Davis, Elizabeth Gould

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DAVIS, Elizabeth Gould

Born 1910, Kansas; died 31 July 1974, Sarasota, Florida

When Elizabeth Gould Davis' The First Sex appeared in 1971, it was barely reviewed and apparently ignored by the reading public. Yet three years later it was producing enormous sales in its paperback edition. Highly controversial, it was called everything from the "nut book of the year" to the "Bible of the Women's Movement," and has since become one of the essential documents of twentieth-century feminism.

Davis attended Randolph-Macon College in Virginia and the University of Kentucky from which she received a master's in 1951. She went to work as a librarian in Sarasota, Florida, and remained there until the time of her death.

Davis wrote two other major books, The Female Principle and The Founding Mothers, which were never published. Yet at the time of her death—thanks to The First Sex—she had become something of a celebrity, surrounded by fans and devotees. It was the product of years of work and of commitment to an idea that Davis said she felt compelled to put into writing. She, like many modern feminists, was convinced history, as we know it, is grossly distorted because it has been written by men in a way perpetuating a tradition male view.

The book challenges "male history" with the assertion that women, not men, were the deities, educators, architects, artists, and civilizers of the world in our most distant and most peaceful past. She supports her thesis with a monumental amount of evidence (although she said the book was drastically cut by her editors) taken from all sorts of scholarly and literary sources including mythology, psychiatry, linguistics, archaeology, and anthropology.

The First Sex is heavily influenced by the Mother-centered mythological interpretations of history developed in part by Johann Jacob Bachofen, Robert Graves, and Robert Briffault. Davis postulates women developed and dominated the earliest civilizations and that the Celtic races were able to preserve and pass on some of the values and skills of these matriarchies despite the onslaught of barbarian Germanic tribes and the surge of Christianity. She believes the abuse of woman by the succeeding patriarchies validates her theory of former female dominance—"a dominance that man felt compelled to stamp out and forget."

In Part I of the book, Davis establishes the existence and superiority of the peaceful Golden Age of the matriarchies. She speculates males were eventually able to overthrow them because the women, in selecting the largest and strongest males as mates, contributed to superior physical development in men. It is clear Davis believes female society was destroyed and replaced by something infinitely inferior: "When man substituted God for the Great Goddess, he at the same time substituted authoritarian for humanistic values." According to Davis, a war is still being waged between the physical superiority of the patriarchal male and the inherent moral and mental superiority of the female.

Part II deals in some detail with the patriarchal takeover, especially as it is recorded in mythology and reflected in the continuing hostility between men and women. Part III demonstrates the extent to which remnants of female dominance survived in pre-Christian and Celtic societies. The conclusion treats the "Tragedy of Western Woman," who has fallen so far from her rightful place.

Although The First Sex is neither the most sensible nor the most scientific book to come out of the contemporary women's movement, it seems destined to be one of the most influential.