The First Sex

The First Sex was a 1971 book by librarian Elizabeth Gould Davis, then 61 years of age. Fitting in with the second wave of feminism, Davis aimed to show that, historically, human society had been matriachal "queendoms" based around worship of the "Great Goddess" and characterised by pacifism and a much greater degree of democracy than more recent patriarchal societies.

She also believed that these societies developed a very high degree of civilization that was wiped out as a result of the "patriarchal revolution", which she believes introduced a new system of society based around property rights rather than human rights, and which worshipped a stern and vengeful male God – as seen today in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

"The Gynocratic World"

In the first part of The First Sex, Gould Davis uses evidence from such archaeologists as Johann Jakob Bachofen and anthropologists like Margaret Mead to support a theory of matriarchal prehistory. The chapters in this section of the book focus on individual parts of the evidence for peaceful matriarchal queendoms: three are titled "Mythology Speaks", "Anthropology Speaks" and "Archaeology Speaks". Gould Davis says that the "loss of paradise" when the "Great Goddess" is replaced by a vengeful God is the theme of all myth. Similarly Gould Davis argues that archaeology, even when still in its infancy as a discipline, always showed society to once have been matriarchal. Davis said that evidence from Çatal Hüyük showed there to be no wars or even violent deaths - and that even physical injury to animals was not permissible. Tombs in other parts of the Mediterranean show, in her opinion, clear evidence of female superiority because Davis claims female tombs are preserved much more carefully than male ones. In "Anthropology Speaks", Davis focused on taboos, chiefly incest, and aimed to show how taboos against brother-sister relationships aimed to protect women against violent men. She also says that women's blood was originally sacred rather than polluting and that only when man began to eat meat did men become bigger than women - in her opinion because of selection of weak women by men.

"The Patriarchal Revolution"

In this section of the book Gould Davis studied how mythology and society changed as what she claims was a result of a supposed switch from matriarchy to patriarchy. This switch Davis argues for is not backed by verifiable evidence at this point. She argued that the patriarchal revolution resulted from the invasion of settled, argricultural, gynarchic queendoms by pastoral nomads who were warlike and destructive. These nomads (Semites from the Arabian Peninsula) are argued to never have achieved a civilization of their own, but only to have destroyed or taken over older ones. Davis believed that most familiar tales in the Old Testament were actually rewritings by Semitic priests of older stories - except that villains turn into heroes and heroes into villains in accordance with the new patriarchal order. This was part, in the view of The First Sex, of a desire to wipe out all evidence of female superiority and the right of women to sexual pleasure — hence the idealization of virginity in Christian culture. As well, Davis discusses female circumcision as a means to protect the virginity of women. This practice is much more painful than its male counterpart.

"Pre-Christian Women In The Celto-Ionian World"

In this part of the book Gould Davis focused on the role of women in the ancient civilizations of Crete and Mycenae. Davis' research suggested that, as in her model of prehistoric civilization, women were the dominant powers and were able to punish men who were "derelict" in their duties. The book sees the Cretan and Mycenaean civilizations as prototypes of the ancient pre-Christian Celtic culture, which Davis also believes to have granted women a great deal of power. For instance, she says that the monarchy was hereditary in the female line and the most of the tribal "chiefs" were women rather than men.

Davis claimed that Greek women possessed rights that are still denied by the Catholic, Orthodox and conservative Protestant churches, such as the rights to abortion and divorce. She cites many well-known historians to support these claims. She also argued that women participated in almost all aspects of ancient Greek and Roman society, notably learning and sport. In the next chapter, "The Celts", she argued that similar rights prevailed until the collapse of the Roman Empire, for a matrilineal system of monarchical descent, and for Celtic women being the major preservers of learning during the early Middle Ages.

"The Tragedy of Western Women"

This last part of The First Sex focuses on the period since Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire in 313 A.D. Davis aimed with this part of the book to show how Semitic "myths" of male supremacy were preached by the early Church Fathers to a pagan people who could not believe them and did not take them seriously until Constantine became emperor. Davis believes the writings of Paul in the New Testament were used by the Church after Constantine to justify the most extreme violence against women, leading throughout the Middle Ages, as she sees it, to a level of cruelty and barbarity simply unheard of in previous ages. Davis believed that once Christianity had attained civil power, the demotion of women and the "terrible materialism that marks and mars our present civilization" were inevitable. She believes that the influence of Mary as a "goddess" allowed Christianity to replace the ancient goddess religion. Davis saw the male gods of Greece and Rome as "rootless" and "artificial" and this allowed Mary's cult, in her view, to triumph.

Quoting Jules Michelet, Davis argued that women by the fifteenth century were treated so badly by men of all social classes that they were seen as "worse than beasts". Davis said that the Church approved of this domestic violence, and shows that brutality to women extended beyond families to the priesthood, who cited the Bible to justify the most extreme brutality.

In Gould Davis's view, the status of women was only improved briefly by the Reformation and a brief flowering of learned women during the sixteenth century. Afterwards Puritanism's witch-hunts and a strengthened papacy placed women back in the same level of submission, and women were studied in the most prurient manner for "witchcraft marks". In Davis' view, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries marked the first time Western women accepted their own inferiority, and until Mary Wollstonecraft nobody spoke up for them, especially given that, as Gould Davis sees it, women were much more liable to severe punishment than men for breaches of the law. Davis especially focuses on how the minds of women were subjugated during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In the last part of The First Sex Gould Davis aimed to show the beliefs used to subordinate women to be myths, with the contention that in reality women are stronger and physically, mentally, and morally superior to men, and that the survival of humanity depends on the restoration of women to their former position as rulers of society. Davis argued that the patriarchal civilization is destroying itself and that only the values of the "matriarchates" can save humanity because a society modelled after the biology of the human male inevitably leads to a focus on technology and gadgetry rather than on loving human relationships.

Influence and criticism

The First Sex has undoubtedly had a major influence on the development of radical feminism and feminist spirituality. Its dubious evidence for the existence of a female monotheism in prehistory was critical to the development of such books as Merlin Stone's When God Was A Woman, Marija Gimbutas' theories of a goddess-worshipping culture in Old Europe, and the neo-pagan goddess spirituality of such writers as Starhawk and Carol Christ. For these people, the belief that patriarchy is not inevitable but a recent development in human history shows the possibility of a society that fits more into the aforementioned writer's somewhat mythical paradigms. Riane Eisler's The Chalice And The Blade follows very strongly from Davis in a location of what has been claimed by some to be a pre-patriarchal society in Crete. This claim is refuted by professionals whose realm of expertise lies within these claims. Goddess writers however take matriarchal claims very seriously.

Since its publication, there has been a great deal of criticism of The First Sex. Many biologists rejected the book for its inaccuracies almost as soon as it came out. Some writers have asserted that the book merely revives fictions that later archaeology has already refuted, whilst from the start many people experienced in human biology have stated that her claim that human males were "mutants" was wrong, as was her claim that Antarctica has historically been far from the South Pole. In fact, the human fetus does not begin its life as a female and is generally androgynous being neither a fully developed male or female; during this time sexual organs have not even fully developed. The SRY region in the Y chromosome is what determines the sex of the child. If the SRY does not determine that the fetus shall be male then a default pattern is followed where the child develops fully into a female. Modern proponents of the ancient matriarchy theory, such as Morgaine Swann continue to comb through new findings in genetics as well as archeology to extend the shaky premise of The First Sex.

Opposition is often virulent and well thought out utlizing scholarly evidence to refute wildly inaccurate claims made by Davis; such as the claim of women existing before men and men being mutants. The fact that Davis was not a scientist, but a radical feminist and librarian, probably figured in greatly with her incorrect hypothesis. In Goddess Unmasked, Phillip Davis suggests very strongly that the arguments of Davis and Marija Gimbutas are severely distorted at best, that serious study of artifacts in Europe and Anatolia does not support the idea of a peaceful matriarchy, and that there is no evidence for a female monotheism of the type advocated by Gould Davis. This argument is supported by the American Anthropological Association. The modern consensus amongst historians that "no societies were/are matriarchal" is constantly being challenged by radical feminists. Others, such as Steven Goldberg in his mid-1970s Why Men Rule have used primatology to hypothesize that a matriarchal society is not compatible with the roles that biology has assigned the human sexes. Proponents of the Matriarchal theory refer to the pansexual, non-violent ways of the Bonobo ape to counter the emphasis on violent Chimpanzee behavior put forth by Goldberg, et al. Newer findings indicate that ancient humans were probably much more cooperative than originally believed, even so warfare has been identified in all ancient cultures as well as other hallmarks of what has been defined as "patriarchy." Patriarchy has been identified as a human universal as the American Anthropological Association has recognized no variance. The differences in the sexes that back-up Goldberg's claim has also been verified by scientists.

Similarly, in her 2000 book The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, Cynthia Eller aims to show that, not only is Davis' theory of a prehistoric matriarchal queendoms unsupported by more modern archaeological evidence, but that, even if it were true, it would not give women any more hope for a just and equal future simply because replicating the ancient past in today's world is not feasible. In turn, Eller's work was supposedly debunked by Max Dashu as being incomplete in its survey of available data. Whether Max Dashu was accurate in her findings remains to be seen.

See also

• History of feminism
• The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory