"Before the Enlightenment the female skeleton didn't exist"

Lots of Greek mythology features babies sewn into their father’s calf or swallowed and growing inside him or stored in a jar or in the earth, so I doubt much eye rolling occurred.

Probably true. The people who would roll their eyes who wouldn't have been at the meetings.

There must have been a disconnect between the layperson's "primitive" male+female breeding concept of sex and the deeper understanding of these experts, who understood all the other ways babies could be made.

I bet Greek sculptors were pretty clear about the difference between the male and female skeleton/frame.

Greek Gender Studies departments came along went really batshit channelling their misogyny ("babies could be grown in jars")

The eye rolls of the Greek philosophers' audiences are not on record

Lots of Greek mythology features babies sewn into their father’s calf or swallowed and growing inside him or stored in a jar or in the earth, so I doubt much eye rolling occurred. That theory of Male Is Life-giver is still visible to us in their stories.

This is all fascinating, thank you all so much

Fabulous thread. It's taken me back to my 'women's studies' part of my degree. I was told at the beginning to suspend all thoughts of today because we were going to another planet. It did help with my understanding, and really good to see so much new research in the mix. Thanks very much all of you

The creation story. Man came first in god's image. Woman was to keep him company. Not in god's image, she came from a bit of him. From man but different. Not in god's image. And then she went and fucked it all up. And was punished by having pain in giving birth.

Making Eve from adam's rib is in Genesis 2, which doesn't say anything about Adam being made in God's image, just that he was created from dust.

Genesis 1 has the 'in God's image part':
^ 26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
27
So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.^

Funny how this idea of both male and female being made in gods image immediately gets rewritten.

@CharlieParley that’s fascinating, thank you for going to the trouble of explaining.

So about 12,000 years or so ago, the general idea was that women had this miraculous power to make new lives. And the life was put into the woman by whatever spirits her tribe believed in. ... Didn't take very long for those early agrarians to understand that male animals and male humans had a role to play in reproduction after all.

Thanks CharlieParley, that's great.

Of course they held onto their one-sex model of reproduction. Instead of thinking of women as life-giving, that was now the man's role. The woman, as previous posters have already said, was now recast as a mere vessel. She made no contribution to the child other than providing a growing environment.

So I guess to call that "one-sex" you have to use this "essence provider" definition of sex, not "reproductive role".

Effectively the "surrogacy" world view, right? You know you need a woman to play a reproductive role - but she doesn't count.

Anyway that makes the point that people had known for thousands of years how reproduction worked in practice - you needed one of each sex - before the Greek Gender Studies departments came along went really batshit channelling their misogyny ("babies could be grown in jars").

The eye rolls of the Greek philosophers' audiences are not on record.

Fantastic theories for justifying nonsensical attitudes and denial of sex, but I think we can be quite confident all patriarchal societies retained full control of their women, rather than relying on jars... Just as all the people seeking surrogates seem to know what a woman is when it matters.

So basically, before the Enlightenment, we had loads of proto-Butlers and Hines and Cohens, spouting the same nonsense for the same basic reasons; everyone knew there were 2 sexes, but the nonsense was used selectively to justify misogyny.

Plus ça change...

Every day is a learning day on mumsnet. This is a whole sphere I am totally ignorant of. Any podcasts on the history of women?

Plenty of stuff found from way back, around the world. With women as important. The ones who gave life etc.

The old ideas got squished as per Charlie's post when the ideas of inheritance plus babies are made from the man and the woman were realised.

The global oppression of women has its roots from there. Male paranoia about paternity. All of our oppression globally and for thousands of years stems from that.

And yet again the underpinning attitudes exist to a greater or lesser extent everywhere.

Why do men feel it's ok to approach s group of 10 women in a pub? But don't if there's one man there?

Why are women out alone, or wearing certain clothes, essentially seen as 'asking for it'?

Why are women subjected to Street harassment?

Because no male owner around, fair game.

It's the same attitude that results in the taleban rules for women, or the situation in Saudi.

Different yes and more extreme in some places.

I read an article about 2 women who were murderered while traveling.
It said they were traveling 'alone'.

As soon as it was realised that babies were contributed to by man and woman. And there was a concept of inheritance. Women were reduced to chattels. To be watched. Controlled. Paternity and the fact you can't guarantee it in the same way as maternity. Made men paranoid and they still are today.

So about 12,000 years or so ago, the general idea was that women had this miraculous power to make new lives. And the life was put into the woman by whatever spirits her tribe believed in.

During the transition from a nomadic to a settled lifestyle, animal husbandry became of great interest to the people of the time. They started breeding animals, at first just to increase their livestock and later to improve the livestock.

Inquiring minds of the time soon noticed that soon after that peculiar-coloured bull had mated with the brown cow, it bore a peculiar-coloured calf.

Didn't take very long for those early agrarians to understand that male animals and male humans had a role to play in reproduction after all. And not only that, if they wanted to make sure their offspring had the best chances, they kept a close eye on their females.

And that was the beginning of the patriarchy according to that hypothesis.

Of course they held onto their one-sex model of reproduction. Instead of thinking of women as life-giving, that was now the man's role. The woman, as previous posters have already said, was now recast as a mere vessel. She made no contribution to the child other than providing a growing environment.

And the man who wanted to ensure his offspring had the best chances, exerted control over the woman he was mating with.

(It's entirely plausible that keen observers of the natural world realised the connection between mating and offspring long before the agrarian revolution. But there was no societal forces coming into play before people were settled, so any early knowledge didn't have widespread consequences.)

Aristotle

'Aristotle believed that only men possessed the quality of rational thought, while women were restricted to the emotive and passionate. He asserted his belief that men naturally were more fit to rule and lead, and therefore it was the natural order of things for women to be subordinate to men. He states, “The relation of male to female is by nature a relation of superior to inferior and ruler to ruled” (Arist. Pol). He goes as far as to compare the relationship between men and women to that between children and adults'

These views are still essentially held, aren't they.

They were wrong, the ancient Greeks.

They believed that women were like men but rubbish, and then looked to confirm that.

The creation story. Man came first in god's image. Woman was to keep him company. Not in god's image, she came from a bit of him. From man but different. Not in god's image. And then she went and fucked it all up. And was punished by having pain in giving birth.

Through history women have been presented as whatever men wanted them to be at the time.

Temptresses who were highly sexed
Gatekeepers of sex
Intellectually inferior
Emotionally unstable
Stoic and self sacrificing
Property
Assets to collect to show wealth and power
Etc etc etc

I think it was the Bible (?) where over the years women were erased. Their names were masculined because the things they had done, were not fitting for women. Men should have done those things.

And still it continues.

The attempts to prove that women's and men's brains are fundamentally different. Which might be interesting if it didn't always go hand in hand with trying to prove that we're not as good at X as men. In a sexist society where 'male' traits are valued it's never going to benefit women.

It's always.
Spacial awareness.
Logic.
Analysis.

It's never.
Propensity to violence.
Social conscience
Stamina

Iyswim.

Yes. They thought there was man. And then there was a defective sort of man

Just like the Green Party!

Women contributed nothing to the process except being a vessel

Some men still think this, especially in regards to surrogacy.

How old is that tweet?

So has Sally Hines inadvertently shown what we all knew? That trans ideology is a return to the Dark Ages.

One of the problems with looking far back at how people thought about these things is that certain ways of thinking about science are so embedded in us that they colour our interpretation, without us realising.

It's also worth knowing that there were a lot of theories in the premodern world, it's not like there was only ever one way to think about things, and it's a huge span of time. And they also didn't always think of explanations in quite the same way either.

As far as why some people were born women, and some were men, so far as it goes some of their observations were not wrong, there area lot of the same building blocks in male and female reproductive organs. But not knowing about genes and such they tended to look for what we might call environmental explanations. So maybe if the mother is very nervy, she has a girl, or if she eats a lot of eggs, she has a boy. SImilarly they thought that other things that happened during gestation could affect the way the baby would turn out - which is actually true though not so much in the way they hypothesised.

So what they seem to have envisaged is that the basic blueprint was male but if certain things happened during gestation it would develop as a female. Rather like turtles, I always think.

The Christian philosophers couldn't quite look at it the same way because they have to see men and women as having a real ontological distinction because of the creation story, among some other reasons. But it's not until the end of the medieval period that you begin to see an approach more like we would recognise to these questions.

Weird how the rest of the animal kingdom just gets on with it.

I'm not sure why it's a shocker that ancient Greek philosophers had certain views about women.

Then and always and still now there's often a conclusion (biased) that is to be proved.

Looking at the skulls brains etc of different races to 'prove' that some were naturally superior is not a thing done any more for obvious reasons.

The studies designed to find the differences between men and women- their brains their behaviour etc- has never stopped.

The bias of the ancient Greeks is still there.

There are men and there are like-men-but-lessser. Non men.

The ideas of the ancient Greek philosophers on women have never gone away.

So in essence we can sum up Sally Hines argument as

"As a Gender Studies person, you need to believe me about how many sexes there are, because 500 years ago, Gender Studies departments were talking gibberish and didn't know how many sexes there are."

How about we never listen to the Gender Studies departments, and just carry on with the traditional 2-sex model the general public has always used? Just a thought.

@NecessaryScene
you may well be right. Aristotle said that women were 'natural slaves' so there was a big push to justify this. Also.... we don't actually know what Aristotle himself wrote. We only have the notes from a really bad student (God, what a legacy.) So we don't know for sure what they actually thought.

And I agree with you. They knew who the sex class were. They knew who got pregnant and who to have sex with to have babies. They knew who to treat like shit. Their ignorance about biology didn't mean they didn't know who the women were. They were able to reliably identify the females and treat them poorly. There weren't any cases of men getting forced to stay at home, uneducated because they were mistakenly thought to be women.

It's a bit like race theory. In the early Enlightenment period there was a debate about whether black people were members of the human species, or whether they were a different species altogether. But the theory didn't actually matter, because the racists of the day were able to justify their prejudices no matter what.

What they didn't have was a scientific theory of why it was like it was, apart from the obvious, or how different creatures were related.

The tendency to take what the classical sources said as the gold standard was a Renaissance thing though, the medievals respected the ancient philosophers but were much more skeptical of the things they said. It was one of the reason the early moderns thought the medievals were backwards.