Evolution, Economics, Patriarchy, and the Status of Women

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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.

“’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.”

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.”

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.”

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