A History of Women in the World Volume I: From Prehistory to the First Millennium
March 24, 2008
In her foreword to this first volume of a four-volume work, Atwood writes that women “are not a footnote” to history, but rather “the necessary center around which the wheel of power revolves.” That is the view that novelist and memoirist French (The Women's Room
) satisfyingly supports. As in any survey, much of this volume reads schematically (“For 99 percent of hominid and human existence, people lived in egalitarian matricentry”), and like many historians, French has an agenda—but she backs up even her more controversial theories with an impressive accumulation of academically accepted historical, anthropological and sociological sources. French covers her material vividly as she discusses the formation of the gendered state in Peru, Egypt, Sumer and China and then surveys the differences between the formation of secular and religious states. The volume ends with a detailed analysis of the position of women in early Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and it's here that French's precise methodology really comes to life, though some will debate her interpretations. Written in concise, understated language, this is a significant addition to literature on women's studies and history.
April 15, 2008
French's history of women, originally published in Canada in 2003, takes the reader on a tour of the global subordination of women from prehistory to the present. In the foreword, Margaret Atwood declares that reading this critical compendium will incite women to feel "horror and growing anger" as they begin to grasp the true nature and scope of their oppression by men. French ("The Women's Room") endeavors to demonstrate how the origins of civilization, the state, and patriarchy are all one and the same. Though some may accuse her of offering an oversimplified account of what amounts to 10,000 years of human social evolution, this fundamental claim is one that no social scientist would deny, and it is further bolstered by French's use of primary sources whenever possible. She also draws on extensive academic research in the fields of archaeology, anthropology, and history to argue that a matriarchal civilization has never really existed. She notes that wherever hierarchy and social stratification exist, with a few sourced exceptions, those with all the power and property have almost always been male.
As in feminist historian Gerda Lerner's groundbreaking "The Creation of Patriarchy", French sets out to account for what happened. While Lerner focused only on the ancient antecedents of Western civilization, French also looks at state formation in China, India, Mexico, and Peru as well as addressing the worldviews of the Greeks, Romans, and the entire Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. The second volume follows with an analysis of the patriarchal social practices of Europe from the Dark Ages into the Enlightenment, including chapters on how the domination of women essentially set the stage for European imperialism and subsequent domination of native peoples in Africa and the Americas. French gives us grand theory at its best, wading through copious amounts of scholarly data on the histories of civilizations and offering up, in readable prose, an important synthesis of what an earlier generation of feminists called "herstory." Highly recommended for both public and academic libraries.Theresa Kintz, Wilkes Univ., Wilkes-Barre, PA
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