The Making of the Suppressed Histories Archives
For 38 years, Max Dashu has researched global women’s history/cultural studies, presenting to all kinds of audiences, from feminist bookstores and community centers to universities, public schools, libraries, museums, prisons, galleries, festivals, and conferences. Her legendary Archives now hold a collection of some 15,000 slides, with thousands more images in hard copy and digital format, as well as text files, maps and books. Dashu has created 100 slide presentations: thirty of them international surveys of topics such as Female Rebels and Mavericks, The European Conquests, and Priestesses; the rest go chronologically by country or region.
In the fall of 1969, in the midst of the anti-war movement and with the ascent of women’s liberation, Max Dashu left behind a full scholarship to began research as an independent scholar on global women’s history, mother-right, patriarchy, and the origins of domination. Women’s Studies did not yet exist, and the academic climate was hostile to raising questions about women’s status and the suppression of female power. She began scouring libraries for evidence of women’s leadership and other social patterns that fell outside the claimed universality of male domination.
Dashu focused on the missing center of women from a global perspective, seeking to understand how domination worked in terms of gender, class and ethnicity. She intuited that the broadest expressions of female leadership were retained in the indigenous world, among the same cultures that had been disregarded and disparaged by classical scholarship, and this proved to be true. This leadership of women often crossed the boundaries of political, religious, economic, and artistic spheres as laid down in the classic “Western Civ” worldview-— one of many pointers toward a different cultural paradigm.
Her research in archaeology showed that neolithic iconography overwhelmingly emphasized women, and in a qualitatively different way than modern media. She found that women in indigenous societies typically had more freedom than women in feudal and colonial systems, and that all present-day matrilineages occur in indigenous societies. It became clear that male domination of women correlated with domination by class, ethnicity, and other socio-political hierarchies. Historical patterns emerged of upper classes being more invested in patrilineage, multiple wives, and constraining women’s bodies and behavior than commoners or indigenous peoples. That is why the Romans called the ruling classes patricians; why veiling and female seclusion began with the Indo-European elite, and footbinding with Chinese aristocrats, long before these customs spread to other classes and cultures.
Dashu found that public female spheres of power tended to concentrate in areas of spiritual leadership and, conversely, that banning the priestess was a keystone to deepening the cultural colonization of women through religion. A more profound level of domination was possible than could be achieved through violence and coercion, if only women could be induced to believe that their oppression was divinely ordained and to acquiesce to an idolatry of the masculine, and to all-male religious authorities.Witch persecutions emerged as another pattern of attack against female power, solidarity, protest and resistance. Persecution of medicine people was a crucial tactic of colonizers to break the spirit of the country they were invading. This went hand in hand with forced conversions and outlawing indigenous religion, or the spiritual practices of subordinated classes and peoples. Women shamans, diviners, and medicine women have often been at the forefront of liberation movements. (See “Priestesses and Political Power” and Rebel Shamans )
In 1973 Dashu became historical consultant for Donna Deitch, who was then at UCLA, working on one of the first feminist documentaries, Woman to Woman. This gave Dashu the opportunity to collect images from several university libraries in southern California and to learn copy photography in the process. She ended up with an initial collection of about 300 slides, the seedlings of the Suppressed Histories Archives. She got a camera and began photographing more images, adding thousands to the growing Archive, year by year by year.
She created slideshows and presented them at women’s bookstores, centers, coffeehouses. The first showing, Matriarchives, took place in 1974 at A Woman’s Place bookstore in Oakland, California, backed by live music by Sandy Ajida, Kay Sato, and Cindy Fitzpatrick. Women of Power premiered at Full Moon Coffeehouse in San Francisco, and was also shown at Mountain Moving Café in Portland and Mother-Right bookstore in Santa Cruz. In 1976 this growing women’s history collection took the name of The Suppressed Histories Archives.
Over the next three decades, Dashu continued to research and teach and archive historic images of women. She investigated mother-right cultures, priestesses, female shamans, witches and the witch hunts, goddess veneration and philosophies of spirit, indigenous female elders and chieftains; patterns of conquest and colonization, the role of captivity and slavery and class systems in developing patriarchy, and the uses of religion in intensifying male domination. She looked at patterns of racist and sexist bias in the way the archaeological and historical record had been evaluated, and called attention to disregarded cultural riches in the Sahara, Ecuador, Sumatra, Indiana, Nubia, Siberia, Utah, Ireland, Ethopia, and Portugal.
Dashu began to present guest lectures at universities in 1981, while continuing to teach through grassroots venues: community centers, women’s conferences and festivals, public schools and libraries, and the occasional prison, gallery, and museum. She presented at women’s centers at Northwestern, Stanford, UC-Berkeley, and many other universities around the US. She gave keynote addresses at the Pagan Studies Conference at Claremont University (2008), the New Jersey Coalition for Battered Women (2005), and California State University at Chico (2000). She presented at international conferences in Rila, Bulgaria; Glastonbury, England; and San Marcos, Texas, and gave slide talks in Spanish at the Museo de San Miguel de Allende, Centro de Justicia Global, and other Mexican venues. She presented at conferences of the National Women’s Studies Association and the American Academy of Religion.
The Suppressed Histories website went online in 2000, reaching a vastly expanded audience, with readers from every country and 80,000 hits a month. It carries dozens of articles, book excerpts, and interviews, and now video clips from the new Women’s Power dvd. Some articles have been translated into Dutch, French, Italian and Hungarian on other websites. Others are available in Spanish on the SHA site, with more to come. Dashu's critique of Cynthia Eller’s The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, has had an international impact since it was published in 2001, and later reprinted in the British journal Feminist Thealogy (Sheffield Press, 2006). Dashu was the first to stand up and challenge Eller’s attacks on Goddess scholars at the Gender and Archaeology Conference in 2002. She follows some sixty scholarly listservs, corresponding with scholars around the world, and fielding queries from other researchers. She continues to present visual talks around North America.
In 1978 Dashu began writing The Secret History of the Witches, a reconstruction of pagan European tradition, especially goddess veneration and female spiritual leadership. Her aim in this sourcebook was to investigate What Happened in Europe: to document how the European witch hunts arose and their cultural impact on women. By 2000 she had written 2000 pages of manuscript, with illustrations and maps. In the decades since Dashu began writing The Secret History of the Witches, significant cultural turnings have occurred: a resurgence of Goddess reverence and, on a larger scale, Christian fundamentalism, church-state patriarchy and authoritarianism, and even new Crusades and torture-trials. This book is intended as a resource for restoration of authentic cultural roots that predate hierarchical religions and to uproot the cultural poisons that continue to sow violence and destruction. Getting the first volume into print is the current priority for the Archives