The Creation of Patriarchy (Women and History) [Hardcover]

While I completely agree with the other review listed, I just wanted to give a few words of warning. This book is long and quite frankly, boring. While Learner brings up some very interesting ideas about the transition of society from matriarchy to patriachy, and is a decent writer, she is only truly brilliant and inspirational occasionally. I do recommend this book for research purposes and it has a fabulous bibliography for making research easier.

Reading this book, I had hoped for a systematic treatment of social structures, laws and customs concerning the relation between men and women. Instead, this book is a Marxist tract tarted up with unfounded speculation built upon literary criticism and anecdotal evidence from ancient Near Eastern societies. The question of the existence or non-existence of matriarchal societies is dealt with in a methodically eccentric manner, but at least arrives at the correct conclusion that there has never existed a matriarchy. The book is long on speculation and short on archaeological evidence. She wrongly colludes with Levi-Strauss' view that 'female subordination' originated with tribal exchange of women through exogamy. She fails to point out that the reason for this exchange would be healthy reproduction and avoidance of the consequences of inbreeding. So 'control of female sexuality' has an objective purpose. She also fails to note that the sexual norms of all societies save our own control male sexuality as well. The grounds for this bad reasoning are twofold: 1) 'to claim that of all human activities only female nurturance is unchanging and eternal is indeed to consign half the human race to a lower existence, to nature rather than to culture.' This is a simplistic dichotomy that is not borne out by study of history. The problem is that Lerner herself clearly sees social and cultural activity as superior to the natural activity of reproduction and childbearing, rather than the two spheres being part of the same reality. 2) 'At a time when overpopulation and exhaustion of natural resources represent a real danger for human survival, to curb women's procreative capacities may be more 'adaptive' than to foster them.' No evidence or statistics are given to support this myth, yet it is clear that she believes that the era of natural reproduction has come to an end. Then there is the claim that women were the first bits of private property because 'neolithic tools were relatively simple, so that anyone could make them. Land was not a scarce resource. Thus neither tools nor land offered any opportunity for appropriation.' No archaeological evidence is proferred for this either. Her discussion of Freud's view on women is irrational. 'Freud's statement that for women 'anatomy is destiny' is wrong because it is ahistorical and reads the distant past into the present without making allowances for changes over time; worse, this statement has been read as a prescription for present and future - not only is anatomy destiny for women, but it should be.' First, the view that anatomy is destiny goes back to Aristotle in the western intellectual tradition. Second, this view is precisely the opposite of ahistorical in that it is historicist, i.e. sees the ultimate goal of human life as lying within human history not beyond it in an eternal realm or afterlife. The view that human norms are ahistorical and eternal comes not from the tradition exemplified by Aristotle and Freud, but from Plato. Third, the concept of 'destiny' denies the distinction between fact and value made by Kant and other Enlightenment thinkers. It is therefore illogical to say that 'anatomy is destiny and should be'. Lerner is at her best dealing with comparative written evidence from the law-codes of Babylon and ancient Israel. However, the discussion on the Biblical narratives of male and female gang rapes in Genesis 19 and Judges 19 suffer from insufficient regard for the texts and literary criticism in this field, which is in plentiful supply. Reading the books of Genesis and Judges as wholes show that God is not seen to approve of either crimes in the narratives. Lerner cites the law of Leviticus 19:29 'do not profane your daughter by making her a prostitute' as an implicit condemnation of the rape in Judges, but omits to show that it is also a condemnation of the rape in Genesis, as the Genesis text was written later than Leviticus. It is strange that she fails to commend John Calvin's accurate reading of the text, which shows clearly that the rape is not seen as good: 'Lot, indeed, is urged by extreme necessity: yet...he is not free from blame' as she points out rightly that the text indicates that Lot is not being saved for his 'virtue' at all, but only out of divine mercy. Her negative view of the Jewish tradition is due to a thorough-going historicism which is doomed to deny that the past has anything to teach us because history necessarily progresses morally. She ignores the fact that it is precisely the Jewish law which is the basis of western jurisprudence and political theory via its Christian incarnation and thereby its fusion with Greek philosophy and Roman law. These are in fact the bases of modern democracy and notions of freedom, without which women would have few freedoms. Towards the end of the book we get grotseque assertions such that class is not a separate construct from gender but is 'expressed in genderic terms', an analysis which operates on an unverifiable notion of class. It is simply not true that men and women have comprised social classes. Last of all, and related to the disparaging of the western tradition, is the insulting claim that 'we have long known that rape has been a way of terrorising us and keeping us in subjection. Now we also know that we have participated, although unwittingly, in the rape of our minds.' The little word 'unwittingly' lets the cat out of the bag: women know if they are physically raped. To talk of 'rape of the mind' is an irresponsible distortion of language and a gross distortion of that most gross of lies that 'all men are rapists'...