It is not true that women were always the ones who were dominated by men, there are examples from many living cultures and traditions which continue till date that there was a time when reverse was true, and a time when they were just two individuals in a team. Here are some lesser known facts to support this arguement:

The women’s pelvis had to evolve first to carry the larger human skull.

We owe our right handedness to the early woman, who used to carry their babies on the left hand side to soothe them from their heart beat, leaving the right hand free to work.

Women’s moon rhythms awakened in the human kind the capacity to recognize abstracts, to make connections and to think symbolically.

Female monthly reproductive cycles ensured human’s survival by giving twelve chances of conception every year, vis-à-vis our closet cousins; chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans who can conceive only once in a couple of years.

In the Human Cell Women’s is the basic ‘X’ chromosome, a female baby simply requires another X at the moment of conception, whereas the male requires the “divergent” Y…

Scientists now calculate that all living humans are related to a single woman who lived roughly 200,000 years ago in Africa. They traced the ancestry through Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in every living person, which directly descends without recombination from Mothers...

( National Geographic)

“Man the hunter” myth can be used to justify every act of male aggression from business chicanery to wife battering and rape, to “right to dominate”.The truth is that man hunted in groups including women so as to scare the animal and trap it, so they minimise danger of being eaten away according to Charles Darwin.

Hunting in only provided for 20% of food which came far in between be reliable, rest 80% came from scavenging and gathering, and women were the authorities in both. They needed to identify edible from inedible among thousands of plant varieties…

The more important but highly undervalued inventions like “food digging sticks”, “swag bags” to collect food and “sling bags” for babies, and sanitary napkins played an important role in the struggle for survival.

Women’s invention of food sharing as part of the extended care for their children would have been as important as group co ordination and team work in hunting. Women’s History Fact File

Interestingly women in primitive societies were often far less subjugated than her modern sister.

She played a far more vital role, as nourishers, counselors, wise women, leaders, story tellers, doctors, magicians and lawgivers. No one controlled their bodies or free movement, making no fetish on their virginity or chastity, and making any demands on sexual activity.

These societies had matriarchy, a form of social organization which is women centric, substantially egalitarian, and where it is not considered unnatural or anomalous for women to hold power and engage in all activities alongside men.

The power of queen was at its most extraordinary height on Egypt, where for thousands of years she was the ruler, fiercest of warriors, goddess, wife of the god, the high priestesses and a totem object of veneration all in one.

There were women monarchs and warriors all over the world at this time Queen Sammuramat (Semiramis), Hatshepsut (Egypt), “The white women” of Natchez Indians of the Gulf of Mexico, Himeko, the priestess Queen of Japan (AD 220-264),

Deborah the leader of Israelites, Jewish Princess Judith, Roman heroine Cloelia, Tamyris, The Scynthian Queen of the Masagetae tribe, Egyptian Queen Cleopatra, Warrior Queen Maedb (Maeve) , Boudicca, queen of Iceni, Amazons of the Mediterranean region, Greek warrior poet Telesilla and the list goes on and on.

In Greece they led a free open air life and got training athletics and gymnastics which promoted both fitness and beauty.

In Crete chosen young women trained as “toreros” to take part in the ritual bull-leaping, while Ionian women joined in boar hunts with nets and spears

The daughters of Sparta “were never at home”, mingling with young men in wrestling matches, “casting their clothes off just for the match, just like the men”, according to a travelers accounts.

In India the freedom with which women expressed physicality and sexuality is evident in the tradition of “gandharva vivah”, “swayamvar”, accounts of “kama –sutra”, “Vasantsena” and depictions on sites like Ajanta and Ellora and many other temples of this period.

“The physical autonomy expressed by these women through sports and military activity speaks of a deeper freedom, and one that later ages found most difficult to tolerate or even adequately explain. Customs varied from country to country but women at the birth of civilizations enjoyed a far more freedom from restraint, rather than the impositions of “modesty” and “Chastity” afterwards. In addition to the warriors and gymnasts, many cultures practiced “cult-nakedness”, frequently disrobing for high ceremonials and important rituals either of a solemn or joyful kind…

Women and Religion

Women with her moon rhythms and power to create were sacred

She became the goddess, subject of human’s first symbolic thought, the “mother goddess” as her children saw her, ripe breasts, rotund belly and buttocks and flaring vulva with tree trunk thighs. Venus figurines found all over the world, earliest one in France, are proofs of Goddess worship.

She was timeless and endless whereas the males came and went. She could be with or without consort (for ex. Goddess Kali is the wild version of Parvati, who is one with no consort, as opposed to the domesticated Parvati). This is different in patriarchy where she was always the wife of the father.

Strong or bright red is associated with genital blood in many religions, where red ochre is called hematite. The red ocher than is symbolic of rebirth through the potent substance of menstruation and childbirth. In Greece for example they would mix it with corn seed as best possible fertilizer.

From when all meaning, all magic, all life lay with women, men had no function, no significance at all. “The baby, the blood, the yelling, the dancing, all that concerns women” declared an Australian Aboriginal: “Men have nothing to do but copulate”.

To take over women’s function they invented male-centered rituals (called male initiations today) to mimic the biological actions of women’s bodies, a debt openly acknowledged by many surviving stone age cultures today: “in the beginning we had nothing… we took these things from women”. (Miles, 1989) The aboriginal word for split “penis” derives from the term for the vagina, and the title “processor of the vulva”.

For Jung, the secret of all male rituals lay in “going through the mother again”, embracing the fear, the pain and the blood in order to be born anew not as a child but as a man and a hero.

Who knows the truth, but it is food for thought. In a world rife with goddess worship, how did the monotheistic religions take hold? Women were at the fore of these foundations which provided them a central role and opportunity, in a world apparently confused with many gods. The first devotees of both Gautam and Buddha were their wives. Khadijah, the brilliant business woman and prominent member of the leading Mecca tribe of the Quraish, actually discovered Mohammad when at the age of forty she gave an ill –educated, epileptic shepherd boy of twenty five regular employment, and took him as her husband and encouraged his revelations.

Judaism was also saved by the mother of Maccabes, who stood by her seven sons while each in turn were tortured and burned to death in the holocaust of 170 BC, urging them to stand firm. Very first Christian churches in Rome and elsewhere were houses donated by wealthy widows, and all Christian communities in the acts of the Apostle recorded as meeting under the woman’s roof.



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