Een vrouwelijke geschiedenis van de wereld

by Marilyn French

This is the Dutch translation of "From Eve to Dawn. a Woman's History of the World

Genres: World History

1311 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

She attended Hofstra University (then Hofstra College) where she also received a master's degree in English in 1964. She married Robert M. French Jr. in 1950; the couple divorced in 1967. She later attended Harvard University, earning a Ph.D in 1972. Years later she became an instructor at Hofstra University.

In her work, French asserted that women's oppression is an intrinsic part of the male-dominated global culture. Beyond Power: On Women, Men and Morals (1985) is a historical examination of the effects of patriarchy on the world.

French's 1977 novel, The Women's Room, follows the lives of Mira and her friends in 1950s and 1960s America, including Val, a militant radical feminist. The novel portrays the details of the lives of women at this time and also the feminist movement of this era in the United States. At one point in the book the character Val says "all men are rapists". This quote has often been incorrectly attributed to Marilyn French herself. French's first book was a thesis on James Joyce.

French was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 1992. This experience was the basis for her book A Season in Hell: A Memoir (1998).

She was also mentioned in the 1982 ABBA song, "The Day Before You Came". The lyrics that mentioned French were: "I must have read a while, the latest one by Marilyn French or something in that style".

French died from heart failure at age 79 on May 2, 2009 in Manhattan, New York City. She is survived by her son Robert and daughter Jamie.

Reviews

[Marc Lamot · Rating 2 out of 5]

First of all: I’m a man. In this book there are statements that can be qualified as “male-unfriendly”, and sometimes the author is quite disdainful or even giggly about “my species”. As a consequence you start to think: “gee, this is one of those fanatic man-hating feminists that only see one solution to all problems of the world: eradicate all males or at least replace male domination by a female one”.

Now, this really is not fair towards French. If I’m honest, I must concede that much, if not all harsh things she says about the actions of men in history, in particular their attitude towards women, is broadly speaking true. For the larger part of human history women have been put in limbo, subdued and enslaved, with brutal force (the chapter on genital mutilation is horrendous), structural oppression and cultural domination. French also stresses the part played by women themselves in this process: at best they accommodate themselves in this secondary role, at worst they actively participate in the legitimation of it. Only recently (let’s say the last 150 years) there’s some change in this situation, but the battle isn’t finished yet (there is of course the question of finality, when is the battle going to be finished?, but more on that below).

The weighty book by French (1300 pages!) is an attempt to bring into account the usually discarded suppression of the other half of humanity, through a detailed account of world history. Behold, an ambitious project indeed, and an almost inhuman task for 1 author. Happily French has put to work an impressive team of collaborators to help her. And I have to concede: the attempt is valuable, albeit as a work of pioneering. I’ve searched for similar studies on the internet, but since the publication of this work in 1995 I have not found anything (a tip, anyone?).

Valuable indeed, but that is not to say there are no objections to make. The central theory of French is that human society in prehistorian times and the earliest civilizations was rather harmonious and egalitarian; according to her that has changed drastically in the second half of the second millennium BC, with the introduction of the patriarchate, the male domination that spread rather rapidly to all aspects of human life and also geographically. French has drawn a lot of criticism for this hypothesis of patriarchal power grip, and rightfully so. It is a variant of the classical “noble wild”-myth that can only be corroborated through a very selective reading of the sources.

French goes one step further and tries to explain this male domination with a rather far fetched psychological substitution-theory: men are jealous of the closer link women have with life and nature through motherhood, and therefore they have put a property-claim on procreation and sexuality; every other aspect of their domination is a consequence of that. I really abhor simplistic and deterministic theories like that, but you can’t disregard that male domination is universal, and so there must be a very basic explanation for that.

I also have some issue with her absolute equivalence between patriarchate and phenomena as hierarchy and inequality: it is as if for French male domination also introduced inequality and repression into human history; as a consequence feminism for her is fundamentally anti-hierarchical. This sounds very utopist, and it is a denial of the undeniable fact that mechanisms of power are found in all domains of life, unrelated to the issue of gender.

Of course there are other remarks to give about this book. French does a good attempt to write a universal history by giving attention to the situation of women in India, China and Japan; but these chapters are not really integrated and the western focus is dominant. And then there’s the global structure of the book with proportionally a lot more attention to the last 200 years. Naturally the great changes in the situation of women have occurred in this period, but especially for the last 50 years French’s account changes from a historical reconstruction into a political-sociological treatise that is rather random.

All in all a commendable pioneering study, but with a number of weaknesses.

[Sense of History]

This is the Dutch translation, in one volume of the 4-part series 'From Eve to Dawn: a History of Women in the World'.

A really universal history cannot but take the gender issue very seriously. During most of human history women have been subdued, enslaved and brutalised in almost all parts of the world. One aspect of this process was to erase the female part out of history itself: in almost all of the historical writings until the 20th Century the male point of view is omnipresent, and if as an exception any attention is given to remarkable women, it is mostly to underline their evil deeds and negative influence.

Only let’s say that the last 100 years the female condition has gone through positive changes, although not everywhere and still rather precarious. And so in historiography a growing league of historians has tried to restore the balance and pays much more attention to the female condition in history in general. Marylin French takes this “correction” one step further: she not only has written a very thorough reconstruction of the female part of history, but also makes a first attempt to fundamentally explain how male domination has come to be universal, and why.

She introduces the notion of “patriarchate”, and illustrates that this was a reality that stretched out into every human activity (political, social, economical, religious, cultural, mental) because it had a very strong ideological motivation. One can reject her hypothesis that the patriarchate was inspired by male jealousy of female nearness to life and nature (through child birth and motherhood), and have an issue with the notion of “male mystique” that she introduces about halfway in the book (to me, that has a too deterministic connotation), but that the patriarchate was (and sometimes still is) a fact, cannot be denied.

So I think it is the job of historians to keep on substantiating how and why this male domination was so universal (there are no societies with outspoken female domination to be found in history, as far as I know). Marylin French has done a great job in formulating some challenging thoughts. I hope others will build on it.