We should not fool ourselves. Although history is written by men, the presence of women is also palpable, from the most ancient legends to today, when they assert themselves as visible players in the life of their countries. This vast area bathed by the Mediterranean, which extends from the old columns of Hercules − the current Strait of Gibraltar −, plunging into the Atlantic to the shores of Asia where it takes on other names, is not only irrigated by this emblematic sea. It is also a land of myths where men have not always held first place. After all, or rather above all, in the Greek mythology that has shaped a decisive part of the European imaginary, Gaia, the Earth, is the origin. It is she who alone engenders Uranus (Sky), and also Pontus (Sea), and the mountains. She then conceives with the first deities, the Titans and the Titanesses, males and females but equally strong. In the Greek myth, hierarchies do not arrive until later, in the world of men and not in Olympus, when Zeus asks Prometheus to create Pandora, the first woman, to sow discord among these inferior beings: humans. And while in Olympus the gods gradually become dominant, there could be no life on Earth or in Heaven without the goddesses.

Let us look now at some older myths that come from the southern shore. The birth of Egypt, for instance, this country of Ptah that was the cradle of one of the oldest states in the world. Isis, wife of Osiris and mother of the god Sun Horus, goes out in search of the remains of her husband murdered by Set, the god of chaos and destruction. Her divine journey puts her in a unique place in the Egyptian pantheon; she is the mother of the gods, the goddess that defeats the powers of the night. She reigns over the sea, over the fruits of the earth, over the dead. She is the universal female principle and has greatly inspired the Hellenic pantheon, where we find her in the form of Demeter.

The Bible also tells stories of women. Is it the mark of the patriarch that prevails in the first monotheism as it will in the next two? Women’s history is here less glorious than that of pagan mythologies, but no less decisive for the future of the human species. First is Lilith, who might have been Adam’s first wife before Eve, and whose existence would explain the contradictions of Genesis. The first version of Genesis tells us effectively that “So God created man in his own image […] Man and woman were created at the same time” (1:27).). Some later verses (2:22) tell us instead that ““from the rib that Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.”[1] Lilith might not have agreed with Adam and fled to the Red Sea. Her desire for independence transformed her into a monster in the Talmud, which demonised her. Eve too, as we all know, wanted to follow her own path. But the Holy Father, who has since become an absolute figure of monotheisms, instructed all humanity to expiate the sin of a woman who had committed the crime of wishing to access knowledge.

However, we should not paint things blacker than they are told in the monotheist revelations. In the Bible we find positive figures of women, such as Esther who saved her people. The Gospels are not particularly misogynistic, rather the contrary; and in the Muslim prophetic gest, figures such as the first wife of Mohammed, Khadija, and his youngest wife, Aisha, are described as women of authority who had a decisive influence on the future of the new religion.

Let us leave aside the divine worlds and the stories of creation, however seductive they may be, and enter our modest human world where, in number, but only in number, women and men are almost equal. However, although mythical stories give women an outstanding place, official history has always overlooked them, other than some figures who have escaped the oblivion to which male stories had condemned them. Official history, both in the Mediterranean and elsewhere, is a history of the sovereigns, the wars they wage and the kingdoms they build on their victories. When women appear, it is in the background, as a decor, and often in inglorious roles of intriguers, sorceresses or odalisques, a kind of pernicious place to rest.

However, although mythical stories give women an outstanding place, official history has always overlooked them, other than some figures who have escaped the oblivion to which male stories had condemned them

And yet, despite what has been done to conceal them, they are present everywhere, and without them the world would not exist. The official accounts have not managed to completely cover up their presence and they insist on emerging from their graves. The historian, female historian in this case – and this is by no means a coincidence – who decides to tell the story of the life of some famous women of the ancient or recent past, nevertheless faces a series of hurdles that at first sight seem insurmountable. The first, the most exclusive, are the sources. For most of these heroines, even the most famous, world-renowned, reliable documentation is scarce, practically non-existent. We can only conjecture based on pieces collected here and there. Some mentions about a story or a handful of lines in the margins of a text is all we have to try to explore a vast dark continent, that of the history of women on both shores of the Mediterranean. It is perhaps for this reason that blurred figures who have managed to emerge from silence have become, in many cases, immortal heroines of so-called novels. Works about women − ranging from Dido, the supposed founder of Carthage in the early first millennium BC, to the Berber Queen Kahena, who in the late 7th century led resistance to the Arab conquest, confining ourselves to the southern shore − are closer to fiction than reality. As the writers of these works cannot explore the depths of the real past, these women live in the imaginary, which often means that they are not forgotten. Pure invention coexists in these cases with the fragments of a history full of mysteries.

Some mentions about a story or a handful of lines in the margins of a text is all we have to try to explore a vast dark continent, that of the history of women on both shores of the Mediterranean

We cannot simply list the women of importance in countries bordering this sea, which is both shared and a place of conflict, since this article would take the form of a dictionary as there are so many. They can be classified at best by categories allotted to them by stories written by men: heroines usually defeated by powers always exercised by men, female regents or queens whose main characteristic is to have exerted a nefarious influence on their male kinship, or women who have been able to orient certain policies thanks to their influence on their son or husband.

The typologies, always partial and biased, usually systematically forget women without a name or genealogy, those without whom the economy in the etymological sense of the term would not exist. In traditional societies, where the multigenerational family cell was also an economic entity, in addition to their reproductive function − which was always underestimated −, women have always ensured the production activities necessary for the life of the group, such as farmers, agro-processors, small livestock breeders, cooks, weavers and potters who pass on their knowledge to their daughters… we would never complete the list of their indispensable activities for life in society. Writing social history, an academic field that has recently earned a prominent place within the broader discipline, means writing the history of women if you want understand the reality of societies as much as possible.

But let us return now to our brief classification of women whose names and endeavours have reached us despite the silences of history. As memories of them passed down the centuries to us, this long journey in time has made most of them mythical figures or archetypes. Some examples give the measure of these transformations.

On both shores, heroines usually come to a bad end. Greek tragedy paved the way for these long martyrological journeys with characters such as Antigone. Dido immolated herself in a fire. Sophonisba threw herself from the top of the citadel of Carthage to escape the barbarism of the Romans. Kahina was mortally wounded in her last battle against the invader. Joan of Arc was burned alive for having played a role that was not assigned to her, that of a war chief leading her troops.

The typologies, always partial and biased, usually systematically forget women without a name or genealogy, those without whom the economy in the etymological sense of the term would not exist

Let us now examine some queens from the north of the Mediterranean. In France, Catherine de’ Medici was long accused by male historiography of having agitated the famous St. Bartholomew massacre in 1572, during which thousands of Protestants died. Everything came together to make her the prototype of a bad woman: Italian, therefore foreign, from a Florentine family famous among others for its supposed use of poison in politics, mother of a weak and mentally obsessed king, according to the doxa, she almost led France into chaos. Less harmful perhaps, the queens Marie de’ Medici, mother of Louis XIII, and the Spanish Anna of Austria, mother of Louis XIV, are equally negatively described by a historiography that has long dominated the discourse. A little more than a century later, another foreigner, the Austrian Marie Antoniette responded with a guilty contempt for the demands of the French people.

Further east, at the edges of Europe and Asia, being a woman in the Ottoman Empire excited the imagination, and the Orientalism that triumphed in art and literature in Western Europe from the 18th century transformed the women of one of the most important courts of the modern era in this region of the world into odalisques, frustrated inhabitants of the imperial harems, places of sordid intrigues, or into cold-hearted sultanas at the service of the ambitions of their male offspring. Certainly, many myths partially feed from the real source, but distort it to make it correspond to the image that their time seeks to attach to the characters portrayed. And if we can learn anything from the few cases mentioned here, it is that women, when they do not sacrifice themselves to a cause that is bigger than them, are often causes of disorder when they exhibit ambitions that go beyond the roles assigned to them.

But history is also a geographically situated discipline and we do not look at the figures that populate it according to whether we are on one side of the sea or the other. While, in Spain, Isabella the Catholic is celebrated for having ended the unification of the kingdom in 1492 by ridding it of its last Arab stronghold, the Nasrid kingdom of Granada, she is not well seen among the Arabs definitively expelled from Al-Andalus, and even less among the Jews for having expelled them with extreme violence from a land that had been theirs for centuries.

The impression that prevails in any case when we read about the myths and history is that of the omnipresence of women in the public sphere of all the countries in the Mediterranean, and we have only mentioned a few here. However, there are other aspects that lead to another reading of history.

One thing immediately stands out: whatever mythical epics and legends we explore, whatever historical period we consider, women are far from being mere spectators of a history that ran its course without them. They are essential players and, in many cases, went beyond the roles to which the patriarchy, firmly entrenched in the Mediterranean, sought to confine them. Warriors, sovereigns, figures behind the scenes, masters of cunning when they had no other means of action, they have contributed significantly to writing these histories, their glorious episodes as well as their dark moments.

Then a question arises that a deeper study of this historical female presence could perhaps answer, although with some uncertainty, as we will see. Do women act differently from men when they do politics and hold power? Is there a feminine way to understand res publica and act on it? In other words, can the Mediterranean myths and the history of the peoples of this vast group be rethought from a gender perspective? And would this perspective radically shift the view about this region that has been projected so far?

It has often been said that women give life and therefore cannot be agents of death. It has also been said, and history confirms this, that wars are a matter of men and that the epics that idealise the stories are odes to virility. Power, as it has been exercised and explained, would therefore have a virile essence and would not involve any feminine dimension. In this case, are the women who have held positions of power virile? In general, this question needs to be answered in the affirmative. In the examples we have given, two types of women actually emerge. The first are those that do politics from the gynaeceum − either the harem or the bedroom − and that go beyond the spaces that theoretically belong to them without deviating too much from patriarchal society’s image of them. The second are those who transmute into men and disguise themselves to act, such as Kahina or Joan of Arc, who dress as men and brandish their weapons. Because, despite the importance of their presence, women have always been minorities in the spheres of power, and have unwillingly adapted to the male model when on exceptional occasions they held the highest positions. Up to contemporary times, women have not broken this rule.

Another question then arises. If power were shared equally between men and women or, more unlikely, if power were exercised mostly by women, would it change its nature and obey other paradigms? In other words, would women become “a man like any other” when they cease to be oppressed, or would they reveal something else that could change this world in which we live, which is always a world of men, since how they see it and act upon it still dominates? In fact, it is impossible to answer such a question, since no empirical data can be relied on to verify its pertinence. For now, we must be content with merely asking it.

If, while walking the streets of their cities, they saw the names of women on signs instead of the monotonous litany of male monarchs, generals and politicians, they would think differently about women, having found it normal that they are not equal

By way of epilogue, I can say that, in view of a history that I have limited myself to outlining here, women must finally find their place in the historical narratives presented to the citizens of Mediterranean countries. To achieve this, there must be first a revolution in education, but not only in this field. If schoolboys and schoolgirls studied women’s real place in the past and present of their societies, many stereotypes would be shattered. If, while walking the streets of their cities, they saw the names of women on signs instead of the monotonous litany of male monarchs, generals and politicians, they would think differently about women, having found it normal that they are not equal. Some states have set about addressing this and are slowly but surely feminising public spaces. Others deny or, perhaps worse, do not even think about, this to the extent that the men who govern them are convinced of the naturalness of the social roles they occupy and the monopolies they grant themselves. Everything must change, not for it to continue the same, as the hero of the novel The Leopard expected, but for it to become better, given that all domination has a devastating effect not only on the dominated but on the dominators themselves. 

[1] The Bible, translation by the French rabbinate. Éditions Colbo, Paris, 1989. This translation has since been challenged by many scholars, who regard it as erroneous. In fact, the exact Hebrew wording of the verse would be “the side”. Eve would thus have been created at the man’s side.