They Huey P. Newton Reader

Eve, the mother of all 1iving: 1974
he psychobiologist Mary Jane Sherfrey made two startling dis­
in the mid-1950s. The first was that biological research
Tcoveries
had clear evidence that life in the uterus begins as female; the fetus
was defined by a rudimentary phallus. The surpassing irony of Dr.
Sherfrey's discovery was that this elemental fact had been totally
ignored, or rather repressed, by biology as it existed under the spell
of the "male bias"-and that is the second discovery. The two discoveries
arc of equal importance: to begin with, that life begins
female, and second, that science has repressed and suppressed this
twentieth-century heresy.
During the period of pre-science, the assumption had been, predictably,
that life began as male, and that a castrated or deformed fetus
was born as a female. This atavistic belief was eventually replaced by
the idea that life began as a neuter with sex differentiations arriving
at a later stage of intra-uterine development. This scientific-sounding
proposition gave way under the weight of modern research data, but
the new discovery was ignored.
This incredible gap in the scientific dialogue can have only one
explanation: that Adam came out of Eve and not the reverse, as we
have been taught for millennia. The fairy tale of Genesis is taken lightly
at our peril, as Ms. Sherfrey and lately the women's liberation movement
have told us. But the conflict between appearance and reality is
perhaps more profound than even the women's movement has argued.
The first principle of nature itself seems to be female. Genesis is a
startling testament to man's realization of that basic identity. In Genesis
we see the ancient Mother Nature co-opted by a patriarchal supcrmasculine
beard of a god. The trauma of female primacy is further
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