The film: seven million years of history, told in the first person

0:00 · Opening and prologue

In 1994, in Tunis, a Moroccan veterinarian successfully exhibited five paintings from each country of the Maghreb. That veterinarian was me. My name is Azeddine Sedrati. I did not know that on that day, I was opening a door I would never close again.

I decided to present traditional garments from the Greater Maghreb at the congress in Algiers. Amazed by the women’s wedding attire, I began to think of a museum.

Advised by the curator of the Palais Galliera, my new goal became a modern, interactive museum.

So I set out to gather Berber drapes, caftans, haiks and djellabas, jewelry of silver and gold, babouches, belts of wool and silk.

I realized something: having been worn by all these women, these objects had ended up acquiring a soul. They tell a forgotten story, one you will not find in any book. Through the splendor of the jewelry and the bridal garments, I suddenly saw the whole human adventure, across more than seven million years.

Women have carried life, nursed, fed, clothed and educated all of humanity. They have rarely ruled over men. But far too often, they have had to endure everything.

I understood one essential thing: it is women’s garments that most faithfully convey the memory of the civilizations that have followed one another over the centuries.

So, let yourself be guided. I am going to tell you seven million years of history in twenty minutes. At the very end, I will tell you about the most beautiful tribute a man ever paid to a woman. One that came too late.

1:59 · I · Carrying life: seven million years, the first mother

Who gave rise to the home?

The pregnant woman, of course, searching for a safe haven to shelter and protect her offspring. This was the beginning of settled life.

Seven million years ago, our most distant ancestors lived deep in the forests. With brown skin, dark hair and eyes, and bodies covered in hair, these first hominids still looked very much like other primates. Hunter-gatherers in constant search of balance, they struggled simply to survive; they walked, and fled, endlessly, from every danger.

In those days, every birth was a miracle. To hope to reach adulthood and pass on life in turn, a child first had to survive predators, cold, fires, hunger and disease. And this unbroken chain of existence, who carried it at arm’s length? The woman.

A pregnant woman cannot run, nor can a nursing mother. So it is around them, deep in the cave, that the group stops, takes shelter and organizes itself. It is around mothers that the first home was born.

In Morocco, at Jebel Irhoud, the oldest known remains of Homo sapiens were found: more than three hundred thousand years old. Among these first humans, there were mothers.

3:30 · I · Carrying life: giving life

Nine months of carrying life. And then, one day, the time comes.

Childbirth: the supreme natural pain, the most violent the human body can endure. For millions of years, women went through it without help and without remedy.

Giving life meant risking one’s own.

Faced with this peril, another way out had to be found: the caesarean section.

In ancient Rome, a law ordered that the belly of a woman who died in childbirth be opened to save the child. A legend says that Julius Caesar was born this way, and that the operation bears his name.

In Persia, around the year one thousand, the poet Ferdowsi tells of the birth of the hero Rostam, delivered from the side of his mother, Rudabeh.

In Córdoba, at the same time, Abulcasis, an Andalusian physician, was already describing instruments to assist difficult births.

For centuries, the caesarean killed almost every woman who underwent it. It would take three revolutions for giving life to stop being a deadly gamble: hygiene and asepsis, in 1847; anesthesia, in 1853; and sutures, in 1882.

Today, one child in five is born by caesarean section.

Other pains mark every month of a woman’s life: menstruation. Nearly six years of bleeding, with suffering endured in silence. In the eyes of men, it became a symbol of impurity, and polytheistic and monotheistic religions, in turn, imposed their rules of temporary impurity on menstruation, a true anthropological taboo.

If you add up all the days of menstruation in a woman’s life, you arrive at nearly six years. Six years during which, in many traditions, she was considered impure.

Despite all this pain, every morning she gets up and goes out to gather wood. She collects it, binds it and carries it on her back, for she has been in charge of making fire for more than four hundred thousand years; and above all, of keeping it alive every day, day and night, in the hearth. This fire protects, warms and cooks the food. To lose it was to risk death.

This fire was so precious that men made goddesses of it. Among the Greeks, Hestia; among the Romans, Vesta, entrusting the sacred flame dedicated to the gods of Olympus to young virgins, the Vestals.

6:16 · II · Shaping the world: terracotta, the hands that feed

About nineteen thousand years ago, clay met fire, giving birth to the first useful pottery in terracotta. From then on, food could be cooked, stored, carried, shared.

So the woman cooks. She pounds the grain in the mortar with the pestle. She grinds it between two stones, on the millstone. She kneads the dough, she bakes the bread. She fills the goatskin with curdled milk, hangs it, and rocks it until butter and buttermilk are born. A gesture that grandmothers still make, in the Atlas Mountains.

Thousands of years of meals, for all of humanity. And not a single line in the history books.

These gestures have no date, no name, no monument. And yet they have fed every civilization.

7:12 · II · Shaping the world: the thread, wool, cotton, silk

Then comes the thread.

Ten thousand years ago, women knew how to spin and weave plant fibers. In that same period, women also learned to work wool.

She washes it in the river, dries it, cards it between two combs. Then she spins it on the spindle, one thread after another. And she weaves: on the loom, the weft passes between the threads, and the fabric is born.

Six thousand years ago, far apart from one another, in Mexico and in India, women discovered at the same time that the cotton flower could become cloth.

In China, Empress Leizu’s cup of tea would reveal the secret of the silk cocoon. Legend has it that a cocoon fell into her hot tea and, as it unraveled, revealed a strand of incredible fineness: the silk thread.

For centuries, it was women who raised the silkworms, unwound the cocoons, spun the silk and wove it. From this thread the Silk Roads would be born, linking China to the rest of the world.

From the spindle to the loom, woman has clothed humanity.

8:32 · III · Passing on civilizations: the goddesses

Our ancestors quickly understood the great natural and biological values that shaped their daily lives. Procreation and the forces of nature were the major themes. What did they see in them? Divine women.

The goddess of love, fertility and beauty. Isis, nursing her son Horus. Hathor, crowned with the disc of the sun. Aphrodite among the Greeks, Venus among the Romans. Lakshmi in India. All of them pay tribute to the same sacred power: that of the woman who gives life.

The goddess of war: why a woman? Because to raise armies, you needed peoples, and to make peoples, you needed mothers. The woman who gives soldiers becomes the goddess who protects them. Ishtar in Babylon, winged, standing on lions. Sekhmet, the lioness, in Egypt. Athena, the wise warrior, in Athens. Durga and Kali in India, with their many arms.

Then, the goddess of the hunt. Artemis among the Greeks, Diana among the Romans. Men prayed to her to survive, to come back alive from the hunt, and for game to multiply so that the hunt would never run dry.

For humanity to continue, couples, families, tribes and peoples had to be united. And this is where the story of the many alliances begins, alliances that strengthened kingdoms, religions, and even civilizations. The bride is their true cement.

10:15 · III · Passing on civilizations: marriage unites peoples

Why did men make their wedding the greatest celebration of their lives?

Because marriage is first of all the ceremony of life being passed on. With it, the first human communities were born: a man, a woman, recognized children, a family. Then marriage united two families. Then two clans.

And finally, two peoples.

King Solomon marries a daughter of Pharaoh, and two kingdoms draw closer.

Cleopatra allies herself with Julius Caesar, then with Mark Antony. Their daughter, Cleopatra Selene, marries Juba the Second, king of Mauretania, our land. Together, they reign as far as Volubilis, and Egypt, Rome and North Africa find themselves united by a woman.

The Prophet of Islam is bound by marriage to the first four caliphs. He marries Aisha, daughter of Abu Bakr, and Hafsa, daughter of Omar. His daughters marry Uthman and Ali.

And here at home, in Volubilis once again, eight centuries later. In 788, Idris, a descendant of the Prophet, fled the East and found refuge among the Awraba, an Amazigh tribe. He married one of their women, Kenza al-Awrabiya. Three years later, Idris died, poisoned. Kenza was then carrying his child. She raised this son, Idris the Second, who would make Fez his capital. From the union of an exile from Arabia and an Amazigh woman, the Idrisid kingdom was born, the cradle of the Moroccan state.

Vladimir, prince of Kyiv, marries a Byzantine princess. With her, his whole people embraces Christianity.

A king will even change religion for a woman. To marry Anne Boleyn, Henry the Eighth breaks with Rome. In 1534, with the Act of Supremacy, the Church of England is born.

The Habsburgs, in Europe, even made it a motto: "Let others wage war; you, happy Austria, marry." Louis the Fourteenth marries Maria Theresa of Spain to seal the peace between two kingdoms. Louis the Sixteenth marries Marie Antoinette of Austria.

Each time, a woman is the cement of the alliance.

Among all peoples, the bride is magnificently prepared and dressed for the wedding ceremony.

12:55 · III · Passing on civilizations: clothing and adornment

Look at a garment: it will tell you about a people.

The drape, first. A story ten thousand years old. A single piece of cloth, wrapped around the body, held by fibulae and a belt at the waist. In Greece, it is the peplos. In Rome, the toga and the palla. In North Africa, the haik and the melhfa. In India, the sari. In Malaysia and Indonesia, the sarong. Peoples who never met invented the same gesture. Every woman, in every country, brought the same style, with her own color, her own climate, her own modesty.

Then comes sewn cloth, from northern China. The Ottomans turn it into the caftan, Iran into the sarouel. Mongol horsemen invent trousers for riding. And these shapes travel: with the Greco-Roman Empire, with the Jewish diaspora, with the pilgrimage to Mecca, with the Crusades, with the Ottoman Empire. All these roads carried these garments all the way to us.

In Asia, the Chinese robe, the hanfu, crosses the sea. It inspires the kimono of Japan and the hanbok of Korea. Look at them side by side: the same crossed collar, the same wide sleeves, the same broad belt. They are cousins.

And here at home, the djellaba. We find it first on monks, the homespun habit with its hood, then on the Amazigh shepherd of the mountains, in thick wool. Then on the Moroccan woman, who adopts it to go out. And today, embroidered and colorful, it walks the runways. One timeless shape, and many uses.

Jewelry and adornments tell the same story. The caftan embroidered with gold. The keswa el kbira, the grand gown of Andalusian and North African Jewish brides. The belt of Fez, the belt of Tetouan, the Berber belt with its wool pompoms. Silver fibulae, necklaces of amber and coral, the hand of Fatma. Every region, every community has written its history in thread and metal.

Sewn fabrics embraced the functions, the rank and the soul of those who wore them.

One day, in Paris, a couturier in love with Marrakech, Yves Saint Laurent, dared to dress a woman in a tuxedo. Once again, clothing heralded a revolution.

Every piece you will see here has been worn. By a bride, a grandmother, a young girl on her special day. Behind every jewel, there is a face.

15:46 · IV · Recognizing women: the invisible work

For millennia, a great part of humanity’s work was neither paid, nor counted, nor even named.

Carrying water. Washing clothes in the river, on her knees, hands in the cold water. Hanging them in the sun. Ironing them with an iron heated on the embers. Sweeping, scrubbing the floor, making the beds, folding the linen into the chest, feeding the family and loved ones.

Our spinning mills, our washing machines, our irons, all our household appliances were born from these very gestures.

This invisible work kept homes standing. And homes kept societies standing.

16:32 · IV · Recognizing women: abuses women endured

What follows is hard to imagine. We cannot ignore the abuses women have suffered in different civilizations.

In pre-Islamic Arabia, in India, and in ancient China and Greece, newborn girls were killed or buried alive for economic, social or religious reasons.

In China, for nearly a thousand years, little girls' feet were bound and their bones broken, to force them into tiny shoes: a symbol of status, seduction and control.

In Asia, among certain peoples, metal rings grip and lengthen women’s necks from childhood.

In Africa and elsewhere, excision still mutilates millions of little girls. In some countries, young girls' breasts are ironed with a hot stone, to hide their bodies from view.

In Europe, the corset crushed waists and breath. The chastity belt became the symbol of the woman as possession.

For centuries, thousands of women accused of witchcraft were tried, tied to the stake and burned. Others were put on display in the public square, their necks locked in a wooden pillory, to the laughter of the crowd.

Stoning. The full veil imposed by force.

And still today, every day, around the world, women are killed, raped or beaten because they are women.

This violence belongs to no single people and no single religion. It was born of poverty and ignorance. It was committed, and sometimes passed on, by men and by women, but it was also fought by others.

This forum must bear witness to it.

18:29 · IV · Recognizing women: women in monotheism

Even before the religions of the one God, a woman’s fate depended on her civilization.

In ancient Egypt, a woman was legally equal to a man: she owned property, inherited, signed contracts, without a guardian. In Mesopotamia, the law already allowed a mistreated wife to return to her father’s house with her dowry. In Rome, on the contrary, a woman belonged all her life to the head of the family, who held the power of life and death over her.

Then come the monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. They bring an ethic: the paramount role of the mother, and the protection of the child born into her faith. Their relationship with women is made of light and shadow.

The light: in our religions, the mother is blessed and revered above all men. In Islam, the Virgin Mary is named in the Bible and in the Quran. Khadija is the first to believe in the Prophet.

The advent of Islam forbade, in Arabia, the burying of girls, and gave them a share of inheritance at a time when they had none.

The shadows: all three religions placed women under the guardianship of men. With the obligation to obey him, to serve him, to cover herself before others, to be faithful to him, to accept divorce if the man decides it. These negative interpretations were made by men of their time. Today, they are debated and called into question.

Between light and shadow, one constant: the mother, the child’s first school. It is she who passes on language, prayer, tenderness and knowledge.

20:23 · IV · Recognizing women: the Great Ladies

How many famous women can you name? Ten? Twenty? And how many men?

A small number, compared to the vast host of patriarchs celebrated by men.

Despite the rigor of dogma, women have governed, built, taught, discovered.

Hatshepsut, woman and pharaoh of Egypt. Cleopatra, last queen of the Nile. Dihya, whom the Arab chroniclers called the Kahina, Amazigh queen of the Aurès, who opposed the arrival of the Arab armies in North Africa. Zaynab an-Nafzawiyya, counselor to the Almoravids, as Marrakech was being born. Fatima al-Fihriya, who founded in Fez, in 859, al-Qarawiyyin, the oldest university in the world still in operation.

Sayyida al-Hurra, governor of Tetouan. Isabella of Castile. Elizabeth I of England. Marie Curie, twice a Nobel Prize winner.

And here at home, Malika El Fassi, the only woman to sign the Manifesto of Independence, in 1944. And Princess Lalla Aicha who, in Tangier, in 1947, spoke out for the education of girls.

Behind each of these great ladies, there are millions of women whose names no one remembers.

21:51 · IV · Recognizing women: 19th–20th centuries, emancipation

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the doors open, one by one.

The university, first. In 1849, in the United States, a woman became a doctor for the first time. In 1861, a Frenchwoman earned the baccalaureate. Knowledge, long reserved for men, opened up to women.

Industry, next. In the spinning mills, women ran the weaving machines, just as their ancestors turned the spindle. During the Great War, when the men left for the front, it was women who kept the factories, and the nations, running.

Wages, finally. A woman who earns her bread chooses her life.

But laws still had to be broken. Did you know that in Paris, an ordinance from 1800 required a woman to ask the police for permission to wear trousers? It was not repealed... until twenty thirteen.

Then came the right to vote. New Zealand in 1893. France in 1944. In 1946, France wrote into its Constitution that the law guarantees women, in all areas, rights equal to those of men. In 1983, it imposed equality in the workplace. In 2000, parity in elections. And in Morocco, the Constitution of 1962 granted women the same political rights as men.

From parchment to law, two centuries of conquests. And often, beside these women, men, fathers, husbands, lawmakers, chose to walk with them.

23:42 · V · Honoring living women: the 21st century

Today, women lead, heal, teach, judge, build, explore space. Machines have replaced physical strength: what once separated men and women at work is fading away.

In Morocco, the Family Code of 2004, the Constitution of 2011, and then the new reform called for by His Majesty King Mohammed VI, enshrine equality in law. The road is not finished, neither here nor elsewhere. But never, in all of human history, has it been so open.

To those who dismiss these truths on the pretext that they are already known, let us propose a calculation on the scale of the eight billion human beings who live on Earth. They have required six billion years of gestation, twelve billion years of breastfeeding, and twenty-four billion years of watchfulness and education in early childhood alone. Why keep endlessly quantifying commodity prices, stock market speculation or the number of missiles, and close our eyes to this true value, the very essence of all biology? Are we not overlooking half of humanity?

One beautiful story remains. The one I promised you at the beginning.

25:01 · V · Honoring living women: the Taj Mahal, the greatest gift

The greatest gift a man ever gave a woman is made of white marble. It weighs thousands of tons. And she never saw it.

In 1612, in India, Prince Khurram married Arjumand Banu. She became Mumtaz Mahal, "the pearl of the palace". She was not only his wife. She followed him on all his military campaigns, advised him, kept the imperial seal. He became Emperor Shah Jahan.

In 1631, at the age of thirty-eight, Mumtaz Mahal died giving birth to their fourteenth child. The emperor, heartbroken, vowed to build her a tomb such as the world had never seen.

Twenty thousand artisans. More than twenty years of work. Elephants hauling the white marble of Makrana. Precious stones inlaid one by one, into flowers of light. The Taj Mahal.

The greatest tribute ever paid to a woman was paid to her after her death. That is why I told you it came too late.

The Taj Mahal leaves us a lesson: we must not wait for a woman to be gone before we honor her. This Forum is dedicated to living women: our mothers, our daughters, our sisters, our wives, and to the men who walk beside them. I have gathered this memory and opened these doors. It is women, and the men who respect them, who will bring it to life.

For the history of women is not the history of half of humanity. It is the history of all humanity.

Welcome to the Forum de Femme.