Since the dawn of recorded history, society has been dominated by men. Sure there have been many powerful women - Elizabeth, Mathilda, Cleopatra, Hatsheput, Catharine the Great, etc - and it’s a foolish man who does not listen to his spouse, but generally history has been dominated by men. Why has this worked so well for humanity?
(Counterpoint to this thread, obviously.)
The inherent superiority of men of course.:D;)
I really would like to know how you define
i) Recorded Human history.
ii) Domination
those are both pretty imprecise. We have little information about many early societies structure (lots of speculation through) and what we have, is always going to be affected by our own biases.
In the 1970’s till today, women rallied for the right to work outside the house. That was a progressive stance. Yet, a century before, progressive rallied against women working..
(Fully expect the man haters to be out in force soon :D)
We don’t know how “well” it has worked because we haven’t got an example of historical female domination.
There is no doubt that historically most societies are/were patriarchal and there must have been countless great discoveries and ideas lost to the world because the person involved had the misfortune to be female and therefore ignored or downtrodden.
To paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, probably the greatest single thing we can do for humanity (and so tackle poverty, hunger, overpopulation and gender inequality) is to give women control over their reproductive cycle. That was rarely possible medically and even less so culturally and so male domination was always likely to be the only game in town.
It’s worked well?
There are examples of matriarchal societies throughout history. (Both terms are pretty imprecise and emotionally charged so make of that what you will). Could you give me examples of discoveries made by women which were ignored? The only one I can think of right now is the fact that surgeons doubted the midwife policy of washing after delivering when doctors began to attend to births in the 19th century onwards. Yet that was less to do with sexism and much more to do with the fact that it was unproven scientifically at the time.
Hitchens was a drunk idiot who talked too much. He was probably the last person to care much. And, historically reliable birth control (when it has existed) has been adopted enthusiastically by those who could, inspite of cultural and or religious issues (which humans are very good at interpreting creatively anyway). “I enjoy sex, and kids are expensive” is enough for most people.
Has it, though?
Not in the proper sense of matriarchy, there aren’t.
Even in the ones that are often touted as such, like the Mosuo, the reality is that men wield all the political power and historically, all political power was wielded by a patriarchal, patrilineal nobility.
What there have been, at various historic periods, are much more equalitarian societies, but that’s not the same thing.
We can only speculate on how quickly mankind may have progressed had it operated as a true meritocracy from day 1.
But at the least we see in the modern world that allowing women to work of course gives a tremendous economic boost (cite).
And as a personal data point, I work in an office of 40 male engineers and 40 female engineers. There is no pattern of men being better, or even of one gender being more suited to one area. It’s sad to think of the wasted talent in countries which might still consider engineering man’s work.
I was about to accuse you of cribbing from wikipedia. Then I realized its** MrDibble**, who probably wrote the cite that wiki relies on.
A good rant, lost because of you being a sensible and knowledgeable poster.
As to merits, that is true. However
i) As I said earlier, definition of matriarchal are hard to define and lay down and often rely on the citer’s own judgement. Its a subjective rather than objective labelling. Western anthropologists tend to define matriarchal vide inheritance rules, which is not very useful.
ii) As for political power, well that is correlated more to social status, wealth and family ties as opposed to strictly being decided by gender. Lots of women even in ostensible “patriarchal” societies have exercised formal and informal political power.
iii) Which ties into again, why oppression, domination are subjective things, what is seen as one by outsiders or future generations might not necessarily be see as such by those in it, while the same thing might be seen as one or the other at different times (the women at work example I gave earlier).
There have been some examples sure, sparse and of a limited nature hence my very careful use of the word “most”
can I give you examples of discoveries and ideas “lost to the world” and so never saw the light of day?..er, no. That is sort of the point. For a vast part of history women were second class citizens and their talents never fully realised. We have no idea what we missed out on by not encouraging the talents of 50% of the population for thousands of years.
and you are surely too familiar with this board to try such a crude ad-hominem. Hitchens with half a bottle of scotch in him was twice the orator, writer and intellect of most of his peers. "idiot"he was not and the emancipation of women and their rights (particularly as regards religion) was a recurring theme of his.
You may not like him but much of what he said stands on its own two feet.
i.e. Here on women, and again
Where on earth are you drawing the line for “reliable birth control”? It is certainly not any time before the 20th century. It exists now and yet it is not even the case for billions of people alive on earth today, neither access to it nor social acceptance of it. Even worse, in some cases even proclamations made actively against it.
“I enjoy sex and kids are expensive” you seriously think that such a statement has any traction in much of the third world?
Yes it has. If a matriarchal society had proved superior it would have dominated patriarchal ones.
No, that’s how they define “matrilineal”, and it’s a poor anthropologist, Western or otherwise, who confuses one for the other.
That’s kind of the point - if it isn’t along gender lines, it’s not a matriarchy.
Never the majority or even a real status-quo challenging amount, though. And I should note I’m talking real (state-level) political power here, not family- or tribal-level stuff.
Sure. But that’s opinions on the merits, not the existence. it’s possible to keep that relatively objective.
That’s circular logic and again ties into the issues with not defining “well”. Matriarchal societies could have excellent qualities and end up being squashed by neighbouring societies because they saw the “otherness” as a threat.
And if you say “Well there’s never been a matriarchal society” then what have you actually got to benchmark against?
No, it’s Darwinian logic.
Society is not a marketplace or even an ecosystem. It’s entirely possible for shitty systems to dominate other ones regardless of their overall beneficence but purely their beneficence for a subgroup. (in the past - slavery, feudalism. In modern times, corporate capitalism and the military-industrial complex).That may render them “superior” to you in some tautological sense, but it doesn’t render them beneficial for humanity as a whole, which is how I read
" worked so well for humanity". If you meant something else by that phrase, do enlighten me.
Only if it was “superior” in a military, conquering sense – an egalitarian, peaceful, relatively “enlightened” matriarchal society could have been overrun by a warlike patriarchal society… but the conquerors are only “superior” in the sense of brute force.
Agriculture, which has been humanity’s primary organizing force for as long as we can remember, is generally not great for women.
For one, agriculture needs lots of cheap farmhands (i.e. kids) to work. Even in the modern US, farms are exempt from certain child labor laws. Having lots of kids has historically been an economic necessity for small farms. But needing to have lots of kids is tough on women-- it’s physically dangerous, it’s disruptive to education and other economic opportunities, it limits your ability to leave a bad partner and it encourages constructs like polygyny, child marriage and trafficking of women. Where women need to have a lot of kids, they will have less freedom and fewer options.
The other tough thing about farming is inheritance. Because land is a very finite thing, who inherits the fields becomes a matter of life and death in a way that inheriting other goods does not. This pressure on inheritance ups the stakes on the “making sure my progeny is my own” thing. And that pressure leads to all kinds of sexual controls that ultimately limit women’s options.
In non-agricultural societies, we see much more variation when it comes to women’s roles (and it’s not always better, but it’s usually different). And in basically every modern society, including our own, we’ve seen a very sharp change basically a generation after we got off the farm.
I don’t think this attitude is accurate, since the common women did a tremendous amount of physical labor in the past, including farming, collecting water, making and mending clothes, and hours upon hours of housework. The invention of modern household appliances freed up a tremendous amount of time for other activities.
Actually, it is. A marketplace of ideas. Look at the spread of democracy, for instance.
And your point is? That’s all it takes.
There are plenty of female-dominated societies in nature: elephants, orca, bees, etc.
Puh-leeze. To take an extreme example, this is like thinking that viruses like Ebola are a higher form of life because humans succumb to them. In a less extreme example, that War Machine is a better human than Gandhi because if they fought we know who would win.