The War Against Women

By Hilary Mantel
New York Review of Books

From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women, Volume I: Origins
by Marilyn French, with a foreword by Margaret Atwood
Feminist Press, 352 pp., $19.95 (paper)

From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women, Volume II: The Masculine Mystique
by Marilyn French, with a foreword by Margaret Atwood
Feminist Press, 477 pp., $19.95 (paper)

From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women, Volume III: Infernos and Paradises, the Triumph of Capitalism in the 19th Century
by Marilyn French, with a foreword by Margaret Atwood
Feminist Press, 385 pp., $19.95 (paper)

From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women, Volume IV: Revolutions and the Struggles for Justice in the 20th Century
by Marilyn French, with a foreword by Margaret Atwood
Feminist Press, 608 pp., $19.95 (paper)

There was once a woman who never smiled. Her name was Bao Si and she was a concubine to a king of the Zhou dynasty, which flourished in China after 1000 BCE. The king wanted so much to see her smile that he scoured the kingdom for entertainers and performing animals; not a flicker of amusement crossed her face. Then one day a bonfire was ignited, a signal of emergency. Troops poured into the capital in battle array, only to be stopped short and told that the fire had been lit by accident. At this Bao Si smiled; in fact, she began to laugh. Keen to repeat his success, the king had bonfires lit over and over again. His troops stopped paying attention to the signals; so when the invaders came, the king was driven out, and the dynasty was at an end.

It's a story emblematic of so much else in Marilyn French's vast four-volume history of women. A twitch of a woman's lip causes the fall of a nation. On the one hand she is sickeningly, destructively powerful. One the other hand she is a chattel, a beast, a commodity, she and her sisters are "human incubators." In the Assyrian empire, which flourished from 1300 BCE, she could be impaled for aborting the child she is carrying. For lesser offenses she could be beaten or disfigured behind closed doors, but if her master wanted to mutilate her permanently—cut off her ears or nose, or tear out her breasts—he had to do it in public; though whether for the sake of example or for the general enjoyment, French does not say. She could be punished at various times and places for going veiled, or not going veiled. She could be sold, pawned, or prostituted.

(More here.)