An integral part of the anti-civilization perspective is a strong critique of patriarchy.
Literally, patriarchy means "rule of men." Patriarchy means the domination of males and the valuing of societally-designated "male attributes"/the masculine principle in all spheres of life (personal, social, political), as well as the disempowerment of females and the devaluation of societally-designated "female attributes"/the feminine principle in all spheres of life. In more concrete terms, what this means is that in patriarchal societies, males are the ones in positions of power, the decision-makers, and females are excluded from being able to exert any or much direct influence or control over their own lives. It also means that who you "should" be is rigidly defined by your sex; in example, males have been stereotypically conditioned within this society to be more tough, strong, unemotional, and aggressive, whereas females have been conditioned to be more weak, yielding, emotional, nurturing, submissive. We recognize these imposed sex roles to be unhealthy for everyone--when we are limited to expressing only a small range of the vast range of human qualities, we are unable to be whole, healthy people. We interact with each other in these pre-scripted ways, as caricatures of ourselves, rather than authentically expressing whatever may really be inside of us regardless of the dictates of these imposed roles. Patriarchal conditioning dictates all our interactions; with ourselves, our sexuality, our relationships to each other, and our relationship to Nature. It severely limits the spectrum of possible experience.
In this patriarchal society, the Earth has been defined as feminine and all things considered feminine have been designated inherently inferior--and so the Earth has therefore been a prime victim of patriarchy, subject to the culturally imposed fear that Nature and the elemental power of the female are potentially chaotic and engulfing unless contained by the will of the cultural fathers. Countless ramifications follow from the notion of "the masculine" being associated with rationality, spirit, culture, autonomy, assertiveness, and the public sphere, and "the feminine" being associated with emotion, body, nature, connectedness, receptivity, and the private sphere. The reductionism of this orientation is accompanied by several assumptions that are essential to patriarchy: that the cluster of attributes associated with the masculine is superior to that associated with the feminine; that the latter exists in service to the former; that the relationship between the two is inherently antagonistic; and that a logic of domination over nature and the female should prevail among (male) humans in the "superior" configuration. The construction of masculinity that follows from all these assumptions hence is a reactive and unstable posturing to appear "not-nature" and "not-female."
As anarchists we are opposed to the domination of any person or group of people over another, and by extension we are opposed to the domination of any being or group of beings over another, as such domination constitutes hierarchy. We believe in the right of all beings to collective self-determination; the disempowerment of women under patriarchy constitues a usurpation of this right. We are not seeking equal opportunities in a flawed system; we do not want more CEOs, be they women or not. We don't want a bigger piece of their pie, metaphorically speaking; we want to create and recreate our own "pie"--and to choose whether or not pie is even what we want. We look at this fundamental split (bigger piece of the pie versus a whole different pie altogether) as the difference between wanting reform--a higher or larger place in the system they have defined--or wanting revolution. Liberation is not about assimilation or "equal opportunities" to do the same fucked-up things men currently have the privilege to do; it is about freedom for all beings. (As Gloria Steinem once said, "Shit divided equally is always better than shit divided unequally,...but it's still shit".)
(This section draws on excerpts from Chellis Glendinning's excellent book, My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery From Western Civilization, slightly modified.)
A practice common to nature-based cultures is a relatively stable population. In today's world the human population is spinning out of control, and along with this explosion of humanity, the capacity of our biosphere to sustain life is being stressed to the breaking point. As the current global population approaches 7 billion, people everywhere around the world are starving--in "underdeveloped" areas like Bangladesh and Nicaragua, in "developing" nations like India and China, in industrial countries like the republics of the former Soviet Union, and on the streets of overdeveloped cities like New York and Los Angeles. Projections from the United Nations Fund for Population Activities estimate that the total human population will grow, before leveling off, to an unfathomable 16 billion.
According to physicist Vandana Shiva of India, rapid population growth is typical not of secure, sustainable societies, but of "displacement, dispossession, alienation of people from their survival base, and inequality of women." The transition from nomadic foraging to agricultural civilizations constitutes the original "displacement, disposession, alienation of people from their survival base, and inequality of women." Some ten thousand years ago, when all human societies on the Earth were nature-based, global population was stabilized at 5 million people. According to archaeologist Fekri Hassan, yearly population growth in those times ranged from .01 to .005 percent, while today's world population is exploding with an additional 100 million each year. The ability to maintain numerical stability exists in human history only in nature- based cultures. Methods of family planning built into hunter-gatherer life worked successfully for a million years, allowing the human population to grow gradually but not to overrun its capacity to live sustainably. This success is attributable to fertility-control factors that evolved when people lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers--and that disintegrated when civilization emerged or, for many people around the world, was introduced by force.
One of these factors is long-term breast-feeding. Foraging women carry their children on gathring treks, into rivers, through forests, sitting around the fire, and they feed them on demand for the first three or four years of their young lives. This practice offers yet another facet of the elliptical whole of the natural world: it not only provides the nurturance necessary for the child's physical and psychological development, but can trigger the secretion of a pituitary hormone that suppresses the mother's menstrual cycle. As Lee puts it, the child's frequent stimulation of the breast is "rather like carrying your contraceptive on your hip."
Other contributing factors to low birthrates among nature-based women include a noticeably late onset of menstruation, as well as extended periods when the blood cycle simply disappears. Contemporary researchers attribute these physiological conditions, in part, to the high-protein diets and lean bodies of hunter-gatherer women and, in part, to the strenuous demands of walking long distances while carrying equipment, mounds of plant food, and children--physical conditions that are reproduced among today's female athletes who also report fewer periods and irregular cycles. The upshot of all these factors is that family size is small, the pressures we typically associate with child-rearing are more relaxed, and population remains low--because for every woman of reproductive age, a new child arrives but once every five, six, or seven years.
The most obvious change that took place during the transition to a livelihood based on planting was the fact that, in order to tend the plots of land, people eventually had to settle in one place all year round. For the first time in all of history, people began to build substantial housing and storage structures and to accumulate more possessions than they could carry on their backs. According to many commentators who have researched the ramifications of this transition, seeds of grain were not the only things planted; the seeds of private property and class stratification were also sown.
The British anthropologist Margaret Ehrenberg describes this sowing in her book Women in Prehistory. "The development of agriculture brought with it a large increase...in the range of material possessions such as farming and food-preparation tools and storage vessels," she writes. "On the one hand, this may be seen as the spur to the development of craft specialization, as some individuals concentrated on the production of one particular item, which they would exchange for other products or services...Increasingly some people might have found that they could acquire enough food and other necessities by producing only one specialized article...These material posessions, as well as the domesticated animals themselves, would have constituted considerable wealth, which could be accumulated and handed on from one generation to the next...As one family accumulated more cattle, or acquired better ploughs, or were able to exchange more goods because of their specialized craft skills, the gap between their wealth and that of their neighbors would increase progressively...A distinction between rich and poor, which is insignificant in forager societies, develops progressively as wealth is passed on from generation to generation within some families, while others are never able to achieve surpluses...The wealthy become powerful by lending to poorer families in return for services, such as farm labor, or support in combat against other groups. By these means the rich are able to become more wealthy, while the poor become indebted to other families, and have to produce more and more, or spend time on tasks other than directly for their own subsistence. So the vicious circle develops."
As was mentioned earlier, the size of the nature-based band had been maintained by fertility- control factors built into life in the wilds. The initiation of a livelihood based on conscious planting began to disrupt these factors--and women began to have more babies than ever before. According to archaeological evidence, the spread of sedentary communities in the Near East brought with it a 700 percent population increase, and as anthropologist David O. Henry sees it, sedentism itself is what caused this explosion.
To begin, the kind of work required of women for the preparation, maintenance, and harvesting of cultivated land was more demanding and mechanistic than the fluid, integrated work of the gatherer. As a result, carrying a child on one's hip became truly burdensome, and since life was now lived in one place, children could easily be contained within pens or special rooms built for this very purpose. As time passed, women also discontinued the lengthy periods of breast-feeding that had previously lasted for the first three or four years of their babies' lives because the demands of planting began to overwhelm their time and attention; the contraceptive-on-your-hip was eventually lost, and postpartum ovulation returned sooner than it ever had before.
Other fertility-control factors were also lost with the advance of organized planning. The high-protein diet of the hunter-gatherer gave way to a high-carbohydrate diet whose centerpiece was the now-available domesticated grains. Women became less lean, storing more fat on their bodies and so ovulating with more regularity. Soft-grain cereal provided an obvious baby-food substitute for mothers' milk, contributing to the move to briefer periods of breast-feeding and earlier postpartum ovulation. The new stationary lifestyle also encouraged women to become less active than they had been, a change that also contributed to the new regularity of ovulation. What resulted from this gestalt of personal and social changes were more babies born more often, perhaps as often as one each year for every woman of childbearing age; the bands of hunter-gatherers with their small families were, through time, expanding into the large farming family with eight to ten children. To the certain surprise and probable dismay of everyone, the population explosion, however humble its beginnings, was on.
Work was also becoming more tedious and stressful. As time passed, everyone had to work harder and longer to maintain a system of food production whose goal was to serve an ever-growing community constantly demanding ever more food. Life was changing from a low-key effort with a workweek of maybe fifteen or twenty hours to a growing concern of combined planting, foraging, hunting, and fishing that eventually, because of inherent pressures, gave way to a complex mechanistic operation whose maintenance threatened to become a full-time occupation for everyone. The rat race was on.
So was economic expansionism. Women who had previously spent their days trekking over the countryside, climbing trees, and digging up wild yams with a stick were increasingly staying in one place and using that stick to plant seeds. In the first generations of the change, they foraged for food as well as cared for a garden at the campsite. As generations passed, though, the surrounding land, now picked over as never before, came to yield less. Tied to their plots of land for survival, they could no longer break camp and so, returning again and again to the same forests and meadows for planting, neolithic peoples became the first perpetrators of overuse. Propelled as well by the needs of an increasing population, they began to expand the size of those original gardens. The growth economy was born.
So were resource wars, colonization, and institutionalized defense, posits anthropologist Robert Carneiro, particularly in fertile planting areas locked in by deserts, ocean, or mountains. Since early farming peoples could not solve overpopulation and overuse by moving, they often attempted agricultural intensification, building terraces and irrigation canals and domesticating more plants. But ultimately such measures did not keep pace with the growing needs for food--and so neolithic peoples turned to warfare, attacking the weakest adjacent village and expropriating its land, harvests, and population.
Perhaps saddest of all the effects caused by domestication concerns women and men: their identities, roles, and relationships became tragically distorted. This perversion unfolded in both farming and pastoral societies as men took over responsibility for all food production while women lost the ability to contribute directly to survival.
Among agriculturalists, the change hinged on the role of animals. Sheep domestication emerged some ten thousand years ago in the Jordan Valley. Domesticated goats and sheep appeared throughout southwest Asia and southern Europe about eight thousand years ago, while domesticated cattle were being herded in Turkey by 5800 B.C. The job of capturing the herds naturally fell to the still-active hunters. At first, the herds were kept for their meat. It has been proposed that somewhere along the line, someone realized that animals could be harnessed to plow the fields, which were growing too unwieldy for the women to tend. Since this act brought the production of animal and plant foods into a single domain (and because women were simultaneously becoming unduly preoccupied with child rearing), men took over the lion's share of responsibility for the production of both plant and animal foods.
The effort to produce food, previously shared by both sexes, now became solely "a man's world." The men, who had been the hunters, now became breadwinners as well, responsible for all food production--not ennobled by their new dual roles, but rather overburdened as they struggled to meet the overwhelming demands placed upon them.
Eco-feminist Adele Getty proposes another development that had profound implications for the male psyche. In captivity, she writes, male animals proved to be too wild and uncontrollable; the use of the word break to describe the domestication process is revealing. To answer the problems of this unforseen predicament, the men sliced of the animals' testicles. In their primal role as hunters, though, men had always revered, communicated with, and identified with the animals they were hunting. As Shepard puts it, the "animals were seen as belonging to their own sacred domain." The brutal act of castration had to have a dramatic impact on the male psyche. The reverberations of this impact are visible even today in Freud's castration anxiety and are unconsciously reenacted again and again, as traumatic themes so often are, in the religiomedical procedure of the circumcision, in rape, in sadomasochistic acts, and in sexual violence.
We know less about the development of male-dominated pastoralism because pastoralists left behind little archaeological evidence. We do know that pastoralism came into existence in the same general period as early farming, evolving not in fertile lands, where herding intertwined with sedentary cultivation--but in less productive terrain like the deserts of Egypt and the steppes of western Asia, where people relied more heavily on animals for food. One thing about these societies is certain: like their agricultural brothers, pastoral men took control of food production by breaking the animals, and in so doing they traumatized themselves.
Meanwhile, women maintained relative status and control as long as they were involved in planting, but as soon as men took over food production, they lost both. As we know, the sedentism of agriculture caused women to have more babies. This development was stressful in itself, putting great demands on their time and probably contributing to their departure from food production into the "secondary" domestic role. In their new position, women began to do work only indirectly connected to survival activity, such as cooking, making household items, and producing future generations of farm laborers (preferably boys, because male work more directly served survival and was therefore considered more valuable). Women in pastoral societies also lost status and control, only to become "ornaments" and status symbols for their husbands and fathers.
The tragedy is painfully clear: for over 99 percent of human existence, women's role had been absolutely vital for community survival. Now what women did was becoming "women's work," and in this lesser role, they were coming to be economically dependent, incapable of self- sufficiency--and vulnerable as the perfect targets for the mounting rage and terror men were feeling.
We see the process of becoming informed about how to take care of your own body in natural ways as an important and empowering one. Knowledge of our bodies allows us to have a greater understanding and appreciation of them, and, by extension, to have a greater understanding and appreciation of our connection to Nature. It also allows us to make informed choices-- freeing us from blind reliance on specialists & experts, on corporate products, and on the allopathic medical model (which has been largely formulated & implemented by men, based on human males as the "standard model") and putting the power to ensure our own well-being back in our hands. It gives us the option to rely on more holistic, natural/Earth-based, herbal remedies which have been proven safe and effective for millenia. In that spirit, we present these links:
Sister Zeus--information on natural fertility awareness methods (i.e. understanding and charting your cycle), herbal contraceptives & emmenagogues & abortifacients, and general herbal remedies, as well as natural alternatives for "catching the blood." Very comprehensive--an excellent resource.
The Bloodsisters Project-- information on the health, environmental and social impacts of conventional menstrual products, as well as their alternatives, and resources for further exploration on these topics. They publish the highly recommended zine "Hot Pantz: Do It Yourself Gynecology--Herbal Remedies" (by Isabelle Gauthier).
S.P.O.T. is a really good site primarily about the dangers of corporate tampons.
Red Spot is another really good site about radical menstrual health and politics.
Glad Rags is a woman-owned and women-run company that sells reusable cotton menstrual pads (which you can also make yourself, by the way) as well as the Keeper (a washable reusable natural gum rubber cup that you wear internally to catch the blood--it lasts 10 years or more), sea sponges, and organic cotton tampons.
Jade and Pearl also sell sea sponges for menstrual use.
Horizon Herbs are the only source for Queen Anne's Lace seeds that we know of. They are a small family-run grower and distributor of certified organic and wildcrafted plants and seeds, including some that are heirlooms and some that are very rare or near extinction, and organic & wildcrafted tinctures.
Mountain Rose Herbs distributes quality organic and wildcrafted bulk herbs, tinctures, essential oils, natural body care products, and bulk ingredients for making your own body care products. They purchase only from fair- trade growers. You can get emmenagogic and abortifacient herbs through them (these are sometimes hard to find locally).
Museum of Menstruation--information on the herstory of menstruation through the ages, its sociological and anthropological aspects (as well as some of its medical/scientific ones), menstruation-related humor, menstrual art, and much more. Very interesting.
www.yoni.com has a wealth of information on the many aspects of the archetypal feminine--interesting stuff--as well as on developing a more healthy and appreciative relationship to our bodies.
Planned Parenthood is an organization that can provide you with free condoms and free STD testing, as well as many other services (one of which is connecting you with low-cost surgical abortion providers). While we do not endorse reliance on mainstream medical treatment for many reasons, we want to include this link because we recognize that sometimes we still need to rely on these sorts of products and services even if under less extentuating circumstances we would choose not to.
Feminist Women's Health Center is a nonprofit organization that promotes and protects a woman's right to choose and receive reproductive health care. They provide information on the various aspects of women's reproductive biology, have links to abortion clinics, and much more.
Depo Provera and Norplant (health dangers and connections to classism, racism and sexism)
We believe very strongly in the importance of radical communities joining together to form networks that support and reach out to mothers (within and outside of those communities). As cliched as it might sound, it really does take a village to raise a child. I heard about some kids in an anarchist community cutting ties with one of their former friends because she became a mother and they disapproved of her decision, calling it "not radical" and using that as a reason for their choice to abandon her. I can hardly think of anything less radical than abandoning mothers in our communities. Let's get it together.
Hip Mama is a website and magazine that offers alternative, politically conscious perspectives and resources on parenting (well, largely mothering) from mothers themselves (and a dad or two). Good stuff.
Girl Mom is a project that stemmed from Hip Mama, offering alternative, politically conscious perspectives and resources on teen parenting (primarily mothering) from teen mothers themselves.
Southern California Midwifery provides information and resources about having a natural midwife-assisted birth, becoming a midwife, and more.
Debunking Stereotypes of Feminists
If Men Could Menstruate--a funny essay.
Books:
A City Herbal by Maida Silverman, Knopf, 1977.
Cunt by Igna Muscio, Seal Press, 1998.
Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks.
Hygieia: A Woman's Herbal by Jeannine Parvati, Greestone, 1978.
My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization by Chellis Glendinning,
Shambhala, 1994.
Our Bodies, Our Selves for the New Century by the Boston Women's Health Book Collective,
Touchstone Book, 1998.
The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf.
The Body Project by Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Vintage.
The Wise Woman Herbal: Healing Wise by Susun S. Weed.
Wise Woman Herbal for the Childbearing Years by Susun S. Weed, Woodstock, 1985.
Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier, Anchor Books, 1999.
Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom by Dr. Christiane Northrup.
Zines:
"Herbal Abortion: The Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge" by Uni M. Tiamat (available for $1 from
Overground Distribution, PO Box 1661, Pensacola, FL 32591)
"Hot Pantz: Do It Yourself Gynecology--Herbal Remedies" by Isabelle Gauthier (available from
Bloodsisters Red Alert c/o Elle Corazon, 176 Bernard West, Montreal, Quebec, H2T 2K2, Canada)