http://www.the-tls.co.uk/this_week/story.aspx?story_id=2107313
Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet
Carolyne Larrington
20 May 2004
NEVER MARRY A WOMAN WITH BIG FEET
Women in proverbs from around the world
Mineke Schipper
422pp. | Yale University Press. | ?35 (US $40). 0 300 10249 6
"Women have very little idea of how much men hate them”, Germaine Greer
famously wrote in 1970. On the evidence of Mineke Schipper’s fascinating
analysis of the more than 15,000 proverbs she has collected, male speakers
in the cultures recorded here do indeed fear, despise, exploit and disparage
women, from birth (“A whole night of labour, and then only a daughter”) to
death (“A dead goose gives life, a dead woman gives heaven”). “There have
only been three good women”, assert the Germans: “The first walked out of
the world, the second drowned in the Rhine, the third they are still looking
for.”
Schipper’s database grew from her own experience of collecting the many
proverbs she heard daily when living in the Congo, for proverbs are an
important cultural component across Africa. Soliciting further contributions
from friends and acquaintances, and adding material from the compendia of
proverbs compiled by nineteenth- and twentieth-century collectors, she has
organized her material under four basic headings: The Female Body, Phases of
Life(from which most of the proverbs in the opening paragraph were taken),
Basics of Life (love, sex, fertility) and Female Power. With the
subdivisions of each broad section, from mothers-in-law to women’s knees,
from sterility (“A barren sow is never kind to piglets”, say the Danes) to
women’s propensity for witchcraft, Schipper establishes an extremely useful
taxonomic system for classifying women’s experience. There is some degree of
overlap, between motherhood and fertility, for example, but most categories
are discrete and significant.
The reader is struck by the conservative nature of the proverbs, wherever in
the world they originate. Women receive praise only for being beautiful
young girls, hard-working and uncomplaining wives (though both are
fundamentally untrustworthy) and, of course, for being mothers. Misogyny
melts into sentimentality as the male wielder of proverbs contemplates his
mother: “The elephant never tires from carrying her own tusks” is widespread
in Africa; “Your mother is your mother, your wife is just a woman”, they say
in the Dutch Antilles; “When the mother sleeps her toes are awake”, opine
Creole speakers in Guadeloupe. A mother can see no wrong in her offspring,
“The beetle saw its child on the wall and said ‘a pearl on a thread’” (an
Arabic proverb from Lebanon). Sexual desire is taboo for women; the girl
should not pursue her lover (“The horse cannot sell itself”, “The mortar
seeks the pestle”); once the virgin has lost her fear of sex, she becomes
insatiable, “The rat will die and the hole will not be satisfied”. African
proverbs are the least coy about sexual matters; Arabic proverbs are often
cynical: “Treat your wife well and you can have your neighbour’s” reflects
an enlightened self-interest.
Though Schipper does not give percentages for the genders of her informants,
the vast majority of the proverbs represent male views, and male experience
of women. Women may well have separate repertoires of proverbs, but these
have scarcely begun to be collected, and are unlikely to gain the cultural
approval and currency of male proverbs. Schipper cites a comment from Kwame
Anthony Appiah to the effect that when a female scholar who collected Twi
women’s proverbs, current in Ghana and the Ivory Coast, reported their
contents to male Twi speakers, the men were shocked by what the women had to
say. Here and there in Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet proverbs expressing
a female point of view occur; one from one of the oldest recorded
collections, from ancient Sumeria, observes, perhaps complacently, “While by
day he is a monk, at night he sleeps in our arms”. “A man is like pepper;
only when you have tasted do you know how hot it is” is a Hausa proverb;
“Mamma’s baby, papa’s maybe” is a Jamaican saying, joking about the
perennial male anxiety about his children’s paternity. The lover’s
unreliability is beautifully signalled by the Arabic proverb, “You promised
me earrings and I pierced my ears; you did not give me earrings and made me
suffer for nothing”; “Your husband, cherish him as your best friend, but
distrust him as your worst enemy”, warns a North African Jewish proverb.
By the end of her analysis, Schipper is able to draw some conclusions about
the universal attributes which proverbs perceive in women, and the normative
rules which govern their existence. Women belong to a gendered and
restricted space, the home, the inside, the kitchen. They are very
frequently imaged as containers, both of love and of wickedness, but most
importantly, as the containers for future children, preferably sons. They
can gain merit by devoting themselves to what Schipper identifies as the
four Cs, childcare, cooking (“Every husband is his wife’s pig, he eats
whatever she prepares”), crafts (primarily cloth production, spinning and
weaving) and cleaning, for “Hell is lined with grimy housewives” (a Japanese
remark).
This is an engrossing book to dip into; many proverbs will raise a smile,
though often a bitter one, others evoke puzzlement, though the author is
assiduous in providing explanations where available. “The lazy pig eats the
soft pears”, as Albanians remark, seems applicable to any number of
situations, not necessarily those which are specifically gendered. “Even an
old woman may run when a goat carries her snuffbox”, say Nigerians; Schipper
explains this as meaning that indecorous behaviour in old age may be
explained by exceptional circumstances, but one feels sure there must be
more to it than that. And what about “A woman with the genitals of a large
octopus is stronger than God and even stronger than the Devil”, from
Guadeloupe? Though the book might have been half as long again, and a
nightmare to typeset, citation in the original languages would have been
desirable. Though Schipper’s English is fluent, it is by no means devoid of
non-native usages; the publishers should really have edited it more
thoroughly.
Proverbs are less common currency in the West than once they were, Schipper
observes; advertising slogans have perhaps taken their place. They intersect
illuminatingly with the literary: in the thirteenth-century Prophecies de
Merlin, the wizard, entombed alive by his cunning inamorata, crossly
observes that horses need the spur and women need the whip, a proverb cited
widely in Europe and North and South America. In a medieval Icelandic vision
poem, a special part of heaven is reserved for those who have placed food in
their mothers’ mouths, the least a child should do, one might expect, rather
than a particularly meritorious deed. Now contextualized by numerous
proverbs stressing the ingratitude of children in contrast to the selfless
love of their mothers, the Icelandic verse begins to make sense. Polonius’s
speech to Laertes in Hamlet, dispensing sage advice to his son before he
departs, is now usually played to characterize the old man as a tedious
windbag. Yet a contemporary audience is likely to have been nodding in
agreement with “To thine own self be true”, and taking note of “Neither a
borrower nor a lender be”. “Didactic” has become pejorative in modern
European culture and we have lost respect for the oral wisdom of our past.
Mineke Schipper’s final thought is that to share proverbs is to share
understanding, that the different sayings in her collection might illuminate
local cultural difference, but point to a universal apprehension and
interpretation of women’s experience. Proverbs are powerful in traditional
societies, even those which are attempting to modernize; though their truth
is often limited and situational, women need to know them to defend
themselves against them and to deploy them for their own benefit.
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