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Mineke Schipper

All over the world, throughout history and in many different cultures, men have had mixed feelings about the female body. Delight has gone hand in hand with insecurity, comfort with fear, and power with feelings of impotence. Contradictions abound: the vagina is ‘sweet as beer’, the Inuit have a legend about breasts ‘pouring with fish’ and much of mythology is permeated with threats and fear, vaginas with teeth and snakes in women’s abdomens. Violence against women is perennial and arises, the author suggests, when male fear turns into aggression, anchored in the belief that the world will turn to chaos without male intervention.Schipper’s gaze is far from Eurocentric. She travels all over the world and through antiquity, telling stories about blood, sexuality, breastfeeding, pregnancy, birth and breasts from very different cultures. She draws from ancient Mesopotamia, Japanese myths, Greek mythology, stories from the Chaco Indians, the Jewish Talmud, the Vikings, the Xhosa, and the Ming Dynasty. Schipper explores male anxieties such as the fear of magic nipples, hymens and menstrual blood; the fear of dark passages, into which that most vulnerable of male parts must heroically seek its way; the fear of dependency on mothers and other women. To calm these fears, different mythologies have conjured men up as creators not only of the world but also of human life, and women have been denied access to public spheres because of their ‘distracting’ anatomy.This revealing and sometimes hilarious account offers not only clear insights into the world before #metoo, but also into the way we, consciously or unconsciously, still interact with each other today. This is a rich book, peppered with anecdotes; it is erudite, accessible and outspoken, written by a compassionate humanist.

Book

Non-Fiction

Heuvels van het paradijs

The female body has been admired, used and abused since time immemorial. Despite the symbiotic relationship between the sexes, men have always ended up with more power than women and the female anatomy seems to lie at the root of this inequality. We can find clues in art and literature; male narrators, artists and scholars have shown an eternal fascination for those body parts they lack: breasts, wombs and vulvas. Yet this fascination is often far from healthy.

Hills of Paradise

At last we find answers to questions such as: Did Adam and Eve wear clothes in paradise? Did they have sex there or only much later? How did Satan come to be in the Garden of Eden? Did he sleep with Eve before Adam did, and was he possibly the father of Eve’s firstborn son Cain who later committed fratricide? One profound question underlies them all: Where did evil come from, if the world was created perfect?According to most stories, Adam’s problems start with the creation of Eve. Although not always the first to eat the forbidden fruit, she is often blamed for the loss of paradise. In the ancient Jewish tradition, Adam’s first wife Lilith, created along with him, wanted to be his equal. Many Christian paintings show the snake in the Tree of Knowledge as having the head and tempting upper body of Lilith. In the stories and their accompanying artworks, fear of female sexuality produces an image of temptation and doom.In all three religions, the clay used to create Adam’s body comes from all over the world, but his head has more specific origins. In Jewish tradition, God takes the mud for Adam’s head from the place where the Temple in Jerusalem would later be built. In Christian stories, God uses clay from Golgotha, where Jesus will be crucified. And in Islamic stories Adam’s head is made of earth from the place where the Ka’aba in Mecca now stands.Schipper shows that stories about Adam and Eve in different cultures, and their accompanying images, originate from the same sources in the Middle East before they spread across the world along with the three religions. The extent to which those stories have shaped our cultures and beliefs, she argues, reflects a unity in diversity that contributes to building bridges. The great variety of traditional stories enables them to throw light on each other and create room for dialogue between believing and non-believing descendants of Adam and Eve.<ul><li>Makes clear how stories of Adam and Eve served to lay a foundation for unequal gender relations in the three religions.</li><li>Draws upon a wealth of traditional and contemporary images to provide remarkable illustrations of the ways in which Adam and Eve have been represented in the three religions and around the world.</li></ul>

No lack of captivating material here. With Adam and Eve Everywhere a treasury of ancient stories is brought clearly into view.

Overal Adam en Eva

God created Adam and Eve and so, according to the Bible, humanity began. The Koran likewise points to Adam and his wife as the first people. The creation story as referred to in their Holy Book by Jews, Christians and Muslims is the best known version, but there is astonishing variety of other stories about Adam and Eve. They have been passed down by word of mouth from one generation to the next, in all parts of the world. Mineke Schipper’s book is the first to deal with these mostly unfamiliar stories.

Adam and Eve Everywhere

Striking similarities emerge across cultures. Mothers, for example, are praised around the world: ‘Mother is God number two’ (Malawi) and ‘Mother’s milk is holy’ (Mongolian), whereas wives seem to be a problem: ‘Never marry a woman with bigger feet than your own’ is advice from Mozambique, but amazingly a Chinese saying contains exactly the same message, and even uses the same metaphor. Those big feet refer to female talents, and all over the world proverbs seem to warn men against marrying women with more talents or education than they have themselves.Of course sayings about women tell us a lot about men: ‘Women and cutlets, the more you hit them the better they’ll be’ (German). The legacy of humanity’s proverbs does not simply describe society, they reflect ethical norms and cultural ideals, particularly those that serve the interests of men. Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet is revealing in a number of ways. Two contradictory lines of thought emerge. On the one hand men are implacable tyrants and shameless profiteers, but they are also insecure, anxious beings who risk entrapment by women. Women are victims, but their beauty and ability to procreate lend them a great deal of power.Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet looks into the place and status of women in cultures all over the world from an intriguing new perspective. It also illuminates the function of proverbs. This is a unique, funny, moving and often startling collection, a global cultural history in miniature.

Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet A fascinating analysis of more than 15,000 proverbs (…) an engrossing book to dip into.

A fine contribution to the cosmopolitan conversation that ought to come with globalisation.

Trouw nooit een vrouw met grote voeten

Countless ideas about women have been recorded over 27 the centuries in the most concise of all literary genres, the proverb. Mineke Schipper’s impressive study examines more than 15,000 sayings about women, drawn from 150 countries and more than 240 languages. They appear on crockery, tiles and clothing as well as in books, but most are passed on by word of mouth. Schipper arranges them by theme: the female body, the phases of a woman’s life as a girl, bride and wife and later as a mother and grandmother, and the joys and sorrows of love, sex and childbearing.

Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet

The customs and restrictions of widowhood, around the world and throughout the ages

Unaccompanied femininity has historically created so much fear that a widow’s vagina had to be ‘locked’, i.e. declared inaccesible, temporarily or for life. Harassment and suspicion of murder or witchcraft — because why had he died and not she? — made many widows opt for the same fate as their dead husbands. ‘Grief over your husband lasts to the door.’ Ever heard that joke before? That’s right, only the variant about dead wives is popular.Schipper delves into the history of widowhood around the world and finds striking differences between their status and that of widowers. The loss of a life partner has traditionally translated for men into new freedom, but for women into disastrous loss. Special mourning rituals and seclusion are imposed on widows, and their mourning clothes served as warning beacons. Think of the women whose hair must be cut, who must only dress in black, or white, or to be condemned to mourning the rest of their lives.Widowhood is a heavily neglected subject. From that thick fog of oblivion looms a staggering global legacy that has never before been mapped. The good news is that entrenched attitudes are slowlychanging — and widows are visibly changing in step.‘We cannot change history,’ writes Schipper, ‘but we can look at the past with new knowledge and look at the future with new eyes. Far too many widows have been told against their better judgment that there was no future after the death of their husbands. Why should the partner who is still alive have to sit out the rest of her days without prospects?’

In Widows Schipper shows the shocking sexism that underlies the way widows are treated. […] Although their position is slowly improving, these vulnerable women deserve more attention within contemporary feminism. Schipper’s contribution is a good start.

With her book, Schipper has placed the accounts of old rituals into a new context.

Publications

Widows have always been more numerous than widowers, who usually remarry fast, almost always with younger women. For this and other reasons (such as war), men die sooner than their wives. According to a recent estimate, there are more than 258.5 million widows on earth and one in ten of them lives in extreme poverty. From ancient texts onwards, the need to represent women as weak and dependent is persistent, and widowhood has long been associated with an empty life.

Widows

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