Saturday, December 14, 2019

Evolution, Economics, Patriarchy, and the Status of Women


Trying to understand ourselves, Homo Sapiens, as a species is an endlessly fascinating topic.  The first lesson to be learned from such an endeavor is that what history can tell us about ourselves is what can be learned over the last few thousands of years, a period when human evolution was mainly cultural, not physical.  If we try to look back tens of thousands of years, we merely know that humans emerged from Africa and spread throughout Eurasia and evolved changes in physical characteristics that are geographical in nature.  We have chosen to refer to these changes as racial characteristics as though they were fundamental in nature.  Over the past few centuries this geographical separation has broken down.  The cultural mixing of the “races” and modern genetic studies have led to the conclusion that we are all best described as simply being one species.  So, if perhaps the last hundred thousand years of evolution has not produced significant genetic diversification, one is justified in concluding that who we fundamentally are was determined over the millions of years of evolution that occurred during our development in Africa—a period about which we know almost nothing.

One must assume that we existed in small bands that survived as hunter-gatherers.  One can try to extrapolate back in time by evaluating what we know about such bands that were encountered before their existence was contaminated by modern cultures.  One can also attempt to extrapolate forward in time by assuming that we share common characteristics with the animals with which we coevolved.  Both approaches are fraught with uncertainties, partly because researchers are generally unable to dismiss current cultural biases from such evaluations.  For example, male anthropologists tend to create a history dominated by presumed male characteristics and activities, while female anthropologists tend to arrive at a different reading of human nature and the role of the genders in human development.  There is good news in this uncertainty.  If one is depressed by humanity’s current state, who we are today is not necessarily indicative of who we could be tomorrow.

Here the choice will be made to determine a few characteristics that seem to be fundamental from animal evolution combined with those that are consistent with what is know from studies of primitive hunter-gatherer societies.  Following that path, the basic characteristics at play in human development seem to be a need for social interaction, a preference for kin over non-kin, a desire for sexual autonomy, and a recognition that the gene pool must be continually enriched.

Living in groups of perhaps several dozen individuals requires a simple but strict social organization.  Individuals seeking food on their own would eventually hit a stretch of bad look and fail to accumulate enough food to support themselves.  Such individuals would survive by having access to surplus food acquired by others.  Sharing of necessary materials was obligatory and efficient.  There was little of lasting value that would tempt some to accumulate “wealth” superior to that of others.  Little is known about the details of interactions between the sexes, but one suspects that neither was inherently dominant.  While males were likely more physically powerful, the gathering of the females was likely more efficient than the hunting of the males at providing nourishment for the group.

Humans and animals—mammals at least—share the same body organs and body chemistry.  Consequently, one expects the intense maternal bond to infants to have always existed in human history.  Current human males only produce small amounts of the bonding chemicals so effective in females, leading them to exhibit varying degrees of paternal support for offspring.  This is probably an improvement over time given that the male kinship influence in our nearest neighbors, the chimpanzees, extends to merely being willing to practice infanticide only on other male chimps’ offspring.  Otherwise they play no role in raising infants.  Little is known about extended families, but females eventually developed lives that extended well past their childbearing periods.  This is unusual in the world of animals.  It is not clear whether natural selection truncated their childbearing time or extended their longevity (or both), but the kinship between an aged mother and daughter would provide the daughter with a dependable babysitter while she foraged for food, or for another to assist in the foraging.

There seems to be a universal desire on the part of females to have considerable say in which male they choose to mate with.  The attitude of males is generally to mate with any female, or, perhaps, every female.  Whether or not the female manages to protect her options will have a significant effect on the evolution of the species.  Chimpanzee males dominate the females and compete within themselves for access to the females.  This nonselective approach does little to enhance specific female characteristics, but it ensures a healthy component of the characteristics of dominant males in the gene pool.  For most bird species, the female has gained dominance in breeding.  Male birds no longer have a penis with which they could attempt to force copulation on an uninterested female, and the females select males on the basis of their aesthetic preferences.  Male characteristics are therefore highly dependent on those female choices.  It was the peahens who designed the peacock we have today.  And then there are a few species of duck who have yet to resolve this conflict between the sexes.  After many millions of years of evolution, male ducks are still developing bigger, more powerful, and more complex penises in order the penetrate unwilling females.  Meanwhile, the females are developing complex vaginal passages to prevent penetration except when she assumes a particular posture that she will only assume for her selected mate.  This can be a nasty business.  Humans seem to have arrived at a compromise in which both genders have participated in mate choice.  Breasts in mammals recede when they are not needed for breastfeeding.  Human female breasts are permanently on display, presumably a choice favored by males.  Males have developed large, prominently (and vulnerably) displayed genitalia, seemingly for the sole purpose of providing females something about which to speculate.  And then there is loss of a specific mating period in human females, allowing sex to go on when desired, with or without procreation.  It is not clear how mate selection managed that trick.

Our ape relatives know, one way or the other, that inbreeding is not a good idea.  Within a small group the hazards of inbreeding would develop eventually unless there were interchanges of males and/or females with other groups.  Humans had to develop means by which these interchanges could occur.  In very early times, the exchanges may have been relatively random with individuals wandering off looking for new opportunities.  At some point, as societies grew more complex, the benefits of kinship within a group would be extended to other groups.  This could be accomplished by exchange of gifts with members of other groups in order to establish good will that might prove advantageous at some future time.  A more effective approach to developing a broader-based support structure would be to provide a son or daughter to another group as a spouse to cement a relationship with another kin group.  This type of exchange likely evolved into our custom of marriage.

Until very recently, perhaps ten to fifteen thousand years ago, there was no reason to expect any deviation from this picture where both sexes contributed more or less equally to society.  That would begin to change as humans became more sedentary and began to cultivate crops, domesticate animals, and form states to control these activities.  James C. Scott is Sterling Professor of Political Science and codirector of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University.  His book, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States will serve as a guide to what will happen next.

Human population was growing.  Scott provides the population estimate of about two to four million worldwide in 10,000 BCE.  Small bands would become bigger bands over time, and regions could be found where relatively large numbers of humans could settle in and live off an abundance of plant and animal life.  Mesopotamia, unlike today, was one of those regions in that era.  The curious thing about the time was that people in that period understood the techniques for cultivating crops and herding animals, but they resisted doing so on a large scale.  Today one assumes that moving in that direction was the inevitable direction for the evolution of civilization, but it would be several thousand years before humans would consent to, or be coerced into, participating in an agricultural economy and the states that would run it.

“The first evidence of cultivated plants and of sedentary communities appears roughly 12,000 years ago.  Until then—that is to say for ninety-five percent of the human experience on earth—we lived in small, mobile, dispersed, relatively egalitarian, hunting and gathering bands.  Still more remarkable, for those interested in the state form, is the fact that the first small, stratified, tax-collecting walled states pop up in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley only around 3,100 BCE, more than four millennia after the first crop domestications and sedentism.  This massive lag is a problem for those theorists who would naturalize the state form and assume that once crops and sedentism, the technological and demographic requirements, respectively, for state formation were established, states/empires would immediately arise as the logical and most efficient units of political order.”

Just as humans—and chimpanzees—were smart enough to realize that inbreeding was dangerous and should be avoided, they also appeared to realize that organizing into dense human and animal populations would lead to disease, discord, and suppression of their freedom.  They were correct in this assumption as the history presented by Scott shows.  In fact, the contrast between the good life they lived as hunter-gatherers compared to the horrors experienced in a state-dominated agricultural economy has been viewed as the origin of the Adam and Eve story of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

When the food supply was plentiful, the life of the hunter-gatherer could involve plenty of time for relaxation and socializing.  They had a variety of food types available and enjoyed what we would view as a healthy diet.  An agricultural system based on the growing of grain and livestock rearing involved much more labor and a highly restricted diet.  Either declining environmental conditions or coercion would be required to capture them in such a system.

“’Domiciled’ sheep, for example, are generally smaller than their wild ancestors; they bear telltale signs of domesticate life: bone pathologies typical of crowding and a narrow diet with distinctive deficiencies.  The bones of ‘domiciled’ Homo Sapiens compared with those of hunter-gatherers are also distinctive: they are smaller; the bones and teeth often bear the signature of nutritional distress, in particular, an iron-deficiency anemia marked above all in women of reproductive age whose diets consist increasingly of grains.”

“Evidence for the relative restriction and impoverishment of early farmers’ diets comes largely from comparisons of skeletal remains of farmers with those of hunter-gatherers living nearby at the same time.  The hunter-gatherers were several inches taller on average.  This presumably reflected their more varied and abundant diet.”

Consider that we began with a picture of humans living in small bands where wealth was not accumulated, and individuals were more or less equal in status.  The dynamic of a small band demands that members look out for each other and share their individual bounties when appropriate.  Would anyone use those same words to describe life in one of the early states?  What the “expulsion from Eden” did was deliver humans into a hierarchical society where class mattered, and there were always elites who accumulated wealth through their control of the workforce.  We went from living in a world of relative equality to one of rampant inequality.  We started in a place where wealth was barely even a concept to one in which it is worth enslaving humans in order to acquire it.  What was appearing in this era were the realities of economics in a capitalist system.  The very early states being formed were more akin to corporations than kingdoms.  The state/corporation directed a captive workforce to produce a limited range of products for trading with others.  The goal was to increase the wealth of the elite (shareholders?).  The workforce was maintained by sending out raiding/recruiting parties to enslave those captured to replace workers who had either escaped or died in the frequent disease epidemics.  Humans would have to become a domesticated species.

“Over and above the drudgery of plough agriculture, the military, ceremonial, and urban needs of the new state centers required forms of labor in terms of both kind and scale that had no precedent.  Quarrying, mining, galley oaring, road building, logging, canal digging, and other menial tasks may have been, even in more contemporary times, the sort of work performed by convicts, indentured laborers, or a desperate proletariat.  It’s the sort of work away from the domus that ‘free’ men—including peasants—shun.  Yet such dangerous and heavy work was necessary to the very survival of the earliest states.”

It is not surprising that the role of women would change during this long imposition of civilization.  One could say that they became more valuable because they could produce offspring, therefore they had to be kept under control.

“Women and children were particularly prized as slaves.  Women were often taken into local households as wives, concubines, or servants, and children were likely to be quickly assimilated, though at an inferior status.  Within a generation or two they and their progeny were likely to be quickly assimilated, though at an inferior status.  Within a generation or two they and their progeny were likely to have been incorporated into the local society—perhaps with a new layer of recently captured slaves beneath them in the social order.”

“Women captives were at least as important for their reproductive services as for their labor…women slaves of reproductive age were prized in large part as breeders because of their contribution to the early state’s manpower machine.”

There are any number of explanations for why women could have lost their status relative to men.  Civilization introduced the concept of warfare into the human condition, something men would be better at.  Economic changes introduced wealth and the temptation to steal it, something men would be better at.  Massive amounts of manual labor were needed.  Men would do the work, therefore women must be focused on producing the men.  The list could go on and on.  What is clear is that at some point women became valuable commodities: they could be collateral for a loan, they could provide income when made available for marriage, they were valuable as concubines, servants or prostitutes.  This commoditization of females became explicitly expressed in marriage transactions.  Within the ranks of the wealthy, it became the tradition to give the bride plus a dowry to the groom’s family as both a means of indicating the wealth of her family and as a way of purchasing ties to the groom’s family.  For the poor and less wealthy the tradition of bridewealth was practiced.  In this case, the groom or his family paid the bride’s family to obtain their daughter as a wife.  This latter tradition seems suspiciously close to a purchase agreement.

Here we will consider David Graeber’s take on the rise of patriarchy in this period.  It is presented in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years.  The economics of advancing “civilization” has been a persistent topic here and Graeber’s explanation fits well within that theme.  He provides this perspective drawn from the earliest of recorded history.

“In the very early Sumerian texts, particularly those from roughly 3000 to 2500 BC, women are everywhere.  Early histories not only record the names of numerous female rulers, but make clear that women where well represented among the ranks of doctors, merchants, scribes, and public officials, and generally free to take part in all aspects of public life.  One cannot speak of full gender equality: men still outnumbered women in all aspects of public life.”

“Over the course of the next thousand years or so, all this changes.  The place of women in civic life erodes; gradually, the more familiar patriarchal pattern takes shape, with its emphasis on chastity and premarital virginity, a weakening and eventually wholesale disappearance of women’s role in government and the liberal professions, and the loss of women’s independent legal status, which renders them wards of their husbands.  By the end of the Bronze Age, about 1200 BC, we begin to see large numbers of women sequestered away in harems and (in some places at least) subjected to obligatory veiling.”

The practices of dowry and bridewealth were active in these Sumerian times, but they were tending to become more nearly an economic matter.

“…as time went on, this payment…often began to take on the qualities of a simple purchase.  It was referred to as ‘the price of a virgin’—not a mere metaphor, since the illegal deflowering of a virgin was considered a property crime against her father.  Marriage was referred to as ‘taking possession’ of a woman, the same word one would use for the seizure of goods.  In principle, a wife, once possessed, owed her husband strict obedience, and often could not seek a divorce even in cases of physical abuse.”

Economic inequality, as we might say today, was enormous, with most people falling into the category of “poor.”

“In Nuzi, for instance, ‘the brideprice was paid in domestic animals and silver amounting to a total value of 40 shekels of silver’—to which the author dryly adds, ‘there is some evidence that it was equal to the price of a slave girl.’  This must have been making things uncomfortably obvious.  It’s in Nuzi, too, where we happen to have unusually detailed records, that we find examples of rich men paying cut rate ‘brideprice’ to impoverished families to acquire a daughter who they would then adopt, but who would in fact be either kept as a concubine or nursemaid, or married to one of their slaves.”

It would be the existence of debt that would literally turn women into an economic commodity that could be bought and sold.

“A Mesopotamian husband couldn’t sell his wife either.  Or, normally he couldn’t.  Still, everything changed the moment he took out a loan.  Since if he did, it was perfectly legal…to use his wife and children as surety, and if he was unable to pay, they could then be taken away as debt pawns in exactly the same way that he could lose his slaves, sheep, and goats.  What this also meant was that honor and credit became, effectively, the same thing: at least for a poor man, one’s creditworthiness was precisely one’s command over one’s household, and (the flip side, as it were) relations of domestic authority, relations that in principle involved a responsibility for care and protection, became property rights that could indeed be bought and sold.”

What normally happens when women become commodities to be passed around is that many will find their best bet for economic survival is in prostitution.  Graeber quotes from the historian Gerda Lerner.

“Women might end up as prostitutes because their parents had to sell them into slavery or because their impoverished husbands might so use them.  Or they might become self-employed as a last alternative to enslavement.”

“By the middle of the second millennium B.C., prostitution was well established as a likely occupation for the daughters of the poor.  As the sexual regulation of women of the propertied class became more firmly entrenched, the virginity of respectable daughters became a financial asset for the family.  Thus, commercial prostitution came to be seen as a social necessity for meeting the needs of men.  What became problematic was how to distinguish clearly and permanently between respectable and non-respectable women.”

To establish why it would be critical to the honor—and creditworthiness—of a father that his daughter could not be mistaken for being one of the many non-respectables, Graeber includes a picture of the activities that were available in these ancient cities—Biblical-scale debauchery.

“From early times, Sumerian and Babylonian temple complexes were surrounded by far less glamorous providers of sexual services—indeed, by the time we know much about them, they were the center of veritable red-light districts full of taverns with dancing girls, men in drag (some of them slaves, some runaways), and an almost infinite variety of prostitutes.  There is an endlessly elaborate terminology of types of sex worker whose subtleties are long since lost to us.  Most seem to have doubled as entertainers: tavern-keepers doubled as musicians; male transvestites were not only singers and dancers, but often performed knife-throwing acts.  Many were slaves put to work by their masters, or women working off religious vows or debts, or debt bondswomen, or, for that matter, women escaping debt bondage with no place else to go.”

One means of separating the respectable women from those who were not, that is, separating women who could not be bought or sold from those who could, was to begin the practice of veiling women.

“The most dramatic known attempt to solve the problem, Lerner observes, can be found in a Middle Assyrian law code dating from somewhere between 1400 and 1100 BC, which is also the first known reference to veiling in the history of the Middle East—and also, Lerner emphasizes, first to make the policing of social boundaries the responsibility of the state.”

“The code carefully distinguishes among five classes of women.  Respectable women (either married ladies or concubines), widows, and daughters of free Assyrian men—‘must veil themselves’ when they go out on the street.  Prostitutes and slaves…are not allowed to wear veils.  The remarkable thing about the laws is that the punishments specified in the code are not directed at respectable women who do not wear veils, but at prostitutes and slaves who do.  The prostitute was to be publicly beaten fifty times with staves and have pitch poured on her head; the slave girl was to have her ears cut off.”

Thus, we have seen how patriarchy gradually developed over time as societies evolved, finally arriving at the most restrictive forms in the early Middle East.  A distaste for the corrupt and ungodly practices that could be found in the major cities of the time, and misogyny, would be imbedded in our cultural heritage via transmission in the scriptures of the major religions that emerged from this area: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

“The world’s Holy Books—the Old and New Testaments, the Koran, religious literature from the Middle Ages to this day—echo this voice of rebellion, combining contempt for the corrupt urban life, suspicion of the merchant, and often, intense misogyny.  One need only think of the image of Babylon itself, which has become permanently lodged in the collective imagination as not only the cradle of civilization, but also the Place of Whores.”


It seems that at around the same period in both India and China women’s freedoms were also gradually being restricted.  This implies that there was some grand universal mechanism at work that is, perhaps, masked by the particular details of the history of a given region.  Graeber provides this attempt at an explanation: “the growing scale and social importance of war.”

“Certainly, the more militaristic the state, the harsher its laws tended to be toward women.  But I would add another, complementary argument.  As I have emphasized, historically, war, states, and markets all tend to feed off one another.  Conquest leads to taxes.  Taxes tend to be ways to create markets, which are convenient for soldiers and administrators.  In the specific case of Mesopotamia, all of this took on a complicated relation to an explosion of debt that threatened to turn all human relations—and by extension, women’s bodies—into potential commodities.  At the same time, it created a horrified reaction on the part of the (male) winners of the economic game, who over time felt forced to go to greater and greater lengths to make clear that their women could in no sense be bought or sold.”


The interested reader might find the following articles informative:








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