The Female Circumcision Controversy. Ellen Gruenbaum
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and his competent older sister, adult mother, and grandmother. Each of these females no doubt has significant say over the small boy. And yet that same male child when older may well move into a position of considerable control over these women. Many cultures have even institutionalized that transition from childhood dependence and lack of power and authority to new roles with authority over women as the boys become men. Joan Bamberger’s examination of this issue offers the classic insight into why the transition into adulthood is so much more elaborate for boys than for girls in so many cultures in which the gender division of labor assigns the primary responsibility for child care to women (1974). Bamberger notes that whereas boys’ initiation rituals often involve grueling physical ordeals, lengthy group educational sessions with adult men (lasting weeks or months) to learn lore, rituals, behaviors, and attitudes appropriate to men, in contrast girls’ transitions to womanhood are rather brief, sometimes individualized, and in some societies no more than a fifteen-minute ritual on the occasion of a girl’s first menstruation. Bamberger’s conclusion is that males in a patriarchal culture must go through a far more wrenching experience than girls—they must learn how to assert control and domination over the females who have until then had a large degree of power over them. It is a role reversal that is at the core of the dominating male role, and it requires a severing or redefining of what is probably the closest relationship most humans experience, the relationship with his mother (and other female nurturers). One classic example of this transition in the mother-son relationship is found in the film Maasai Women (Llewellyn-Davies 1983), in which young men having completed the manhood rituals gather with their mothers in a location far from the settlements and engage in all sorts of entirely inappropriate joking and wild behavior to break down the former relationship of female authority and help both mothers and sons get used to their future reversed roles.
In Bamberger’s South American examples, girls more often merely carry on, continuing the roles they have been learning in apprenticeship to their mothers—doing women’s tasks, acting as caregivers to children, and being subordinate to men, but adding a new role in sexuality as they mature.
When we reflect on patriarchy in this way, it is also evident that age is part of the core power relations. Indeed, patriarchy is not simply a system of rule by males over females, but a more complex set of relationships that result in domination by older men over both younger men and females. But there is other domination and authority here as well: females over children, older women over younger women, older children over younger children, boys as they grow up increasingly asserting themselves over girls, even older sisters who used to have authority, and so on. Even in the most strongly male-dominated culture, where women might be said to be very subordinated, young men often do not feel that they have power.3
Patriarchy is not a single, uniform pattern. The degree of male domination, female autonomy, hierarchy among males, and other factors is quite variant and includes manifestations that defy any conclusion that patriarchy is a universal impulse of the species. For some time, anthropologists, seeking to refute the notion that patriarchy was universally found among humans, searched for its presumed opposite, matriarchy. Disappointment followed, as each example of matriarchy turned out to be either mythical (the Amazons), disputed, or to have inconsistent patterns of female power. Matrilineal societies in which women’s important roles in kinship systems are easily recognized nevertheless usually have men in important power roles as political leaders. Matrilineal kinship systems do not prevent women’s subordination or female circumcision. Societies that emphasized goddess cults may have had very important and revered roles for women, however, and some writers have interpreted these as matriarchies.
Eventually, anthropologists have had to conclude that if matriarchies ever existed, the evidence that they mirrored patriarchies, that is, senior women ruling and dominating men in their families and society, is slim. But in any case the truly profound opposite of patriarchy is not a matriarchy but a society that is based on gender equality. Several writers have embraced this model, alternately looking to the hunting and gathering and horticultural precursors of agricultural patriarchal civilizations (and their twentieth-century cousins, the marginalized hunter-gatherers who managed to pursue a somewhat parallel adaptation long enough to be observed by anthropologists in recent times) for examples of “different but not unequal” roles between the sexes (e.g., Leacock 1972) or to the apparently peaceful, goddess-worshiping ancient peoples who seemed to emphasize partnerships instead of conflicts in their values (e.g., The Chalice and the Blade, Eisler 1987, and Gimbutas 1989).
It is reasonable to believe that if female circumcision contributes to the oppression of women, it will be found only in the societies in which the oppression of women is established. But because the subordination of women and girls is so common, there is bound to be a strong correlation between patriarchy (broadly defined) and female circumcision. That does not make it causal, of course, because the vast majority of cultures that do not practice female circumcision are also patriarchal.
Antiquity and Folklore
The difficulty of offering a causal explanation for female circumcision practices is further complicated by its antiquity. Various mythologies are part of this set of speculations, and I have encountered them in oral tradition and in print. For example, Al-Safi states that “Female circumcision with infibulation was practised by ancient arabs [the uncapitalized form often means “nomads” in Sudanese writing] long before islam [sic] to protect the shepherd girls against likely male attacks while they were out unescorted with their grazing sheep” (1970:63). According to another speculative origin story, an ancient pharaoh who was endowed with a small sexual organ demanded that women should be infibulated to better enhance his pleasure (Huelsman 1976:123). From a social scientist’s point of view, this is no more believable as the start of a custom that lasted for millennia than is the tale about the origin of clitoridectomy reported by English explorer and “orientalist” Sir Richard Burton (1821–90), who sojourned in Somalia and Sudan during the nineteenth century: “This rite is supposed by Moslems to have been invented by Sarah, who so mutilated Hagar for jealousy and was afterwards ordered by Allah to have herself circumcised. It is now universal … and no Arab would marry a girl ‘unpurified’ by it” (quoted in Brodie 1967:110).
Although the origins of female circumcision practices are unknown, several authors report scattered references to its existence in the Nile Valley at least since the times of the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Sudan (Assaad 1980, Sanderson 1981, Rushwan et al. 1983). In addition, there is widespread presumption among contemporary Nile Valley people who practice infibulation that it originated in the society of the pharaohs, as reflected in the contemporary term “pharaonic circumcision.” One study of mummies by Elliot Smith (reported in Sanderson 1981) failed to support this idea because he found no evidence of female circumcision in predynastic or later mummies from Egypt. There are documentary indications, however, that it existed. Sanderson cites a statement from Herodotus that Egyptians, Phoenicians, Hittites, and Ethiopians practiced female excision five hundred years before the birth of Christ. She also notes that “Aramaics have described excision in Egypt in the second century B.C. A Greek papyrus in the British Museum dated 163 B.C. refers to the ‘circumcision’ of girls at the age when they received their dowries in Egypt at Memphis. Strabo described ‘Pharaonic circumcision’ in 23 B.C. amongst the Danakils of Ethiopia and in Egypt. He noted it at Antiphilus, which was situated at about a hundred miles south of the present site of Massawa. He also described excision in the first century A.D. in Egypt” (Sanderson 1981:27).
Meinardus speculated that in ancient Egypt circumcision was related to the Pharaonic belief in the bisexuality of the gods; humans were thought to reflect this in their anatomies, with the feminine “soul” of the man being situated in the prepuce and the masculine “soul” of the woman being in the clitoris. Male circumcision and female clitoridectomy and labia removal are thus needed for one to become fully a man or fully a woman (quoted in Assaad 1980:4). That circumcision operations establish unambiguous gender identity is an idea widespread in circumcising cultures (see Chapter 2). Even if we were able to nail down the origins at a specific location and even if we were able to bring evidence to bear on the speculations of what it meant to thinkers like Meinardus, we would still need to understand why it is preserved by peoples living today. The preservation across the centuries is