Are Men Becoming the Second Sex?

Back in 2009, Christina Hoff Sommers wrote an article titled Are Men the Second Sex Now? She raised that question because of the gains women made since feminists had stirred up the female masses in the 1960s.  She noted that, compared to men, women were now equally employed (by number), better educated, healthier in mind and body, living longer, and had momentum on their side.  While that was good news, Sommers complained that the plight of men was not receiving the attention it deserved.

“Why are there no conferences, petitions, workshops, congressional hearings, or presidential councils to help men close the education gap, the health care gap, the insurance gap, the job-loss gap, and the death gap? Because, unlike women, men do not have hundreds of men’s studies departments, research institutes, policy centers, and lobby groups working tirelessly to promote their challenges as political causes.”

To consider whether or not men were becoming the second sex, one must understand the meaning of that descriptor as it was originally applied to women.  The term was enshrined when the French writer and intellectual Simone de Beauvoir chose it as the title of her 1949 book in which she proclaimed that women have biological traits, and cultural traits that are imposed upon them, and it is the latter that mainly produce what society has viewed as womanhood (“one is not born a woman, one becomes one”).  De Beauvoir’s work would serve to motivate women who would come after her.  They would drive the feminist movements that have made much progress in recognizing women more as social equals to men than as subordinates to men as had been practiced for millennia under various forms of patriarchy.

Gerda Lerner provides perhaps the best description of how women went from essentially co-equals with men in early history to little more than slaves to a patriarch in pre-Biblical times in her book The Creation of Patriarchy.  The transition from the generally relaxing hunter-gathering existence in Mesopotamia to sedentary cities and states based on an agricultural economy was a horrible period for mankind.  The development of this “civilization” demanded hard physical labor on such a scale that slavery had to be invented in order to accomplish what was needed.  The creation of wealth worthy of coveting was part of this development.  The increased human population density, coexisting with herds of animals of different varieties, generated frequent deadly disease epidemics that decimated populations.  The constant need and desire for resources of all kinds generated an age where war and mercenary soldiers were critical concerns of governmental entities.  The result was that somewhere along this developmental path men, who were better at defending wealth, conquering neighboring cities and states, and performing exhausting physical labor acquired the superior role to that of women.  Females, willingly or otherwise, accepted their role as subordinates who would focus on their biological roles of conceiving and raising children, and providing sexual services to males.  This was probably at some point conceived of as an efficient solution to the needs at hand, but, over millennia, this arrangement would become the type of patriarchal construct familiar from Hebrew sacred documents that would be canonized as dogma by three major religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  Lerner points out that in the earliest years recorded by the Hebrews, the patriarch had absolute authority over the lives of his wife and children with the right to sell a mere daughter into prostitution or slavery.  This degree of control would gradually change over the years, but patriarchal attitudes and practices would persist into the current century.

Women of recent generations were the result of thousands of years of indoctrination as to their status in the patriarchy.  This left them with no recorded history containing women of accomplishment and authority yet knowing that they were capable of more than was being allowed them.  There would be the occasional woman of note, but it would take someone like de Beauvoir to focus women on the tyranny of cultural values and help them generate a movement.

In this context, men can never become a second sex in the same manner as women, but they could become a lesser sex in the sense of social, economic, and technological contributions.  Is there any indication of such a trend?  Yes, there is.

One of the attributes of a contributing citizen to society is a good education.  It seems that women are much more educable than men.  This trait begins early in life when girls are known to develop physically earlier than boys.  That means they enter primary schooling with a more mature brain and better emotional control than boys of the same age.  It appears that it takes until about age eight for boys to catch up.  Meanwhile, girls have been able to sit patiently and listen to what teachers are saying while boys are dreaming of being outside playing.  If schools begin separating out high performing children from lower at an early age, then women will be favored in this process and will receive more rigorous and more advanced schooling than the average student.  Where this practice is not formalized, it still may take place informally.   Ironically, men allowed women to become teachers of children because the vocation was deemed too lowly for male focus.  Consequently, most children are taught by women (90% of public primary school teachers are female), and some people are becoming concerned that there is a bias that exists in the process that favors docile girls over rambunctious boys.  These issues are further discussed in Are Our Schools Biased Against Boys?

Regardless of the details, girls tend to outperform boys in school from childhood through training for professions and advanced degrees.  This source tells us that women began earning more bachelor degrees way back in the 1981-82 academic year.  In 2016-17 women earned 57% of the degrees, and in 2019, for the first time there would be more college-educated women in the workforce than men.

One might argue that these are average numbers and the story might be different in the truly elite schools.  Data from Ivy League colleges which admitted no women at all for a very long time are different, but only slightly.  This source tells us that after starting from zero, female undergraduates at these elite schools now outnumber males by about 2%, suggesting that in the competition for admission the women are at least holding their own.

Women are also producing more advanced academic degrees than men.  This source provides this perspective.

“Of the 79,738 doctoral degrees awarded in 2017….women earned 41,717 of those degrees and 53% of the total, compared to 37,062 degrees awarded to men who earned 47% of the total…Women have now earned a majority of doctoral degrees in each academic year since 2009, and the 53% female share last year is a new record high. Previously, women started earning a majority of associate’s degrees for the first time in 1978, a majority of master’s degrees in 1981, and a majority of bachelor’s degrees in 1982 according to the Department of Education. Therefore, 2009 marked the year when men officially became the ‘second sex’ in higher education by earning a minority of college degrees at all college levels from associate’s degrees to doctoral degrees.”

The professions are also seeing a surge in female activity.  Consider data on medical doctors from this source.

“From January to June 2017, athenahealth surveyed 18,000 physicians at 3,500 practices on its network, and determined that more than 60 percent of physicians under the age of 35 are female, while just under 40 percent are male. In the next-highest age bracket (35 to 44 years of age), women are the dominant gender as well – just slightly – coming in at 51.5 percent. As each age bracket gets older, the percentage of female physicians drops, with 82.4 percent of physicians over the age of 65 being male.”

“The trend shows no signs of slowing down: In 2017, the number of women enrolling in U.S. medical schools exceeded the number of men for the first time, according to data from the Association of American Medical Colleges.”

And then there is the legal profession from which this source provides relevant data.

“Women were 50.3 percent of law-school grads in 2017 and are 51.3 percent of those currently enrolled”

Important employment trends in recent years affect gender issues.  Economic developments have tended to eliminate semiskilled jobs and midlevel white-collar positions and replaced them with service-sector jobs.  Positions that were traditionally the domains of men are being converted to lower-wage service jobs for which employers seem to prefer hiring women.  Women with their advanced educations are competing successfully with men for elite, high-paying positions, but not without some problems.  Daniel Markovits provides some insight into occupational gender issues today in his book The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite.  He focuses on how meritocracy, combined with limited access to a few elite private schools, produces a class of highly-educated workers willing to work long, hard hours to maintain their status and to successfully pass on that status to their highly-educated children.  The trap for the well-paid elite is that they cannot escape the need to continue to compete successfully in order not to fall out of the rat race.  The work demands for these elite performers are particularly burdensome for women who might wish to raise a family.  To do so might involve exiting from the competition entirely or losing a considerable degree of status—and income—as a result.

“…The most elite, highest paying jobs in the economy belong among the most male-dominated.  Only about 14 percent of the top executives (and just about 8 percent of the highest earners) in Fortune 500 companies are women, and more than a quarter of these companies have no women in top management; Wall Street remains overwhelmingly male-dominated; women make up only 18 percent of equity partners at American law firms; and the gender pay gap among doctors has widened in recent years.”

Markovits claims that many women whose elite education granted them access to these high-paying jobs will choose to retreat from competition to invest time in providing the same sort of elite education to their children.  Presumably, she will have married another elite performer whose income will remain sufficient for the task.

“The intense personal involvement that elite education now demands, when overlaid on gender norms that distinctively bind mothers to parenting, rationalizes these patterns.  The hours that superordinate work requires are incompatible with bearing (let alone raising) children.  Elite women therefore no longer stay home to signal their leisure, as Veblen imagined, but rather to labor intensively at training their children.”

In this view, women’s biological role limits their ability to compete with men performing at an elite level.  With lower income families a totally different situation emerges.

“On the other hand, middle-class men traditionally dominated the jobs—quintessentially in manufacturing—that have been lost or seen wage stagnation in recent decades, even as many of the service jobs that displaced them are conventionally done by middle-class women.  (In fact, progress in diminishing the gender pay gap overall principally comes courtesy of declining wages for men without a college degree.)”

So, men are clearly not becoming the second sex at the higher incomes but may be becoming so at the lower income levels.

“Moreover, poorer men are less successful than poorer women at acquiring the schooling needed to secure better jobs in a meritocratic labor market: men make up only 42 percent of college students from households with annual incomes below $30,000.”

“Together, these patterns entail that the wage gap between men and women has been growing among the elite even as it has been falling among the middle class and the poor.  Indeed, among dual-earner households with incomes in the top quintile, just 29 percent of wives earn more income than their husbands, whereas among dual-earner households in the bottom quintile, fully 69 percent of wives out-earn their husbands.”

Markovits presents a compelling argument that it is meritocratic inequality stemming from the inherent inequality that is present when private schooling competes with public schooling that is driving the diverging trends in gender equality.  One can support this claim by looking at the Scandinavian countries that always seem to be at the top of the lists of those with the greatest gender equality.  In them, education is almost completely public and mostly free.  In our country, the well-off compete for elite private education from the time of birth until their children exit from an elite university.  Where everyone receives a good education throughout their lives the same intense meritocratic competition does not seem to grow.  People seem content to work hours that leave them time for a satisfying non-work life.  This allows women to compete better at the high-income levels.  Meanwhile, the economies continue to grow, and the people claim to be among the happiest on earth.

There is another reason why women fare better in the Nordic countries: men seem more willing to accept gender equality which demands that they play a more active role in parenting.  Most countries have exceptionally generous family leave rather than maternal leave policies.  These require men to also take time off from work to care for their children and not burden only the mother.  Why are the men so much more accepting of these practices?  Perhaps, because they had Christianity imposed upon them very late in their cultural evolution and the patriarchal subordination of women it taught never really had much effect on society.

So, the conclusions that emerge from all this are that private education is inherently bad for society, and gender equality will only come when men are more willing to share parenting responsibilities equally.  Surely those things can be quickly fixed.

Women: Patriarchy, Religion, and History

It has been fascinating to learn how important early human history has been to our present-day societies.  Much of the culture that supports us—or burdens us—was developing before humans had the capability to record it in writing.  David Graeber, an anthropologist who specializes in economics, provided a guide to these early times with Debt: The First 5,000 Years.  It provided a major source for the articles Economics: Money, Markets, Debt, and the Barter Myth and Evolution, Economics, Patriarchy, and the Status of Women.  Graeber discussed the social evolution of males and females in early societies and introduced the historian Gerda Lerner. 

Lerner was a fascinating individual who dabbled in many fields.  She was an Austrian who spent some time in prison for her political activities after Anschluss in 1938.  In 1939 she managed to immigrate to the US sponsored by the man she was engaged to marry.  Her activities included writing novels, short stories, poetry, and essays.  She also collaborated on the development of a musical play, and cowrote the screenplay for the 1964 movie Black Like Me (1964) staring James Whitmore.  Her collaborator was Carl Lerner, her husband, who also directed the film.  However, Lerner is best known for her focus on women’s history.  In fact, she is credited with producing the first formal class on women’s history at any university in 1963 while she was still an undergraduate.  It would be her efforts that were critical in establishing the history of women as a formal topic for academic research.  She is best known for her book The Creation of Patriarchy (1986) which was the source for the article Patriarchy, Women, and the Origins of Slavery.

Lerner’s book covers the origins of patriarchy, its effects on society, its incorporation into religion and history, and its effects on women up to our current time.  A survey of what she provided is the subject here.

As humans progressed from a hunter-gatherer existence to a more sedentary agricultural-based economy, the division of responsibilities between the genders changed.  This period would begin the introduction of features of economics and capitalism that encouraged the accumulation of wealth in individuals, the industrialization of production, and the waging of war for conquest or defense.  All of these advantaged a division of labor in which men took the lead while women focused on the female responsibilities of breeding and caring for children.  Writing and the production of historically useful documents date back to about 3000 B.C.  At that time, evidence existed that women played a substantial, though not equal, role to that of men in society.  Over the next 1000 years or so such references disappeared from historical documents and the dominance of men was expressed in the patriarchal family structure.  At its worst, patriarchy provided these characteristics.

“The father had the power of life and death over his children.  He had the power to commit infanticide by exposure or abandonment.  He could give his daughters in marriage in exchange for receiving a bride price even during their childhood, or he could consecrate them to a life of virginity in the temple service.  He could arrange marriages for children of both sexes.  A man could pledge his wife, his concubines and their children as pawns for his debt; if he failed to pay back the debt, these pledges would be turned into debt slaves.”

 “The class difference between a wife living under the patriarchal dominance/protection of her husband and a slave living under the dominance/protection of the master was mainly that the wife could own a slave…”

The fate of women from poor families was worse.

“By the second millennium B.C. in Mesopotamian societies, the daughters of the poor were sold into marriage or prostitution in order to advance the economic interests of their families.”

Women became valuable commodities that could be bought or sold, but men would do the buying and selling.  It became very important to a man of wealth that he have some means of demonstrating that the women of his family were not available for sale and were safely held under his protection.  From this grew the practice of veiling “honorable” women so they could be distinguished from “dishonored” women who were forbidden the veil.

Lerner emphasizes that women must have acquiesced at some point to a division of labor that disadvantaged them, not realizing where it would ultimately lead.  After many generations of this treatment it was inevitable that women, with no other example, would accept this arrangement as natural.  The logic of patriarchy closely follows that of slavery.  If a group such as women can be treated as a lesser class of human being, then they must be a lesser class.  If a group of people can be enslaved, then they must deserve to be enslaved.  The institutionalized slavery of women, mostly captured in war, and their offspring would follow.  It would prove to be a profitable social and economic model that was eventually extended to include men as well.

Patriarchy would become an important part of the social organization.  The king or leader would depend on the allegiance of the wealthy patriarchal families, so laws were created by the state to support or regulate its practices.

“Patriarchy is a historic creation formed by men and women in a process that took nearly 2500 years to its completion.  In its earliest form patriarchy appeared as the archaic state.  The basic unit of its organization was the patriarchal family, which both expressed and constantly generated its rules and values.”

“These conditions were so firmly established by 1750 B.C. that Hammurabic law made a decisive improvement in the lot of debt pawns by limiting their terms of service to three years, where earlier it had been for life.”

The patriarchal subordination of women would become enshrined not only in state laws but also in religious beliefs.  Gods are created to serve the needs of those who have the power to create them.  The earliest societies, recognizing the importance of both creation and procreation, tended to create female gods with powers equal to or greater than that of male gods.  It was inevitable that as females became less influential in human societies that the importance of female gods would fade as well.  Lerner indicates that is exactly what happened, although it would take some time for this transition to occur.

“My thesis is that, just as the development of plow agriculture, coinciding with increased militarism, brought major changes in kinship and in gender relations, so did the development of strong kingships and of archaic states bring changes in religious beliefs and symbols.  The observable pattern is: first, the demotion of the Mother-Goddess figure and the ascendance and the later dominance of her male consort/son; then his merging with a storm-god into a male Creator-God, who heads the pantheon of gods and goddesses.  Wherever such changes occur, the power of creation and of fertility is transferred from the Goddess to the God.”

As kingdoms became larger and kings more powerful, a king would desire co-rule with the an ever more powerful god as his accomplice.  This would culminate in the all-powerful single god produced by the Hebrews in the Book of Genesis.  This and the other sacred Hebrew texts would contribute to the evolution of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and propagate concepts of morality up to the current day.  Much of what is found in the Bible is based on practices common to the peoples who lived in the areas where the Hebrews resided.  Thus, patriarchy would become God’s will, and the covenant that God made with the Hebrews would be made with men alone.  Women, at best, would be little more than a pot in which men could plant their seed.  At worst, they were temptresses who could lead men into sinful behavior, thus justifying control of their sexuality by the patriarch.

“It is by now taken for granted that earlier Sumero-Babylonian, Canaanite, and Egyptian cultural materials were adapted and transformed by the writers and redactors of the Bible and that contemporary practices, laws, and customs of neighboring peoples were reflected in its narrative.  In using the Biblical text as a source for historical analysis, one must be aware of the complexity of its authorship, its purposes, and its sources.”

“…the Bible, whether one wishes to believe it divinely inspired or not, was the work of many hands.  The writing of the Book of Genesis spanned a period of roughly four hundred years, from the tenth century B.C. to the fifth.  It is now generally accepted that there are three main traditions of authorship and that many of the sources represent a far more ancient tradition, which the redactors reinterpreted and incorporated in the narrative.”

The Biblical narratives are not kind to women.  The tale of Adam being created by a presumed male God by a means not requiring a birth process, eliminates any female role in creation.  Woman, in the form of Eve, is subsequently created from a rib of Adam, suggesting a lower status or rank relative to Adam and thus to God himself.  Eve then becomes the temptress that causes the fall from grace and the expulsion from Eden.  What clearer message could there be suggesting that women and their sexuality are dangerous to men and must be strictly controlled by men.

“In the earliest period the patriarch had undisputed authority over the members of his family.  The wife called her husband ‘ba’al’ or ‘master;’ he was similarly referred to as the ‘ba’al’ of his house or field.  In the Decalogue the wife is listed among a man’s possessions, along with his servants, his ox, and his ass (Ex.20:17).  In this period the father also could sell his daughter into slavery or prostitution, which was later forbidden him.  By the time of the monarchy, the father’s power of life and death over his family members was no longer unlimited and unrestrained.  In this respect we note an improvement in the position of daughters over the earlier period.”

The foundational event in the Hebrew religion was the covenant God was said to have made with Abraham.

“The decisive change in the relationship of man to God occurs in the story of the covenant, and it is defined in such a way as to marginalize women.”

Abraham was delivered this message from God.

“’Unto thy seed I have given this land’ (Gen.15:18).  The male seed thus acquires the power and blessing of the procreativity which lodges in Yahweh.  The metaphor of the male seed planted in the female womb, the furrow, the earth, is older than the period of the writing of the Old Testament.”

And what was asked of Abraham?

“He asks acceptance that He will be the God of Israel, He alone and no other.  And He demands that His people which worship Him will be set apart from other people by a bodily sign, a clearly identifiable token…”

The token will be the required circumcision of males.

“We must take note of the fact that Yahweh makes the covenant with Abraham alone, not including [his wife] Sarah, and that in so doing He gives divine sanction to the leadership of the patriarch over his family and tribe…the covenant relationship is only with males—first with Abraham, then explicitly with Abraham and Sarah’s son, Isaac, who is referred to only as Abraham’s son.  Moreover, the community of the covenant is divinely defined as a male community, as can be seen by the selection of the symbol chosen as ‘token of the covenant’.”

“For females, the Book of Genesis represented their definition as creatures essentially different from males; a redefinition of their sexuality as beneficial and redemptive only within the boundaries of patriarchal dominance; and finally the recognition that they were excluded from directly being able to represent the divine principle.  The weight of the Biblical narrative seemed to decree that by the will of God women were included in His covenant only through the mediation of men.”

One might ask why women remained in this subordinate state for so long.  Lerner provides this perspective on that matter.

The tyranny of the religions men created in order to propagate their dominance held women back for many centuries—and still does in some regions and cultures.

“…All males, whether enslaved or economically or racially oppressed, could still identify with those like them—other males—who represented mastery of the symbol system.  No matter how degraded, each male slave or peasant was like to the master in his relationship to God.  This was not the case for women.  Up to the time of the Protestant Reformation the vast majority of women could not confirm and strengthen their humanity by reference to other females in positions of intellectual authority and religious leadership.”

“Where there is no precedent, one cannot imagine alternatives to existing conditions.  It is this feature of male hegemony which has been the most damaging to women and has ensured their subordinate status for millennia.  The denial to women of their history has reinforced their acceptance of the ideology of patriarchy and has undermined the individual woman’s sense of self-worth.”

“The system of patriarchy can function only with the cooperation of women.  This cooperation is secured by a variety of means: gender indoctrination; educational deprivation; the denial to women of knowledge of their history; the dividing of women, one from the other, by defining ‘respectability’ and ‘deviance’ according to women’s sexual activities; by restraints and outright coercion; by discrimination in access to economic resources and political power; and by awarding class privileges to conforming women.”

Lerner made this prediction.

“The system of patriarchy is a historic construct; it has a beginning; it will have an end.  Its time seems to have nearly run its course—it no longer serves the needs of men or women and in its inextricable linkage to militarism, hierarchy, and racism it threatens the very existence of life on earth.”

Gerda Lerner wrote this in 1986.  She died in 2013.  One hopes that by that time she could feel confident that the long struggle for women’s rights had an end in the foreseeable future.

And for those men who continue to believe in their superiority, beware, the women are acting as if they have a lot of time to make up.  Women are now the majority of college students, a majority of those graduating with a degree, the majority of those being awarded doctorates, the majority of those earning law degrees, and the majority of those becoming medical doctors.  And they also have their sights set on political power.  One had best negotiate a truce with the women.  The momentum is not on your side.

Patriarchy, Women, and the Origins of Slavery

There seems a tendency to view “important” history as beginning with the classical Greek and Roman eras of the first millennium B.C.  However, by the time of the arrival of those well-documented societies, the several thousand years preceding had already evolved many of the basic characteristics of society that define our current existence.  Basic religious practices, hierarchical structures, economic concepts, and the social relationships between the sexes all were developed in that earlier era.  There is more to be learned about those millennia than the traditionally educated might expect.  Gerda Lerner is a respected historian who is best known for her studies of the role of women in society.  Her best-known work is The Creation of Patriarchy in which she summarizes the knowledge that can gathered from early archeological studies and the written records that began to be available around 3000 B.C.  Although her focus is on the history of females, it soon becomes clear that all of history is intertwined in addressing that topic.  Her subject was the developments in Mesopotamia, but similar trends were observed as societies evolved in both China and India.  Learning more about those earlier millennia sheds light on the problems that still beset us today.

Lerner discovered that different regions developed characteristics at different rates and times, but there was a distinct convergence in many of the societies studied.  She provides the reader with her “best estimate” of how the establishment of sedentary societies based on agriculture replaced hunter-gatherer societies and transitioned women from a highly egalitarian status with respect to men to one of subservience.  The topic here is not that entire history, but Lerner’s insights into how the treatment of women played into the establishment of slavery as a social institution.

Lerner provides this general perspective.

“The story of civilization is the story of men and women struggling up from necessity, from their helpless dependence on nature, to freedom and their partial mastery over nature.  In this struggle women were longer confined to species-essential activities than men and were therefore more vulnerable to being disadvantaged.  My argument sharply distinguishes between biological necessity, to which both women and men submitted and adapted, and culturally constructed customs and institutions, which forced women into subordinate positions.  I have tried to show how it might have come to pass that women agreed to a sexual division of labor, which would eventually disadvantage them, without having been able to foresee the later consequences.”

“There are a few facts of which we can be certain on the basis of archeological evidence.  Sometime during the agricultural revolution relatively egalitarian societies with a sexual division of labor based on biological necessity gave way to more highly structured societies in which both private property and the exchange of women based on incest taboos and exogamy were common.  The earlier societies were often matrilineal and matrilocal, while the latter surviving societies were predominately patrilineal and patrilocal.  Nowhere is there any evidence of a reverse process, going from patriliny to matriliny.  The more complex societies featured a division of labor no longer based on biological distinctions, but also on hierarchy and the power of some men over other men and all women.”

The transition in the role of women would take place gradually.  Evolution, Economics, Patriarchy, and the Status of Women discusses this process in more detail, but suffice it to say here, that women became valuable as property, and as property, they could be bought and sold.  Their status depended on the whim of their patriarch, either father or spouse.  If that protection was withdrawn, they had few options available other than making their bodies available for sexual services.  Once men realized they could exercise such power over women, and women realized their lack of power, this relationship became imbedded in the psyche of each gender and it became the natural order of things.  What Lerner focuses on is the similarity of the status of females to that of slaves.

“The father had the power of life and death over his children.  He had the power to commit infanticide by exposure or abandonment.  He could give his daughters in marriage in exchange for receiving a bride price even during their childhood, or he could consecrate them to a life of virginity in the temple service.  He could arrange marriages for children of both sexes.  A man could pledge his wife, his concubines and their children as pawns for his debt; if he failed to pay back the debt, these pledges would be turned into debt slaves.”

“The class difference between a wife living under the patriarchal dominance/protection of her husband and a slave living under the dominance/protection of the master was mainly that the wife could own a slave…”

The logic of patriarchy closely follows that of slavery.  If a group such as women can be treated as a lesser class of human being, then they must be a lesser class.  If a group of people can be enslaved, then they must deserve to be enslaved.

Slavery surely existed for a long time as the earliest settlements competed with each other for land, resources, and laborers.  Those defeated were likely subjected to various degrees of involuntary servitude, but often had options to emerge from that status over time.  As time went on and settlements became larger and more organized, the need for involuntary labor would only grow.  However, as conflict became more common and better organized, the males who might have been captured were more likely to be trained warriors rather than simple laborers.  A different approach to slavery was called for.  In Lerner’s phrasing, it had to be “institutionalized.”

“The ‘invention of slavery’ involves the development of techniques of permanent enslavement and the concept, in the dominant as well as in the dominated, that permanent powerlessness on the one side and total power on the other are acceptable conditions of social interaction.”

The “techniques of permanent enslavement” would eventually involve a permanent threat of death, complete separation from a person’s social origins, and imposition of some form of permanent dishonor.  For a long time, it was not clear that such a system could be imposed on a class of people and make it work.  Male captives from a defeated city or state were deemed too dangerous and were either killed outright, mutilated to lessen any threat they might pose, or transported to some far-off location from which they were unlikely to return.  The previous demotion of women to lower-class humans suggested that experimentation with women and their children as permanent slaves could work.

Initially, the practice was to kill all captives taken in war.  Women were often raped prior to their murder.  It seems the thought occurred to the victors that women, especially ones with children, would be willing to endure servitude in return for their lives.  Even those without children would eventually become pregnant due to sexual usage and remain docile to protect their newborn children.  If the dishonor of rape and sexual bondage was not sufficient to define a slave woman as different from normal society, they could be branded or forced to dress in a specific manner to remind them of their status.

Lerner notes that male historians and anthropologists recognize the initiation of institutionalized slavery with that of women but assign little significance to it.  For her, it is extremely significant.  She sees this as a direct result of the demotion of women in the patriarchal system and suggests that the successful enslavement of women became a further justification for patriarchal control of women. 

“As subordination of women by men provided the conceptual model for the creation of slavery as an institution, so the patriarchal family provided the structural model.”

It should be noted that the captives after a battle were generally similar peoples to the victors.  In a patriarchy, the honor of the males is tied directly to their ability to protect and control the sexual experiences of their women.  Raping the women not only dishonors them but also dishonors greatly the men.

“The impact on the conquered of the rape of the conquered women was twofold: it dishonored the women and by implication served as a symbolic castration of their men. Men in patriarchal societies who cannot protect the sexual purity of their wives, sisters, and children are truly impotent and dishonored.  The practice of raping the women of a conquered group has remained a feature of warfare and conquest from the second millennium B.C. to the present.  It is a social practice which, like the torture of prisoners, has been resistant to ‘progress,’ to humanitarian reforms, and to sophisticated moral and ethical considerations.  I suggest this is the case because it is a practice built into and essential to the structure of patriarchal institutions and inseparable from them.”

The successful enslavement of women allowed recognition of the mechanism by which other groups could be enslaved.

“The precedent of seeing women as an inferior group allows the transference of such a stigma onto any other group which is enslaveable.  The domestic subordination of women provided the model out of which slavery developed as a social institution.”

“Once a group has been designated as enslaved, it gathers on itself the stigma of having been enslaved and, worse, the stigma of belonging to a group that is enslaveable.  This stigma becomes a reinforcing factor which excuses and justifies the practice of enslavement in the minds of the dominant group and in the minds of the enslaved.  If this stigma is fully internalized by the enslaved—a process which takes many generations and demands the intellectual isolation of the enslaved group—enslavement then becomes to be perceived as ‘natural’ and therefore acceptable.”

This system for the degradation of women began about 5,000 years ago.  Is it any wonder that it has been difficult for them to extract themselves from its clutches?  Patriarchy was the practice in place when the great religions that would emerge from the Middle East were created.  They would enshrine these customs and continue to propagate them into our current era.  It should be recognized that patriarchy preceded the religions and demanded that the religions support its traditions—not the other way around.