Pre-agricultural sexual roles were equal?!

Great Debates
1

Resolved: insofar as it claims that the rise of agriculture resulted in the initial creation of markedly different sex roles in human society in general, and particularly of cultural mechanisms to control women’s bodies, the passage above is absurd and contrary to the manifest weight of the evidence. I contend instead that highly distinct sexual roles, a sexual double standard intended to control women’s bodies, and the relegation of women to a status subordinate to men, are all far older than the origin of agriculture.

Before I begin arguing, I want to get two caveats out of the way.

  1. I agree that the transition to agriculture, in most societies, made women’s status worse than before; but this was a “bad to worse” change, not a change from roughly equal or similar roles.

  2. I know nothing about Çatalhöyük, and have no specific argument against Ian Hodder’s reports from the site; for all I know, Çatalhöyük may well have been an unusual case of a sexually egalitarian early society. But even if Hodder is correct about Çatalhöyük, I still very strongly dispute the idea that it represents the norm for sexual relations in pre-agricultural societies.

First, if the Pulsiphers’ thesis were correct, we would expect to find sexual equality in the pre-agricultural societies that existed today or in the recent past. We do not. In the vast majority of hunter-gatherer societies of which we have direct written record - the Plains Indians of America, the Asmat of New Guinea, and every hunting people from sub-Saharan Africa that I have seen - there is a strict sexual division of labor, with women being the principal gatherers and men virtually monopolizing the role of hunters and warriors.

Second, cultural mechanisms for controlling women’s bodies, especially including a sexual double standard, are also clearly of pre-agricultural origin. The hunting-gathering Comanche of the 19th century had rituals specifically designed.to praise chaste young women and stigmatize those who yielded their virginity, and it was the men who passed these judgments on the young women. Nomadic, herding Bedouins have also practiced seclusion of women from time immemorial (long before they adopted Islam, even) and this practice is designed to enforce chastity on women but not men.

The idea that control of women’s bodies results from a concern about “confusing lines of inheritance” is particularly insupportable. There is, of course, a very easy way to prevent lines of inheritance from becoming confused as a result of a woman becoming pregnant by multiple sex partners: adopt a matrilineal system where inheritance passes from mother to daughter instead of father to son. Several pre-agricultural peoples have in fact adopted such a system, including, most famously, the ancient pastoral Hebrews. (To this day, Israel’s legal definition of a Jew is the child of a Jewish mother, rather than the child of a Jewish father). The key point is, despite their crystal-clear lines of inheritance, matrilineal societies such as the Hebrews’ show absolutely no inclination to treat men and women equally. Political rule and warfare were dominated by men, and men in their prayers gave thanks that they were not born female.

Also, the matrilineal custom sometimes survives the transition to agriculture. The agricultural Bakongo and some of the Akan-speaking tribes of West Africa are matrilineal. I am not any expert on their societies, but the little I have learned suggests that they are strongly patriarchal and polygynous, and furthermore the men with harems exercise a virtual reign of terror on the bachelors to keep them away from their wives. All this despite the fact that property passes along the female line.

In the face of all this evidence, the single example of Çatalhöyük isn’t enough to support the Pulsiphers’ argument. Would anyone step forward to champion their thesis?

2

This is definitely a case of reading a lot into a little. It’s a very common problem with pre-writing societies. We know virtually nothing about what they valued, who realyl led their societies, and how they were organized. We can more often say what they were not than what they were.

3

The thread sort of reminds me of this: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/080111.html

4

Life far prior to life as it existed at Çatalhöyuk, back when we were hunter-gatherers, was in all likelihood considerably more egalitarian. Most centrally, it may not have been an Issue if you were pregnant or not, and/or by whom; scarcity was not as big a motivator, or so it seems, prior to settling down to agriculture.

Çatalhöyuk is at least at the dawn of agricultural civ, not before it.

Be all of that as it may (and I am no time traveller and have no hard evidence to dispense here), I think the golden age of sexual equality still lies in front of us, not far far behind us in an era prior to that we dub “civilization”. It is nevertheless useful, sometimes, to toss out the notion that we have not always been this way when confronted with someone who deigns to assert thiat this way is the way it has always been and therefore (by extention) always will be.

5

Do different gender roles necessarily mean that one gender was “more valuable” than the other, that men oppressed/controlled women?

6

Danimal: Very erudite, and beautifully expressed. I love good rational thinking.

I have a question. In societies like those you describe where the property and wealth is inherited by women, is the wealth also held by women? Can an unmarried woman inherit? If she inherits, is she expected to get married? Can she designate another heir besides a direct female descendant if she doesn’t have one? If a woman inherits and is married, does her wealth effectively become her husband’s wealth at least until his demise? After he dies, is it hers or her daughter’s?

The reason I ask is because I find it a bit peculiar trying to picture material wealth entirely separated from political power. I’m not saying I don’t believe it, I’m just not aware of the circumstances which made it possible.

7

Danimal-

  1. Please define the standard of equality you are using. This is not an accusation, but some confuse “equal” with “identical,” when there seems to be a preponderance of evidence of men and women originally having more parallel than identical roles.

  2. You do not address the idea of interacting with other cultures in your point regarding pre-agricultural societies today being chauvinistic. I was under the strong impression that the existence of limited ranges and corresponding militarization of male social roles led to male dominance was a fairly current theory, and pre-agricultural societies existing near post would fall under that set from necessity.

8

This should be easily falsified: do hunter-gatherer groups today concern themselves with parentage?

9

I agree that hunter-gathering culture tends to be closer to egalitarian than farming culture; as in the Iroquois whose women could divorce their husbands and had their own council, something you don’t find in many early agricultural societies. As I said, I think agriculture did cause a decline in women’s status; I just think their previous status was also a good long way from equal, and certainly not one of “similar chores in daily life.”

I think pregnancy and childbirth were probably very important from the earliest hunting-gathering days in causing sexual division of labor. Hunting places a premium on footspeed, and even the most fit woman will have a hard time keeping up speed in advanced pregnancy. After her baby is born, the lion’s share of the duty of carrying the baby around is going to fall to her, because she can nurse and the man cannot; she can carry a baby around and still gather, since fruits and nuts don’t run away, but it’s going to slow her down in the chase.

I also have my doubts that scarcity was not so large a motivator before agriculture. I would think that the agricultural revolution would not have occurred in the first place if not prompted by the scarcities typical of the hunting and herding lifestyle. Farming is hard work for everybody; people only do it because things are too scarce for them as hunters or herders.

10

As I understand it, the answers to your questions are mostly “no.” In early matrilineal societies, just as with our modern corporations, there is a vast gulf between ownership and control. The woman may own the wealth without controlling it. The controller was almost always a man, but might be her brother or another male relative rather than her husband (and of course in that case there is no necessity that she get married). But in no case that I know of did the woman herself have total control. As Will and Ariel Durant explain it in Our Oriental Heritage, “[e]ven when property was transmitted through the woman she had little power over it; she was used as a means of tracing relationships which, through primitive laxity or freedom, were otherwise obscure.”

11

This is the same thing vision was getting at. The standard of equality I was using was the one set forth in the Pulsipher book that I am disputing: “men and women performed similar chores in daily life, had similar status and power, and both played key roles in social and religious life.” I think hardly any hunter-gatherer culture meets that description.

If we limit “equality” to “similar status and power” alone, without throwing in the absurd “similar chores in daily life,” then you could say that pre-agricultural societies were equal relative to early agricultural societies. On the other hand, they were not necessarily “equal” relative to our own Western society today, at least in the sense that our society opens far more roles to both sexes than pre-agricultural societies did.

I’m not sure I’ve understood your meaning here. Are you trying to say that it was only in the recent past (you meant to write “near past” rather than “near post”?) did pre-agricultural societies have limited ranges and a resulting militarized role for men? If so, I don’t agree. Hunter-gatherer societies appear to have had limited ranges, and intense military competition for those ranges, from the earliest times they have been observed. For example, the Comanche pushing the Apache out of Texas and into New Mexico and Arizona. Ranges can also be limited simply by exhaustion of resources, as when the Lakota left Minnesota for the Dakotas and Montana because they had used up most of the local fish and game.

12

Pre [del]agriculture[/del], or pre loss of game and herding, men didn’t need social conventions to benefit from having it better than women. Men had their dream jobs which women weren’t good at and women got the crappy work, because that was the only division of labour that worked. But when the good jobs became scarce, men had to stay home and help their wives supplement the family income by tilling soil. But then men realized that they could use their hunting skills by raiding other settlements and bring women back to help their wives instead and get some benefits as well. This resulted in devaluing the marital contribution of individual wives to their husbands but it also enhanced the value of women in the region causing constant strife. The way to pacify an agricultural region therefore was to instutionalize a concept that women like horses were the property of men so that all men would respect them as property.

13

I’m trying to picture what this theoretical “wealth” of pre-ag. societies was. I think we forget how dirt poor hunter-gatherers are. They own only what they can carry on themselves, and those goods are usually highly susceptible to wear and tear, such that they are unlikely to last beyond the owner’s lifetime. What wealth, exactly, are you passing on to your children? Even modern “uncivilized” tribes don’t qualify as good examples, because almost all of them engage in some form of farming or herding, so you do have the wealth of pigs or taro roots or something. Before any domestication, what wealth do we have to speak of? A few cowrie necklaces?

14

If you can stomach the romance aspect, try reading The Mammoth Hunters, by Jean Auel for an idea of what a hunter gatherer society would consider wealth (personal or home ornaments, decorated clothing, useful containers and dishes (the more decorative the better), finished hides and furs, foodstuffs prepped for long-term storage, seasonings such as salt, amber, flint, flint tools, etc). And don’t confuse hunter-gatherer with strictly nomadic. In an area rich with game and plants, a small band need not exhaust their resources, especially since the residents could readily make overnight trips for resources known to exist in the area. The Mammoth Hunters is a rather idealized picture of a possible hunter-gatherer group, but it offers a picture of life that doesn’t seem to stretch credulity too far, and the author researches up the wazoo! You can skip over the romance/sex bits, which would be perfectly at home in any contemporary romance novel, if you like (I do). It remains a fascinating book. Do bear in mind that it was written before DNA evidence had been found to pretty much kill the idea that Neanderthals interbred with Homo Sapiens enough to contribute to their genetic heritage. (Or am I out of date, and that in question again?)

15

Exactly. Çatalhöyuk is a fully agricultural society. I don’t even understand why anyone thinks it would typify pre-argicultural societies, which seems to make the argument extraneous.

Sailboat

16

Hunter-gatherer societies don’t live in a vacuum, though. If they have some contact with agricultural societies (as the 19th century Comanche certainly would), they might pick up ideas like the idea that it is good for women to be chaste.

Also, not all agricultural societies have the same attitudes toward women and sex roles- attitudes differ in time and space. Why should hunter-gatherer societies not have similar variation?

Careful. Couple of things here:

  1. Hebrew and later Jewish society hasn’t stayed the same all throughout history. The matrilineal descent idea may actually only date to the first Babylonian exile or even to the Mishnah. Tradition says it was that way earlier as well, but that may or may not be true- there are many instances in many cultures of trying to make a rule appear more authoritative by saying it’s always been done that way, when that’s not the case. There are instances in the Torah of Jewish men marrying non-Jewish women, with the children being portrayed as Jewish (Joseph is one example- he married Asenath, the daughter of an Egyptian priest). Later tradition says the women converted to Judaism or were Jewish by birth- there’s a tradition that Joseph’s wife Asenath was the adoptive daughter of the Egyptian priest, and was actually the daughter of Jacob’s daughter Dinah. But it’s by no means clear from the text of the Torah that these women were actually Jewish.

  2. Only status as a Jew has ever been transmitted matrilineally. Tribal membership (such as whether you’re a Cohen or a Levi) and property inheritance were patrilineal.

17

Does anyone have any information about what role hunting really played in hunger-gatherer socieites? I seem to recall reading that that hunting was a fairly ocassional thing that contributed only a small portion of the average diet.

While I won’t say that hunter-gatherer socieites are the paragon of gender equality, I don’t think anyone can dispute that they were surely more equal than your average agricultural society. You can tell be simply looking at the evolution of gender roles in modern times.

Agriculture transformed having a lot of children from being a burden to being a neccessity. Hunter-gatherer societies could not support a woman having 7-10 children. But in agricultural society where children work as fieldhands, having that many kids is pretty much required to get the work done. This means that women will end up doing little but dealing with kids their entire life.

In modern times, when having many children has once again become a burden instead of increasing the living standard, we see women being able to fulfill other roles and an increase in gender equality. This change happened in our own society and is happing as we speak around the world. Here in Cameroon, women in towns in cities enjoy a vastly more equal life than women in agricultural villages.

18

Depends on the terrain. In arctic regions, it can account for as much as 90% of the food eaten. In more temperate zones, maybe 30%. Hunting was not so much an occasional thing, as only occasionally successful. Meat is a highly valued commodity, but it can’t be counted on every day.

Yeah, I think this is the case. There isn’t a lot of room for inequality when you don’t have any property to speak of.

19

One other thing. Be careful about using the Plains Indians as a model for hunter/gatherers. It’s unclear just how much contact and/or experience with agriculture those tribes had in pre-Columbian times, so they could very well be carrying a lot agricultural baggage when they were encountered and studied by Europeans. Better to look at some of the Arctic peoples or the San Bushmen of Southern Africa.

20

There are also peoples such as the Australian Aborigines and the people of New Guinea – there are plenty of living hunter-gatherer societies that have been extensively studied.