The Descent of Woman

1972, 1973 Bantam edition
Elaine Morgan
The Descent of Woman
Original price unknown, purchase price $1.65
Worn paperback
C+

This is a lively, thought-provoking but deeply flawed look at evolution.  Morgan is trying to rebut what she calls the "Tarzanist" view of "the descent of man," as explained by Desmond Morris and the amusingly named Lionel Tiger.  The most intriguing part of her book is a premise she admits that she borrowed from Sir Alister Hardy, that we were once "aquatic apes," primates that waded into the water during the hottest part of the Pliocene era.  That's why we've got less hair and more fat than most land mammals, and why we resemble sea mammals more than you'd expect.

One of the similarities is that the vagina shifted towards the front and so face-to-face sex, a rarity among land mammals, came into being.  And here's where we find the deepest flaw in her theory.  She argues that Ancient Man, in his frustration at no longer being able to get in doggy-style (his penis not yet having grown long enough), forced his way in the front.  For an unspecified amount of time (millennia I guess, but she doesn't say how many), the human race was reproduced solely through rape.  You don't have to be Todd Akin to find this insane.  As Morgan tells it, Man flung Woman on her back and, since she was in estrus, he got on top of her, despite her frightened protests.  This despite the fact that Morgan elsewhere says that Man isn't as aggressive as the Tarzanists claim. 

Couldn't her editor or best friends have pointed out to Morgan that there were other possibilities?  What about Ancient Woman climbing on Ancient Man?  Or face-to-face standing sex?  And why does she think that foreplay came along centuries or millennia later, rather than immediately?  If hominids were out in the water (about four feet deep), couldn't they observe the nonviolent face-to-face coitus of their friends the whales and dolphins, and thought Hm, let's try that on land?

The odd thing is, Morgan might describe herself as a feminist, although she disagrees with radical feminists on such issues as marriage and children.  She seems to think that men never have and never will take on any child-rearing, which just isn't so, and wasn't even true 40 years ago.  Her view of men is similar to Elizabeth Gould Davis's, that men are big, clumsy, dumb, kind of ugly, lustful beasts, although as the wife of one and the mother of three she seems to have an affection for them, unlike Davis.  "You big lug" as opposed to "you beast!"

Her view of women is much more negative than Davis's image of them as goddesses on Earth.  Ancient Woman is in this book a sweet, affectionate, creative, hard-working dear but sort of passive and almost as thick as her man.  Sometimes Morgan forgets Woman's role in evolution (even as a passive object acted upon by Man and weather), most startlingly in the chapter "Speech," which she sees, like a Tarzanist, as starting among male hunters.  This despite the fact that women are generally regarded as more verbal than men.  That may be a stereotype, but she doesn't even address the idea.  As it does with The First Sex, The Great Cosmic Mother uses the evidence to greater effect, and convincingly argues that gatherers have more need to communicate verbally than hunters.  (For one thing, plants aren't going to run off if they hear you.)

For those keep tracking, Morgan is Welsh (and does have a wonderfully Celtic name that would thrill Markale), while Greer is Australian turned British, and Millett is and Davis (the only one yet deceased) was American.  I don't know if that affects these women's perspectives, but Morgan does talk about how the U.S. seemed to lead the way in feminism and other changes.  Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor, whose GCM I'm getting impatient to read, were Swedish and American respectively.  (Mor might still be alive.)

As for the best part of this book, the theory of the aquatic ape, it's been generally dismissed.  So I guess you can read this book as a very dated early attempt to give a more balanced view of evolution, and you can try to ignore the flaws.  Oh, and English Lit majors can have fun spotting the references to Dickens, Austen, and Stella Gibbons.  (Two uncredited references to seeing something nasty in the woodshed!)