Chapter 6 Chapter 5 Women in the Early Farming Ages

Chapter 5 Women in the Early Farming Ages We have seen before that in the primitive tribes the fate of women is merciless, and no doubt little effort has been made to compensate for the cruelty of the women who do not smoke.However, women were not deceived and bullied as they were later under the protection of patriarchy.Inequality between men and women was not recognized by any institution; indeed, there was no institution—no ownership, no inheritance, no legal system.Religion is neutral, and the object of worship is some kind of asexual totem. Institutions and laws emerged after nomads settled and became farmers.Man is no longer limited to harsh contests with hostile forces, he begins to express himself by shaping the world, thinking about the world and himself.At this time, the difference between men and women is reflected in the group structure of people, and has a special form.Women are often held in high dignity in agricultural communes.This dignity should be explained mainly by the new importance of the child in a civilization based on the cultivation of the land.After settling down in a certain territory, the man established the ownership of the territory, and the property was in the form of collective ownership.This property requires the owner to provide offspring, so motherhood becomes a sacred function.

Many tribes live under communal ownership, but this does not mean that women are common to all men - hardly anyone today considers mixed marriages to be a common practice, but it means that men and women experience religious, social and economic life: their individuality remains a purely biological fact.Marriage, whatever form it may take—monogamous, polygamous, or polyandrous—is a mundane affair and produces no mystical bond.It does not involve the enslavement of the wife, since she remains one with her clan.The whole clan is united under one totem, and has a supernatural power in a mysterious sense, which is embodied in the common ownership of a territory.Through this territory, the clan acquires self-consciousness in objective concrete form, in accordance with the process of alienation discussed above.Thus, by virtue of the permanence of the land, the gens becomes a veritable unity whose identity survives the passage of time.

Only by adopting this existential stance can we understand the hitherto existing identification between the clan, tribe, or family and property.The agricultural commune replaced the fleeting worldview of the nomadic tribe with a conception of life derived from the past and linked to the future.The object of worship in the agricultural commune is the totem ancestor who bestows his name on the members of the clan.The clan is very concerned about its descendants, because the clan itself will survive through the land passed on to descendants.Aware of its unity, the commune aspires to a continuous existence beyond the present.It realizes that it exists through the child, that the child is its own.It is made possible through them.

At that time, many primitive people did not know that fathers also played a role in reproduction (this happens even today).They believed that the child reappeared the ancestral spirits that wandered around woods and rocks, among holy places, and later fell into women.It has been argued that in order for this penetration to be possible, a woman should no longer be a virgin.But it has also been suggested that this penetration could also have occurred through the nostrils or mouth.In any case, virginity taking is here of secondary importance, and, by virtue of a certain mystical nature, is rarely the prerogative of the husband.

But for reproduction, the mother is clearly indispensable.It is she who protects and nurtures the microorganisms that grow in her body, so that only through her can the life of the clan reproduce in the tangible world, so she begins to play the most important role.Children often belong to the mother's clan, use the clan's name, and have the rights and privileges of the clan, especially in the use of the land controlled by the clan.Communal property was passed down from generation to generation by women: it was they who secured clan members' ownership of land and harvests.In turn, whether these members go to this territory or to that territory is also designated by the mother.We may then assume that, in some mystical sense, the earth belongs to women: they have a right over it and its fruits, a right that is both religious and legal.Women are more closely related to the land than they are to property, since it is characteristic of matriarchy that women are literally assimilated by the land.The permanence of life—principally, fertility, is realized both in woman and in the earth by procreating its individual manifestations, its incarnations.

Among the nomads, fertility was almost an accident, and the wealth of the land was unknown to them.But the farmer marvels at the mysterious fertility that sprouts in the fields and in the mother's womb.He realizes that, like his livestock and crops, he is begotten; and he wishes his clan to beget others, in order to immortalize the clan while the fertility of the land lasts forever.The whole of nature seemed to him to be a mother: the earth was woman, and, like the earth, woman had that mysterious power.This is, in a sense, the reason for handing over agriculture to women.Since she can summon the spirits of her ancestors into her body, she also has the ability to make fruits and grains grow quickly from the cultivated land.In neither case are creative acts possible, only magic.At this stage, man is no longer limited to gathering the produce of the ground, but he does not yet understand his own power.He is torn between technology and magic, thinking that he is passive and attached to nature, and nature can decide his life or death at will.Of course, he also vaguely recognized the role of sexuality and the technology of turning the land into arable land.But children and crops still seemed to be gifts from the gods, and he still believed that it was the magic of the female body that brought into this world the wealth that lay latent in the mysterious roots of life.

These beliefs were deep-rooted and persist today among many tribes in Indian, Australian, and Polynesian.In some places, sterile women are considered a threat to gardens.Some places also believe that if pregnant women are allowed to harvest crops, the harvest will be better.Back in India, naked women at night had to go to the fields to help the plow, and so on.These beliefs and customs are all the more important because they are in harmony with the actual interests of the commune.Maternity condemns woman to an inactive being, so naturally men hunt, fish, and fight while women stay at home.But among primitive peoples, the scale of garden planting is very small, and it is all carried out in villages, so garden cultivation is a kind of housework.Using stone age tools doesn't take much effort.Economic conditions and religion have consistently left agricultural labor to women.As cottage industry developed, it also became the domain of women: they weaved straw mats and baskets, they made pottery.Women are often in charge of bartering activities, and business is in their hands.So through them, the life of the clan is maintained and developed.Children, clothes, crops, utensils, and the whole prosperity of the community depend on their labor and magic - they are the soul of the commune.This magic inspires in men a respect mingled with fear, which is reflected in their adoration.The whole alien nature is concentrated in women.

As I have said, a man cannot think about himself if he does not think about the other.He believes that the world has the characteristics of duality, not first of all the characteristics of sex.But since there is a difference from man, and man establishes himself in this way, it is natural to include woman in the category of other; the other includes woman.Initially, it is not very important whether she should embody the other alone, so this division is only a superficial phenomenon in the mind of the other: in the ancient creation theory, an element often has a male and a female incarnation; Thus, for the ancient Babylonians, the ocean (male) and the sea (female) were the dual manifestations of cosmic chaos.As woman's role expands, she represents almost the entire range of the Other.At that time there were goddesses through whom the idea of ​​fertility was worshiped.At Susa, the oldest statue of the Great Goddess was found, the GreaMOther in robes and high ornaments.In other statues we find her with a tower as a crown.In Crete, such statues have also been unearthed.She was sometimes fat-hipted and squat;She is the Queen of Heaven, and the dove is her symbol; she is also the Queen of Hell, wriggling forward, and the viper is her symbol.She appears among mountains and forests, over seas and springs.She creates life everywhere; whoever she kills brings him back to life.She is as capricious, indulgent, and ruthless as nature; yet she is merciful and timid.She reigns over all the islands of the Aegean Sea, and rules over Phrygia.Syria and Asia Minor ruled the entire West Asia.In Babylon she was called Ishtar; among the Semites she was called Astarte; the Greeks called her Gaia, Leia, or Sepele.In Egypt we meet her again under the name of Isis.All male gods belong to her.

Since woman is the supreme idol in the distant heaven and hell, she is surrounded by taboos on earth like all holy things, and she is taboo herself.Because of her magical powers, she was considered a sorceress and witch, and she performed her magic among prayers.Sometimes she was a priestess, like a shaman among the ancient Celts.Sometimes she participates in tribal management and may even be the sole ruler.These remote ages have left us no literature.But the long age of patriarchy has preserved the memory of a time when women had a high status in their myths, monuments and traditions.From the female point of view, the Brahmin era is a return to the Rigveda era, which in turn is a return to the primitive age mentioned earlier.In the pre-Islamic period, the status of Bedouin women was much higher than that designated by the Qur'an.The great images of Niosian and Medea evoke a time when mothers were proud of their children and regarded them as their own special property.In Homer's epics, Andromache and Hecuba have an important place that ancient Greece no longer accords to women in the harem.

From these facts it seems to be surmised that in primitive times there was a veritable female dominion: matriarchy.This hypothesis was put forward by Bachofen and adopted by Engels.Engels believed that the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy was "the world-historic failure of women".But that golden age of womanhood is really nothing more than a myth.To say that woman is his is to say that there is no mutual relationship between man and woman: the earth, the mother, the goddess—she is not at all his kind in the man's mind.Her powers are believed to be beyond the range of humans, so she is outside the range of humans.Society has always been masculine, and political power has always been in the hands of men.Levi.At the end of his study of primitive societies, Strauss declares: "Public or pure social power always belongs to the man."

For the male, his fellow is always another male, an other like himself, with whom the so-called mutual relationship is established.The duality that manifests itself in society in one form or another pits groups of men against each other.Women are part of the property, owned by every group of men, the medium through which these groups exchange.Errors arise by confusing two forms of otherness or otherness, which are actually mutually exclusive.Precisely, since woman is seen as the absolute other—that is, as secondary, whatever her fascinations—it is impossible to see her as another subject.Therefore, women never formed a separate group formed according to their own interests, as opposed to the male group.They never had a direct, autonomous relationship with men.Levi-Strauss said: "The mutual relationship that is so important to marriage is not formed between men and women, but it is formed between men through women; women only provide for it. A very important opportunity." A woman's actual situation was not affected by the type of kinship (the way blood was traced) prevalent in her society.Whether the system is patrilineal, matrilineal, bilineal, or indiscriminate (which is not strictly adhered to), she is always under male tutelage.The only question now was whether a woman, after marriage, would continue to submit to the authority of her father or brother, which would also extend to her children, or whether she would turn to that of her husband.Levi-Strauss also pointed out: "Woman in itself is nothing more than a symbol of her blood... Matrilineal blood relationship is nothing but the authority of a woman's father or brother, which in turn extends to the brothers' village ’” She’s just a medium of authority, not a person with authority.The actual situation is that the relationship between two groups of men is determined by the blood relationship system, not by the relationship between the sexes. In fact, the real situation of women is not closely related to this or that kind of authority.She may have a high status in the matrilineal system; but we must still be careful to see that although there is a female chieftain or queen who occupies the highest position in the tribe, this by no means means that the women there are sovereign: Yeka After Terina the Great came to the throne, the fate of Russian peasant women did not change at all, and women were still often in a pitiful situation.Also, it is rare that the wife still lives with the clan and only allows hasty or even private visits from the husband.The fact that a woman often left her gens and lived in her husband's house was enough to show the importance of the male.Levi-Strauss writes: "Insistence on living with her husband's kinsmen provides evidence for the highly asymmetric relationship between the sexes that is a defining feature of human society." Since a woman lets her children live with her Together, the result is that the territorial organization of the tribe does not coincide with its totemic organization—the former is circumstantial and accidental, the latter is rigidly established.But in fact the former is more important, because the place where people live and work is more necessary to consider than their mysterious connection. In the widely distributed transitional institutions, there are two kinds of authority; one religious, the other based on the possession and cultivation of land, and the two check each other.Although marriage is only a secular institution, it still has very important social significance; although marriage and family no longer have religious significance, they still have strong vitality in the human sense.Even in groups with great sexual freedom, marriage is still appropriate for women who are about to have children.She was unable to form an autonomous group or live alone with her children.The religious protection offered by her brother was not enough and a spouse was required.This spouse often has many obligations to the children.The children do not belong to his clan, but he still has to support them and bring them up.Between husband and wife, father and son, a kind of relationship of living and working together and closely connected emotionally is formed.The relationship between the secular family and the totem clan is very complicated, as evidenced by the variety of weddings.Initially, the husband took a wife from an unfamiliar clan; or, at least, the two clans exchanged valuables: one clan surrendered a member, and the other offered livestock, fruit, or labor in return.But since the husband owes his duty to the wife and her children, he also gets compensation from the bride's brother. The balance between these two realities, the mystical and the economic, is a precarious balance.A man's bond with his son is often much stronger than that with his nephew.When he is in this position and can do so, he prefers to assert his rights as a father.This is why all societies tend to adopt a patriarchal form when man's development brings him to the critical moment when he becomes self-aware and imposes his will on others.But it is also important to emphasize this insight: even when he is bewildered by the mysteries of life, nature, and women, he has not lost his power.When he is overwhelmed by the dangerous fascination of woman and thus makes her the principal, he puts her in that position, and thus actually plays the principal role in this voluntary alienation.Though woman is filled with the magic of procreation, man is as much master of her as he is of the fertile earth.Just as woman embodies the nature of her procreative magic, so she is meant to be subject, to belong, to be used.From the point of view of men, the prestige she enjoys is something they bestow.They kneel before the Other and worship the Great Mother.But no matter how powerful she may be, she can only be understood as such through the ideas in the male head. The idols that man creates, however powerful they may be, are actually subordinate to him, and that is why he has always had the power to destroy them.In primitive societies this subordination is not recognized and thus not openly maintained, but it certainly exists immediately.Once a man has acquired a more definite sense of himself, once he has dared to assert his rights and resist, he does not hesitate to take advantage of this subordination.Indeed, even if man thinks himself given, passive, subject to the contingencies of sun and rain, he achieves it by transcendence, by design; The contingencies of life are opposites. The totemic ancestor (of which the woman is a complex incarnation) is the masculine primordial who appears under the name of an animal or a tree.Woman keeps it alive in the flesh, but her role is nurturing, not creating.She is not creative in any way.The way she relied on to keep the tribe alive was to provide it with children and food.She is still doomed to be internal, merely embodying the static side of a self-enclosed society.And men continue to monopolize the functions of society that are open to nature and to the rest of humanity.The only things worth doing for him are fighting, hunting and fishing.He took the spoils from outside and gave it to the tribe.Conquest, hunting, and fishing represent an expanded existence and a projection of existence onto the world.Male still embodies transcendence alone.He still doesn't have the practical means to completely dominate a woman's land, and he doesn't dare to ask her to fight-but he is already eager to break free from her. It is against this desire, I think, that we must inquire into the deep-seated causes of the well-known custom of intermarriage; a custom widespread in matrilineal societies.Even if a man is unaware of his role in procreation, marriage is a matter of great importance to him: through marriage he will acquire the dignity of manhood and a piece of land that is his.Through his mother he is bound to the clan, through his mother to his ancestors and all that can supplement his property.But when he performs various secular functions, when he works, when he gets married, he is eager to get rid of this bondage, insists on using transcendence to overcome immanence, and creates a future different from his past.The incest taboo takes different forms, depending on the type of kinship recognized in each society.But from primitive times to the present it has always had the same meaning; man desires to possess that which he is not, to unite with something other than himself.Therefore the wife should not share in her husband's supernatural powers, she should be a stranger to him, and therefore to his clan.Primitive marriages are sometimes based on snatching marriages, which may be real or symbolic.Undoubtedly, violence against another is the clearest affirmation of that person's otherness.The warrior, in violently taking his wife, proves that he can acquire the property of a stranger, that he can push beyond the bounds of his natural destiny.The purchase of a wife, in its various forms—payment of tribute, rendering of services—is equally significant, if less dramatic. As in real life, man acts bit by bit according to his experience, and in his symbolic performance it is the masculine principle that triumphs brilliantly.Spirit over life, transcendence over immanence, technology over magic, reason over superstition.The devaluation of woman is an inevitable stage in human history, because her prestige is not based on her own positive value, but on the weakness of men.Woman embodies the unsettling mystery of nature, so man, in freeing himself from nature's shackles, also frees himself from woman's control.The progress from stone to bronze enabled man to tame the land by his labors and become his own master.The peasant is subject to the accidents of the land, the germination of the seed, and the seasons.He is passive, so he prays, he waits.This is why the totem spirit once ruled the world of men.The farmer is subject to these unpredictable forces around him.The worker, on the contrary, designs the tool from his conception, and fashions it with his hands according to the design.He bravely confronts passive nature, overcomes its resistance, and asserts his sovereign will.If he hits the anvil faster, the tool will take less time to make.However, no matter how hard he tried, it was impossible for the crops to mature earlier.Man comes to realize that he is responsible for what he makes: skill makes it, clumsiness destroys it.Meticulous and intelligent, he developed his skills to a point of perfection of which he was proud: his success depended not on the favor of the gods but on himself.He challenged his peers, and he rejoiced in his success.Even if he had left a place for religious ceremonies, he must have regarded precise technique as much more important; mystical values ​​were secondary, and practical interests first.He did not completely get rid of the influence of the gods, but when he parted from the gods, he thought that there was a difference between himself and the gods.He drove the gods back to Olympus without a country, and left the secular territory to himself.When the first blow of the hammer sounded and the reign of men began, the great god Pan began to be eclipsed. A man knows he has power.In the relationship of his creativity to the things he makes, he experiences causality: the grain sown may or may not germinate; but metal always responds to burning, quenching, and mechanical treatment.This world of tools can be grasped with clear concepts, so rational thought, logic, and mathematics emerge as the times require.The entire concept of the universe has been overthrown.The religion of woman is governed by agriculture, by irreducible duration, by chance, by chance, by waiting, and by mystical dominion plus him, which is dominion over time as space can be controlled, is domination of inevitability, is domination of Design, action, and reason govern.Even if he had to deal with the land, he must henceforth manage it like a worker.He discovered that the land can be fertile, that it is good to fall fallow, and that different seeds must be treated differently.It is he who multiplies the harvest; he digs ditches, irrigates, or drains water; he designs roads, builds temples; he creates a new world. Those who are still dominated by the Mother Goddess, those who still maintain the matrilineal system, are also those who are suppressed in the stage of primitive civilization.Woman is adored only in the sense that man has made himself a slave out of fear, that he has created his own impotence.He worships her out of fear, not out of love.It is only in beginning to dethrone her that he is fulfilling his destiny.Since then he must have considered the masculine principle of creativity, light, wisdom and order to be sovereign.Then a male god appeared beside the Great Mother Goddess—the son or lover.He was still subordinate to her, but very much like her, united to her.He is also the personification of the fertility principle in the form of a bull, half-man, half-bull monster, the Nile god who made the Egyptian lowlands fertile.His wife is his mother, she is powerful but unhappy.She casts a spell to retrieve his body and bring him back to life.He died in the autumn and was resurrected in the spring.We first met the couple in Crete and later found them on the Mediterranean coast: in Egypt, Isis and Horus; Donis; in Minoa, Cyprus and Attis; in ancient Greece, Leia and Zeus. Thus the Great Mother was dethroned.In Egypt, however, women still fared exceptionally well; Nut, the personification of heaven, Isis, the consort of the god of fertility and the Nile, and Osiris remained goddesses of the utmost importance.But still Ra, god of the sun, light and male fertility, reigned supreme.In Babylon, Ishtar was merely the wife of Baelor-Marduk.He is the one who created everything and keeps everything in harmony.The Semitic god was a male.As soon as Zeus gained power in the kingdom of heaven, Gaia and Leia had to give way.Demeter has only a second degree of power, but her power is still important.The Vedic gods had consorts, but these consorts had no claim to be worshiped as the gods.The Roman Jupiter had no idea what equality was. So the triumph of patriarchy was neither a matter of chance nor the result of a violent revolution.From the earliest days of man, the biological superiority of the male has enabled him to affirm his status as the sole sovereign subject.They never relinquished that status.They had given part of their independent existence to nature, to women, and then took it back.Decided to play other roles, woman is also condemned to possess mere unreliable power: slavery or idolatry is not a destiny she chooses.As Fraserchong said, "Men made the gods, and women worshiped only the gods." It is indeed men who decide whether their supreme god will be female or male.Woman's social place is always assigned by man; she never enforces her own laws. However, if a woman's physical strength is capable of productive labor, she may complete the conquest of nature with men, and humans may rebel against the gods through both sexes.But women fail to take advantage of the potential benefits of the tool.Engels only gave an incomplete explanation of her devaluation: it is not enough to say that the invention of bronze and iron has greatly disturbed the balance of productive forces and thus led to the inferior status of women.This inferiority alone is insufficient to explain the oppression of women.The misfortune of woman is that she does not become a worker of the same kind with the laborer, and is thus excluded from human fellowship.The exclusion is not explained by the fact that women are weak and unproductive.The reason why the man doesn't see her as one of his own is because she doesn't share his work and way of thinking, because she's still locked in the mysterious process of life.Since the man does not accept her, since the man thinks she has his old side, the man can only be her oppressor.Male power and will to aggrandizement, with female impotence, has wreaked havoc. Man wishes to fully realize the new potentialities revealed by the new technology: he resorts to slave labor, turning men of his own kind into slaves.Slave labor was far more productive than what women could do, and women lost their economic role in the tribe.Sovereignty is much more thoroughly confirmed by the master in his relation to his slave than in his limited authority over a woman.Adored for her fecundity, for her disturbing otherness as distinct from man, woman somehow dominates the man who is dependent on her and at the same time is dependent on him.She actually appreciates the reciprocity of the master-slave relationship and escapes slavery because of it.But the slave is not protected by any taboo, he is nothing but a slave man, indifferent but inferior: the dialectic of his relation to his master must have taken centuries to develop.In organized patriarchal society, the slave is little more than a man in front of a draft animal; the master exercises a despotic authority that intensifies his pride—he also stands up against women.Everything he won, he won against her; the stronger he was, the weaker she was. Especially as he became a landowner, he also claimed title to women.Before he was possessed by supernatural powers, by land; now he has a soul, some land.He has freed himself from the shackles of women, and now he wants women and offspring of his own.He wanted the household labor—which he used to improve the land—to be his outright, which meant that the laborers had to be his too, so he made slaves of his wife and children.He needs to have an heir; to whom his earthly life will be continued by the transfer of his property to him; and after his death, the heir will perform for him the necessary religious ceremonies and ceremonies for the peace of his soul.Superstitions of domestic gods were superimposed upon the organization of private property, and the duties to be performed by heirs were both economic and mystical.So, from the day that agriculture ceased to be manipulated primarily by magic and first became a creative labor, man is aware that he is a reproductive force, and he considers his children, his harvest, to be his own. In primitive times, no revolution in ideas could have been more important than that of replacing matrilineal blood with patrilineal blood.Thereafter, the mother was relegated to the status of nurse and servant, and authority and rights belonged to the father, who passed them on to his offspring.The necessary role of man in reproduction is realized.Not only that, some people also assert that only the father is the generator of life, and the mother is just the recipient and nurturer of the microorganisms in her body, as Aeschylus said in "The Three Furies".It is believed that women are only material, while sports, the male origin, are "better and more sacred" than it.In the process of fully possessing offspring, men complete the domination of the world and the conquest of women.Although ancient mythology and Greek drama represented the transition to patriarchy as the result of violent struggle, it was, as we have seen, a matter of gradual change.Man reconquers only what he already possesses, and he brings the legal system into harmony with reality.There is no struggle here, no victory and defeat. However, this ancient legend is meaningful.At the same time that man asserts himself as a subject and a free being, the concept of the other emerges.From then on, the relation to the other is dramatic: the presence of the other is a threat, a danger.Ancient Greek philosophy shows that otherness and otherness are no different from negation, so they are evil.To put forward the other, it is necessary to establish the theory of the opposition between good and evil (Maniclllerlism).This is why religions and codes treat women with the hostility they concoct.When mankind developed to the stage of recording myths and laws in writing, patriarchy was clearly established: codes must be drafted by men.They naturally accorded woman a subordinate position; but one might think that they would treat women with the same kindness as children and livestock--but it is far from the case.Despite building a machine to oppress women, legislators remain uneasy about her.The paradoxical fascination she had had before still retains the semblance of evil: once she was holy, now she is filthy.Eve, which was given to Adam as a partner, led to the destruction of mankind; the pagan gods wanted revenge on mankind, so they invented women; Pandora, the first female created, released various disasters that tortured mankind.The Other—this is passivity against activity, multiplicity against unity, matter against form, chaos against order.This is how woman is offered to evil.Pythagoras said this: "There is a good principle, which created order, light, and men; there is also an evil principle, which created chaos, darkness, and women." Manu Law Code Defines woman as a villain who should be kept in slavery. Leviticus likens her to a draft animal owned by a head of a family.The Solon Law gave her no rights.Roman law placed Earth under the tutelage of men, asserting that she was "imbecile."Canon law regards her as "the devil's gate".The Qur'an is extremely contemptuous of women. 不过，恶对善是必要的，物质对观念是必要的，黑暗对光明也是必要的。男人知道，要满足自己的欲望，要让他的种类永存，女人是不可或缺的。他必须在社会上给她一个完整的位置，以便她在某种程度上接受男人所确立的秩序，消除地固有的污点。这种观念在摩奴法典里被阐述得十分清楚：“妇女以合法婚姻与之结合的男子，〔无论男子的品位如何，〕妇女本人也取得这些品位，有如河流与海洋结合。不修于丈夫，思想、语言、身体都纯洁的妇女，〕死后抵达和丈夫一样的住所，被善人称为贤德的妇女。同样，圣经也以赞赏的笔调，描绘了一幅'项女”的肖像。基督教尊重修女，也尊重贞节的妻子，尽管它鄙视肉体。女人甚至可以扮演重要的宗教角色：印度婆罗门教的女僧，罗马的女祭司，每一个都和她的丈夫一样神圣。男人在夫妻关系中处于支配地位，但男性本原与女性本原的结合，对于生殖机制和维持生命以及对于社会秩序，都仍是必要的。 他者的、女人的这种矛盾，被反映在她后来的历史中；她服从男人的意志，直到我们的时代。但是，这种意志是模棱两可的：彻底的占有和控制，会把女人降到物的等级；但不论男人征服和占有了什么，他都渴望能表现出他自己的尊严；在他看来，他者仍然保留着一些原始魔力。怎样能让妻子既做仆人又做伴侣？这是男人要解决的问题之一。多少世纪以来，他的态度一直在演变，从而也引起了女人命运的演变。