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PoMo Prescriptions

Eller sees "fms" as reinforcing patriarchal gendering by insisting on
the classic feminine traits, speculating that "they see no escape"
from them. She doesn't seem to entertain any possibility of redefining
"female" in a positive, flexible and diverse way. For her it
represents -- can only represent -- a negative, constrictive category
imposed by a patriarchal system. In support of this, she uses a great
quote from the 19th-century British feminist Millicent Fawcett: "We
talk about 'women' and 'women's suffrage,' we do not talk about Woman
with a capital W. That we leave to our enemies." Nonetheless, many
estimable feminists such as Matilda Joslyn Gage used this syntax to
articulate very radical critiques of women's oppression.

[INLINE] Eller writes that "both the category of feminism and its
context are to a large degree determined by prior discrimination
against the very people who are forced to occupy that category." That
seems tautological. Why else would a women's rights movement need to
come into existence at all? Her formulation seems to deny any voice,
creative shaping or subversion of ordained identity to the women
themselves. Eller's solution to the problem is simple: vacate the
category of women, as meaningless, illusional, and confining.

Valdivia, ancient Ecuador >>>

Post-structuralism insists that it is pointless to look for
commonalities, because there are none: "The only femaleness that is
characteristic of all women as a class is the experience of having the
label 'woman' affixed to one's being." (Are all identities as
meaningless as this?) Eller skims over the performance theory of
gender without addressing -- except for a mention of pink and blue
blankets -- the heavy social/cultural/economic enforcement that
underlies these "performances," and the retaliation and repression
dealt out for the "wrong" behaviors. As Stevie Jackson has pointed
out, "Regarding meaning as _entirely_ fluid can mean denying even the
starkest of material realities." [Jackson, Stevie, "The Amazing
Deconstructing Woman," Trouble and Strife, #25, Winter 1992, p 92]
And, because it recognizes no group interests, a post-structuralist
worldview also entails abandoning solidarity and collective action.

The program seems to be: make gender disappear, as in no previous
human society. The structural realities of patriarchy -- physical and
sexual abuse, low female status combined with heavy caregiver
responsibilities, poverty and economic insecurity, legal
inconsequence, women's reactions to violent and degrading treatment --
can all that be made to vanish by declaring gender irrelevant? Quoting
Vicki Noble's remark that "We have to create the feminine," Eller
retorts, Why? "Why can't we just ignore it and see if it goes away?"
(She must not have been to a toy store lately.) The naivete of this
approach is staggering.

The Myth gives the impression that patriarchal social systems serve no
interests, involve no power or benefits: "Male dominance may be
perpetuated through inertia and have no better reason to exist than
tradition." Eller proposes the Sisyphean project of overcoming a
pan-historic male domination of men through... moral choice. She
doesn't address the problem of whether the will to achieve this exists
on a society-wide basis, amidst the anti-feminist backlash against
women's recent gains. But even if this goal is unreachable, we can
still try really hard, hoping for a better future in spite of a bleak
past. And "We can comfort ourselves with the thought that many of the
conditions we suspect have worked to create male dominance are no
longer with us, or need no longer produce the same response as they
did in the past."

Hmmm. What might conditions might these be? This is the first mention
of male dominance having to be created, it having existed since the
dawn of time and all. Now Eller points to Richard Leakey's argument
that the hunting and gathering division of labor is the culprit in
women's oppression. She hopes that "the farther we grow from those
roots, the less we need to be affected by social roles that made sense
only in the past." This assumes that they ever made sense -- that they
were not based on sheer coercion, to the detriment of women, children,
and non-dominant males.

But if patriarchy originated in foraging societies, why do so many of
themÑthe Agta, Mbuti, SemangÑdisplay relatively egalitarian social
relations? And why is it that the most patriarchal systems are found
in the highly organized feudal, imperial and capitalist societies?
More than one anthropologist has proposed the reverse of LeakeyÕs
thesis: that hunter-gatherer gender parity gave way to patriarchy
within the settled agrarian societies. None of this has been settled.

There's another problem. Eller puts this era of leaving behind
foraging lifeways (at least for "the West") at some 10,000 years ago.
It seems as if that would be more than long enough to outgrow any
functionality of old hunter-gatherer roles (were we prepared to
concede them) which would then just "go away." She tries to explain
away the problem: "social systems can continue to thrive long after
the conditions that formed them have become irrelevant." Indeed. This
is what any number of feminist thinkers have been saying about the
persistence of goddess veneration in patriarchal societies, but Eller
doesn't apply the principle in that case.

Another inconsistency is that although Eller posits male domination in
all human societies, she hedges toward the end of her book with the
question "Why is it that where gender hierarchy has developed, women
have always been the dominated gender?" (my italics) Which is it to
be: is male domination universal, or not?

The author reports that she presented her students with an choice:
would they prefer "that of explaining women's (pre)historical loss of
power in such a way that it does not rule out women's power in the
future, or that of explaining how male dominance -- universal up until
now -- can be ended at some point in the future." (They split evenly.)
But a group which never had power is not more likely to gain future
power than one which once had it, and there's no reason to assume that
lost power can not be regained. Enslaved people free themselves,
countries throw off colonial yokes -- and they always look back to
their previous freedom for inspiration.

Although it is already being pointed to as the authoritative summation
of its subject, this book obscures the variety and differences among
matrix historians. Eller comes off as dismissive or ignorant of female
contributions in the field. She cites Will Durant as crediting women
with the invention of farming, weaving, and pottery, but the omission
of Ariel Durant's name from early editions of their historical series
has long since been remedied, and should not have been repeated here.
In the same fashion Eller presents Leonard Shlain as the first to
propose a relationship of literacy to patriarchy.

At the end of the book, Cynthia Eller offers an unconvincing sop to
the objects of her inquiry: "The care and imagination feminist
matriarchalists have devoted to these 'origins' questions is in itself
an impressive achievement." There is cold comfort in this, as Eller
immediately reverts to accusing "fms" of "sloppy or wishful thinking"
and attacking their "pretensions to historical truth." Not only does
Eller consider matrix history escapist and nostalgic for patriarchal
archetypes, she thinks it's dangerous, and even serving the enemies of
feminism.

The only problem is... those enemies just love her book. On the Net
it's being gleefully hailed by outright and covert anti-feminists.
Lawrence Osborne's article on salon.com trumpets: "False Goddess:
Despite what believers in prehistoric matriarchy proclaim, women never
ruled the Earth." [June 28, 2000] Osborne pontificates that Cynthia
Eller is "unravelling the pretensions of matriarchalists" and
"middlebrow feminists." He calls them "sentimental, gawky" and "woozy,
sexist romantics," whose "twaddle" is probably a "pathological
reaction" to corporatist society. The more cautious types on academic
listservs won't be caught in such extreme language or
19th-century-style cariacatures, but some are still are holding up
this book as the definitive refutation of those pesky feminist
ideologues and goddess "fantasies."

So, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory fails Eller's own "enemies"
test. Instead, it's looking a lot like Camille Paglia all over again.
ThatÕs an old, familiar story. But we donÕt have to choose between the
two extremes of pan-historic masculine domination or a utopian
negation of violence and oppression. The differences between the Hopi
and the Nazis do count. ThereÕs a vast expanse of variation in human
culture, with much more to be learned about the history of womenÕs
power, oppression and resistance. However, theory needs to take a back
seat to assembling a broader range of knowledge, one that includes
female clan heads in Yunnan, women shamans in Chile and South Africa
and Korea, Alaskan huntresses, Bulgarian midwives, and priestesses in
Togo and Okinawa.

The project of reevaluating history with a gender-sensitive eye is in
its infancy. History has changed rapidly since the '60s, in every
field: Africana, Celtic studies, West Asian studies, American Indian
scholarship. Thousands of new books come out every year that look
deeper into women's status and stories in a huge range of societies
and periods, at a level of detail not possible before. Fresh
interpretations are being advanced from voices not heard before, and
there's a huge variety of feminist interpretations of history. Some of
the most exciting contributions, histories never published before, are
coming from indigenous perspectives and from the global South. The
task of synthesizing and analyzing information from archaeology, oral
history, linguistics, and written records is just beginning.

Copyright 2000 Max Dashu

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References

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