Who Cooked the Last Supper?
I continue my recently renewed interest in non-fiction works with Rosalind Miles' Who Cooked the Last Supper?: The Women's History of the World. I'd seen a few excerpts floating around the internet and, honestly, who can resist that title?
This wasn't the greatest book I ever read. There's a lot of anger in these pages, and an uncomfortable amount of flipping some Freudian theories to accuse men of womb envy and natural inferiority to account for their oppression of women over the millenia. Additionally, while individual women are referenced a great deal, their struggles tend to be painted with a single brush. Intersections of gender with race or class are largely ignored and glossed over. There is a chapter about imperialism that touches on some of these issues, but Miles also misinterprets Sojourner Truth's famous "And Ain't I A Woman?" speech as being about the virgin/whore dichotomy rather than race relations.
Despite that, there are also a lot of interesting facts that I never would have known or thought of. For example, Cleopatra is best known as an Egyptian queen, but she also wrote the first definitive alchemical text, which was widely used for centuries after her death. And that great philosopher Socrates had several female teachers.
The book picks out the accomplishments of a lot of individual women, as well as documenting the sweeping social changes over the history of humankind. There was a lot of interesting information, and the book took a lot of care to point out the importance of women's work and women's inventions. However, I think the scope was ultimately a little to great for the size of the book. It's hard to document the entire history of our species in less than 300 pages, no matter how hard you try.
That said, I think this book is worth reading. A lot of ideas come together in the excellent final chapter (which is mostly what I've seen excerpts from). If you can get past the anger and the blasphemy (which I, personally, found delightful) and stomach the cataloging of some truly atrocious actions against women, there's a lot of great information in these pages. But be sure to take it with a grain of salt.
This wasn't the greatest book I ever read. There's a lot of anger in these pages, and an uncomfortable amount of flipping some Freudian theories to accuse men of womb envy and natural inferiority to account for their oppression of women over the millenia. Additionally, while individual women are referenced a great deal, their struggles tend to be painted with a single brush. Intersections of gender with race or class are largely ignored and glossed over. There is a chapter about imperialism that touches on some of these issues, but Miles also misinterprets Sojourner Truth's famous "And Ain't I A Woman?" speech as being about the virgin/whore dichotomy rather than race relations.
Despite that, there are also a lot of interesting facts that I never would have known or thought of. For example, Cleopatra is best known as an Egyptian queen, but she also wrote the first definitive alchemical text, which was widely used for centuries after her death. And that great philosopher Socrates had several female teachers.
The book picks out the accomplishments of a lot of individual women, as well as documenting the sweeping social changes over the history of humankind. There was a lot of interesting information, and the book took a lot of care to point out the importance of women's work and women's inventions. However, I think the scope was ultimately a little to great for the size of the book. It's hard to document the entire history of our species in less than 300 pages, no matter how hard you try.
That said, I think this book is worth reading. A lot of ideas come together in the excellent final chapter (which is mostly what I've seen excerpts from). If you can get past the anger and the blasphemy (which I, personally, found delightful) and stomach the cataloging of some truly atrocious actions against women, there's a lot of great information in these pages. But be sure to take it with a grain of salt.
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