Joan O'Bryan

In my dissertation, I’m investigating a variety of “origin stories” for patriarchy, because I think they have a lot to tell us about how we think about the problem. There are a lot of different stories, and some of them are more … plausible, let’s say, than others.

One of my favorite examples of this genre of theorizing is Elizabeth Gould Davis’s The First Sex. The book is, to put it succinctly, absolutely insane. After lots of thought, I’ve decided I probably won’t be able to incorporate the text into my dissertation, but I think the story she tells is too wild — so bad it’s good — not to share.

So see below for my attempt at a thorough academic exegesis of the origin story found in the text.

Elizabeth Gould Davis on Patriarchy

Proof … is found in the evidence that the male himself was a late mutation from an original female creature. For man is but an imperfect female

Elizabeth Gould Davis

Elizabeth Gould Davis’ The First Sex (1971) is, in the words of Cynthia Eller, a marvelous “shard of crackpottery.” The book contains almost three-hundred pages of copiously footnoted conspiracy theory, and reviewers at the time noted that its “extravagant disorganization makes the job of summarizing nearly impossible” (Hackett 99). Despite these faults, The First Sex was undeniably popular in second wave feminist circles, influencing the rise of second wave “feminist matriarchalism.”

Like the other origin stories at play in my dissertation, Davis begins by hypothesizing on the conditions of human evolution. She goes farther than most, however, in that not only is she hypothesizing on the state of early hominids, but she considers the evolution of binary sex altogether. According to Davis, it seems likely that the female evolved first, whereas “the male himself was a late mutation” (34). Once upon a time there was an “all female world” in which parthenogenesis was the only means of reproduction (35). “The first males were mutants, freaks produced by some damage to the genes caused perhaps by disease or a radiation bombardment from the sun” (35). Later she notes that men and women were also likely to have originally been physical equals in size and strength (95). (Logically, she argues, this only makes sense, as the male role is merely “to provide spermatozoa” and sperm is much smaller than the egg. This reasoning produces another one of the phenomenal and hilarious phrases that litter the book: “The male, in the view of nature, is only a ‘glorified gonad’ (93)). 

On this biological basis, we can envision the first matriarchy, in which men and women played the roles accorded to them by their place in evolution: men subservient to women, as the “weaker” “despised” sex (36), women the rightful rulers, “the originators and repositories of all culture” who “dragged man, kicking and screaming, out of savagery into the New Stone Age” (40). Taking the opposite approach to Engels, Davis argues that it was women whose innovations led to the emergence of private property, as she developed the means of planting and storing crops (41). 

These early women developed a fully advanced civilization, probably Celtic (Davis’ racial preferences are quite manifest throughout the text, as she waxes poetic on the presumed “golden hair” and “blue eyes” of the first sex) and then seeded various human colonies throughout the world, explaining what Davis perceives to be the intrinsic matriarchalism in all ancient religions – great goddess worship – as well as the myth of the lost city of Atlantis, a woman-only colony which eventually sunk into the sea. During this time, women lived in gynocentric communities, all female excepting their young sons, or those men well-trained enough to do the women’s bidding (87). The remaining males formed bands of “nomads and hunters, womanless except for seizure and rape” (89). 

This was the “Golden Age”, a time of “paradise on earth” when “man was pacific” and “warfare unknown before the patriarchal revolution” – the seizure and rape notwithstanding (63-65). The end comes suddenly: 

A dark age overtakes the world – a dark age brought on by cataclysm accompanied by a patriarchal revolution. Nomads, barbaric and uncivilized roving bands of ejected, womanless men, destroy the civilized city states, depose the queens and attempt to rule in their stead. The result is chaos (68). 

And at this point, she takes a small break to suggest that maybe we evolved from space aliens (70). But I digress. 

So what is the mechanism by which this cataclysmic fall occurs? How did woman lose her power? 

According to Davis, “She may, as the expression goes, have ‘asked for it’” (95). The exclusion of the wild men from the communities of women would have left them hungry and unsupervised, from which they would have learned to become “killers of flesh, which they devoured raw” (96). “The wild habits and raw meat diet of the undomesticated males no doubt led to their gradual sexual development – and eventually to their conquest of the matriarchs” (96). For after all, meat eating results in larger “sexual organs” which “may have proved irresistible to the women” (96). “It is thus possible that the women of the old gynocracies brought on their own downfall by selecting the phallic wild men over the more civilized men of their own pacific and gentle world” (96). Meat-eating and selective breeding on the part of women created strong men and the “force, the acquired muscularity of the inferior sex, that led to the patriarchal revolution” (119). 

It’s worth diving further into the process Davis puts forth. Perhaps it was inevitable that the excluded men would develop carnivorous urges, but Davis also posits that the existence of a global drought might have pushed man into meat-eating in order to survive. Regardless, the fact that man now had the power to conquer woman did not explain why he did so. Although there are hints throughout that man simply has a violent and sexually aggressive nature (“marauding beasts” she calls males, citing anthropologist Robert Briffault), Davis actually sees the problem as more psychological than physical. She writes: 

Man became so thoroughly conditioned to the idea of his own inferiority through the long ages of feminine supremacy that he built up in his subconscious mind an everlasting resentment against women (148). 

It was this resentment, the “bitter need to retaliate”, which led to the unfortunate, if “understandabl[e],” desire to take power and give women “a little of their own back” (148). The psychological resentment is made worse by the fact of sex: womb envy and penis vulnerability. 

[D]uring coitus the male has to entrust his genitals to the female body…and interprets this as a surrender of his vital strength to the woman…The penis is the only muscle man has that he cannot flex…This fact in itself, the possession of an external anatomical part which seems in no way to be connected to his brain, is a disconcerting and humiliating phenomenon in itself. But even worse, as it affects the dignity of its owner, is its seeming obedience to that inferior thing – woman (152).

Once man had the power to eliminate his own inferiority, he took the chance. The ancient city states of women were thus conquered by nomadic bands of men, and with the downfall of matriarchy came the downfall of human civilization. 

And quite the downfall it was. Indicative is the switch from the worship of the mother goddess to the father god, and our resulting pursuit of patriarchal traits: “arrogance, self-interest, indifference to the sufferings of others, authoritarianism, and the violent enforcement of man-made laws” (116). This stands in strong contrast to the earlier matriarchal societies, which were “characterized by a real democracy in which the happiness and fulfillment of the individual supersede all other objectives of society” (116). (What about the subservient, cowering, or expelled men, you might ask? What about them indeed). 

Davis’ work here shows a common tendency in the matriarchal literature, which is to waffle between “women’s superiority” and “women’s natural justice/pursuit of equality” and to see the matriarchy as somehow evidence of both. Like Beauvoir, she sees “groupishness” and the resentment of perceived inferiority as natural to the human condition. The reason why I might consider this a “materialist” story is that men’s strength plays a large role in their success: if men weren’t strong, it wouldn’t matter what their psychological desires were. This story is also less all-encompassing than Beauvoir’s, positing the existence both of “pre-patriarchal values” and the idea that human evolution, on the basis of sexual selection, has much to do with our eventual power balance. (We’re still evolving; according to Davis, the hymen emerged relatively recently – only post patriarchy, as a means for men to “keep track” of the virgins). 

Perhaps if women could develop physical equality with men, they could (violently?) overthrow the patriarchy and once again institute matriarchy. This, after all, would be returning the world to its natural order, as patriarchy is “the very reverse of nature’s usual arrangements” (329) and fulfilling our biological condition. 

Or, in a world sick with the “rot of masculist materialism”, a return to the original values of the matriarchy might be the best way forward. “There is, apparently, a physics of the supernatural whose laws modern man has been totally unaware of and to which he is only now becoming attuned” (338). Early woman knew of these powers, in her civilized state, which “gave early woman her power over man” (338). Thus, in the twenty-first century, “not physical force but spiritual force will lead the way” (339). 

The contradictions in The First Sex are obvious and many, as this brief summary of just one element of the book – the origin story – makes clear. However, the book was undeniably influential. In particular, the theories put forward by Davis entered the public consciousness via the writings of a former Weather Underground member, Jane Alpert, writing in the 1974 issue of Ms. Magazine.