Contributor: Paul Atherton

Bio Notes: Television Producer and owner of Independent Production Company Simple (tv) Productions Limited, specializing in social commentary documentaries. Visit http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478511/ for examples of his work.

Author: Rosalind Miles

Work: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women’s History of the World

A great friend of mine, Rosalind Miles, is an author and on our first meeting at the Reform Club (she’s one of the first women to be allowed in) she gifted me one of her books.

Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World is a feminist polemic that retells History ensuring women get their rightful place in it.

In a humorous evaluation of how women have lost their powers of authority through the centuries she examines religion and its impact on how they are perceived in it:

‘Virginity came in with a vengeance as every budding patriarch suddenly realized his divine right to a vacuum-sealed, factory-fresh vagina with built-in hymenal gift-wrapping and purity guarantee.’

This book inspired me to make a seismic shift in how I engaged with the world. I experience life without the confines of normal behaviour—not wishing to have a marital style relationship I know exists surrounded by and engaging with many people whom I love deeply.

I have therefore in one way become Rosalind's Monster as her whole life is now dedicated to her new boyfriend.

From Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World

…The Koran makes it clear that the only virtuous woman was a mother: ‘When a woman conceives by her husband, she is called in Paradise a martyr, and her labour in child-bed and her care of her children protect her from the hell-fire.’ Woman, once sacred for her mysterious power of life, is now reduced to nothing more than an obliging uterus; once the Mother of us all, she is now a mere container; and the Great Goddess, ‘She of the Thousand Lovers,’ is forced to present an obliging orifice to every conscienceless cock.

Yet by a bizarre and limiting paradox, the emphasis on women's duty of
procreation carries no connotations of female sexuality. As women were denied any full part in the process of reproduction, so they were likewise denied any pleasure of participation in the act. In fact, the less they knew about sex, the better, decreed their fathers and keepers; and thus in another reversal of the old mother-centred ways of thought, the highest value shifted from adult womanhood and the pride of fecundity to maiden ignorance. Now the child-bride, the unspoiled female, not-yet-woman, became the finest type; and a small film of atavistic membrane the hymen, casually deposited by evolution in the recess of every woman's body, was discovered to be her prize possession. Virginity came in with a vengeance as every budding patriarch suddenly realised his divine right to a vacuum-sealed, factory-fresh vagina with built-in hymeneal gift-wrapping and purity guarantee.

So powerful was this fetish of virginity that a new ideal gathered momentum, that of preserving it in perpetuity. One early Christian father, St Jerome, was active in persuading fathers to dedicated their daughters to nunneries at birth, while another, St Martin of Tours, constantly compared the ‘pure ungrazed field of virginity’ to ‘the field of marriage torn up by the pigs and cattle of fornication’. As this shows, the Christian church had from its origins a particular problem with women's sexuality: ‘to embrace a woman,’ wrote Odo of Cluny in the twelfth century, ‘is to embrace a sack of manure’. The ‘sack of manure’ metaphor for women's bodies was an obsession with early Christians: ‘If a woman's bowels were cut open,’ pronounced the monk Roger de Caen, ‘you would see what filth is covered by her white skin. If a fine crimson cloth covered a pile of foul dung, would anyone be foolish enough to love the dung because of it?’

(Quoted from Rosalind Miles, The Woman's History of the World. London: Michael
Joseph, 1988. pp. 71-72. Permission to publish not yet granted.)