Blood Story

"Moon made love to all the women. "Ari!” they screamed. "Why does my vagina bleed?"

Then Moon asked his mother for a black ball and a white ball of thread, which she threw from the house. Then Moon went up the thread to the sky, and all his people watched, and they said, "My child, my child goes playing to the sky."

Then many women, three days after he came, bled. One woman after another, all of them." Sharanahua-Peru (Knight, 401)

"In ancient times the women occupied the men's houses and played the sacred flutes inside. We men took care of the children, processed manioc flour, wove hammocks, and spent our times in the dwellings while the women cleared fields, fished and hunted. In those days, the children even nursed at our breasts. A man who dared enter the women's house during their ceremonies would be gang-raped by all the women of the village on the central plaza.

One day the chief called us together and showed us how to make bullroarers to frighten the women. As soon as the women heard the terrible drone, they dropped the sacred flutes and ran into the houses to hide. We grabbed the flutes and took over the men's houses. Today, if a woman comes in here and sees our flutes, we rape her. Today the women nurse babies, process manioc flour and weave hammocks, while we hunt, fish, and farm." Methinaku-Amazonia (Knight, 424)

"But really we have been stealing what belongs to them (the women), for it is mostly all women's business; and since it concerns them it belongs to them. Men have nothing to do really, except copulate; it belongs to the women. All the belonging to those Wauwalak [sisters], the baby, the blood, the yelling, their dancing, all that concerns the women, but every time we have to trick them. Women can't see what men are doing, although it really is their own business, but we can see their side. This is because all the Dreaming business came out of women-everything; only men take picture for that Julunggal [i.e. men make an artificial reproduction in their rituals of the Rainbow Snake]. In the beginning, we had nothing, because men had been doing nothing; we took these things from women." Yolngu-Arnhem Land Australia (Knight, 479)

"The monthly seclusion of women has been accepted as a proof of their degradation in primitive communities, but it is far more likely that the causal sequence is to be reversed and that their exclusion from certain spheres of activity and consequently lesser freedom is the consequence of the awe inspired by the phenomena of periodicity." (Robert Lowie, quoted in Knight, 384)

"We begin, then, not with the supposed sudden emergence of male sexual generosity and self-restraint—as in the origins models of Freud and Levi-Strauss...but...with female child-rearing and economic priorities, female ultimate determination of social structure and female self-restraint in women's own direct material interests. From this, the incest taboo, food taboos, and the other basic features of the human cultural configuration will be derived." (Knight, 153)