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Notes and References
Chapter 1 The First Women
1 Elizabeth Gould Davis, The First Sex (1971), pp. 34–5. The argument that the male chromosome ‘Y’ is no more than ‘a defective X’ has a long pedigree – see Francis Swiney, Women and Natural Law (1912). In the modern period it has been vigorously advanced by Valerie Solanas in The SCUM Manifesto (New York, 1968), and by Gould Davis: ‘this small and twisted Y chromosome is a genetic error . . . the first males were freaks, produced by some damage to the genes . . .’
2 Amaury de Riencourt, Women and Power in History (1974, first published in English in 1983), p. 52.
3 Nigel Calder, Timescale (1984), p. 10.
4 Accounts of the ‘gene fount mother’ are to be found in the Listener, 27.2.86, and the Guardian, 3.3.86.
5 For the shortness of the first humans’ life span, see Marian Lowe and Ruth Hubbard (eds.), Woman’s Nature: Rationalisations of Inequality (New York and Oxford, 1983), p. 131.
6 George P. Murdock, Our Primitive Contemporaries (New York, 1934); Social Structure (New York, 1949); ‘World Ethnographic Sample’, American Anthropologist (1957); ‘Ethnographic Atlas: a Summary’, Ethnology 6, No. 2, 109–236. Murdock’s own work is discussed in Jo Freeman (ed), Women: a Feminist Perspective (Palo Alto, California, 1979), p. 94. See also the work of Richard Lee, in Man the Hunter, eds. R. B. Lee and Irven De Vore (1968). Lee showed that even failure at the hunt would not induce the !Kung bushmen of Botswana to hunt more than one week in three or four; since hunting was subject to magic outside their control no amount of effort on their part, they believed, could reverse a run of bad luck. Their refusal could go on for a month, or even longer, during which visiting, entertaining and especially dancing were the primary activities of the men, and women’s gathering alone sustained the tribe.
7 Women’s gathering skills are described by Elaine Morgan in The Descent of Woman (1972), p. 184; and see Calder, p. 156, for a description of the botanical and ecological knowledge displayed in the most famous of prehistoric burials, that of ‘the Flower Man of Shanidar’. This unknown Mesopotamian was laid to rest about 60,000 years ago on a bed of flowers like ragwort and hollyhock, all known to have medicinal properties, and all used to this day in women’s traditional remedies. Of course the flower-gatherers could have been men – but if prehistoric Shanidar boasted a man who could tell a hollyhock from a hole in the ground, he failed to hand down the secret of his skill to most of his male descendants.
8 For a discussion of tool-making, see Kenneth Oakley, Man the Tool-Maker (1947); R Leakey and R. Lewin, Origins (New York, 1977); G. Isaac and R. Leakey, Human Ancestors (1979); B. M. Fagan, People of the Earth: an Introduction to World Pre-History (1980).
9 Elise Boulding, in The Underside of History (Colorado, 1976), p. 78, discusses women’s discovery of the technique of fire-hardening and suggests that women thereby invented hunting, by providing the tribe with weapons capable of spearing and impaling.
10 See Sally Slocum, ‘Woman the Gatherer: Male Bias in Anthropology’. This landmark paper is to be found in Rayna Reiter (ed.), Towards an Anthropology of Women (New York, 1975), and in Mary Evans (ed.), The Woman Question: Readings in the Subordination of Women (1982). The importance of the swag bag is also discussed by Sheila Lewenhak in Women and Work (1980), pp. 20–1.
11 Slocum, above.
12 The story of Man the Hunter is to be found everywhere, in scholarly and popular books for adults and children – see Lee and De Vore (above); S. Washburn and C. S. Lancaster, ‘The Evolution of Hunting’, in Lee and De Vore (eds.), Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers (Harvard, 1976); Sol Tax (ed.), Evolution After Darwin, Vol. II: The Evolution of Man (Chicago, 1...
