With respect to liberty and the power to make decisions for themselves were women treated better overall in pre-agricultural primitive hunter gatherer societies or early agricultural societies like the Egyptian, Judaic and early “fertilecrescent” cultures?
Wrong Forum - Would a kindly mod please move to GQ?
Not an answer, but the direction my prior assumptions lead me in:
Back in the pre-Enlightenment feudal days of Europe, it is my understanding that everything in the realm was assumed to belong to the monarch, including, ultimately, the serfs. Does this paradigm extend back to BCE, and as far as the Fertile Crescent? If so, it would seem to me that when a farmer is chattel to the king, the farmer might see his wife as chattel to him.
It would not occur to me that this mindset would be likely in a hunter-gatherer society.
I’ve recently re-read my books on the Louis & Clark expedition and Warpaths, which is about invasions and conquest in North America. There are some references in each about how various tribes treated their women.
For the most part, they were essentially slaves and chattel. Burdened with unbelievable amounts of labor so that the men would be free to hunt and war on one another. Not a good life at all, for the most part.
Although that’s not a universal truth regarding NA tribes. Some were a bit more egalitarian, giving women some semblance of status. But these were certainly not the norm.
I would say that the underlying assumption (that there is a commonality to HG cultures vs agrarian ones with regard to role of women) is probably false.
I do know the Ya̧nomamö women are treated like shit, though. Bushmen women seem to be a lot better off, in general, but even there, domestic violence is quite a problem. How much of that is a result of dislocation & alcoholism, and how much cultural, I couldn’t say.
In how many HG cultures do women routinely hunt with weapons? Not that it doesn’t happen but it certainly isn’t as universal as male hunting and weapon using. So you have males who are larger and stronger on average than the females, and more used to violence and killing. Add in circumstances where survival means remainging with the group, so fleeing is the last most desperate option, and it looks to me like females being oppressed by the males is the most likely tendency.