The First Sex

1971, 1973 Penguin edition
Elizabeth Gould Davis
The First Sex
Original price unknown, purchase price $3.75
Very worn paperback
C+

While Davis offers a great deal of evidence that women have been undervalued in the past 2000 years, her vision of the matriarchal past is flawed by contradictions and a disdain for men that makes her closer to a man-hating feminist than anyone else I've read so far.  To sum up her premise, ancient societies were peaceful and egalitarian, although women ruled because of their superiority, keeping men in line and possibly enslaving them, through the fear men had of them, although men respected and honored women, and the men were very gentle, except that they had rabid lusts that the women had to contain, although women are more sexual than men, except that men are more lustful, until women "asked for it" (her phrase) by preferring violent meat-eaters, since herbivores have smaller penises than carnivores (among men?  among all animals?  what about horses?), although men's bodies are sensually unappealing, and therefore--

Davis's research is used to greater effect in The Great Cosmic Mother by Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor (which I'm placing under 1987, although it was revised a couple times).  They point out the possible racism of Davis's obsession with the blue-eyed, red-golden-haired Celts.  (I think of red and golden as two different colors.  Did Davis mean strawberry blonde?)  Their book has its own inconsistencies but it is over all an improvement over this one.  Still, Davis does know how to keep you reading on, and her thinking is, if as muddled as Greer's, at least more wide-sweeping.  Not every book could encompass the Magna Carta and deodorant commercials.

Oh, and yet another definition of "sexual revolution" for those keeping track.  Here it means the revolt of men against women.  Davis hopes for a counter-revolution, with the dawning of the age of Aquarius.  Uh, yeah, good luck with that.