Australia yes, but agriculture is pretty extensive in Papua New Guinea. In fact, that has some of the oldest agricultural sites known. Hunter/gatherers are pretty rare there.
I think they are generally a mixture of agriculture and hunting/fishing, but I’m not really an expert on this.
It’s pretty common for subsistence farmers to include hunting to supplement their diets. But the point is that most of the Papua New Guinea tribes are settled, with livestock and other possessions that put them clearly on the “agriculturalist” side of this discussion. Most hunter/gatherers are nomadic, which limits the number of possessions one can own.
This was my comment also - it’s impossible to know based on the societies the OP refers to whether the theory holds up because most of the cultures referred to had already had contact with Western society who did everything they could to either assimilate those cultures or eliminate them.
Also, the OP refers to a very small subset of hunter-gatherer cultures that existed. There were hunter-gatherers not just in North America, New Guinea and Africa, but also all over Europe, Eurasia and Asia (including the Middle East and East Asia), plus South America and Australia, many of which placed a LOT of importance on the role of women in society. Additionally, the OP discounts those cultures in the referred-to locations where large emphasis was placed on women’s abilities, roles, etc. (Of course, doubtless the reverse was true as well.)
I think it’s true that there has historically and pre-historically been a clear division of labor between women and men, but I’d say that a lot of that has been based on capabilities and practicality and not always (perhaps sometimes, but not always) a result of inferiority of one gender vs. the other.
I guess my point is that it’s very difficult for a theory like this one to hold water because there are so many unanswered questions and potential holes - the timing of the sample hunter-gatherer cultures, trying to compare them against far older cultures who had never had contact with agriculturalists, etc. Also, as smiling bandit noted, it’s very difficult to compare the values of post-writing cultures with that of pre-writing cultures because of the lack of records (with the exception of the archaeological record and potentially the biased legends and recollections of others that have been translated or relayed so many times they’ve become distorted).
I don’t deny that recent pre-agricultural societies could have adopted sexually repressive practices from agricultural neighbors. But where is the supporting evidence? We can’t simply presume a priori that all these societies were different the instant before they came in contact with observers. Are their oral traditions, ancient cave paintings, or the like that suggest a sexually equal situation before the arrival of agriculture?
Furthermore, assuming that the preagricultural societies known to be sexually repressive did pick up their practices from agricultural neighbors rather than evolving such practices on their own, that begs the question of why they adopted them. The very fact that preagricultural societies lacked the incentives of increasing wealth and confused lines of inheritance that the Pulsiphers claim led to sexual differentiation and repression, but still chose to adopt those practices from their agricultural neighbors anyway, suggests that there are other reasons that led them to this choice. And if the preagricultural societies had reasons other than the ones that the Pulsiphers list, might not the early agricultural societies also have reasons other than the ones that the Pulsiphers list?
You could argue that preagricultural societies adopted sexual repression out of admiration for the superior wealth and numbers of their agricultural neighbors. But if that was the feeling, you would expect such societies also to adopt the practice of agriculture itself, which was the source of that wealth, but in the case of the Comanche, Bedouin, Asmat, Bushmen, etc., they didn’t.
Here’s my hypothesis. Historically, men have oppressed women chiefly because they can; because their higher average level of physical strength has allowed them to coerce most women (and men weaker than themselves) into submission. This preponderance of male physical strength exists in both preagricultural and agricultural societies, and thus sex roles have been divided and sex status unequal in both kinds of societies.
Why, then, did the oppression of women get even worse in agricultural societies than preagricultural ones? I can think of three possibilities. 1) as even sven argued, the agricultural revolution made it more profitable for men to confine women to the role of childbearers. 2) The adoption of the plow made the man’s strength advantage a greater source of food, and thus of wealth and power; male hunters had contributed a minority of the calories that the group consumed, but male plowmen contributed a majority. 3) In hunting and herding societies, small groups of abused women could abandon males who mistreated them and still survive by gathering, but in an agricultural society, women who ran away from their male abusers also ran away from their main food source.
Any hypothesis regarding women’s options in any pre modern society must take into account the additional vulnerability of unattached women to men of evil intent.
You realize, don’t you, that using a discussion board to mount an argument against a textbook’s authors is akin to shouting down the well? If you want to contribute to the scholarly conversation in this area, do your research and submit a paper for publication. I’m pretty sure nobody in academia gives a rat’s ass what gets posted on SDMB.
Cite? Or did you mean to add ‘survive to adulthood’?
That’s cite for the former part, please.
True enough. However most of us (including myself) don’t have the qualifications or the time to do the research in sociology or anthropology that would lead to an article in a referreed journal. So we can’t debate at that level. Meanwhile, it can be fun to debate at this kind of level.
First of all, evidece does support that the cultures you cited earlier, Native Americans in particular, absorbed the traditions of their invaders. They either did so or were exterminated, sometimes both (i.e., absorbed the traditions and were later exterminated anyway or pushed aside).
Secondly, where is your evidence? Thus far, you’re making an argument based on a single cite that you’ve provided at the beginning of your thread - a cite which you disagree with - but have yet to provide evidence of your own except your own personal theories.
I think this is a very interesting premise for a debate and am really looking forward to seeing how this plays out. But as a former archaeologist, I’ve not seen a trend in the archaeological record that supports your theory. In fact, depending on where I’ve worked, the archaeological record (particularly in Europe, but also in some places in South America and the southwest) considered women as important as men, particularly since they could bear children. Yes, there was frequently a division of labor, but in some places (again, Europe is a good example from my research), women were said to have joined in the hunting alongside men.
Here’s a cite from the Boston Globe: Stone-Age Feminism
Also, in circumstances where women were primarily responsible for gathering rather than being involved in the hunt, since gathering would have been 80% of their food, it would have been silly for that role to have been marginalized. If you look at it that way, women were the primary breadwinners, not men. According to this cite, women would have been recognized as extremely important in these societies.
Native American hunter-gatherers only adopted agriculture after the whites destroyed the buffalo (which happened, remember, in an extremely short time, from 1870 to 1885). On the other hand, they had already adopted sexual division of labor and stigmatizing practices against unchaste women while their hunter-gatherer culture was at its zenith of prosperity.
Of course, the whites weren’t the only agriculturalists that the Plains Indians were exposed to: the Cherokee, Creek, and Pueblo had adopted agriculture on their own. I wish I could compare Comanche sex roles and customs to Cherokee or Pueblo, but I don’t know enough about them to do so intelligently.
I provided evidence of actual, observed sex roles in preagricultural peoples: the Comanche, Asmat, and Bedouin, so I’m wondering whether you mean 1) you want the sources where I found that evidence, or 2) you’re wanting archaeological evidence that the observed sexual division of labor and unequal status of men and women in preagricultural societies already existed before they made contact with agriculturalists. I can do the first, but I don’t have the second.
That is interesting, and thanks for providing it. I agree that in hunter-gatherer societies, women often provided more food than men did (the Plains buffalo culture being atypical in that regard); as I said, that could be one reason that women’s power and status declined after the agricultural revolution.
I note in your Boston Globe cite that the study suggested that it was H. sapiens neandertalensis, not H. sapiens sapiens, that had female big game hunters. It appears that the study specifically contrasts the Neandertals with our own preagricultural ancestors, who did have a sexual division of labor if the study is correct.
Please see post #19.
Homo neanderthalensis. Most biologists consider them to be a separate species. And, as a nitpick, the older “th” spelling is preserved in the species name. Taxonomy is a conservative art and pays no attention to these fleeting fads! 
Thank you, John. I will need some time to educate myself on the San and the Arctic cultures. They may indeed be better examples, but the ones I mentioned were simply ones I was more familiar with.
What, the Committee on College Accreditation isn’t going to read this and place the Pulsiphers on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum? I am crushed!
No, seriously, I well know that the SDMB has no academic clout whatsoever. I’m thrashing it out here because 1) I may never have the time or money to submit a paper on the subject, and 2) if I can’t defend my argument on the SDMB, it’s damned unlikely I’ll be able to do it in a peer-reviewed journal, so it’s kind of a preliminary vetting to see if my ideas have any merit.
And just to be clear, I’m generally in agreement with you here, it’s just that we have a big hole in our picture of what pre-Columbian Native American cultures were like, especially outside the large civilizations that left written and stone records (like those in Meso-America). If you’re interested in some the current hypothesis, pick up a copy of 1491. The title pretty much tells you what the book is about.
My ability to research is kind of hampered here, but a hunter-gatherer mother cannot have more small children than she can carry around- in practice, this means one baby at a time. This is largely acheived by extended breast-feeding, although infanicide is not unheard of.
Not to say that rape (that is what you are talking about, right?) isn’t a heinous crime. But to what degree is the amount of heinous-ness we attach to it come from social values that largely define women as property (i.e. being raped makes a woman “damaged goods” and reduces her value to other men, limiting her options in life) I’m not saying stone-age women were cool with being raped, but maybe the threat of rape didn’t have quite the restricting impact that it does on women in modern times.
Ding ding ding ding! I’m not sure where we got the idea that gender equality=going out hunting. I suspect this is part of our own internal biases that make anthropology so difficult.
I’d say an equal society is one where women can choose to sleep with whoever they want, have choice in the work they do, have an equal say in their living situation, not be threatened with more violence than a man would be threatened with, control their reproduction as best they can, and have the right to own and inheret property.
Anyway, in my experience, even in agricultural societies the oppression of women is a luxury. Poor families here do what they can- women work the fields, they go to the market, they create products to sell, etc. Keeping a family going is really a group effort. It’s only in relatively rich families where they can afford to seclude the women from public life and support things like (quite common here) someone having a half dozen wives, some of them quite young, and 40+ children.
Rape isn’t just forced sexual intercourse. In a primitive society especially, acts like mutilation leading to death for the sake of jollies wouldn’t be out of the question. And the likelyhood of a woman being raped would be considerably diminished if she was attached to a man. Her options were much more limited with regard to independance than say a man.
Biases? Perhaps, so when I see housekeeping or fruit picking vacation packages being offered on the internet , I’ll have to review my opinion.
1491, while an excellent book, mainly deals with the Native Americans south of the border. A book that better covers the Native Americans that lived in what is now the United States, Canada, and the artic regions would be Native American Heritage by Merwyn S. Garbarino and Robert F. Sasso. The copy I have the 3rd edition from 1994 but they might have come out with another.
Marc
“acts like mutilation leading to death for the sake of jollies wouldn’t be out of the question”. Why do you say that? They aren’t “out of the question” now, either, when you get right down to it. Do you think our more remote ancestors were unable to recognize sadistic violence or just ignored and/or accepted it?
“the likelihood of a woman being raped would be considerably diminished if she was attached to a man” ???
I don’t think our primitive ancestors were any more likely to “rape” a woman than the current male population, mostly because I can’t see why they would be. Why would they be? If a people have developed a culture that “recognizes” rape as a crime, it isn’t what I would call primitive.
Our very earliest ancestors were few in number. I think - and it’s only my thought, not based on any science - that they would have valued each other quite highly, regardless of gender. Their attitudes towards sex might have differed a great deal from ours, no doubt they did. I suspect (again, not based on science) that until a woman was regarded as property, whenever that began, women were* freer* to engage in sex where and when and with whom they liked.
Rape is a crime of violence, it is not sex.
I’m an Evolutionary Anthropology major with a particular interest in sex and gender. While Hunter-gatherers didn’t have equal sex roles in every society, of the societies I’ve studied, they had the most equality between males and females.
Lumping all groups who do not practice agriculture together is ignorant, however, I agree with the basic statement of the authors in that “as wealth and property became more important in human society… women’s bodied needed to be controlled.” All the examples you have given of pre-agricultural societies where women’s behavior is controlled are societies in which property and resources increase male reproductive success. For example, the Bedouin are Pastorialists which tend to be the most restrictive of female sexuality of any cultural group I’ve studied due to the high variance in male reproductive success. The more important wealth and property are for male status and the more stratified a society is, the more control is exerted over the females.