Reading: The Creation of Patriarch (Gerda Lerner) Chapters: Introduction, (half of) Chapter 1 To contextualise: How Nonviolence Protects the State / Chapter related tags: #HNvPtS
This book is almost as old as I am. Anyway... Peter mentions in a footnote that this resource is greatly engaged in gender binarism.
And yet, most of the theoretical work of modern feminism, beginning with Simone de Beauvoir and continuing to the present, has been ahistorical and negligent of feminist historical scholarship. This was understandable in the early days of the new wave of feminism, when scholarship on the past of women was scant, but in the 1980s, when excellent scholarly work in Women’s History is abundantly available, the distance between historical scholarship and feminist criticism in other fields persists. Anthropologists, literary critics, sociologists, political scientists, and poets have offered theoretical work based on “history,” but the work of Women’s History specialists has not become part of the common discourse. I believe the reasons for this go beyond the sociology of the women doing feminist criticism and beyond the constraints of their academic background and training. The reasons lie in the conflict-ridden and highly problematic relationship of women to history.
She's... not endearing me to her. Of course, she's not entirely wrong, but this really just feels so much like an “I'm right, and you're not.” I'd also like to posit that anthropologists are the weird ones being put in there because archaeologists, in the US context, are part of the anthropological discipline. They are likely some of the precise people she took her information about Mesopotamia from. And historians aren't without guilt in these either.
I'm saying this as a person who studied both anthropology and history. Anyway, I won't pass judgement, but this is weird to me as part of an introduction... even in 1986. Unless she wrote this book to argue with someone, which is precisely what it sounds like.
From the time of the king lists of ancient Sumer on, historians, whether priests, royal servants, clerks, clerics, or a professional class of university-trained intellectuals, have selected the events to be recorded and have interpreted them so as to give them meaning and significance.
One could argue that all of these categories do not a historian make, but sure.
The point is that men and women have suffered exclusion and discrimination because of their class. No man has been excluded from the historical record because of his sex, yet all women were.
I would make the case that not all women were because there were very specific women who did manage to get into the historical record. I probably would've softened this to “the vast majority of women were excluded” because it's hard for me to ignore that we've kept tabs on women of immense power (Cleopatra, Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, etc).
It would possibly be correct, however, to recognise the treatment they receive versus a man who would technically be their equal.
Women have not only been educationally deprived throughout historical time in every known society, they have been excluded from theory-formation.
Yes, but. Women have always engaged in theory-formation but their theory-formation, more accurately, has been overlooked and neglected. People of marginalised genders engage in a great amount of theory-formation, and we are forced to pass it down within internal networks. Sometimes it escapes into the rest of society, but it's rare that it happens that way.
She's not inherently wrong, but I think she wrote this with too much incendiary flare. It becomes grating and equally as off-putting as the negligent history of the second wave feminists she complains about.
I also find it interesting because, if you look at certain subcultures, women have been doing this historical analysis and interpretation for centuries... So Lerner's also making the elementary mistake of ignoring it (and I know for a fact that in the 1980s, there were women with whom she could've engaged because multiple anarchist and anarchist-adjacent women's groups were already doing this). This reads like the overly privileged person who ignores those “beneath her” and fails to see that what she claims doesn't exist actually, in fact, does.
Although questions of “origin” initially interested me, I soon realized that they were far less significant than questions about the historical process by which patriarchy becomes established and institutionalized.
I agree!
Under the influence of Marxist theories of origin...
Ah, another one. Interesting that Peter likes Marxists and liberals. It's not bad to learn from them, but he doesn't engage with anarchist feminists (or specifically anarchafeminists) unless they specifically side with him, and I find that particularly interesting. He doesn't engage with any who challenge his views.
I also need to make it clear that she wrote this book as a historian of 19th century America, which will probably be relevant as I continue reading a book that engages with prehistory. This isn't to say she couldn't explore a new time period, but it is to say that certain things she was trained to do might keep creating hiccups in the work.
...
I currently don't feel like reading the rest of this. It seems moderately tolerable, but I think a useful takeaway is that it's one more example of Peter ignoring feminists within the anarchist milieu.