She Who Controls the Past

For decades, the left has directed efforts to reinterpreting and presenting the past in ways that bring it into line with various grand ideological visions.

A woman holds a sign reading "Feminism = Equality" as she takes part in a nation-wide women's strike for wage parity outside the federal palace in the Swiss capital Bern on June 14, 2019. Stefan Wermuth/AFP/Getty Images

Commentary

“He who controls the past, controls the future,” George Orwell wrote in “1984.”

Although Orwell had the totalitarian regimes of the mid-20th century in mind when he wrote his most famous book, the idea that the past should be molded to fit the designs of power in the present is a very old one indeed.

It goes back at least as far as Plato’s “Republic,” written in about 330 B.C. In the perfect republic described by Plato’s Socrates, a myth about the origins of society, a “Noble Lie,” explains the place of every individual member within its structure, ensuring harmony for all. The Noble Lie is perhaps the most notorious philosophical expression of the maxim, “The ends justify the means.” For the sake of a few untruths, the best of all possible worlds can become reality.

Friedrich Nietzsche developed a not dissimilar idea in one of his “Untimely Meditations,” in the early 1870s. He put forward the idea that different forms of history—quite literally, different ways of telling the truth about the past—make possible different forms of life.

Today’s leftists also have their own idea of history. In 2023, there’s no group that better understands the need to control the past in order to control the future than the left. For decades, the left has directed massive efforts, especially within the academy but also through the culture industry, to reinterpreting and presenting the past in ways that bring it into line with various grand ideological visions. Capitalist class society, systemic racism, decolonization, the patriarchy—these fundamental concepts of modern leftism are all buttressed by accounts of the past that, at one time, were radically different from those of mainstream historians.

Although leftists have been wildly successful in gaining acceptance for their new histories, there’s still much to be done. The process of historical reclamation continues. We can see it at work in a new study published in the journal American Anthropologist. The study purports to show that, in man’s early days as a hunter-gatherer, hunting wasn’t, in fact, a male-dominated enterprise as we’ve been led to believe. Women were just as involved as men, and their contribution to sustaining the group with nutrient-dense animal food was just as valuable.

Examining the Evidence

Prehistory is no less important to the left than more recent history. Indeed, the Marxist tradition has its entire foundations built on a theory of prehistoric gender relations. This theory, developed most thoroughly in Friedrich Engels’s 1884 work “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,” has it that the first type of society, in which class didn’t exist, was a “primitive matriarchy,” where women were basically in control of society and mating was “promiscuous.” The arrival of the first class society was also the arrival of the patriarchy, making women the property of men for the first time in history. The unspoken assumption, left to be developed by future thinkers, was that the Marxist overthrow of class society would also be a restoration of primitive matriarchy.

There’s only one problem with this theory: There’s no evidence for it. Not a shred. Nobody has ever discovered a truly matriarchal society or any credible indications that one existed, although there are, of course, societies where women have fared better and had more power than others.

In the case of the new study in American Anthropologist, the ideological purpose is obvious: to prove physical equality between the sexes and that any attempt to deny such equality is bigotry—a “social construct,” plain and simple. These contentions are vital to the ongoing project of seeking radical equality for women and throwing off the last shackles of the patriarchy, which, we’re told, has held women down since the dawn of time and prevented them from fulfilling their true potential.

The study is based on all sorts of evidence that’s no less flimsy than the case for primitive matriarchy. I won’t go through it all, but I'll talk about a couple of notable instances.

Equalizing Strength

Much is made about a recent study that suggests that the invention of the atlatl, a handheld tool to launch spears, would have allowed women to use spears with the same power as men. It’s beyond contention that men and women differ physiologically, for instance in the hips and shoulder joints, in ways that make men far more powerful throwers of objects ranging from balls and grenades to javelins and spears. The atlatl (spear-thrower), or so the new theory goes, equalizes these physiological differences, allowing women to hunt as successfully as men. And if they could do that, then why wouldn’t they have done so?

There are a number of difficulties with this theory. First of all, it’s unclear how widespread the atlatl actually was. There’s no historical evidence for the use of atlatls in Africa, and there are present-day hunter-gatherers around the world who don’t use them. The atlatl appears to be a relatively recent creation. The first evidence is from 30,000 years ago, but modern humans have been around for much longer. Then again, atlatls are often made of perishable wood, so it’s not a surprise that more examples haven’t survived.

We also don’t have any actual data about hunting with atlatls by primitive men and women. What we do have are data from a small-scale experiment conducted by the authors of the paper, and those data are useless, for reasons I’ll now discuss. The experiment involved 108 amateur participants who threw spears and then used an atlatl to launch them. The velocities of the throws and launches were measured and compared. The data are supposed to provide a clear gender-based comparison of throwing and launching power.

Instead of being grouped into male and female, the participants were grouped into three categories: “male,” “female,” and “not reported.” In an experiment that’s specifically designed to test the differences in physical ability between men and women, it seems more than a little odd to have a substantial “neither” category (apparently almost 10 percent of the sample). Dig a little deeper into the methodology and it turns out that the participants were able to self-designate their own gender, meaning that there may have been biological men who chose to class themselves as women and biological women who chose to class themselves as men. Since the authors say nothing about whether or not this was actually the case, it’s best to assume it was and simply discard the results altogether. This isn’t a valid comparison of male and female.

The atlatl study also says nothing about the accuracy of the throws, undoubtedly as important a quality as sheer power when hunting prey. Again, the pre-existing data provide overwhelming evidence of gender-based differences. It’s well documented that, as early as 3 years of age, boys in general throw faster, further, and more accurately than girls. Although this is almost certainly due to the physiological differences mentioned earlier, it may also be due to differences in cognition and perception as well.

Endurance Advantage

Another particularly egregious claim in the American Anthropologist paper is that women must have participated in hunting because the hormone estrogen helps women “excel in endurance activities, like running,” whereas men’s excellences lie in “speed and power,” which are governed by testosterone. This is patent nonsense. Yes, it’s true that estrogen does have important functions in fat metabolism, especially as it pertains to prolonged exercise, and yes, women have higher estrogen than men, but all the world’s best endurance athletes are men. To say that women “excel” at endurance over men is to ignore the minutely documented evidence—down to the millisecond—of a century of professional athletic competition.

In any case, even if women had an innate advantage in endurance running, prehistoric hunters probably weren’t running marathons or half-marathons or even a 10k regularly. If we look at how latter-day hunter-gatherers hunt, they mix walking with shorter, more intense bouts of running and sprinting, especially the latter in the final stages of an attempted kill. There’s at least one documented case of hunter-gatherers who don’t even run at all, but simply walk down their prey over long distances.

All in all, it looks like the prevailing consensus about men’s and women’s roles in hunting in prehistoric times, which mirrors the anthropological consensus, should remain. Men do the hunting, women do the gathering; although in some cases, such as that of the Guayaki Indians of the Amazon, as documented by Pierre Clastres, men sometimes do both.

Women Warriors

None of this is intended to deny women their place or their dignity in the great story of mankind’s historical struggle. Feminist critics of history as a male-dominated tradition are right: The majority of history has been written by men, with particular attention to men’s concerns, and women’s vital roles have often been overlooked. Women resent this—understandably.

The women of the past have surprised and confounded our expectations, and they'll continue to. In his “Histories,” the ancient Greek historian Herodotus described fearsome “Amazon” warriors among the Scythian nomads of the Black Sea steppe. Herodotus also described how a Scythian tribe under the leadership of Queen Tomyris defeated the Persians. After the battle, she plunged the severed head of the Persian emperor into a bag full of blood, proclaiming, “There, drink your fill!”

Modern historians believed that these stories of horse-riding warrior-women were myths, but new archaeological discoveries suggest that they were anything but. In 2017, for example, Armenian researchers discovered the remains of a Scythian woman who had died from battle injuries, with an arrowhead buried in her leg. The evidence of her bone and muscle structure showed that she was definitely a horse rider. Then, in 2019, an even more stunning discovery: a tomb containing four female warriors was unearthed in western Russia. They were buried with a large cache of arrowheads, spears, and horse-riding equipment.

There is, nevertheless, a fundamental difference between paying careful attention to the evidence and allowing it to lead you to potentially new conclusions, and the radical feminist insistence that men and women must be made equal and that any evidence to the contrary from the past must be distorted, suppressed, or even destroyed.

Harmful Effects

This warping, verging on fabrication, of history has dangerous effects. For one thing, it helps to put women in actual positions of serious danger—such as on the modern battlefield.

The now largely unsuccessful attempt to keep women out of frontline combat roles didn’t emerge from some patriarchal desire to confine women to the kitchen where they supposedly belong but out of a genuine concern to ensure optimal warfighting capability and prevent unnecessary suffering and loss of life.

After the Department of Defense ordered all branches of the U.S. military to open combat roles to women in 2013, the U.S. Marine Corps did extensive research into male and female fighting capability. In a simulated battle scenario that lasted months, male and female Marines fought side-by-side. In almost every single area, the men significantly outperformed the women: They were faster in tactical movement, were better shots, overcame obstacles, and evacuated casualties more efficiently.

Off the battlefield, the insistence on radical equality is having paradoxical effects that are just as dangerous for women, if not more so. By pushing to minimize the differences between the genders and effectively making gender a “social construct” and therefore a matter of personal choice, the radical feminist agenda is largely responsible for the growth and legitimacy of the even more radical transgender movement. Women’s spaces are now invaded by biological men—from toilets and changing rooms to college sororities and women’s sports—and the hard-won rights and recognition women have fought for over the past hundred years are suddenly at risk of disappearing.

It would be a painful irony if, in fighting to protect, preserve, and celebrate women as women, feminists actually ended up making it impossible to define what a woman is. What an ignominious end that would be. Maybe now would be a good time to reacquaint ourselves with our differences and be thankful they exist.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.