive, women are nurturing, mothers are especially important to children, war is no place for a woman, boys don’t cry, women must worry about their looks, men must sow their wild oats, and so on. Women’s role in childbirth led to suggestions that they were closer to ‘Nature’ and to a passive kind of ‘spirituality’. Men and women were expected not only to believe these ideas but to try and live up to prescribed gender identities in their behaviour.

Conclusion

The reactionary explanation of sexual inequality is that men are innately more aggressive and domineering than women, i.e. that male dominance is natural and inevitable. But the predominance of men has only existed for a very small and recent period in human society. Inequality is not rooted in innate differences between male and female biology or psychology, but in the development of productive forces through history.[8] This is a fact that only historical materialism can properly explain – a theorist who wants to resist any radically progressive conclusions has to resort to the ‘nature’ argument to some extent.

Biology has been important – ‘male’ and ‘female’ have no meaning outside it – but only because it is women who give birth to children; the historical stage at which this difference determined the inequality of the sexes is long past. Women were not forced into submission by male aggression: the change in their status took thousands of years, and followed a socio-economic logic based upon the interests of society in increased production and reproduction.

However, human beings are rarely fully aware of the historical processes they are swept up in, and society came to believe its own propaganda – officially, at any rate. Male dominance came to be seen as ‘inevitable’ and decreed by the gods. (This pattern, wherein particular historical circumstances are mistaken for absolute and universal ones, is repeated again and again across history.) The egalitarianism of prehistoric society was conveniently forgotten as new interests were asserted.

Even when new techniques made the physical differences between men and women irrelevant to production, class society persisted with the male-dominated family because it drew several benefits from it. Firstly, women’s domestic role meant that future generations of labour were reared and supported at little cost to the ruling class.[9] Secondly, the family became an important means of passing on ‘official’ ideology to those new generations – respect for the monarchy, one’s obligations to the ruling class, subservience to religion, the superiority of men over women, etc – which could be asserted against more dangerous notions of class and gender solidarity. Thirdly, restricting women’s status in the workplace creates a pool of labourers who can be paid less, for the same work, than men. And fourthly, the right to inherit wealth within the family is as important for the bourgeoisie as it was to the nobility in ancient civilisations. It is for this reason that Marx and Engels argued that “it is with the abolition of private property that the abolition of the family is self-evident”.[10]

The result of all this for art was, and is, that it disproportionately represents male discourses and experience. This has been a characteristic of artistic production ever since civilisation began.

---

[1] Jared Diamond, Why is Sex Fun? (1997). Diamond argues that men hunted, despite lower calorie yields, because they could trade their occasional bonanzas for adulterous sex.
[2] Margaret Ehrenburg, Women in Prehistory (1989).
[3] See for example Judith Brown, ‘Iroquois Women’, published in Rayna Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women (1975).
[4] V. Gordon Childe, What Happened in History (1942).
[5] Eleanor Leacock, Introduction (1972) to Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
[6] Engels, Ch. II The Family, 4 The Monogamous Family from The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884).
[7] Ibid., Ch. II The Family, 3 The Pairing Family.
[8] To take a contemporary example, girls today outperform boys in the education system. Many responses to this place huge emphasis on differences between boys’ and girls’ brains, etc, whereas the real cause of the difference is socialisation, such as the idea that it is not ‘cool’ for boys to study hard. It is only by encouraging different attitudes in boys that their underachievement can be resolved. This however means overturning many long-cherished, even Romantic, assumptions about male behaviour.
[9] This is one of the reasons underlying the right’s insistence upon the importance of the family. The family operates as a kind of welfare system for its members, thus sparing the state from responsibility for supporting them.
[10] Marx and Engels, The German Ideology (1845–6).