Anatomy of Female Power Read online

  Note to the digital edition: all printing errors have been preserved. As spelling was inconsistent, we standardized it making it British. Numbering is consigned between {brackets} at the end of each page, thus preserving the original as much as possible.

  Anatomy of Female Power

  In this brief treatise, Chinweizu challenges one of the fundamental premises of feminism. He shows how women rule men and have always ruled men; and he outlines what men might do to reduce female power, and so advance toward equality, in hardships and privileges, with women.

  Chinweizu is a Nigerian cultural critic, poet and occidentalist. His books, essays and newspaper articles have been published in Africa, Europe and North America. His popular column, "The Chinweizu Observatory", appears in the Sunday Vanguard (Lagos).

  He brings to his cultural analysis his skills as a. journalist, his experiences as a traveller, and his training in various disciplines: Mathematics and Philosophy (M.I.T.), American Studies and History (S.U.N.Y. at Buffalo), and post-doctoral research in Economics (M.I.T.). His recreations are dancing and mathematics.

  Pero Press

  P.O. Box 988

  FestacTown

  Lagos, Nigeria.

  © Chinweizu, 1990

  First Published

  Second printing

  ISBN 978 2651 05 2

  October 1990

  November 1990

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior and written permission of the publisher.

  Printed in Nigeria

  Dedication

  To the handful of women now in my life (platonic friends, lovers, ex-lovers, lovers-to-be);

  To the countless others who have slipped in and out of my life; and especially

  To those who have attempted to marry me:

  From them I have learnt most of what I know about women. {v}

  Epigraphs

  The object of woman's existence is not to war with man, or allow man to war with her, but simply to conquer him and hold him in subservience without so much as a threat or a blow. Clever women always do this; clever women have always done it.

  - Marie Corelli, British novelist.

  What woman hasn't been able to wrap a man around her fingers, if she puts her mind to it?

  - Regina Joseph, Nigerian columnist.

  You think: We men are clever. If you see womankind and watch how four or five of them sit together and tell each other things, you think: Instead of chatting here, they ought to get up, go home and cut grass. As you talk like this to each other, you think in your own minds: They are stupid and ignorant. See, my grandchild, they are not stupid. Nothing in the whole world is cleverer than the female sex. Know this: If you are as other men, you are not as intelligent as a woman ... I tell you: a woman is clever. And if you respect what is woman's business your reputation will not suffer. And your wife will honour you, because she knows that you have learnt to keep quiet like other men.

  - Teachings of the Chagga Elders of Tanzania. {vi}

  Contents

  Epigraphs vi

  Prologue: Who Rules Who - Man or Woman 9

  Part I: Features of Female 13

  1. The Five Pillars of Female Power 14

  2. Womb, Kitchen and Cradle: Control Centres of Female Power 17

  Part II: Motherpower - In the Nest of His Father s Matriarch 25

  3. The Commandant of the Cradle 26

  Part III: Bridepower - In the Cockpit of Courtship 35

  4. The Powers of Her Body-beautiful 36

  5. Love: Male and Female 41

  6. Courtship: The Hunting of the Love-smitten Man 46

  7. Wedding: The Bride's Triumph Ceremony 59

  Part IV: Wifepower - In the Nest of His Own Matriarch 65

  8. The Husband Managers 66

  9. The Facade of Patriarchy 69

  10. The Double Standard 78

  11. The Silly Souls of Men 85

  12. Man's Fear of Woman 95

  13. The Baby as Wife's Weapon 101

  14. The Penalties of Divorce 105

  Part V: Matriarchy and its Discontents 107

  15. The Matriarch: Sovereign of Her Nest 108

  16. Feminism: A Revolt in Paradise 117

  Epilogue: On Masculinism 124

  Notes 131

  {vii}

  Prologue

  Who Rules Who - Man or Woman?

  In the last couple of decades, feminist propaganda has sought to persuade the world that women are powerless in society, and that men are natural oppressors of women. It claims that wives are subordinate to their husbands in the home; and that, outside the home, men have excluded women from political, economic and cultural power.

  Some, like Ellen Galford of Britain, say: "Women are slaves and men are masters".4

  Some, like Andrea Dworkin of the USA, say: "All housewives are economically exploited; all working women are".5

  And some, like Carol Hanisch of the USA, have even gone so far to deny that women have any power at all over men.

  The term men's liberation was derived, from the term women’s liberation and thus insinuates that women have power over men. Its very name infers liberation from female domination and is therefore an inversion of fact as well as women's liberation principles.6

  As a rule, those few women have not been taken seriously who have bothered to acknowledge female power over men: like Denyse Plummer, the Trinidadian calypso singer, who proclaims that "woman is boss”;7 or like the expatriate Nigerian actress Patti Boulaye, who says: "most men are controlled by women”;8 or like the Argentinian, Esther Vilar, who said:

  Women let men work for them, think for them and take on their responsibilities - in fact, they exploit them.9 {9}

  This great division of opinion among women should prompt one to ask: Which kind of claim is true? Which picture is the illusion, and which the reality?

  Conventional modern opinion, as well as the social science consensus, would appear to support the feminist picture. It is conventionally assumed that female power, if it existed, would be wielded by women, through some public system of authority. It is also held, by conventional expert opinion, that matriarchs (who would be the natural wielders of female power) are illusory; and that matriarchy (a system of females wielding authority) does not exist.

  For instance, The Concise Oxford Dictionary (6th Edition, 1976) defines a matriarch as a "woman corresponding in status to a patriarch (usually jocular)". The venerable compilers of that dictionary add that the word is derived "from Latin mater mother on false analogy of patriarch". Treating the notion as a joke derived on a "false analogy" suggests that matriarchs are illusory, phantom figures. However, powerful matrons, often elderly, who dominate family groups and clans, who are patriarchs in all but their gender, are neither unknown nor rare.

  Similarly, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, (15th Edition, 1986) matriarchy is a "social system in which familial and political authority is wielded by women". And that repository of conventional knowledge adds that "the consensus among modern anthropologists and sociologists is that a strictly matriarchal society never existed." This is despite the fact that, in some African and Native American societies, women did have their structures of political authority parallel to and countervailing those of men.

  When a definition will not allow us to acknowledge what is before us, it is flawed. For example, if we defined the sun as a square star, it would then be, strictly speaking, true that there isn't and never has been a sun. But since such a claim flies in the face of our experience, we would have to reject that definition for not capturing the reality, and f
or misleading us into the absurdity of denying the existence of the sun we can see and point at. On similar grounds, we would have to reject the conventional definitions of matriarch and matriarchy for flying in the face of the examples cited above.

  In any case, even if no "strictly matriarchal society" ever existed, that would not imply that female power did not exist. Authority is only one of the many types of power; and the wielding of authority is not necessary for the exercise of many types of power. Power without authority {10} is neither unknown nor rare, as is recognized when it is said that someone is "the power behind the throne".

  Such obscurantist views from the organs of conventional knowledge suggest that female power has yet to receive the investigation it deserves.

  Feminist propaganda and conventional knowledge notwithstanding, it seems prima facie odd to claim that women are powerless in society and, in particular, over men.

  [Printing error] what one wants, then women are far from powerless. Women do get, and always did get, what they want - be it riches, or thrones, or the head of John the Baptist, or routine exemption from hardships and risks which their men folk are obliged to endure. That women operate by methods which often differ from those available to men does not in any way mean that women are bereft of power.

  If women are not powerless, are they, perhaps, less powerful than men? Some feminists find it in their interest to have the world believe this. And for proof they point to the public structures of political, economic and cultural power, and show that these are almost exclusively occupied by men. But does that prove what they aim to prove? Not at all! All it shows is that in the public structures, which form the domain of male power, women are not well represented. If this under-representation is to prove that women are less powerful than men, it would need to be also true that those public structures exhaust the modes and centres of power in society. Alas, for feminist claims, they do not; for there indeed are other modes and centres of power which women monopolize. Such are the subjects of this inquiry.

  In those centres, women control scarce resources, commodities and opportunities; and they distribute them. They exercise power through education, propaganda, directives, suggestions, rewards and punishments.

  They wield instruments of persuasion and coercion.

  As this inquiry shall show, matriarchs (who wield female power) and matriarchy (an organized structure or institution for the exercise of female power) do exist, indeed have always existed. The power they wield is neither illusory nor a joke. Furthermore, in human society, it is not male power but female power which is supreme. Or rather, to change the imagery, however great male power may be, it is to female power what that one-seventh of an iceberg which is visible above water is to the six-sevenths which lies below the water line.

  As we shall see, the male modes of power are actually tributary to the female modes, in as much as the fruits of male power are poured at {11} the feet of women through the workings of female power. That men seek wealth, power, status and fame for the love of women is widely attested to by knowledgeable commentators. According to Esther Vilar: "Man's work is only done with woman in view”.10

  And from his studies of the human psyche, Sigmund Freud reports:

  … in the greater number of ambitious day-dreams, too, we can discover a woman in some corner, for whom the dreamer performs all his heroic deeds and at whose feet all his triumphs are to be laid. 11

  From his own experience, Aristotle Onassis, an ambitious and very successful businessman of this 20th century, confirms this when he declared: "If women didn't exist all the money in the world would have no meaning" .12

  Moreover, male preoccupation with wealth, power, fame and status in order to win the love of women is quite natural, being rooted in the animal origins of humanity. As Robert Ardrey reports, it would be unreasonable,

  in the light of our new knowledge of animal behaviour… conclude that feminine attraction for wealth and rank, and masculine preoccupation with fortune and power and fame are human aberrations...13

  If the natural goal of male power is to pay tribute to women, then male power is naturally tributary to female power. If, however powerful a man may be, his power is used to serve the women in his life, that would make dubious the notion that men are masters over women. Because every man has as boss his wife, or his mother, or some other woman in his life, men may rule the world, but women rule the men who rule the world. Thus, contrary to appearances, woman is boss, the overall boss, of the world.

  To understand why woman rules man, we need to examine female power and how it operates on men. {12}

  Part I

  Features of Female Power

  1. The Five Pillars of Female Power

  You reckoned without the powers of a woman; they always know what they want and they get it in the end.14

  - Remark at a Nigerian party.

  Female power exists; it hangs over every man like a ubiquitous shadow. Indeed, the life cycle of man, from cradle to grave, may be divided into three phases, each of which is defined by the form of female power which dominates him: mother power, bridepower, or wifepower.

  From birth to puberty, he is ruled by motherpower, as exercised over him by his one and only "mummy dearest". Then he passes into the territory of bridepower, as exercised over him by his bride-to-be, that cuddlesome and tender wench he feels he cannot live without. This phase lasts from puberty to that wedding day when the last of his potential brides finally makes herself his wife. He then passes into the domain of -wifepower, as exercised over him by his own resident matriarch, alias his darling wife. This phase lasts till he is either divorced, widowed or dead.

  In each phase, female power is established over him through his peculiar weakness in that stage of his life. Motherpower is established over him while he is a helpless infant. Bridepower holds sway over him through his great need for a womb in which to procreate; if he didn't feel this need, he wouldn't put himself into the power of any owner of a womb. Wifepower is established over him through his craving to appear as lord and master of some woman's nest; should he dispense with this vanity, not even the co-producer of his child could hold him in her nest and rule him.

  There are five conditions which enable women to get what they want from men: women's control of the womb; women's control of the kitchen; women's control of the cradle; the psychological immaturity of man relative to woman; and man's tendency to be deranged by his own {14} excited penis. These conditions are the five pillars of female power; they are decisive for its dominance over male power. Though each is recognized in popular jokes and sayings, their collective significance is rarely noted.

  There is a joke which goes thus:

  1st woman: The way to a man's heart is through his belly.

  2nd woman: Aren't you aiming a few inches too high?

  This joke pays tribute to how the womb and the kitchen control the feelings of men. A man can be controlled by the hunger in his belly, and by the other hunger which flares up just below his belly. Consequently, he can be manipulated by whoever controls the kitchen which feeds him, or by whoever carries the womb through which he craves to procreate.

  That man abandons the kitchen to woman, and grovels for access to a womb, are not ordained by nature or by god, but result from how woman, who controls the cradle, has chosen to condition boys and girls. We must remember the saying that "the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world" .15 That is so because whoever trains a child in its first years shapes it for life. Woman, who rules the nursery, shapes boys and girls for life; and the ways in which she shapes boys make them what they become as men.

  Women enjoy two other advantages which are the subjects of popular sayings. It is said that a man comes of age at 60, and a woman at 15; which is why, in the eyes of women, men are babies or, at best, little boys. When Nora Ephron of the USA declared: "Men are little boys",16 she was voicing a view held, and frequently articulated, by women all over the world.
That men are babies or little boys is why a bride can fool her suitor, however much older than her he may be; and why a wife can rule her husband so readily. Being a baby in the hands of his bride or wife, the suitor or husband is rare who discovers the true nature of the courtship or marital encounter before it is all too late for him; he often does not do so till he is shoved into his grave, leaving whatever he has accumulated, through a lifetime of toil and risk, to his widow to make merry with.

  It is also said that when his penis stands up a man's brain takes French leave. Which is why a woman who wants to rule a man first gets his penis to stand up and salute her.

  How did female power acquire these five pillars from whose tops it dominates men? The womb is evolution's priceless gift to woman; man's {15} psychological immaturity and his deranging penis are evolution's special handicaps on man. As if these natural advantages were not great enough, women have artfully annexed the kitchen and the cradle, and turned them into control centres from which to manipulate men.

  Of these five pillars, the womb is by far the most important. Because it is of exceptional importance in reproduction, because woman has a monopoly of it, and because of man's irrepressible craving to use it, the womb has become woman'-s supreme headquarters for manipulating men. It is female power's ultimate base. {16}

  2. Womb, Kitchen and Cradle: Control Centres of Female power

  I use my brain and my uterus to achieve my goals.

  - A Nigerian tycoon's wife.

  What right do men have to infringe on territories most wives have held erring husbands with? (Said apropos of the kitchen)17

  - Bunmi Fadase