Writing began in Sumer, south-central Iraq, in about 3,400 BCE, and not long afterwards in Egypt. The very first named author in history was Enheduanna, she was the High Priestess of the goddess Inanna in the Sumerian city of Ur, in around 2,200 BCE. Despite this accolade women’s voices are few and far between in history. Men most often held power, and women’s access to education and writing was limited. This month marks 250 years since the birth of Jane Austen, the British writer, known for her novel’s, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion. Jane Austen was one of the pioneers of female literature. But she didn’t use her name to promote her work, instead she published her novels simply as, written ‘By a Lady’. And she only enjoyed moderate success in her lifetime. Austen’s novels are a commentary on late 18th century English life. She uses humour and irony to examine women’s dependence on marriage for favourable social standing and economic security. In 1847 Charlotte Brontë published Jane Eyre, under her pen name ‘Currer Bell’, to disguise the fact that it was written by a woman. And even in 1997 Joanne Rowling used the pen name, JK Rowling to publish the first Harry Potter book, because her publisher was concerned that using her first name would put boys off reading it. And later she used the name Robert Galbraith to write adult fiction.
Since the last ice age ended 11,700 years ago humanity has been living in warmer conditions, known as the Holocene. During this period, we have been through two significant technological changes, the Agricultural and the Industrial revolutions. Arguably we are in the middle of a third one, with the growth of computing power and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Population size expanded massively as a result of the social changes brought about by the advances in technology. Alongside our material progress and population growth have come states, empires, and hierarchies of dominance. One of these dominance hierarchies is the social dominance of men over women. Though the situation is much better now, true equality of opportunity and access still doesn’t exist in the UK and is much worse in developing countries. The lack of female literature is just one example of how this played out. In the UK voting rights for women over 30 years old were only introduced in 1918, after the contribution women made to the war effort. Equal suffrage was only achieved in 1928. The Equal Pay Act came into force in 1970, making it illegal for men and women to be paid differently for ‘work of equal value’. But this Act of Parliament needed strengthening in 2010, and a gender pay gap still exists today.
Men and women are different, but we do need to treat the sexes the same in terms of opportunity and access. On average men are 5 inches (13 cms) taller than women, they are 40-60% stronger in upper body strength, 25-35% stronger in lower body strength, and 50-70% stronger in grip strength. But these are averages and you only have to look around you to see the huge variations across both sexes. And trans people aside, men cannot bear children.
I believe we live in a transformational age, and not just because of AI. It may not be the cause of this transformation but one of the aspects of it will be equality of the sexes and a balancing of male and female energies. All of us can express both male and female energy, and of course, men will display more male and women more female energy. But as with averages of height and strength there is a great variety within and across the sexes. Traditionally male energy is associated with the conscious mind and female energy is associated with the unconscious mind. An expression of this is men are generally considered to be less in touch with their emotions than women. Male energy is more assertive, and female energy is more nurturing. We can all access both male and female energy, what we need to seek within ourselves and within society is balance. Not a sense of better or worse, just different and both equally valid and useful. I don’t believe that women want to dominate men in the way that men have dominated women. But men do need to re-invent what maleness means without thinking that it means the domination of women. Men need to learn to let go of their pride and their prejudice and be men, so that women can, once again, be women, across the kaleidoscope of what that means for all sexes.
“How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.” Wayne Dyer
