"Patriarchy, Civilization and the Origins of Gender"

John Zerzan, Green Anarachy #16 (Spring 2004)

Civilization, very fundamentally, is the history of
the domination of nature and of women. Patriarchy
means rule over women and nature. Are the two
institutions at base synonymous?Philosophy has mainly ignored the vast realm of
suffering that has unfolded since it began, in
division of labor, its long course. Hélène Cixous
calls the history of philosophy a "chain of fathers."
Women are as absent from it as suffering, and are
certainly the closest of kin.

Camille Paglia, anti-feminist literary theorist,
meditates thusly on civilization and women:

When I see a giant crane passing on a flatbed truck, I
pause in awe and reverence, as one would for a church
procession. What power of conception: what
grandiosity: these cranes tie us to ancient Egypt,
where monumental architecture was first imagined and
achieved. If civilization had been left in female
hands, we would still be living in grass huts.1

The "glories" of civilization and women's disinterest
in them. To some of us the "grass huts" represent not
taking the wrong path, that of oppression and
destructiveness. In light of the globally
metastasizing death-drive of technological
civilization, if only we still lived in grass huts!

Women and nature are universally devalued by the
dominant paradigm and who cannot see what this has
wrought? Ursula Le Guin gives us a healthy corrective
to Paglia's dismissal of both:

Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the
rest is other — outside, below, underneath, subservient.
I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I
do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for.
I am that I am, and the rest is women and wilderness,
to be used as I see fit.2

There are certainly many who believe that early
civilizations existed that were matriarchal. But no
anthropologists or archaeologists, feminists included,
have found evidence of such societies. "The search for
a genuinely egalitarian, let along matriarchal,
culture has proved fruitless," concludes Sherry
Ortner.3

There was, however, a long span of time when women
were generally less subject to men, before
male-defined culture became fixed or universal. Since
the 1970s anthropologists such as Adrienne Zihlman,
Nancy Tanner and Frances Dahlberg4 have corrected the
earlier focus or stereotype of prehistoric "Man the
Hunter" to that of "Woman the Gatherer." Key here is
the datum that as a general average, pre-agricultural
band societies received about 80 percent of their
sustenance from gathering and 20 percent from hunting.
It is possible to overstate the hunting/gathering
distinction and to overlook those groups in which, to
significant degrees, women have hunted and men have
gathered.5 But women's autonomy in foraging societies
is rooted in the fact that material resources for
subsistence are equally available to women and men in
their respective spheres of activity.

In the context of the generally egalitarian ethos of
hunter-gatherer or foraging societies, anthropologists
like Eleanor Leacock, Patricia Draper and Mina
Caulfield have described a generally equal
relationship between men and women.6 In such settings
where the person who procures something also
distributes it and where women procure about 80
percent of the sustenance, it is largely women who
determine band society movements and camp locations.
Similarly, evidence indicates that both women and men
made the stone tools used by pre-agricultural
peoples.7

With the matrilocal Pueblo, Iroquois, Crow, and other
American Indian groups, women could terminate a
marital relationship at any time. Overall, males and
females in band society move freely and peacefully
from one band to another as well as into or out of
relationships.8 According to Rosalind Miles, the men
not only do not command or exploit women's labor,
"they exert little or no control over women's bodies
or those of their children, making no fetish of
virginity or chastity, and making no demands of
women's sexual exclusivity."9 Zubeeda Banu Quraishy
provides an African example: "Mbuti gender
associations were characterized by harmony and
cooperation."10

And yet, one wonders, was the situation really ever
quite this rosy? Given an apparently universal
devaluation of women, which varies in its forms but
not in its essence, the question of when and how it
was basically otherwise persists. There is a
fundamental division of social existence according to
gender, and an obvious hierarchy to this divide. For
philosopher Jane Flax, the most deep-seated dualisms,
even including those of subject-object and mind-body,
are a reflection of gender disunity.11

[Full article continues here.]