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Have we really ‘been there done that’ with feminism?

Lorese Vera reviews Pythagoras’s Trousers. A book about women's exile from education throughout history.

In a book group I attend we get to take turns at choosing the book for the month. Some choose the latest best seller; others choose a classic that has meant a lot to her. Last month one brave soul chose Pythagoras’s Trousers: God, Physics, and the Gender Wars, by Margaret Wertheim (1997). I say ‘brave soul’ as it was predictably but sadly met with some apprehension by the all female readers.

I dutifully dusted off my copy that I haven’t touched for some years and as I read it I was reminded of just what an important read it is. It is true that it’s not as easy to read as the Woman’s Weekly, but you can’t compare marshmallows to steak, and sometimes you need a good chew.

Pythagoras’s Trousers is an important book for all women as it answers systematically with historical evidence just why women have been disenfranchised from western culture, particularly through education or as Wertheim argues, through the science of physics in particular. This is because it is physics that attempted to explain the design of the world, and thus the ‘mind of God’. Wertheim’s story begins in ancient Greece where Pythagoras claimed that women were inferior mathematically as compared to men. In other words in later Christian parlance they were not as ‘balanced’ as men and so were more ‘corruptible’.

By the Medieval and Renaissance eras in Europe and Britain, the universe was seen to have a mathematical order described by the earliest scientists and created by God, who kept the planets in place; hence the concept of the order of the ‘celestial spheres.’ It was believed that people too, had to be in balance and keep to their own ‘spheres’. This belief was made a virtue of the standing social, class, and gender order, as it was reasoned that if God had created the order of the planets, therefore it was also him who had placed people in their ‘spheres’ and it was improper to try to rise above the circumstances that the Almighty had placed you in.

Women of course, had no business in the sphere of learning as they were corrupted and ‘disordered’ by the sin of their mother ‘Eve’. The danger that women represented could be controlled by keeping them in a contained ‘sphere’. And more credence was given to male misogyny by using so called ‘science’ as proof of the ruling males version of the world order.

Later in history education was made available to all men but to no women, and right up to the 20th century women were still fighting for equal access to education.

Wertheim shows how throughout the 20th Century science still refused to recognize brilliant women. While the male establishment (apparently) no longer had any justification for its quasi ‘scientific’ proofs of the inferiority of women, they did have a long gender memory of misogyny that was anything but scientific. This begs the question of what could women have achieved if they had not been locked out of education for the last two millennia?

As my friend who said we have “been there done that” with feminism, why does all of this matter? Wertheim thinks it is vital to remember so that we can keep working for change, as the battle has not yet been won. She feels that the world can only change for the better when women are genuinely accepted into all fields of academia equally. This is of course greatly simplifying what she says in her book and I urge you to read it. I think it is important that we know why, and remember why women have been at such a disadvantage throughout history so that we can educate our daughters to arm them against it happening again.

If we think that history is linear and only gets better, I think that we are terribly mistaken. If we see history as circular, there is no reason to disbelieve that things could revert back to how they were. If we see feminism as some sort of ‘rebellious stage’ that we all went through but now everything is fine and dandy then we are fools indeed.

There seems to me to be a reversion to an ‘easy sexism’; those blatant comments that many men are making again out of their ignorance now that the so-called ‘backlash’ has made it fashionable again to be ‘politically incorrect’. The fact that the same men who would not have dared to share their ‘politically incorrect’ views some years back but are now doing so with gay abandon shows that society never changed, it just put a band-aid of legislation on the wound, mixed with a coterie of women who would always speak up under such views at university or wherever they found themselves. These same women are now being effectively shouted down again, not helped by the “I’m all right Jack” (or should I say Jill?) attitude of older so called post-feminists who are quite comfortable with their lives now but want to forget all about how they got to where they are.

I was devastated and amazed to be told by a male academic friend that: “After all, women have never really invented anything important for the world nor have they written anything of much substance have they?” This was supposed to prove that we really are essentially different – “Oh, but that’s ok, we still respect you”. The problem is that ‘men’s doings’ whatever they are, are always seen as much more important than ‘women’s doings’. This has always been the stumbling block for feminists; “If I choose to stay home and raise my children I’ll never be taken seriously again”.

History shows that one half of the population (men) suppressed and oppressed the other half (women) merely because they could. Women are physically more vulnerable than men especially during childbirth and rearing years, and it seems that this may be at the bottom of it all*. I don’t think our feminism needs to be angry or even particularly radical, but it does need to be informed, and it needs to be continually informed. I think it should be such a natural part of our lives that we are aware on a daily basis of the subtle and not so subtle attacks on our gender so that we can respond in subtle (and not so subtle) ways.

We obviously do not live in some kind of peaceful sexually equal utopia, and I think we should keep our eyes wide open until we do.

* There is a huge amount of literature on the concept of the male fear of female immanence being a threat to spirituality in the tradition of psychoanalytic feminism. See especially Powers of Horror by Julia Kristeva.