F R O M E V E T O D AW N Other Books by Marilyn French Fiction The Women’s Room(1977) The Bleeding Heart (1980) Her Mother’s Daughter(1987) Our Father (1994) My Summer with George(1996) Nonfiction Beyond Power. On Women, Men and Morals (1988) Women in India (1990) The War Against Women(1992) A Season in Hell. A Memoir (1998) F R O M E V E T O D AW N A HISTORY OF WO M E N VOLUME 1: O R I G I N S M A R I LYN FRENCH Fo rew o rd by Ma r g a ret At w o o d The Feminist Press at the City University of New York Published in 2008 byThe Feminist Press at the City University of NewYork The Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406 NewYork, NY 10016 www.feministpress.org Text copyright © 2002 by Marilyn French Introduction copyright © 2007 by Marilyn French Foreword copyright © 2004 by Margaret Atwood All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used, stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy- ing, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission from The Feminist Press at the City University of NewYork, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. The Library of Congress provided the following Cataloguing-in-Publication Data for all four volumes of this series: Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data French, Marilyn, 1929- From eve to dawn / Marilyn French ; foreword by Margaret Atwood. p. cm. “Originally published: Toronto : McArthur, 2002. ISBN 978-1-55861-565-6 (trade paper) 1. Women—History. I. Title. HQ1121.F74 2008 305.4209—dc22 2007033836 This publication was made possible, in part, by the Lawrence W. Levine Foundation, Inc., and by Florence Howe, Joanne Markell, and Eileen Bonnie Schaefer. Cover design by Black Cat Design Cover illustration by Carole Hoff Printed on acid-free paper in Canada byTranscontinental 12 11 10 09 08 5 4 3 2 To Barbara Greenberg and Margaret Atwood C O N T E N T S FO R EWO R D by Ma r g a ret At w o o d . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i x IN T RO D U C T I O N . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 PA RT ON E: PA R E N TS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 9 CH A P T E R 1: TH E MOT H E R S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1 CH A P T E R 2: TH E FAT H E R S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5 1 PA RT TWO: TH E RI S E O F T H E STAT E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 7 CH A P T E R 3: STAT E FO R M AT I O N I N PE RU, EG Y P T, A N D SU M E R . . 6 9 CH A P T E R 4: A SE C U LA R STAT E: CH I N A . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 8 CH A P T E R 5: A RE L I G I O U S STAT E: IN D I A . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 4 3 CH A P T E R 6: A MI L I TA R I S T I C STAT E: ME X I C O . . . . . . . . . . . 1 6 5 CO N C LU S I O N: AN AN A LY S I S O F T H E STAT E . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 7 7 PA RT TH R E E: GO D, GLO RY, A N D DE LU S I O N S O F GR A N D E U R . .1 8 9 CH A P T E R 7: JU D A I S M . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 9 1 CH A P T E R 8: GR E E C E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 0 4 CH A P T E R 9: RO M E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 2 3 CH A P T E R 10: CH R I S T I A N I TY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 3 7 CH A P T E R 11: IS LA M . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 5 7 GLO S S A RY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 9 7 NOT E S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 0 1 BI B L I O G R A PH Y . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2 5 IN D E X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 3 9 MA P S: The Expansion of Ro m e . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 3 0 – 3 1 The Expansion of Is l a m . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 8 4 – 8 5 Map of the World: Peters Pro j e c t i o n . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 3 6 – 3 7 F O R E WO R D FROM EVE TO DAWN is Marilyn Fre n c h’s enormous four- volume, nearly two-thousand-page history of women. It runs from pre h i s t o ry until the present, and is global in scope: the first volume alone covers Pe ru, Egypt, Su m e r, China, India, Mexico, Greece, and Rome, as well as religions fro m Judaism to Christianity and Islam. It examines not only actions and laws, but also the thinking behind them. It’s sometimes annoying, in the same way that Fi e l d i n g’s Am e l i a is annoying—enough suffering!—and it’s sometimes mad- deningly reductionist; but it can’t be dismissed. As a re f e re n c e w o rk it’s invaluable: the bibliographies alone are worth the price. And as a warning about the appalling extremes of human behavior and male we i rdness, it’s indispensable. Especially now.There was a moment in the 1990s when, it was believed, history was over and Utopia had arrived, looking very much like a shopping mall, and “feminist issues” were supposed dead. But that moment was brief. • ix • F O R E WO R D Islamic and American right-wing fundamentalists are on the rise, and one of the first aims of both is the suppression of women: their bodies, their minds, the results of their labors—women, it appears, do most of the work around this planet—and last but not least, their wardrobes. From Eve to Dawn has a point of view, one that will be familiar to the readers of French’s best-selling 1977 novel, The Women’s Room. “The people who oppressed women were men,” French claims. “Not all men oppressed women, but most benefited (or thought they benefited) from this domination, and most contributed to it, if only by doing nothing to stop or ease it.” Women who read this book will do so with horror and growing anger: From Eve to Dawnis to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex as wolf is to poodle. Men who read it might be put off by the depiction of the collective male as brutal psychopath, or puzzled by French’s idea that men should “take responsibility for what their sex has done.” (How responsible can you be for Sumerian monarchs, Egyptian pharaohs, or Napoleon Bonaparte?) However, no one will be able to avoid the relentless piling up of detail and event—the bizarre customs, the woman-hating legal structures, the gynecological absurdities, the child abuse, the sanctioned violence, the sexual outrages—millennium after millenni- um. How to explain them? Are all men twisted? Are all women doomed? Is there hope? French is ambivalent about the twisted part, but, being a peculiarly American kind of activist, she insists on hope. Her project started out as a sweeping television series. It would have made riveting viewing. Think of the visuals— witch-burnings, rapes, stonings-to-death, Jack the Ripper clones, bedizened courtesans, and martyrs from Joan of Arc • x • F O R E WO R D to Rebecca Nurse. The television series fell off the rails, but French kept on, writing and researching with ferocious ded- ication, consulting hundreds of sources and dozens of spe- cialists and scholars, although she was interrupted by a bat- tle with cancer that almost killed her.The whole thing took her 20 years. Her intention was to put together a narrative answer to a question that had bothered her for a long time: how had men ended up with all the power—specifically, with all the power over women? Had it always been like that? If not, how was such power grasped and then enforced? Nothing she had read had addressed this issue directly. In most con- ventional histories, women simply aren’t there. Or they’re there as footnotes. Their absence is like the shadowy corner in a painting where there’s something going on that you can’t quite see. French aimed to throw some light into that corner. Her first volume—Origins—is the shortest. It starts with specu- lations about the kind of egalitarian hunter-gatherer soci- eties also described by Jared Diamond in his classic Guns, Germs and Steel. No society, says French, has ever been a matriarchy—that is, a society in which women are all-pow- erful and do dastardly things to men. But societies were once matrilineal: that is, children were thought to descend from the mother, not the father. Many have wondered why that state of affairs changed, but change it did; and as agriculture took over, and patriarchy set in, women and children came to be viewed as property—men’s property, to be bought, sold, traded, stolen, or killed. As psychologists have told us, the more you mistreat people, the more pressing your need to explain why your victims deserve their fate. A great deal has been written • xi •