Recently I’ve been reading The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. The book, as a whole, attempts to provide a universal overview of women — biologically, historically, culturally, and socially — from the dawn of time down through the mid-20th century (when it was written). It’s a stunningly ambitious project and, to its credit, succeeds far more often than it fails.
In the historical section of the book, Beauvoir analyzes how and why women came to be subjugated in almost every culture from the beginning of recorded history until the present day. If it was a matter of pure chance or a cultural artifact, she argues, we would not expect it to appear so reliably in cultures with little or no connection to each other. Nor would we expect to see the subjugation continue with such unmitigated persistence in all of these disparate cultural traditions while every other aspect of those cultures could be seen to shift dramatically.
Beauvoir makes a rather worthwhile argument that the key moment of change lies in the shift from hunter-gatherer societies (in which women are frequently seen as societal equals or even superiors) to agricultural societies. In short, no matter where agriculture arose, women were almost simultaneously subjugated. This indicates that the subjugation of women is neither a biological imperative nor some cultural oddity, but rather the result of something systemic to early agricultural societies.
Unfortunately, Beauvoir ends up muddying her argument rather thoroughly with heavy doses of mysticism, existentialism, and bald assertion. (These features may also be the result of a poor translation.) So, to try to straighten this out in my own mind, I wanted to put it down in a clearer form and then expand upon it.
THE PREMISE
Prior to the invention of agriculture (roughly 10,000 years ago), women were mythologically venerated. The degree to which this translated to daily life is somewhat unclear, but based on a variety of information (including the study of primitive tribes) it seems clear that men and women in hunter-gatherer societies were generally considered equals. There was a division of labor in these societies (usually with the men hunting and the women gathering) based on the physical differences between the genders, but not subjugation.
But with the invention of agriculture, things shifted. Mother goddesses were shoved out of power and replaced with male gods. And by the time written records begin to appear, women have almost universally been shoved into a second-place status.
Something had changed.
CHANGE #1: PROPERTY
Agriculture created a sense of ownership in the land. And I think, from that, a stronger sense of property in general developed. Property is a form of power and allows for the extension of the personal will. The desire for control seems pretty deeply ingrained into humanity, and property is one way of asserting control.
This expansion of the concept of property eventually led to other humans being controlled as property. Slavery is the most egregious form of this concept, but the concept is also expressed in the idea that a daughter belongs to her father and is given to her husband.
What determines the difference between master and slave? Power. And in a society ruled by physical strength, who gains the power and who becomes the object to be owned? Statistically speaking, it’s the male who has more physical strength than the female.
In this way, the expansion of the concept of personal property leads to the opportunity for the subjugation of women.
CHANGE #2: LEGACY AND IMMORTALITY
The expansion of property rights also created the ability to pass on a greater and more meaningful legacy to your children.
The nascent desire to achieve immortality through our children (so that some part of us might continue throughout eternity) is a pretty basic building block of human psychology. But being able to give our children property acts as a kind of force magnifier on our genetics: Now we’re not just passing on our flesh and blood, but also all that we have achieved in the course of our own lifetimes.
(The ultimate futility of this is demonstrated by Ozymandias, for example, but that doesn’t stop us from wanting it.)
But there’s a catch here: Without property, we’re perfectly happy to spread our genetic material far and wide and hope that some of it will endure. With property, however, there’s suddenly a desire to give it to the most worthy of our heirs. And, even more importantly, make sure it goes to one of our heirs and not somebody else’s heirs.
Unlike women, however, men have no surety of paternity. Which means that they have no inherent surety that they’re giving their property to their own kid or to the kid of some guy just down the street.
In order to gain that surety, the female mate must be controlled. And this creates the motivation for the subjugation of women.
CHANGE #3: FAMILY SIZE
There is plenty of evidence — both archaeological and anthropological — indicating that the movement from a hunter-gatherer society to an agricultural society resulted in larger families. This is either because the agricultural lifestyle required a larger workforce (which was obtained by having a larger family) or it was because the predictability of the agricultural lifestyle allowed for more children (which was desirable because of the legacy and sense of immortality they created).
However, for women having more children means spending more time in the non-productive state of biological reproduction (i.e., pregnant or recovering from pregnancy). Because women become less productive, they become more dependent on the production of men.
There are two edges to this sword: First, dependence allows for control. To put it in crude terms, if leaving your husband means you’ll starve to death, you effectively can’t leave your husband.
Second, because men are the breadwinners, they have a natural inclination to believe that the resulting wealth belongs to them alone. (Even if, in point of fact, their own productivity is heavily ennabled by their wife’s partnership and the children she is sacrificing her own productivity to bear and raise.) Since it is their wealth — not their wife’s wealth — the desire to make sure it goes to their own child (and not the progeny of cuckoldry) becomes even stronger.
(These impulses, it can be noted, explain the common laws prohibiting women — particularly married women — from owning property. It is a simple and expedient way to make sure that they can’t lay claim to any of the wealth which their husbands believe belongs rightfully to themselves and to their sons.)
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
This is all simplified to its most basic components, of course. But that’s pretty much inherent in the exercise: We’re looking at the broad similarities created in society and economy by the agricultural revolution. Those broad similarities result in certain cultural patterns, of which the oppression of women is one.
And that’s why the oppression of women appears in tandem with the agricultural revolution, even when cultures are discovering agriculture independently.
On the flip-side, this does lead to the interesting observation that women’s liberation groups first began meeting with widespread success right around the time of the industrial revolution. In other words, the oppression of women appeared with agricultural economies and began disappearing as the agricultural economies gave way to industrial economies.
Is that mere coincidence?
From a philosophical standpoint, the women’s liberation movement is commonly understood to grow out of the Enlightenment-era focus on liberty. But were those philosophies only able to find fertile soil because the economies created by the industrial revolution de-emphasized inheritable property, reduced the need for large families, and made it possible women to obtain gainful employment?
This, ultimately, opens a much larger discussion of whether culture influnces economy; or if its the economy that influences culture. I suspect that, to one degree or another, both are true. I also suspect that it’s probably more insightful to look at how the necessities of an economy create certain social structures, and then look at the cultural impact those social structures have. (For example, the agricultural revolution may have subjugated women, but that subjugation manifested itself in very different ways across a wide swath of cultures and classes.)
ARCHIVED HALOSCAN COMMENTS
Gracc
The idea that property is the base for the oppression of women is far from new, and I think the basic idea was implied by Morgan in the mid-1800’s. This was subsequently taken up and fleshed out by Frederick Engels (co-author of the Communist Manifesto) in his more thorough text The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
Though likely extremely outdated in parts (I’m an electrician, not anthropologist), I think it’s an interesting read when thinking about this stuff.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009, 9:04:16 AM
Justin Alexander
I’m just going to respond in brief here…
Mother/Fertility Goddesses: While the goddesses themselves persisted in agricultural pantheism, it’s important to look at how their stories actually involved. Based on what we know of pre-agricultural religion, the Mother Goddesses were pre-eminent. But while Gaia remains the Mother Goddess, for example, she is deposed by her own son. And this is, again, a common pattern followed across many different cultures: The worship of the Mother Goddess is supplanted by the worship of her Son, and that usurpation becomes encoded into the myth cycles.
Beauvoir also raises the issue of how men approach fertility goddesses. In pre-modern times, plow was a common sexual euphemism. The term “seed” is still used to refer to semen, revealing a deep-seated analogy that was drawn between woman and soil. And man becomes seen as mastering their soil and mastering their women. And, by mythological extension, the male gods master the fertility goddesses.
In other words, women don’t need to disappear from mythology in order to subjugated. Just as women don’t need to be removed from reality in order to be subjugated.
Territoriality: While it’s true that territoriality has always been part of human psychology, the notable shift that occurs around the time period of the agricultural revolution is away from territoriality and towards personal property. The difference here being between “our land” and “my land”.
It should also be noted that none of this was like flipping a switch. People didn’t start planting seeds one day and then treating their daughters like property the next.
I really liked reading your thoughts. Good stuff.
Sunday, September 07, 2008, 11:46:43 PM
Richard
was arranged to allow that job, and the raising of children to reproductive age, to be performed successfully. The problem is that each new development in civilization has forced a massive reorganization of roles. As the majority of roles decrease in the danger they offer and medical science advances, the less each natural specialization of the sexes will matter to what one does in life… but it takes time and trouble for that to settle in.
In the end, I guess I feel that de Beauvoir’s ideas (as presented in the post) are a near miss. Agriculture itself has little to do with the subjugation of women, and certainly can’t be pointed to as a clean cut-off line before which they were all half-deified equals and after which they were slaves. Rather, some elements (e.g. women-as-wombs-as-property) have existed since prehistory and are partially coded into our genes. And other parts — many of the specific manifestations that we think of when we think of sexism — are the result of a trend that agriculture started: specialization.
The hope that I see (that de Beauvoir presumably didn’t) is that while specialization put women into the house, put them barefoot into the kitchen, its fruits are currently bringing them out again. We moved from a state where everybody had to do all the work together or die, and now we’re moving to a state where anybody can do any work they want, and live.
I do have one question: when will women make up 50% of garbage collectors?
Whew!
Sunday, September 07, 2008, 10:54:19 AM
Richard
And while having property to pass on may be an incentive to be sure of one’s heirs, that’s hardly a deeply-hardwired motive. In fact, given how people will freely bequeath what they own to friends, organizations, and relatives besides their own children, I’d say it’s hardly a motive at all, statistically. On the other hand, if a hunter-gatherer man is barely scraping together enough resources to feed a child, he’ll likely want to be bloody certain that the child he’s feeding is his. One could argue that the development of agriculture — allowing the support of many children at once — would even relieve some of this tension and reduce the degree to which the subjugation of women would seem necessary. (Not that males with power over women would necessarily want to give it up just because of the need decreasing slightly.)
According to Diamond, the reason agriculture leads to a population explosion is simple: agriculture vastly increases the amount of calories available. Nothing to do with need or predictability: more resources simply support a larger population, so more babies are born and fewer babies starve to death.
In a basic agricultural society, men are hardly “the breadwinners.” They may do more of the sheer physical labor, but I can’t think of a single pre-industrial agricultural society that doesn’t have women in the fields in some capacity or other. It’s only with the invention of leisure time and leisurely castes within society that you have women being moved away from hard physical labor… and not because they were too busy having babies. Poor peasant women in the fields had plenty of babies too. Rather, working in the fields is more likely to complicate a pregnancy, leaving child or mother or both dead. So as agricultural technology progressed, women were moved from doing the same work as men to doing parallel work in the home.
Men have always done the more “visible” work than women, though. In hunter-gatherer societies, as you said, women would gather (near the home) and men would hunt (far afield). Given our society’s fascination with meat, I can imagine that a successful hunt would be a more important event to a tribe than yet another day of successfully gathering, which would mostly yield vegetables and similar unexciting fare. It’s a pattern that remains to this day: if there is dangerous work, or high-stakes work that subconsciously translates to us as dangerous, the people assigned to it tend to be men, because testicles are more expendable to a society than uteri. Male work is still more visible, and what was once an instinctive means of dividing labor has now become a glass ceiling.
When Epimethius gave Man and Woman their powers, he gave Woman the ability to create new life, and Man… the ability to be athletic. When it came time for people to start assigning jobs, women of necessity did the bearing of children, and as a rule everything else a culture did was arranged to allo
Sunday, September 07, 2008, 10:53:23 AM
Richard
A lot of what I’m about to say comes from a fuzzy memory of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and similar sources, compounded by a complete lack of having read any of de Beauvoir’s work, so feel free to poke holes in it… but this post didn’t quite make sense to me.
Religion as we know it seems to spring from two fundamental sources of awe: nature, and one’s parents. The Japanese still engage in both animistic and ancestor-worship, for example. As time goes by, named and personified forces of nature (and deified ancestors) can be mythologized into pantheons, and pantheons can evolve into monotheism (as one can see from the evolution of the Greek and Roman deities, with city-states such as Athens arising, devoted to one god). I look on any assertion of pre-agricultural religion as being especially dominated by mother goddesses, or female gods being “replaced” after the advent of agriculture, as hardly credible… Wikipedia lists 49 agricultural goddesses, so the assertion that agriculture disenfranchised feminine divinities doesn’t hold much water.
Agriculture may have changed humanity’s conception of ownership vis-a-vis land, but the idea can hardly have begun there. Humans are territorial by design, as any study of social distance, cafeteria seating, or urinal use will show. Modern anthropologists studying remaining hunter-gatherer cultures have found that even without agriculture, groups will still assert a territory for themselves, one that allows them sufficient food and water and other resources to sustain their members. No-man’s-land between the territories of various groups tend to be havens for wildlife, where hunters are unlikely to come for fear of themselves being hunted by a rival tribe. The vagaries of nature may force a group to wander in search of new resources from time to time, but the advent of agriculture would merely have made a given territory viable for longer stretches of time, rather than changing the basic urge to control a particular piece of land.
Similarly, I see no reason why the physical subjugation of women would have begun with agriculture. It has been noted that hunter-gatherer tribes have a far higher murder rate (as a percentage of the population) than organized (agricultural and industrial) societies… even factoring in the institution of war. The example I recall reading was of a woman on her third husband… who had killed her second husband, who had killed her first. The idea of women (perhaps more specifically, access to wombs for reproductive purposes) as a commodity to be possessed certainly goes further back than the invention of agriculture.
The uncertainty of paternity has similarly existed since humanity first developed the capacity to worry about it. (For that matter, lions worry about it… male lions will attempt to kill any cubs their mates have borne to previous males.) A
Sunday, September 07, 2008, 10:52:01 AM