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.