Said Gloria Steinem, in an Esquire interview. That quote struck me, having just read an article by Jane Kramer in The New Yorker called "Road Warrior/After fifty years, Gloria Steinem is still at the forefront of the feminist cause," which shows how central this idiosyncratic anthropology has been to Steinem. Steinem went to India for a 2-year fellowship after college and says she did her "first organizing there." She returned to India in 1974 and:
She had trekked to villages cordoned off by the government because of caste riots, and watched, at night, as the villagers emerged from mud huts to sit in circles, lit by kerosene lamps, and tell their stories of burnings, murders, thefts, and rapes, “with fear and trauma that needed no translation” but with the relief that came from talking and being heard. In her road book, she calls it “the first time I witnessed the ancient and modern magic of talking circles, those groups in which anyone may speak in turn, everyone must listen, and consensus is more important than time.”Also:
[Wilma] Mankiller had been the first elected chief of the Cherokee Nation, and she and Steinem had been close ever since she joined the board of the Ms. Foundation. Over the years, Mankiller had become, for Steinem, a kind of spiritual guide.... It was Mankiller, she says, who continued her education in the “deep history” of matrilineality, and the communal talking circles that expressed it. “We have always started our ‘history’ with when hierarchy, patriarchy, and nationalism started,” Steinem told me. “But democracy did not come from Greece. It is much, much older, and it came from women and men together.” She added, “The Iroquois Confederacy had circles of consensus—it was matrilineal.”Before Mankiller died in 2010, she was working on a writing a book with Steinem, and Steinem wants to continue the project:
“I want to contribute our idea that most of human history was very different from what we have today, with our monotheistic patriarchies and their ‘pyramid’ structures of authority from the top,” [Steinem] said. “Many peoples were—and some still are—not gender-based in their languages. And there was rarely a single chief. There was always a chief for peace, and a different one for war. Their societies were not polarized, and not violence-based.” The jury is out on that. Many archeologists and anthropologists would disagree. But, as an organizing principle for Steinem, and for the feminists she has brought together, the evocation of an ancient tradition of talking circles for sharing stories, bridging differences, and coming to acceptable common solutions has been a remarkably effective tool.Many archeologists and anthropologists would disagree.... but it's not science, is it? It's mythology. Mythology is a different process. When Steinem says she "witnessed the ancient and modern magic of talking circles," we're witnessing the ancient and modern magic of mythology.
By the way, this fascination with the imagined better world of India and the Cherokee and the Iroquois is stereotypical of the 1960s. The hippies had the same dream. Steinem is not a hippie. Her cultural stream diverged from the hippie philosophy. I remember when that divergence occurred. At the time I thought the Ms. Magazine people were retro, missing the zeitgeist, the counterculture. If we were shedding "concepts of masculine and feminine," getting together and loving one another, why heighten the sense of the differentness of women, why talk about the oppression of the kinds of families our parents lived in — we were already free — and why go on and on about careers — when the point was to drop out?
ADDED: That line "the villagers emerged from mud huts to sit in circles" made me think of the old Camille Paglia lines: "If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts" and "Trying to build a sex theory without studying Freud, women have made nothing but mud pies."
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That was back before men's brains developed. They played with dolls and wanted to be nurses like the women.
The original languages did not have words for stupid woman. But need required it be developed.
Seriously delusional. The end result of a lifetime of grievance and moral relativism. Imagine failing to recognize even the role and power of her own gender by denying that there is even a difference.
Wilma Mankiller. How perfect is that?
I see the noble savage myth is still alive and well.
So how come this continent wasn't a garden of eden before the coming of the white man?
I was unaware that Steinem was such a gifted anthropologist.
... most of human history was very different from what we have today, with our monotheistic patriarchies and their ‘pyramid’ structures of authority from the top,” [Steinem] said. “Many peoples were—and some still are—not gender-based in their languages. And there was rarely a single chief. There was always a chief for peace, and a different one for war. Their societies were not polarized, and not violence-based.
Anyone can confirm this truth by reading The Iliad and The Odyssey.
Common mistake to confuse "gender" with "sex."
What’s sad, really, is the number of people whose lives have been ruined because mentally disturbed people like Gloria Steinem gained a following. People like her, Germaine Greer, Andrea Dworkin, and the up-and-coming replacements are not mentally healthy and yet, they act as guides for women who are that stage in life when they are confused and impressionable.
So what do we get?
National Gay & Lesbian Archives has organized “KillJoy’s Kastle,” which has its version of Halloween entertainment:
"You might punch a bag emblazoned with the word “capitalism” on it. Or you might take a shot of liquor from a witch’s fake penis."
Or you have Alana Massey who describes herself as “a walking cliche of disastrous 20-something in New York: I treated mental illness with alcohol and drugs and bad sex with much older men.”
Miriam Mogilevsky, a recent graduate of Northwestern University who will lecture men on how tiresome they are based on her classroom training in feminism and experience with men who have left her after being told that they did it wrong when they had sex with her. She's running for National Arbiter of Correct Thought and could well be the next Gloria Steinem.
"But democracy did not come from Greece. It is much, much older, and it came from women and men together.” She added, “The Iroquois Confederacy had circles of consensus—it was matrilineal.”"
The Greeks are like 1000BC and the Iroquois Confederacy was 1500 AD.
And isnt a matriarchy just another " ‘pyramid’ structures of authority from the top"?
I believe the proper phrase for this kind of myth-making is "making shit up."
Poor Gloria still doesn't understand human biology
The Iroquois Confederacy was a product of oral culture, not a written culture.
So we don't have much record of its internal workings.
A year or so ago, I began reading a book titled "The Wilderness Empire". It was about the interactions between the English Colonial leaders, the French Colonial leaders, and the Iroquois Confederacy in the 1740s and 1750s.
At the time, the Iroquois claimed to have many thousands of braves available to go to war. They also claimed to control vast stretches of wilderness between the Great Lakes and the Ohio river valley.
The maneuverings and trade agreements between the French, Iroquois, and English never really settled down. Each was trying to claim the Ohio valley.
And one war leader from the Iroquois--a man called "Half-King", often named as Tanaghrisson--somehow thought it was to his advantage to help militia officer George Washington set up forts in Western Pennsylvania.
Tanaghrisson also led Washington on an ambush of a small French scout team. Washington intended to capture the French, but Tanaghrisson and his men suddenly began killing and scalping the French.
This event was a trigger in the escalating series of actions which led to war between the English colonials and a French/Indian alliance.
The War with the French and Indians...
Wait a minute. Weren't we talking about how the Iroquois Confederacy was matrilineal, and worked on consensus?
It looks to me like it was a society that worked on successive Council Fires, both small and great. And finding some method of settling disputes that wasn't constant, low-level tribal warfare.
But the Confederacy wasn't very good at controlling long-term strategies while interacting with higher-technology, literate cultures.
"The original languages didn't even have he and she".
I didn't know that Gloria Steinem spoke Neanderthal.
Wilma Mankiller? Was she a widow? Ever married?
Not just the Greeks. The world's oldest surviving literature, "The Epic of Gilgamesh" (2750 BC) has the king and his manly buddy Enkidu running around Ur doing manly things.
I like how the wonderful matriarchal society just happens to coincide with a time before writing and evidence.
I am sure Steinem is glorifying the Indian experience (we all do in our head about things we like). But 1974 was a tumultuous time in India with Indira Gandhi's Emergency and government overreach and citizens exercising their power, (Gandhi made the mistake of calling for an election and people booted her out of office for her excesses), though I can't attest to any of what she says personally.
Many peoples were—and some still are—not gender-based in their languages.
I'm not really sure what she's trying to say here. Is she talking about grammatical gender? Because that's got nothing to do with how the society runs.
Ah, Gloria, the linguistic anthropologist! It's just more BS. Humans have always been able to distinguish between men and women and their languages have reflected this. Does she think reproduction is the result of males randomly inserting their penises into openings? Perhaps she does.
The best work Gloria Steinham was in her 20s, going undercover as a Playboy Bunny. Yes, she was hot.
Since then? Not so hot, not so productive, not so coherent. Indeed, these feminists are crazy people.
"...People were people. And the whole idea was that we were in a circle together..."
A basic tenet of Circle Jerk Theory.
I am Laslo.
Something that has long interested me was why is language often gendered? Or, importantly maybe to us, why do we use gendered pronouns? My working theory is that it is because it is efficient. We tend to pair bond, with one of the male persuasion and one of the female persuasion. We can easily and efficiently distinguish between the members of a heterosexual pair with "he" and "she", etc. Since that was how you often met family units, it was efficient. And still is, despite gay marriage, Caitlin Henner, etc.
Even if language didn't have a he or she pronoun (which I'm skeptical of) people recognized the difference between men or women. i
What original language is she referring to by the way?
Lost in the Back to the Future hoopla was the fact that (according to James Ussher (1581-1656), Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland, and Vice-Chancellor of Trinity College in Dublin) God began the creation of the Universe on October 23 exactly 6019 years ago. Earth was created on October 25 and for the next millennium "The original languages didn't even have he and she. They didn't have concepts of masculine and feminine. People were people. And the whole idea was that we were in a circle together, not in a hierarchy together."
"... most of human history was very different from what we have today, with our monotheistic patriarchies and their ‘pyramid’ structures of authority from the top,” [Steinem] said. “Many peoples were—and some still are—not gender-based in their languages. And there was rarely a single chief. There was always a chief for peace, and a different one for war. Their societies were not polarized, and not violence-based."
and yet they had a chief for War.
Was the war actually peaceful back in the day? Or did it mean what it means today? Also, how much do you want to bet that 99% of the time the war chief was a guy.
I read the article. Steinem had a troubled childhood. Both her parents were screwed up people, but Gloria claims that her mother's depression was caused by her father's erratic behavior. Maybe so, but the mother chose the father, and perhaps she chose him because of his demon lover qualities. Bad marriages are a corporate activity, and not the result of the patriarchy........Primitive societies produce mud huts and women sitting around the fire taking about their rapes without anyone taking social precedence or hogging the conversation. Steinem observes and thinks that this is a good thing.
I love the praise of the Iroquois system when seemingly nobody EXCEPT the Iroquois had to deal with it.
"Yeah, our system was fucking awesome!"
Southern plantation owners felt their way of life was also nearly perfect. Seems to be an issue with humanity.
The fact that such shallowly-understood and subsequently misapplied traditions of Central Asia and pre-Colonial America have made such an impression on our Baby Boomers is just too perfect.
If you were writing a fictional story about the Baby Boomers and included the idea that their leaders' entire worldviews were influenced by two-week vacations to India and meeting with tribes that hadn't mastered the wheel or writing, your editor would say that it's too perfect an encapsulation of such an entirely self-absorbed, mendacious mob and that nobody could be that stupid.
But here we are.
She must really be offended by the romance languages and their assignment of gender prefixes to everyday objects.But I can understand her attraction to talk circles, given the thought pattern many Feminists employ.
A reference to the customs of the Iroquois Confederacy should be as strong a signal of probable bogosity as an email from Nigeria requesting money.
For better or worse, not all that much is known about Iroquois (or pre-Columbian natives in general), due to their lack of written history. Thus, one winds up with "oral histories" such as those such as those in which the Sioux insist that they always had horses and were always great horse warriors, even though their horses actually came with/from Europeans.
In the absence of real knowledge, it becomes all too convenient to project whatever "noble savage" myth one prefers onto Iroquois.
Although the reference to "kerosene lanterns" does make me wonder whether Steinem realizes that kerosene is a refined petroleum product and not some ancient, indigenous technology.
"The Greeks are like 1000BC and the Iroquois Confederacy was 1500 AD"
The Greeks of the classical age were a society where women were kept in harems and it was said "A woman's virtue is to never have her name mentioned in public." That is why homosexuality was so common among young men. Women were unavailable.
The Iliad, with a totally patriarchal society, was oral tradition from Homer until it was written down under Peisistratus in Athens who died in 527 BC.
I wonder if these ahistorical fools consider Otzi, the "Icemen" who was murdered about 3,000 BC to be part of the Nobel Savage period?
Al Gore created man-caves so men could get away from woman-chatter. Imagine bring forced to listen to a dozen of them in a community circle!
One of the primary sources for all of these ideas about prehistoric matriarchal & egalitarian cultures is the Lithuanian anthropologist Marija Gimbutas.
Early on, she did very interesting work in the archaeology of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, but in her later works, the works that make her a patron saint of "mythological" feminists, she takes an archaeological molehill & turns it into Pikes Peak. Her later work reminds me of this article from The Onion.
We do knowing a fair amount about the Iroquois and other Indians from the reports of the Jesuits of the 17th century. They were rough customers- ask St. Issac Jogues. Tangarisson not only had his men attack the French parley-ers, he then washed his hands in the brains of the French commander. The French and Indian was was not between the French and Indians and the British, but rather between the French and their Indian allies, and the English And their Indian allies. Many Iroquois stayed loyal to (perhaps more accurate to say allied with) the crown during the American Revolution. I have never understood why Steinem is famous: what has she ever accomplished?
The Ms. Foundation has a Board? Oligarchy still has a hierarchy. Only a handful get to sit in the circle
@Humperdinck,
Wilma Mankiller? Was she a widow? Ever married?
Didn't she collaborate on some projects with the noted Russian feminist Ivanna Kutchakockoff?
So.....modern society has created this amazing standard of living and safety because.....it was the weaker form of society all those thousands of years ago?
Actually, the oldest language we have any reliable knowledge of, Proto-Indo-European, was gendered, complete with separate pronouns for "he" and "she".
But, as our hostess pointed out, this is all about mythology.
Freud? FREUD??? Freudianism says neurosis proceeds from childhood trauma.
Today every FUBAR tranny, hysterical female falsely claiming rape, and SJW requiring safe rooms to protect their precious feelings from micro-aggressions, has turned that idea upside down:
*They're* not fucked up, society is.
(Other than for Paglia, when was the last time you saw Sigmund Freud invoked to explain feminism's discontents?)
"They didn't have concepts of masculine and feminine."
Then they didn't have the concept of "matrilineal" (which usually means the mother's brothers, rather than the father, helps raise the kids).
I'd also wager a fair amount of money that Steinem has read neither the journals of the Jesuits nor Brian Moore's novel Black Robe.
Yeah, nothing says "well-working consensus society" quite like rural areas of India rocked by caste riots.
Question: According to Steinem's view most civilizations through history were matrileneal, non-hierarchal, etc...what happened? What caused that way of life to die out, for pyramid-favoring men to take over? Must have been something pretty big, you know, since it apparently occurred over and over across very widely varying societies at different points in history.
Someone needs to ask Richard Chopper about all this.
The rule of talking circles is don't seat two women next to each other.
Spanish is a very patriarchal language. How come nobody ever gives Spanish shit?
"At the time I thought the Ms. Magazine people were retro, missing the zeitgeist, the counterculture. If we were shedding "concepts of masculine and feminine," getting together and loving one another, why heighten the sense of the differentness of women, why talk about the oppression of the kinds of families our parents lived in — we were already free — and why go on and on about careers — when the point was to drop out?"
At the time, I thought it quite strange that Steinem and friends claimed to want to eliminate the social distinctions between men and women, but they named their magazine Ms. The theory being, that men were called Mr., whether married or not, so why should women be addressed as Miss and Mrs.? But if you really want to eliminate the distinction between men and women, wouldn't you name the magazine Mr.?
The "original languages" described delivery of babies by storks. A historical twist on today's spontaneous conception secular fad.
Didn't see it. Didn't hear it. Didn't speak it. Privacy under the veil of a penumbra.
I find it hard to believe that no one understood the difference between men and women back in this magical time. As if they didnt' have moms. No one got the point that somehow only one segment of the species was actually giving birth. And it was the one that didn't have the penis between the legs.
"Spanish is a very patriarchal language. How come nobody ever gives Spanish shit?"
There actually are crazy people who do object to gender in the Spanish language and want to reform it. It seems, however, and interestingly, that most of those people are Americans.
However, it would be an enormous task to purge and reform Spanish in this sense.
Its a much more difficult matter than doing so for English. Thousands of words and many grammatical rules will have to be changed, and there would be a very significant disconnect vs the Spanish literary canon, which connection is taken more seriously in Spanish than in English (because Spanish is regulated through an official academic body).
Assuming an extreme, total removal of gender states it would render most of it "dead", unreadable except to specialists.
Spanish has a central standards body (The Real Academia Espanola), like French and unlike English, which should in theory make this more feasible politically. And Spanish has gone through several cycles of centrally directed reform in the past. But this would be a very very radical change.
Steven said: Actually, the oldest language we have any reliable knowledge of, Proto-Indo-European, was gendered, complete with separate pronouns for "he" and "she".
Well, sort of ... thus:
"[...] and probably originally two genders (animate and neuter), with the animate later splitting into the masculine and the feminine [...]"
"Animate and neuter" ain't "masculine and feminine".
But it's also a "probably", and no evidence of hippie drum-circle equality BS.
Gahrie said...
Spanish is a very patriarchal language. How come nobody ever gives Spanish shit?
Yeah. My wife is Nelida S___ de Henry where the S___ is her father's family name. Doesn't even get better if I go toes up. She then becomes Nelida S___ Vda de Henry Vda is for Viuda or widow.
Some people might say that this signifies that I "own" her somehow. After more than 40 years of marriage, I am convinced it is the other way 'round. I am proud to be John Henry de S_____
OTOH, women here have been commonly keeping their own names after marriage for at least 50 years. Not only their father's name but the mother's as well. For example, Maria Pedraza-Lozada's father would have been a Pedraza and her mother a Lozada. The two names are mandatory for men and women on many govt documents as well as bank accts, mortgages and the like.
John Henry
Writing sure makes people violent. Someone should study that.
Also, these supposed ancient, happy women cultures sound like they centered around long staff meetings with neighbors every day. This is not so appealing.
I notice that for all of Steinem's being enamored of the primitive life, she always came back to live in her tony digs in NYC.
She talks the talk, doesn't walk the walk.
I do like that she got Ms generally accepted. Back when I had to write lots of letters to women whose marital status was unknown, it made things simpler.
Of course calling everyone by the same things (Misterce perhaps?)would have made things even simpler. As someone else pointed out. When writing a letter to Pat Milfors, did I address it to Mr Milford or Ms Milford?
John Henry
@Ganderson
Black Robe is a great book, I thought it was fair to both the French and the natives showing the good and bad of both (the movie adaption isn't that bad either). People would be surprised about how many martyrs were created by the "peaceful" natives of America.
"People would be surprised about how many martyrs were created by the "peaceful" natives of America."
Indeed. And for all the effort that went into it, the missionaries converted very few.
Whats also remarkable is that France made no money in Canada, it was a drain on Royal revenues.
IIRC starting with Colbert in Louis XIV's day there were several proposals to sell, abandon or give away the colony. It was kept through the lobbying of Catholic interests in court, as they were pushing the missionary efforts of the "black robes'. So the only reason, ultimately, why Canada was French were the 'black robes'.
In Spain women do not change surnames upon marriage.
This is actually quite old, going back to the Middle Ages.
And there were many regional variations as well, as befits such a fragmented land.
And preference was often given to the maternal name for children, of the marriage, especially if there was some social advantage. The "patriarchial" rules here are quite modern.
IIRC there are many other such local peculiarities across Europe, of greater or lesser antiquity.
Sigivald --
PIE has "he", "she", and "it".
Sure, it is speculated that early PIE, or Indo-Hittite, or whatever term is being used by the person writing a paper this week, may have, on the basis that Proto-Anatolian only has animate and neuter genders, only those two genders. But Wikipedia way, way overstates it when it says "probably"; Proto-Anatolian just as easily could have lost the distinction, rather than the whole rest of PIE gained it.
Women will always be discounted by society, as long as Congress keeps endowing them with a minority status.
Like affirmative action, it is a leftist political scam.
If you’re looking for a phrase that captures how our political culture is increasingly shaped by twitter-driven, herd-like behavior, Talking Circles and Circles of Consensus are good candidates.
Wilma Mankiller. How perfect is that?
Yabba-dabba-doo, indeed!
talking circles? Well, maybe...but most of these societies were not democratic, but run by the senior wife. Heaven help the young married lady who dares to state an opinion against her husband's senior wife or her mother in law in public.
as for peace: no, it's passive aggression. Anger is held in. I worked among the peaceful Mashona in Africa. They never showed anger...but get someone too angry, you get poisoned. You ever read about those terrible "sponatanous" uprisings in Africa that result in massacres? That's what happens when the anger boils over big time.
No myth making here, you need individuals for that not a primitive circle of consensus makers who can't agree on who to cook for dinner. Ahh, the good old days!
This is pedagogy that doesn't even reach the level of Heather Has Two Mommies.
Steinem really isn't all that bright.
Mary Beth,
" Is she talking about grammatical gender? Because that's got nothing to do with how the society runs. "
Indeed. As one of the world's few leading authorities on the Baka language, as is universally true of that language family, there is no concept of grammatical gender (and thus no concept of "he" vs "she" in the pronouns), there are nevertheless fairly strong differential gender roles in all groups that speak Central Sudanic... oh, heck, all Nilo-Saharan languages.
jr565,
Don't be sceptical. There are hundreds if not thousands languages in Africa without any concept of grammatical gender. (Probably other places, too, but I'm not up to speed on them.)
Jupiter,
"But if you really want to eliminate the distinction between men and women, wouldn't you name the magazine Mr.? "
Try MX.
John Henry,
The pattern father's-family-name + mother's-family-name is widespread in Spanish Latin America and is far, far older then 50 years.
Steven,
The other thing to note about PIE vs Proto-Anatolian is how faint our evidence is for anything at that distant remove. There are no written records! Everything is a best-estimate reconstruction based on extant and/or historical written languages no older than about 1000BC +- some centuries.
Nancy R.,
This was in Zimbabwe, right?
We saw a big division in this aspect, between the various tribes in southern Sudan (now South Sudan.) The cattle tribes (notably Dinka, Nuer) had none of this and they would fight you man-to-man. The farmers further to the south were notorious (at least in pastoralist minds) for smiling at you in person and then going away and working witchcraft/magic against you later.
" '...groups in which anyone may speak in turn, everyone must listen...' "
Or what?
@monkeyboy- you are right, the movie is good.
Sex and gender are recent additions to the human condition. One merely has to browse through an illuminated text book from the middle ages to see that we did't even have belly buttons. Children weren't born until white people started enslaving colored people. God punished us by making us be born in blood and tears to remind us of that horrible perversion. WE still haven't atoned for it, that's why we still have nasty ugly sex.
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