“When God made man, she was just practising”. I don’t know how far back that joke goes – I can find it referenced in 2006 but I seem to remember it in the late 1970s, alongside “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”, which pretty definitely originated in 1970. There’s an (undated) claim to have heard the “God made man” line in the playground, in the course of a discussion from The Guardian on the question of whether Adam and Eve had navels. That one turns up all over the place on the internet, often in a jokey way but, as some Guardian contributors observed, at least from early modern Europe onwards, it used to be a Very Serious Question Indeed. Although most images of the primordial couple include navels, it isn’t clear why, as they were never inside a mother’s body. The navel question is not dead yet, not least among people who believe Adam and Eve were real.
The story of Adam and Eve is one which we can recognise without much knowledge of the Bible, because it has been told and retold over millennia. There are of course two versions of the creation of humanity contained in Genesis. Written perhaps three centuries apart, they are arranged so that we read the later version first: the one where God creates male and female last of all, made in God’s image (Genesis 1). In Genesis 2, we have the alternative version, where God makes man much earlier on, and then makes woman separately, as a ‘helper’ for the man, from one of his ribs. So, while in one version the creation seems to be simultaneous, in the other Adam came first. 1970s feminism read this earlier version as making Eve was the improved version of humanity, Humanity 2.0. But this was not a new idea. In the much-quoted words of a 1589 book published under the name of ‘Jane Anger’, Eve was superior to Adam because she was made from part of his body, while he was made out of “dross and filthy clay.” Other early modern writers argued that her superiority was expressed in her enthusiasm to learn, interested in eating the fruit of a tree that supposedly imparted knowledge of good and evil. Who wouldn’t want knowledge?
I published a book recently – Immaculate Forms – in which I focused on four body parts which, over Western history, have been seen as constituting a ‘woman’. I’m someone who does read reviews, including those from readers, rather than just those from professional reviewers. One comment from the former is to ask why I didn’t do more ‘parts’. Simple reason, that there was already so much to say, just about my chosen four: breasts, clitoris, hymen, womb. However, ribs, and indeed navels, could definitely have been included.
When I was writing Immaculate Forms, I had a chat with a friend who is from a far more conservative Christian tradition than mine. I mentioned the rib story and he seemed confused; of course it’s true, he said, because a woman really does have one more rib than a man. This is so not the case, as even a cursory online search will show you. But why would you think of doing such a search when you’ve grown up being told that men came first and women came later and men are the origin of women? He wasn’t aware of the urban myths about celebrities such as Raquel Welch and Cher, where modification extends to having ribs removed to create a more defined, more ‘feminine’ waistline. And that’s not just the supposedly ‘extra’ rib.
My friend’s lack of knowledge of bodies has a history, too. According to the great anatomist Andreas Vesalius, in Chapter 19 of the first book of his Fabrica, some people in the sixteenth century similarly believed that Eve’s creation from Adam’s rib meant that men always have one rib less than women. Vesalius regarded this as “plainly absurd.” Even if Adam had lost a rib, that didn’t mean that all men after him had one less – and they clearly don’t. And it tums out that there are also some genetic conditions in which people have a non-standard number of ribs; Vesalius himself noted that while the norm is 12, sometimes there are 11 or 13. That could have led to some of the confusion.
The best story about Adam’s rib has to be the one about the feminist magazine Spare Rib. One of its co-founders, Rosie Boycott, recalled the eureka moment in 1972 when it received its name: “We were all at a Chinese restaurant one evening when Claud [Cockburn] picked up a spare rib and said ‘Call it Spare Rib’. It was a moment of genius.”
However, the plot thickens. In 2015 a further suggestion about Eve’s creation was made by Professor Ziony Zevit who argued that the bone in question was not a rib, but the penis bone (baculum); unlike many other mammals, humans don’t have one, so was the story explaining where it went to? You can probably imagine the reception of this suggestion: it made the UK mass media, with entirely predictable headlines like the Times of Israel’s “Flaccid Response: Claim Eve came from Adam’s penis dismissed as phallacy” as well as attracting more serious analysis. Body parts, present or absent: perhaps you’ve now learned about one, the existence of which you had never previously suspected?
Mistaking histories 