The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to 1870.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew

Here is a fascinating and liberating account of how women came to feminist consciousness over the last 2,500 years. It was not easy or straightforward, according to Gerda Lerner. Instead, the efforts of individual women to recognize the injustice of patriarchy and to organize against it foundered repeatedly as women were isolated from each other and kept in the historical dark.

"Women were denied knowledge of their history, and thus each woman had to argue as though no woman before her had ever thought or written. Women had to use their energy to reinvent the wheel, over and over again, generation after generation."

Lerner cleared the way for this study with her 1986 pathbreaking work, The Creation of Patriarchy, which argues that patriarchy, far from being a natural or eternal condition, was a historical construct that came into being "over a period of nearly 2,500 years, from approximately 3100 B.C. to 600 B.C.," when societies moved from hunting-gathering to agrarian systems.

To justify itself, the patriarchal system propagated a set of sexist ideas that relegated women to inferior status. These "metaphors of gender" insisted that men were by nature more rational than women. It was therefore up to men to "explain and order the world," while women were left to "sustain daily life and the continuity of the species."

This, then, is Lerner's starting point: How did women overcome these patriarchal metaphors, break out of "the cage of restraints," and assert their equality?

The first hurdle was asserting the mere right to express themselves intellectually. "Each thinking woman had to spend inordinate amounts of time and energy apologizing for the very fact of her thinking," Lerner laments.

Throughout history, women asserted this right, or, as Lerner puts it, sought "authorization," by several means. Female mystics claimed divine inspiration; mothers grounded their right to think on their responsibility for educating the young; women reinterpreted religious texts to show their intellectual legitimacy in what Lerner describes as "one thousand years of feminist Bible criticism"; women of great talent and creativity pointed to their genius as justification in itself.

One of the great virtues of Lerner's book is her archeology: She discovers hundreds of courageous women battling throughout the last thousand years for the right to be treated as equals. These little profiles not only buttress Lerner's argument, but they are inspiring in themselves.

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