Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy (21 page)

Tami Blumenfield, Eileen Walsh, and others have noted that the Na tend to have long-term partnerships, one at a time, with the visitors, and that these “walking marriages” (the people’s own term) lead to paternal responsibility (including financial contributions and direct care), since a woman usually knows who the father is (and would feel embarrassed if she didn’t). Nevertheless, the main household itself is matrilineal, and it is run by a matriarch; by comparison, the role of male sexual partners is fluid and small, based on women’s affectionate choices, and subject to change. It is certainly a challenge to the Western idea of marriage. Outside the household, however, Na society is stratified and patriarchal, especially at the top, where even descent becomes patrilineal and noble male legacies are preserved.

So despite these fascinating cases, and however they reckoned legacies, early farming and herding cultures were almost certainly patriarchal, even if some were matrilineal, and “Big Men” would have had central roles in their clans. Among the Enga of highland New Guinea, studied for decades by Polly Wiessner, “Relations between
men and women were structured by separation of the sexes that assigned public roles to men and private ones to women.”

Patriarchy at first may have been weak, but as populations swelled, they grew ever more stratified and unequal. They had to stand and defend their crops and grazing land. Plowing, livestock, and war put male strength at a premium, and those who could built coalitions to rule women and weaker, poorer men. Many patriarchies eventually built pyramids, but even before that they
were
pyramids—social pyramids, and steep ones, too. They were also systems of predatory expansion, growing at the expense of neighboring peoples. In Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Mexico, Peru, and Nigeria, similar trends independently appeared at different times. All the trends enhanced men’s power.

Thousands of years passed between the invention of farming and the rise of empires; that awaited the emergence of cities housing imperial governments, organized religions, a merchant class, and an army under central control. Urban life was decried from the first for its filth, crowding, loose morals, and corruption of youth, yet it became a worldwide trend, unabated since. Cities beckon according to what people can learn and gain, and how and with whom they can play when they take breaks from striving. And for males, it is often about access to females.

Karl Marx famously claimed that “capital comes into the world soiled with mire from head to toe and oozing blood from every pore.” Whether or not this is true of capital, what we call civilization
literally
arose from the mire of flooded fertile soil spattered with the blood of conquered peoples. Men killed men and seized women or enslaved both. Wealthy hereditary aristocracies had standing armies and allied with priestly classes. All were coalitions—conspiracies—of men. The masterpieces of art, architecture, and literature that we associate with civilization are compelling, and the artists who created them are worthy of homage, but they were made in the service of violent male hierarchies, not for the simple sake of beauty.

Slaves built the majestic Sphinx and the towering pyramids of Egypt, so that all who might have thought of freedom could only gaze and wonder. The step pyramids of the Aztecs were altars where scores of thousands of conquered victims had their hearts cut out while alive. Magnificent life-sized terra-cotta soldiers and other works of art were buried with Chinese emperors, but in many cases concubines and other servants were, too, entombed alive with the king’s corpse to keep him company. The superb craftsmen who created the terra-cotta army that tours the world’s museums were killed by the thousands when they finished it, to keep their skills secret.

Mayan painting and hieroglyphs of the classic period are the products of artistic and literary genius, but they often depict human sacrifices made to celebrate the ascension and power of new rulers. The Parthenon was designed to display the strength and importance of Athens, and it was built largely by slaves, who made up half the population—then and throughout the subsequent period we associate with Athenian democracy, philosophy, and theater. The Colosseum is a masterpiece of architecture, but its purpose was to intimidate Rome’s subjects and enemies, and to that end countless gladiatorial contests were held in it, to the delight of the nobility and other spectators—a type of human sacrifice. The exquisite temple complex at Angkor Wat, for centuries sacred to Hindu and then to Buddhist nobles, commoners, and worshippers, is completely covered with bas-reliefs depicting battles and conquests, although the military displays are in some parts of the complex relieved by hundreds of carvings of dancing girls.

It does not detract from the achievement of the artists, craftsmen, architects, and engineers of all these and many more revered ancient works to admit that their purpose and function was not just beauty. The artists weren’t in charge; they only worked there. No ancient society could have built these monuments without the use of oppressive force, and no civilization would have invested in them purely for aesthetic reasons. They dazzled all who beheld them, seduced or intimidated foreigners, and, along with religion,
control of goods, and sheer physical force, helped keep subordinates—women included—under control.

In all early civilizations, women were subjugated, and their status
declined
over time. Royal women could help their husbands rule and, rarely, rule for a time themselves, but their voices were typically weak, while anti-woman ideologies were strong. Noblemen had many wives, and even for commoners, the family was explicitly the father’s little kingdom. In Shang dynasty China, a woman joined her husband’s family home and worshipped
his
ancestors. Mesopotamian wives had their property controlled by their husbands and were forbidden from extramarital sex, though their husbands were allowed it. Aztec rulers would send raw cotton to their enemies to insult them, implying that they were only fit for weaving—women’s work. Several civilizations allowed gay sex but ridiculed a man who took a woman’s role.

Fertility was pivotal, both practically and symbolically. Rich men married as many women as they could, and captives became concubines. Goddesses were worshipped, but male deities dominated in myth and ritual, and heavenly females’ privileges were not reflected in any earthly mirror. Women could become priests in some civilizations, but they had to be celibate—unless they were lower-class, in which case they might become temple prostitutes in fertility cults. Marginal women were often sex workers unadorned by sacred purpose. Women could farm, trade, or do other valued work outside the home, and noblewomen had more influence in some civilizations than others, but men ruled in all of them.

We often suppose, quite reasonably, that one factor in women’s status is how much they contribute to the economy. Anthropologists have been thinking about this for a long time; Judith Brown’s “A Note on the Division of Labor by Sex,” published in 1970, was a touchstone. She found that the division was universal and made men value women, but she concluded that “repetitive, interruptible,
non-dangerous tasks that do not require extensive excursions are more appropriate for women when the exigencies of child care are taken into account.” She gives examples of women’s plant and shellfish collecting, which do require excursions and are not so repetitive, yet often permit taking babies and children along. However, for most societies, compared to the hunting-gathering era, women did less autonomous, more repetitive work tied to the home.

A few years later, cross-cultural researchers George Peter Murdock and Caterina Provost did a systematic study that remains valuable. In 185 societies, only fourteen out of fifty technological tasks were almost exclusively male. Women had no such nearly exclusive activities, although cooking and processing plant foods came close. Of course, there is that other vital task in which women overwhelmingly predominate, but it isn’t technological: baby care and, less exclusively, child care, which has been the greatest perceived value of women in every traditional culture, however changed that may rightly be in the modern world.

Yet of all the fifty activities, only two—hunting large aquatic animals and smelting ores—were the sole province of men. Gathering plant foods, fuel, and water, spinning, and dairy production were among the tasks that were chiefly female, while males predominated in hunting, lumbering, mining and quarrying, stoneworking, metalworking, and boatbuilding. But we see exceptions even in hunting large animals: among the Agta women in the Philippine highlands, who almost rival men in killing game, and among central African foragers, where women are critical players in net hunts. As for fishing, tending large animals, and house building, women did these tasks in quite a few cultures.

Then there were “swing activities”—twenty tasks that could go either way, like fire-making, hunting small animals, preserving meat or fish, weaving, making clothing, baskets, and pottery, or planting, tending, and harvesting crops. These were rarely shared equally in any given culture, but a particular community could
assign them to be mainly done by either sex. So even for tasks that
across
cultures were equally likely to be done by men or women, there was usually only one sex doing it;
within
a given culture, a division of labor held. This means that traditional people felt comfortable when women and men around them were doing different things; it didn’t matter if the folks over the next hill were doing the roles in reverse. Yet most cultures depending on farming and gardening got both men and women involved in different ways. This means that the move from hunting and gathering to farming
needed
women as well as men to pitch in, and improvements relied in part on women’s inventiveness.

But increased childbearing and shortened life span were not the only reasons agriculture made life worse for women. Even more, it was because of men’s power politics—male coalitions out of control. Life as a whole was no longer face-to-face; private and public spheres diverged, and every major aspect of social life—politics, economics, religion, defense—became detached from hearth and home. Males assembled, sparred for positions, and scratched their way up the pyramid as best they could; they barred males who couldn’t make the grade—and all women, as well.

There is an old distinction in sociology between
gemeinschaft
and
gesellschaft—
community and society. Hunter-gatherers lived in the ultimate communities: you spent your life with people you knew, and collectively you made decisions that in later cultures would be made by specialists—political, judicial, economic, religious, and so on. As populations grew and hierarchies arose, a separate apparatus usually came into being for each of those categories. Men in these new settings could, really for the first time, freeze women out. Hunter-gatherer men may have wanted to but couldn’t; women were present for just about everything, and they had their say.

Then, too, in densely populated settlements, with their political hierarchies, organized violence became far more important and so, accordingly, did male aggression and complex male coalitions. If
hunter-gatherers had less organized violence than later subsistence types, it was more because they weren’t organized than because they weren’t violent; we know that they had individual fights, including homicides. But as horticultural and pastoral societies developed into chiefdoms, warfare became a crucial way to defend and augment resources, and to capture slaves, women, and the means to acquire women—bridewealth to present to a woman’s family. For Plains Indians this meant horses; for many African cultures, cattle. But every successful warrior who didn’t get killed or maimed was also acquiring something else: reputation.

If hunting was showing off, what was success in war? In a simple gardening culture like the Yanomami, anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon found that men who had killed another man in a raid or battle had more children and grandchildren than men who didn’t. Among the Ilongot of the Pacific islands, also gardeners, groups of men mounted head-hunting raids on neighboring groups. Ethnographer Renato Rosaldo wrote eloquently, “When a victim is beheaded, older men discard the weight of age and recover the energy of their youth.” Meanwhile, “youths advance from novice status and adorn themselves with red hornbill earrings. . . . To wear such earrings, they say, is to gain the admiration of young women and to be able to answer back when other men taunt. And taunt they do. . . . ‘Others will scorn you if you marry without taking a head,’” one young man said.

We know that violence, including war, has often been between men over women, but was that true in deep human history? Neanderthals show the scars of violence in many of their remains, but they were different from us; their robustness, seen literally in their bones, could have been in part an adaptation to conflict. Yet the fossil record of our own kind before agriculture also shows violence.

The record is sparse, and even in violent human societies most people die non-violently, so it is remarkable that we see as much as we do in fossils. Homicide has been part of our lives for at least 27,000 years.
At Grimaldi in Italy, in a find from that time, a projectile point was embedded in a child’s spine. Czechoslovakian cemeteries of around the same vintage show numerous violent deaths. A Nile Valley man buried 20,000 years ago had stone weapon points in his belly and upper arm. Between 14,000 and 12,000 years ago, the era of
settled
hunting and gathering, there are many more such cases in Egyptian Nubia, and violence was common at sites in Europe. The famous alpine “Iceman” of five thousand years ago, whose well-preserved body has been meticulously studied, has an arrow in his upper back. Research suggests that he was alone in the mountains, had a last meal, was hunted down and shot in the back, and bled to death.

Most of this was still in hunter-gatherer times; there were also homicides in many recent hunter-gatherer societies, including the !Kung, Eskimo, Mbuti, Hadza, and others. It has often been said that hunter-gatherers did not have group-level violence, but this claim is no longer tenable; complex hunter-gatherers like the Northwest Coast Indians certainly had quite a bit. Also, historical studies of “classical” hunter-gatherers suggest that their level of intergroup combat has been understated. Finally, southern African rock paintings, Australian aboriginal clubs and shields, and common spear wounds in skeletons thousands of years old in the American Southwest point to hunter-gatherer group violence.