The Huey P. Newton Reader

The psychobiologist Mary Jane Sherfrey made two startling discoveries in the mid-1950s. The first was that biological research had clear evidence that life in the uterus begins as female; the fetus was defined by a rudimentary phallus. The surpassing irony of Dr. Sherfrey’s discovery was that this elemental fact had been totally ignored, or rather repressed, by biology as it existed under the spell of the “male bias”—and that is the second discovery. The two discoveries are of equal importance: to begin with, that life begins female, and second, that science has repressed and suppressed this twentieth-century heresy.

During the period of pre-science, the assumption had been, predictably, that life began as male, and that a castrated or deformed fetus was born as a female. This atavistic belief was eventually replaced by the idea that life began as a neuter with sex differentiations arriving at a later stage of intra-uterine development. This scientific-sounding proposition gave way under the weight of modern research data, but the new discovery was ignored.

This incredible gap in the scientific dialogue can have only one explanation: that Adam came out of Eve and not the reverse, as we have been taught for millennia. The fairy tale of Genesis is taken lightly at our peril, as Ms. Sherfrey and lately the women’s liberation movement have told us. But the conflict between appearance and reality is perhaps more profound than even the women’s movement has argued.

The first principle of nature itself seems to be female. Genesis is a startling testament to man’s realization of that basic identity. In Genesis we see the ancient Mother Nature co-opted by a patriarchal super-masculine beard of a god. The trauma of female primacy is further denied by making the woman, Eve, a mere extension of the man, Adam, and the issue of his body!

The early gens and tribes, as far as we can tell, were primarily matriarchal and matrilocal, or at the least, avuncular, with the mother’s brother as the power. All of the earliest mythology is univocal in the identification of creativity, power, and primacy with the female. Mother Nature and Mother Earth are the universal models for all creation, human and metaphysical. But by the time of writing the Bible, woman had suffered her world-historical defeat and man’s revenge appears complete.

It is my argument that women were socially supreme as long as the size of population groups was relatively small. Man was ignorant of his role in procreation and so worshiped women and the impenetrable process of birth and renewal that she acted out. The seed, he thought, came from the rain and the wind. This set of fantasies was bound to lead to a slavelike mentality in the man that, combined with his socially inferior status in the gens, snakelike, caused him to plot his rebellion and revenge against women and nature itself. A revenge he is still exacting.

Behind the iron reaction formation of the myth of Genesis stands a much older sensuous myth that enshrines woman as the center of creation. Modern chromosomal research echoes the old story of parthenogenesis. Twenty million years ago at the dawn of the Pleistocene there must have existed a basic ambiguity about the process of fertilization. A remnant of this Ur-theory of procreation can be seen in Genesis. The Hebrew word Ladat means both “knowledge” and “sexuality” in its broadest sense.

The Tree of Knowledge is a transitional symbol, looking backward to a time when men were not absolutely necessary for the creation of life. Simultaneously, the tree is a maddening symbol of power that men must possess if they are to control the mysterious female. Thus men must destroy the garden and the tree in order to make woman totally dependent on him and his seed. This reverses the power relationship at one stroke. But the existential and race memories of the female paradise where man was a parasitic nonentity throbbed then, as they do now, like unhealed wounds.

In those days “there were giants,” Genesis says. No doubt, but by the time of Genesis, the sex of the giants had been changed. And the sacred fruit that reminded men of their eternal biological androgyny was declared forever taboo.

The female could be best overthrown during pregnancy or just after childbirth. When man discovered his role in procreation, he could then attempt indirect coercion by the constant impregnation of the woman, and direct control by the seizure of those goods and symbols that stood for power.

Woman was slowly imprisoned in the very biology that had made her supreme. She bore her fruit in pain, and she became a slave to the now-physically superior male, just as earlier he had been her vassal under the spell of her fecundity.

Men moved swiftly to the necessary dehumanizing of women: she was the snake and the devil, the unclean and the freak of nature—all the identities that man had labored under in a universe that was female in principle. No wound to man’s vanity was too small for restitution. Genesis would be hilarious if it were not such frightening evidence of the historical male rage.

Once man was physically and mythologically compensated for his former humiliation, he had to force on women a slave mentality and erase forever any intimations of her former glory. Since the man’s exposed and erectile tissue could not naturally gratify or answer the complex inner organism of the woman, she had to be desexualized. The age-old whore/madonna strategy was the crude answer to the stinging reminder of female superiority that was before his eyes every day: she was always ready and therefore potent, while he, with his exposed genitalia, was always potentially impotent, and his impotence or inadequacy was called forth precisely by her biological readiness, at almost any age!

So man, who could not give birth, began to invent everything else. His “brain children” were all made possible by the art of writing; the exclusion of women from that process meant that she dropped below the level of history to live like an animal in a perpetual drudgery and blows. The “masculine protest” suffered by women, corresponds in many ways to the agony of Black people since the Renaissance.

Now the tables seem to be turning. Modern technology gives women the upper hand once again. She does not need man as a father or a provider or even necessarily as a lover (since her demands for orgasm have created a new epidemic of impotence). Her psychological armor is less paralyzing than that of the fearful male. He must constantly prove his adequacy. In the era of doomsday weapons, his war-loving, chauvinistic, sexist male protests of power have become the scandal of history. Man, who cannot give life, has begun to take it by the billions in our century. He has revenged himself by desecrating Mother Nature and polluting Mother Earth.

The historical defeat of woman came by violence—that must be admitted now. It is only natural, then, that there should be a burning component of violence in the women’s movement. The war between the sexes is just that.

Black liberation has something to say to women on the score of revolution and rebellion. The first thing to understand is that black men are enslaved by the white man, just as the white and black women have been. It is therefore futile to try to make black men the enemy of black women. Futile and counterrevolutionary!

The aim of some women to replace men, mechanically, as the master, simply posits another inferior order—men, once again. The “natural superiority” of women does not give them any social superiority in this age of technology; they must fight for power with their natural allies: all those who are oppressed by our system of chauvinistic exploitation. Men, except for a handful, are merely “women” to the ruling circle: cannon fodder, taxable objects, cogs in a wheel.

It is human liberation that makes a dialectic with every suffering member of the mass of humankind. There is simply not enough power to go around. So men will fight women in the way that whites fight blacks. Women’s liberation must transcend the scarcity principle under which it has been operating, must make common cause against the ancient snake of antinatural tyranny; in the house, certainly, but finally, in the White House and other palaces of the West.