Given that about one in every 100-200 births resulted in the death of the mother, and that most mothers underwent anywhere from several to over a dozen pregnancies, it seems likely that almost one in ten married women in pre-modern societies perished as a reproductive casualty. That was probably quite a bit higher than the percentage of men who died in armed conflict during military service. (Of course, wars also killed large numbers of both male and female civilians.)
I think you might be overthinking this phenomenon. ISTM that female infanticide has traditionally been not so much a conscious social-engineering strategy as merely a byproduct of the combination of economic hardship and patriarchy.
Societies facing widespread poverty don’t collectively decide that their population is too high and they must limit their future population by decreasing the number of female individuals. Rather, individual families simply respond to the immediate problem of there not being enough food to go around by invoking the cultural assumption that daughters are of lesser worth than sons, and therefore the least worst solution to this crisis is getting rid of daughters.
Just as an interesting side note - in the Aztec world view women who died in childbirth were given as many honors in the afterlife as men who perished as soldiers or willing sacrifices. I always thought that was interesting.
Juxtaposed with your mention of fatality rates in armed conflicts that does give one food for thought.
Hmm, okay, you are talking about tribal warfare in traditional societies, while I was thinking of “before modern medicine” more in terms of large-scale pre-modern societies that were at least partly urbanized and centrally organized with official militaries, etc. So the stats for male death rates in warfare are probably different in those different categories.
That type of pre-modern but “developed” society is also what my maternal-mortality cite of one death in every 100-200 births pertains to. Maternal mortality rates appear to have been higher in prehistoric and traditional societies.
I sort of agree - I think more along the lines of not just “not enough food now” but also “how many mouths can my meager plot of land support over the next decades or so?” I suppose for richer families it was calculated in terms of dowries they could afford. The net effect of each individual calculation is an Adam-Smith-like “invisible hand” setting the population level.
Traditional fairy tales are also an interesting source of data - how many like Cinderella or Snow White revolve around a step-mother? Failry common. Good chance the logical explanation is the real mother died in childbirth. Not to mention Hansel and Gretel where the parents abandon the children in the forest due to lack of food - which is why Hansel’s failed attempt to track their path using bread is all the more impactful to the story.
(I recall an interview where a historian said fairy tales were actually morality plays - teaching, for example with Hansel & Gretel that it was OK to abandon your kids if you were starving, but not OK to kill and eat them like the witch tried.)
The “meager plot of land” line of thinking would tend to have a family make and keep the first X babies where X is the number they think they can feed, then dispose of all after that. Which in and of itself would be neutrally sex-selective.
Now if the babies are coming thick and fast, you might choose to kill year-old girl X and keep her “replacement” boy X+1 who’s now the new number X. But that only goes so far; I don’t suspect too many families will be killing female toddlers or tweens or teens in response to a fresh male infant.
Past a certain point no, you aren’t likely to get direct killing, but you could get situations where attention to prevent accidents is directed at one child rather than another, making “accidental” elimination of one too many mouths more likely, or giving more food to one child and not enough to another, which reduces survival odds, increases the chance of illness, and makes surviving illness less likely.
Resource allocation can wind up favoring one child over another, and affecting survival. Doing this is documented by anthropologists, and is suspected in historical situations where you have very lopsided mortality rates between child genders.
This theory doesn’t hold up regarding the history of those tales. All the stepmothers you know from Grimm’s fairy tales were put in for bowdlerization. In the original sources for tales the brothers collected, the wicked women had been biological mothers, but the Grimms found that too cruel to be told to kids. IIRC, in early editions of their tales the mothers in Cinderella and Snow White still were biological mothers.
ETA: here’s an interesting article about this trope:
Another obvious calculation would be in the number of girls vs boys and the amount of work they can do - boys as field hands would be sturdier, able to work without protection, etc. etc. So the first girl that came along, helps with kitchen and child care in future, OK. Any further girls, it’s already a struggle feeding two or three boys that eventually help with the back-breaking labour. And so on…
So the farmer that needs a son to help with the labour - the second girl that is born, well, we already got one we don’t need two. If we keep this one, it’s one less son in future. This sexist sorting out is happening at birth. There’s also presumably a calculation made for chances of infant death from disease, another common problem, so it wouldn’t just be “we can have 2 children and that’s all”.
“Nasty, brutish and short” was the phrase used to describe life in those days.
We seem to accept - and presumably it’s decently documented - that infanticide, particularly of girls, was common in the olden days. What I have never seen is some contemporary commentary on what the people involved thought about it. Particularly, it must have been hard for a woman to carry a baby to term just to have it killed (or a 50-50 chance of that).
The late King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia had, according to Wikipedia, 36 children from ‘about’ 30 wives.
King Salman has had three wives, but not all at the same time.
King Fahd had ‘at least’ thirteen wives, but not all at the same time.
Osama bin Laden had possibly 6 wives and 20 to 26 children. Osama’s mother was bin Laden’s 10th wife of 17 wives and he was one of 54 children. His mother was divorced not long after he was born and re-married another Saudi who worked for bin Laden. (This seems to have overtones of “take my wife, please!”)
This seems to be pretty standard among rich Saudis. You don’t have to be king - but it helps.
Must comment that every time I see the “Extreme polygamy” title in the page, I can’t help but get a mental image of a guy and a bunch of wives all together jumping attached to the same bungee cord or riding in a racing speedboat or helicopter-skiing.
It’s also hard on a woman to try to raise two children and have one (or even both) starve to death because there’s not enough food to go around.
There were some nomadic hunter-gatherer groups where you NEVER had adults who were part of multiple births. It’s because they couldn’t manage two infants at the same time, only one. So if there was a twin (or triplets) only one was allowed to live. It’s a rather cold equation, but if that was the reality then, well, perhaps having one child live instead of losing both was some consolation.
It is the case these days that a lot of island communities that used to practice infanticide, and Arctic groups where the old people used to volunteer to walk out in to the winter (with probably some less voluntary leaving at times) have discontinued those practices. I don’t think anyone liked killing babies or leaving old people on ice floes, it was a choice forced on them by circumstances. These days islands with excess population have folks travel in relative safety to another place (in some cases there is a formal agreement with a mainland nation allowing immigration) and there are more resources and help with old/disabled people.
People dealt with it as best they could when they didn’t have a better alternative. These days, they have alternatives and use them.
Back more to the original topic - the reasons why Bronze Age pastoralists or farmers had multiple wives are probably somewhat different than the reasons men in the 21st Century have multiple wives. In the Bronze age women might have been more willing to be a 3rd or 4th wife rather than starving or ostracized. These days… not so much. Women are not as dependent on men in a lot of societies (there are, of course, exceptions, even some people living in essentially a Bronze Age or earlier type of environment, but they’re a very small minority these days).
I had seen it more like a reality show about who can have the most wives / husbands, or the coolest multi-user sex toys and sex facilities, or the craziest living arrangements. IOW, the sort of contest that the Very Evil Warren Jeffs would be very likely to win. But somehow in a fun way, with less exploitation and more free-wheeling abandon.
The assumption that post-colonial hunter gatherer groups live lives identical to those lived by all humans in the distant past ignores the fact that these HG societies don’t exist in a vacuum. They are on marginally useful land like desert or jungle not because that’s where HG cultures thrive but because that’s where they had left once agricultural societies took everything else.
Historically most hunter gatherers probably lived in exactly the sorts of places that civilizations would later arise - fertile river valleys.
We can’t look at people living in the deepest densest jungle or driest desert and come to conclusions about what HG societies did when they had access to much more fertile land.
I would suppose that the natives of North America who retained their original cultures long enough to be recorded by European historians are probably the main counter-example (with the usual caveats).
Which cultures are you thinking of? Note that North America had plenty of sedentary societies - the Iroquois, for example, were an agricultural society, as were the people of the Mississippi culture who lived in cities like Cahokia; so were the Puebloans in the West, and more others than I can name here.
Most HG societies that I can think of in North America either formed as a result of Colombian Exchange induced collapse of a sedentary society (through disease or enemy action). I’m sure there were pre-Colonial HG societies around, but they were driven to marginal land by their sedentary neighbors, just like HGs in Europe or Asia or Africa.