“The condition of women in society is an uninterrupted history of diminished development. In every culture, in every time, violence against women has been constant and normative and sophisticated. It has taken every form- physical, social, and psychological.
“Women were the first slaves. An early hieroglyph for ‘slave,’ was the symbol ‘woman held in hand.’ Women were easier to capture in raids and keep, more useful as domesticsand breeding chattel. Women have been the majority of slaves throughout history. Only the slave system of North America and the Caribbean, where male workers were essential to plantation labor, violated this norm.
“Nieboer, in his classic and definitive work, Slavery as an Industrial System, completely excluded women from the study on the grounds that ‘slavery proper does not exist where there are none but female slaves.’”
Joan Chittister, 1986.
Attempting to discern origins and trends of pre-historic human culture must be through a lens darkly. Ethnographic studies of pre-literate stone age Australian tribes, with a Dream State lineage stretching back 50,000 years, New Guinea headhunters, “first contact” Amazon tribes and numerous European accounts of cultural beliefs and practices of hunting and gathering people are subject to bias and misinterpretation by trained anthropologists and the most intimate ethnographers.
There have been many thousands of socially bonded groups of humans with hundreds of languages, organized in myriad fashions. There are common themes, where patterns can be compared. Archeology can pick out concrete evidence and place it in time to trace changes, but dogmatic beliefs are so fossilized there, that high priests must die before new seeds can sprout theory. Legends and myths can be mined for meaning along with Holy Books. Root words traced back to the original hoot.
None of these “primitive” cultures necessarily mirrors those first naked black humans wandering out of Africa, ruining the neighborhood for Neandertal brutes, Denisovan giants and Flores Island pygmies, as we victors call the vanquished humanoid species. Were women slaves in these nomad clans or coequal gatherers of mussels and roots, eggs and nuts? Did they throw stones ‘like girls’ to drive off predators from kills? We can’t base our bets on great ape societies, whether silverback gorilla harems, or sex crazed bonobo chimpanzees. Humans are decidedly different than all other primates in that females are fertile year round, with a vagina shifted forward, facilitating face to face sex that creates bonds more powerful than force. And we can physically walk or work all day, unlike apes. Sex Slaves to alien gods like the legends say, or to club wielding alpha males, like modern fantasies?
Whatever the origins of inequality, women have created powerful social tools that reshaped their enslavement across time and cultures. Painted hands in the deep caves of Lascaux are women’s size. Art and decoration were female creations as was religion- beginning with the menstrual blood taboo. The most ancient figurines uncovered are Goddesses. Only an eon later does the penis emerge on shapeshifting shamans.
There’s little doubt that we’d still be living in caves without curtains if not for women weaving fiber cloth and mats, fleshing and tanning hides, sewing clothes. As well as gathering most of the calories and preparing what’s available in gathering and hunting societies. Providing the comforts of home created family time. Food storage and stews boiling in baskets, agriculture itself as the science of seeds evolved. Even a dog knows who feeds him.
In the Igbo villages scattered through the Bight of Biafra on the gold coast of Africa, women had their own land, garden plots outside the patrilineal family compound. Wives set rules for markets they ran. Men had to abide or the entire female population, organized through family of origin and marriage went on strike. They refused to cook, have sex, packed up and returned to home village if husbands didn’t give in to their market decisions. In extreme cases of spousal abuse they would ‘sit on a man’ mobbing his house, exposing their genitals, the ultimate insult, part of their web of power and punishment outside the male system of elders. Wealthy, elder women were obviously favored by the local goddess of Igbo religion. This gave them ultimate authority.
The Aro people controlled the coastal port for the Bight specializing in the provision of slaves for Atlantic slave trade by the 1700’s. They used existing systems to supply slaves, and modified them over time to supply ever greater demand by English, who controlled the vast majority of the slave trade during the 18th century. Local war captives were bought from Igbo men raiding other tribes. Pawning people was practiced by Igbo in exchange for loans which could be worked off, as they had their own days to pay off debts. Poverty and famine debt was common, and raiding could pay loans back, where labor would not. Others were trapped in tribal justice systems, while parents sold off children for farm labor.
Aro merchants and Igbo leaders worked together to make slavery a more common punishment for infractions. British goods were treasured items and both grew wealthier as the culture dissolved, unraveling as strands of the web of society were extracted. The Aro established village shrines to their powerful oracle, which demanded a sacrifice because of an offense, illness or misfortune. The oracle's diviner or interpreter proved guilt of the chosen offender. Verdict was enslavement to the shrine for life. The oracle “ate its slaves” as they were taken down river to British slavers.
The Cherokee or Tsalagi were pushed out of the Piedmont of the English South Carolina colony in the same century. They held out in stronghold villages in the mountains of Georgia, still powerful enough that they had to be bargained with to buy more of their land. Tribal land was held in common. Cherokee women did the seasonal farming on plots they prepared, while men helped at planting and harvest. Using land gave women rights to its produce, when fallow it reverted to tribal lands.
Women provided the bulk of calories, plus preparation, cooking, cleaning, weaving, sewing, and tanning hides as in most cultures. Men hunted and lazed around, as white settlers saw it. Europeans thought hunting grounds were waste lands, instead of renewable resources. Hunting was essential to feasting and trained for war and defense against enemies, although in the end it was their downfall as they killed more and more deer for hides to trade for European goods.
Tsalagi were matrilineal- husbands moved onto wives property, did not gain ownership of her, and still belonged to his mother’s clan. Older women were recognized in councils held in huge council houses and had more authority on land decisions, including sale to the white colonists. Attakullakula in 1757 asked the colonial government, ‘Since the white man as well as the red man were born to women, why not admit women to your council?’
The Cherokee rapidly became a Civilized Tribe adopting many English habits, building towns, growing cash crops, owning slaves, wearing fancy clothing, even organizing their military and governments in imitation. They owned plantations and guns, bought alcohol, cloth, steel knives and copper kettles, promising payment with hides and produce. Men and women wanted goods and accrued debt, but the colonists only negotiated with male leaders.
George Washington told them,‘your wives and daughters can soon learn to spin and weave’ instead of planting farm land he aimed to acquire as a land speculator and surveyor. Thomas Jefferson’s plan was to divide Indian land into private plots, trade powder, bullets, alcohol and trinkets for deerskins, lower the price gradually and offer credit. As overhunting for skins reduced deer, hunting became harder, to force them into farming. By 1776, they lost another enormous area of land in eastern Georgia due to debts.
Cherokee resisted reducing women’s rights and powers, because they were tied to religion, family and obligations. Many became Christian, some became wealthy with many slaves growing cotton and corn. Andrew Jackson didn’t sort them out. All but a few hidden villages in the deep southern mountains were sent to Oklahoma on foot in the winter of 1838/9. Surviving their Trail of Tears, the Tsalagi maintained communal ownership of their new Indian Lands, until federal law in the 1890’s ended this forcibly. Divided plots of land were allotted to each male head of household, drunk or diligent. He could sell it if he couldn’t keep it.
The very tools slaves use to wedge rights from the masters can stuff them down. Over millennia, cross dressing eunuchs and learned Brahmins supplanted female high priestesses in the ancient temples of Ishtar, Isis and goddesses of the vast Hindu pantheon. Women were dragged from the pulpits, enslaved as prostitutes for the temple's tithe. Modern religions, Hindu, Hebrew, Buddhist, Shinto, Christian and Muslim re-shackled women as property of their fathers, then husbands.
Art frees the mind or binds in commercialism. Words are lies not spells, comfort food kills. Awe of the Mystery herds us down blind alleys. The only way out of the Minotaur’s maze is inward.
*Igbo and Tsalagi examples are drawn from The Punishment Monopoly, Monthly Review Press, 2019. Pem Davidson Buck