Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture
economist.com
economist.com
There was no writing anywhere during the earliest part of that transition, and if we saw statues of voluptuous female figures in some places (as we do) from that far back, it is at least as likely that the statues are porn as that they are representations of powerful goddesses. Archeology has historically systematically underestimated, perhaps for delicate readers, the amount of sheer erotic art that was produced by early human beings. The oldest surviving human art on at least two continents is crude drawings of vulvae, so the working hypothesis until additional evidence is found is that ancient human beings did not have a highly developed religion of "all-powerful mother goddesses" but rather incoherent local folk religions that didn't exclude teenage boys (the ancient artists of surviving ancient art were mostly teenage boys) from producing crudely drawn and crudely sculpted porn.
See The Nature of Paleolithic Art by R. Dale Guthrie (published by the University of Chicago press)
http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Paleolithic-Art-Dale-Guthrie/dp...
for much more about the evidence, as analyzed by an author who is a specialist in Pleistocene megafauna (including Homo sapiens) and himself a fine visual artist.
AFTER EDIT: It boggles my mind that I can link to a source in my comment and still have "readers" here ask what my source is for a factual statement in this comment. The source I linked is the source. (The book I link to is by a research scholar, and itself cites dozens of thorough sources about all aspects of human prehistory.) The book I link to is a lot better than any Wikipedia article. (I am a Wikipedian, painfully aware of how many good sources are missed when amateurs edit articles on Wikipedia.)
Also:
the ancient artists of surviving ancient art were mostly teenage boys
Sources?
Edit: Anyone care to reply instead of downvoting?
I'm not so sure there is or needs to be a distinction between the two. Penis goes in, life comes out. You can't explain that. Well, paleolithic man couldn't. But they could draw/sculpt it and revere it for both its pleasure- and life-giving properties.
It was not until 1677 [1] that people started to discover how reproduction works beyond "penis goes in, life comes out". Yet there are no major religions documented before that (in about 5000 years of recorded history) which revered crude vulva drawings. Whereas pornographic graffiti has been widespread everywhere from the streets of Ancient Rome [2] to modern boys' bathrooms.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonie_van_Leeuwenhoek#Discove...
[2]http://www.pompeiana.org/resources/ancient/graffiti%20from%2...
> II.7 (gladiator barracks); 8767: Floronius, privileged soldier of the 7th legion, was here. The women did not know of his presence. Only six women came to know, too few for such a stallion.
I don't know that I'm arguing for anything 'major' or 'documented'; for any specific religion or culture; or for anything at all beyond the fact that crude vulva drawings can be either or simultaneously a show of reverence and sexual interest. That we (meaning largely post-Testament historians) haven't documented the intentions of ancient cave-artists as being born of such duality is hardly evidence against that possibility.
That's a very modern application of those words. The very act of creating a statue is (true) objectification, whether it was carried out due to respect or solely to titillate. I'm not convinced that both cannot be true of the same statue.
And the modern concept of pornography means very little when framed in a pre-Judeo-Christian world. I doubt any of our loin-clothed ancestors shared the shame-based perspective 21st century humans have on the human body. No doubt some statues/drawings of vulvae were made because vulvae were fun things to interact with, and some were made because they were meant to be revered; I'd argue that it's possible for some percentage of those works of art to be motivated by both respect and eroticism, and further that the two motivations need not be considered so inherently at odds.
Making a statue in ancient times wasn't cheap or easy. Cheap in the aspect of always living on the edge of life, where a bad season could decimate a living group, and having time to do so. Easy in that tools weren't readily available to get it done quickly. I don't think anyone was just swinging in a hammock on a lazy Sunday - there were no lazy Sundays.
From that you can most likely assume that statues had purpose and significance. They weren't just put up for titillation which is really all modern porn is today.
It follows from your argument that because our ancestors didn't share an evolutionary perspective, modern humans describing our ancestors in evolutionary terms is less meaningful.
Put another way, when modern humans describe the process of objectification, it matters not at all if the objectifier says to themselves "I sure am making an object out of this".
It really doesn't. People can relate to porn in many ways. Unless the definition of "objectification" is so broad as to make the statement meaningless.
that's way too general. There's enough pornography out there, recent and old, where people are just having nice sex without there being some sort of power/dominating relationship nor where things get objectified to the extreme.
what exactly do you mean by this?
The main counter to this is that it's fiction and the actors are consenting adults, and that the only material difference between porn and other crappy fictional films is prudish judgment of (primarily) women's sexual behavior.
And this is why North European countries, which used the heaviest plows [1], are the most backward in their treatment of women. Oh wait...
In any case, as anyone who has had a serious conversation with a farmer can attest, the bulk of the work in agriculture is by far in harvesting and not in plowing. Pretty much all traditional societies "allow" women to do that.
Then they find support for the opposing hypothesis that such changes in society have long lasting effects, i.e., that the position of women in society does not change quickly.
Finally they place both opposing hypotheses in a single narrative.
To me, this is a major inconsistency, perhaps only due to the journalist rather than the scientists. Both hypotheses should be discarded since neither fits all the observations.
B) The separation of work due to existential needs was not sexist. It's just the initial condition that created the asymmetry in gender roles. That's to say a more agrarian society isn't necessarily more sexist than a less agrarian one. It's all the other factors that mold this asymmetry.
Tilling, on the other hand, is less time sensitive, and can better be the job of a smaller group spreading their effort over a longer period of time.
Also, the research doesn't claims any relation between the weight of the plow and the mindset beyond for the passing of a threshold where men gain a physical advantage.
So let's see, the research is about the relationship between two variables, both of them naturally continuous: weight of farming tools and degree of discrimination against women. The correlation doesn't quite hold for some sections of the graph, so what do you know: let's just separate the first variable into two arbitrary buckets, "light" and "heavy". Voila, case proved! Except if we happened to place the division at a "heavier" point, leaving only the Nordic countries in the "heavy" bucket, we'd obtain the exact inverse correlation.
But the separation is not arbitrary. "Light enough to wield by women" is the important statistic here, so the value in question is binary by nature. Weight in isolation simply isn't what is being considered here.
If the authors of the original article dotted all their is and crossed their ts, that's really something extraordinary: peoples whose ancestors were plough users show a strong correlation with regressive views on gender. That's remarkable.
That original paper can be found here:
On the Origins of Gender Roles: Women and the Plough http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/02/19/qje.q...
Note also that the strong correlation here lends itself to a variety of causal claims. Maybe ploughs led to higher population densities and strong states, which enforce gender roles. Maybe it's the strength based argument offered by the Economist. Maybe they became manufacturable only once society had developed strong states, which would make the correlation purely a one of shared cause.
Pre-agriculture, everyone's job #1 was getting food on the table. Post-agriculture, you had a surplus of food, so people began to specialize. Economic and market forces started to become more sophisticated, as people were secure enough that daily survival wasn't an issue.
So economically speaking, before the advent of modern farm machinery, what did a farmer need to prosper? Answer: Labor.
Where did this labor come from? Answer: Children.
Farm families are historically speaking very large. Much larger than what a hunter/gatherer could possible support.
A woman might have 12-15 children, and since you have a food supply, many of them will survive to adulthood. So if you have 15 term pregnancies, starting at age 15, you're talking about being almost continuously pregnant until age 30.
In primitive surroundings, pregnancy is deadly. Today, the lifetime risk of maternal death in sub-Saharan Africa is 1/16. (vs. 1/2800 in the developed world).
But in countries like Rwanda, Botswana, Madagascar or Kenya, whose people are predominantly descended from hoe-users, women are far more likely to be in the labour force than those in historically plough-using places like India, Syria or Egypt.
This is all an exercise in intellectual wankery that reminds me of the bit in Cryptonomicon where Randy's girlfriend publishes a paper correlating Unix beards with female oppression.
Oh, and by the way, 'twas Margaret Mead -- a woman and hardly an apologist for the patriarchy -- who put the lie to the myth that preagricultural human society was matriarchal. There have been matrilineal societies, but in these the property tended to pass from father to daughter's husband rather than father to son.
But worshiping domesticated animals isn't as universal or persistent as patriarchy supposedly is.
The orthodoxy is pre-traditional societies were about equal in likelyhood between matriarchy, patriarchy, and both. If you're looking at dominant deities for this definition.
The original academic article can be read here:
The Quarterly Journal of Economics http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/02/19/qje.q... (open access full text, at least for now)
I haven't read it, it is a peer reviewed publication, so I imagine they do have some evidence.
So the bulk of the argument stems from some initial qualitative assessment of the region's agricultural state (i.e. hoe or plow) and then comparing it to present day stats for the metrics he outlines.
Your suspicions are probably right, but I don't think the author would even disagree necessarily. I think this is just an interesting look into one of the factors that may have been responsible.
Farming promoted development. It did not hold it back.
Thinking in terms of "development" is generally a bad approach. History doesn't have levels. Using generic terms like that implicitly assumes all sorts of correlations that don't actually exist.
Not that I'm aware of. My understanding is that agricultural societies were less violent. As I understand it, when humans are in hunter-gathering societies, we are more territorial and less accepting of those outside of our tribe. (On the order of 50 people.) I'd like to know if that understanding is wrong.
What I do know is that we have gotten much less violent over time. The 20th century, even with all of its wars, was still much less violent than all previous centuries.
Before significant agriculture some amount of warfare was simply a part of life as usual. This scenario suggests martial competence is fairly ubiquitous, and thus dominating enemies without paying a high cost in blood is difficult (e.g. you might need great political skills to stitch together a powerful local coalition).
However once significant cities were established, being skilled at warfare was potentially very lucrative. This means a soldier specialist may be a very rewarding career.
Is it really the plough itself, or that the larger cities the plough helped create were a big incentive for professional soldiers to become the ruling class?
Hegel would be very disappointed
This surplus of skills has allowed humans to survive under a wide variety of circumstances and environments. Evolution does not guarantee long term survival of the fittest--it guarantees long term survival of the most adaptable.
In some environments, the female may be more critical to the success of the family (or extended clan, or tribe, or what have you). In others, it's the man. Sometimes it's equal. But just because a particular skill set isn't the most valuable at any point in time doesn't mean that the individuals with those skills should be second class citizens. Eventually, years or decades or millennia from now, or thousands of miles away, their time will come again.
The focus on thr future ownership gave rise to the focus in single inheritance: a son. And tbe importance of knowing whose son was your's. To ensure lineage men suppressed women as an extension if their property.
Now both theories are complimentary because the reason sons (not daughters) became the targtarget for inheritance probably boiled down to these same issues of strength.
The key change thwt occured is we became more monogomous and suppressive of women even though it was not a natural way to be, to preserve property after death.
Source: "Sex at Dawn", an interesting read on post-religiously framed anthropology
This method could be extremely error-prone, due to borrowings, etc. between languages, e.g. see some of the criticisms against gluttochronology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottochronology#Discussion) which uses similar techniques to determine relation between languages.