Customer Reviews

The First Sex

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Beginning with some very controversial (but very well supported documentation) foundations on the history and evolution of modern religious and patriarchial theological development, Gould-Davis presents a very compelling basis for matrilinial foundations for religion and patriarchial resistance and subsequent attempts to hammer it into submission. The chapters on matriliny and the Bible are particularly compelling and well- supported as are the very foundations of Old and New Testament editing to support the patriarchial dogma which has prevailed thus far.

i can't help but notice which reviewers gave the book 1 star and which ones gave it 5... ;) whether it's been proven or disproven i have to say that the IDEAS are enthralling, and VERY well argued. i have to say in response to one of the reviewers that it's hard to swallow the assertion that free thinkers would be harmed in some way by this book: the work is, in and of itself, about the freedom of thought. as a college professor i am constantly reminding my students that history is written by the victors, and that anthropology is not the study of human development - look at the word - it's the study of the development of MAN. we all have our lenses, which refract our views of life experiences, and i think that this book is a testament to the notion that we really MUST reconsider what we think we know. that which is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt is often later found to err from reality. who knows what further investigations will yield? i, for one, was liberated by this book, and have used its theories as the basis of a novel (yes, fiction) i am writing. i would suggest this reading to anyone interested in gender studies, anthropology, archeology, sexual identity, and religious studies.

Although it is not without flaws, the book is a landmark.
The only thing better is Mary Daly's "Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism" (1978) which builds on Elizabeth Gould Davis's work.

Elizabeth Gould Davis' "The First Sex" was written in 1971 and attempted to argue that women are the natural leaders of society and that humanity is being destroyed by patriarchy. The book is written in a very logical manner starting with what Gould Davis describes as "matriarchal queendoms" and states that these were culturally advanced and ecologically highly sustainable.

She bases her arguments on the science of archaeology and anthropology as they developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She states that the patriarchal Christian and Jewish societies of the last five or six millennia have wanted to destroy remnants of this matriarchal culture because of their desire to suggest society had always been male-dominated, Moreover, Gould Davis constantly states that these religions and their gods and bloodthirsty and demanding sacrifices of animals in contrast to earlier goddesses who demanded only vegetables as sacrifices.

The goddess religion, she argues, was a female montheism with priestesses wearing robes like those of male priests today. She argued that matriarchal societies possessed a much more genuine democracy than do modern patriarchal societies because human rights took precedence over property rights and there was no rigid moral conformity as there is in most patriarchal societies.

Gould Davis spends the early part of her book on describing the "Golden Age" of mother-right, based on the idea of a pacifist humanity with a female deity. Before this, she states that all myth is built around the ideal of a "golden age", including that of the Fall in the Bible. Gould Davis sees the "fall" of mythology as relating to male gods taking over from the Great Goddess, man becoming carnivorous and mercy and justice being replaced with warlike vengeance. As stated above, she relies on archaeology to find evidence that there was no violence in these ancient matriarchal societies which she said were universal in the early days of humanity.

She then moves onto the patriarchal revolution, saying that patriarchy probably first evolved in barbaric societies that relied on nomadic herding in arid climates, but which, with the spread of the Semites, moved into more settled agricultural societies with the coming of the Jews. (However, she says that India was the first civilised country to shift to father-right). She then in a systematic way traces the decline in the status of women from the advent of Christianity, which she saw as producing a huge decline in scholarship and scientific knowledge.

Indeed she actually sees it as Christianity's job to submit women and repress their desire for power, and views the vast appeal of Catholicism today as spawning from the devotion to Mary rather than its patriarchal Trinity. As Marina Warner has said, this devotion to Mary is actually opposed to power for women because extreme feminisation (through a female deity) most likely according to contemporary psychology would make a culture have extremely rigid gender roles. Even men taking on the appearance of women is likely to be a preventitive device against masculinisation of women.

Her idea that Charistianity was unusually barabric and violent does not agree wiht the research of many other scholars, for although there were wars in the Middle Ages they were not unusually severe. Even the idea that people were driven away from Christian Europe by despotic clergy is uncertain.

However, despite the fact that Gould Davis has obviously done much research, her claims about continuing decline in the status of women since the nineteeth century. She does cite such philosophers as Rousseau very well, but she does not consider early feminists like Matilda Joslyn Gage or Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Moreover, recent discoveries in the field of archaeology have laid the gravest doubts concerning the existence of pacifist, matriachal societies in early humanity - Gould Davis may have not done a good job, for no reputable scholar today believes in the matriachates she describes. Even those suspicious of universal patriarchy do not accept matriarchies.

Nonetheless, an enthralling read that can show just how far (and how deep) feminists are able to go if they have the brains and talent.

If I could make everyone on the planet read one book, this would be it. Ms. Davis gives us a new slant on archeology, stripping away layer upon layer of gender bias to find our decidedly feminist roots.

Note that the reviews listed below which are critical are written by men. This is the truth they can't handle, and the herstory they've tried so hard to bury. Even if you don't agree with the book's content, looking at history from a new perspective can only enhance ones world view. I disagree that the information has been "disproven". Rather, the vehemence with which it is attacked tells me that Davis was on to something.

Absolutely essential for any woman's library.

In short, I'm in love with this book, and now consider it a must-read for any woman. I find it uplifting, inspiring, and informative. It's well-written from start to finish -- clear and compelling and smart. I know that some of the research she draws on has been de-bunked or criticized, but frankly, that doesn't diminish the experience of reading this book, at least not for me.

This book opened my eyes to a whole new world, one I had always felt existed but never knew anything about. I have sent this book to a couple of my close friends in hopes that they will be able to see our history.

This is a book that absolutely must be taken with a grain of salt the size of the Hope Diamond, but it should not be discounted entirely. Ms. Davis makes many bold assertions in this book. Some of them are perfectly reasonable, like her claim that many pre-Christian, pre-Judaic cultures were goddess-worshipping cultures, and archaeological evidence demonstrates that these cultures frequently had a very high level of civilization, thus demonstrating that patriarchal culture has no monopoly on civilization, or that women have been treated rather shabbily (to put it mildly) by the Christo-Judean society of the last 3000 years; many are plausible, such as the assertion that some (many? most?) such cultures were matriarchies just as chauvinistic as later culture was in reverse.

Others are more dubious, such as the assertion that the Biblical story of Cain and Abel is an attempt by a newly-fledged masculinist society to tell of the conflict between the old matriarchal civilization, which was agricultural (Cain, the elder brother, being the raiser of fruits and vegetables) and the newer, nomadic, meat-eating culture (Abel, the younger brother, being the shepherd), with Cain being cast in the role of the villain. Sounds plausible enough, until you start to wonder why a new culture would claim to have been symbolically "killed" by the old one.

Then there are the highly dubious claims (in the old matrilineal societies, violence, even to animals, was unheard of) and the outright speculative (legends of the lost city of Atlantis are true, it was the site of the original prehistoric civilization that all other later civilizations, from Sumer down to Ur, Greece, and Egypt all devolved) and worst, the internally contradictory (on back-to-back pages, she makes the interestingly matched claims that A)women in some South-Pacific Island cultures, still relatively untouched by the masculinist modern society, still practice the age-old ritual of surgically breaking the hymens of their young girls before they reach puberty, thus avoiding an unpleasant first sexual experience, and B) that hymens are a recent evolutionary development, having only evolved since patriarchal culture began selecting for them -- itself an assertion in the "highly dubious" category, but absolutely incompatible with the previous one. Then there is her continuing difficulty in deciding whether to claim that matriarchal societies were peaceful and nonviolent, or that women leaders could, too, be great warrior-queens, fully the equal of any male warrior.

Then there are the downright offensive bald-faced assertions, such as the statement casually made that all men hate all women.

The problem is, these assertions are all made with identical (read absolute) confidence, spoken as unquestionable truth. Thus it is difficult to tell where the author's evaluation of evidence is accurate, where it is pure speculation, and where it is simply wrong. The temptation, after reading a couple of her more outreageous statements, is to simply assume that everything she says is wrong, and that does a disservice to her legitimate arguments. I will say that the book improved markedly with the beginning of Part III, "Pre-Christian Women in the Celto-Ionian World". Her denunciations of the treatment of women in Christian culture from the time of Constantine rang true, and were very persuasive. Also, it helps to remember that this book was written in 1971, when women's treatment in our own society was only beginning to improve beyond the appalling stage.

I strongly recommend avoiding this book for anyone who is uncertain of their ability to sift through the dubious and the silly without being unfairly influenced against the reasonable; surely, there must be more reasonable, well-written books that discuss her more plausible concepts. Unless, of course, you're a good old-fashioned chauvinist looking for cheap ammo with which to discredit any feminist argument by virtue of guilt by association. I must admit, in that case, this book is a must-read.

Elizabeth Gould Davis' book THE FIRST SEX is the author's assertion that prehistory was matriarchal and that women are physical, mentally, and morally superior to men. Her aim is already questionable, for who would want to say one half of the human race is superior to the other, and her manner of carrying out the argument is ineffective.

The problems with the book are manifold, and the difficulty in describing them all lies in where to even start. For one, Davis does not appear to have been qualified to write a book based on archeological and historical data, for being a common librarian she had no specialized training in the subjects. With no proficiency with, for example, Latin she has to interpret ancient sources by translations, and in one bizarre passage suggests that only women translators are capable of producing reliable results. While later saying that Christianity was made up entirely, she takes everything written in other ancient sources as dry fact insisting, for example, that the Amazons existed while most experts would now hold that they were a mere fanciful myth.

Within the field of biology, her limited knowledge of the field and the outdatedness of her sources results in tired assertions such as that all children regardless of gender begin at conception as female, which modern science has shown to be a misconception based on visual appearance when there is always a clear genetic distinction.

Davis makes a number of curious sidetracks into areas for which she simply has a personal distaste, even if they have no relation to her thesis. Christianity and Judaism particularly suffer. Her feelings for Judaism appalingly approach anti-semitism, with Jews being portrayed as distasteful and shifty barbarians whose ideas, introduced to the civilized (i.e. matriachal) world resulted in its downfall. Then with Christianity she does what she can to belittle it, calling it "the barbarous religion" and reducing all the sundry denominations of the faith into one single doctrine of evil. At times, this results in obvious contradictions, as when she writes that Christians made up stories of persecution and were really treated well in Rome, and then a mere couple of pages later notes that several Roman emperors persecuted Christians to a great degree.

Finally, Davis drops a long expected bombshell in her afterword by proclaiming that we are now "on the threshold of the new Age of Aquarius", reducing what wasn't even a passable academic work to mere new-age claptrap.

THE FIRST SEX, in the three decades since its appearance, has been extensively debunked, and thankfully contemporary readers are more likely to approach it through first hearing that it is nonsense. Cynthia Eller's THE MYTH OF MATRIARCHAL PREHISTORY is the most detailed of these critical examinations and essential reading if you intend on perusing Davis' book. Eller's book is admirable in that it shows how these crank ideas, by basing hopes upon an imaginary past, are actually harming the possibility of creating a just and equal society in the future.

Davis' is a book of already objectionable premise made terrible by its spiteful tone and disregard for academic standards, and the ease by which it has been debunked. I really cannot recommend THE FIRST SEX; even for those looking for opposing voices in anthropological study there are better, more trustworthy works.

Now I know where Maureen Dowd gets her boring and rather idiotic rants that chic pseudo-intellectuals find so amusing while the "inbred" (in other words, dissenting free thinkers who actually do not just give blind praise to someone because of their gender,race, religion, ethnicity, etc.) hicks think of a reason why we wasted our time of this drivel.

This crap has been disproven by many professional men and women time and time again. It is understandable that some women are angry at how they have been treated. However, some of them are becoming what they hate. And it will destroy them in the end.

This book is garbage, pure and simple. It is this kind of stuff that makes people who can think for themselves realize this author and Dowd merely undermine their efforts instead of aiding them. Good job, dingbats.

Anyone find this rather scathing? Good, they can dish it, they should be able to dine on it.