“Women are the symbol of civilization.”

No matter what gender you are, how do you react to that statement?

Much to the surprise of my female colleagues reading this statement with me for the first time, I found it insulting, supercilious, and patronizing. (They thought it was more or less true!) I, however, had immediately thought of Mary, mother of Jesus, inflated in our own Church to symbol – of purity, goodness, blessedness, whatever. What a burden, I thought, when you have to stand for something rather than be someone. Why are we not good enough simply as human beings, even ones with flaws? Why doesn’t that fact alone qualify us to embrace roles as leaders and ministers if so called? And why, throughout the ages, did the men of the Church think elevating that particular woman into symbol would placate the rest of us for all the exclusion and repression and erasure we have always faced?

Just think, if we let ourselves be labeled “symbols of civilization”, we would have to embody ideals like culture, truth, beauty, courtesy, decorum, propriety, peace, polish, and civility. You first! I would fail … or is that the point?

The quote itself is in the sidebar description of a series of paintings of women by artist, Willem de Kooning, and is attributed to him there (although he may have been quoting someone else). He also notes that his conflating women’s bodies and landscapes in this series of his paintings “makes them friendly and not so aggressive”. (Why do I want to go ‘Grrrr”!) Even more telling, his statement, “women are the symbol of civilization,” ends with this: “like the Venus of Willendorf.”

Needless to say, I had to look her up. Here she is:

She is a Paleolithic figurine dating from about 25,000 BCE, and she is 4 1/2 inches high.  

According to art historians, her enlarged breasts and stomach and enhanced pubic area indicate her probable main function as a symbol (here we go again…) of procreation and fertility. In fact, traces of red ochre paint on her pubic area seem to include even her menstrual blood as a symbol of the life force. All other parts of her body are reduced and subordinate. And, of course, she has no face.  

Author and commentator Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe writes: 

As the earliest known representation, she became the “first” woman, acquiring an Ur-Eve identity that focused suitably, from a patriarchal point of view, on the fascinating yet grotesque reality of the female body and its bulging vegetable nature; an impersonal composition of sexually-charged swollen shapes; an embodiment of overflowing fertility, of mindless fecundity, of eternal sex, the woman from which all women descend.

Okay, you who want to define us as symbols, what are we to be: lofty and unapproachable or tiny and way too approachable? 

Once again, I call out to let us define ourselves. We are actually wise and resourceful and brave enough to do that.  In fact, if no one limits our actions, we will show you all we can be. 

In fact, here is one example, a definition of civilization by Margaret Mead, that sounds much closer to who we really are:

A broken femur that has healed is evidence that someone has taken time to stay with the one who fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery. Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts.

We are who we are through what we are allowed, and choose, to do in and for the world. 

I offer you another piece of art, this one as abstract as the one above was graphic. It is one of many extraordinary pieces of art by women and other gendered in the exhibit “Taking Space” at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Artist Winifred Lutz titled the work:  

Uncontainable, Once Begun,

Light Flees Its Center Ceaselessly

Oh yes. Now that is more like us. 

That is us: doing. 

That is us: being. 

And that is us: becoming.