Last time I attempted to answer the question of why our society tends to favor women over men, why women’s wants and needs tend to be meticulously attended to while men’s are mostly ignored. The answer is that (a) our species successfully evolved in large part by protecting women and (b) mothers tend to be the primary caregivers to our children, resulting in a strong preference for female attention and approval.
But then I asked another question. However true those motivations may be, aren’t we beyond all that? Didn’t we embark on a voyage to a Brave New World in which those motivations no longer hold true? Didn’t we decide to set aside gender roles and move forward without them in ways never before dreamed of?
The answer is “yes and no.” A more detailed answer requires me to go back in time and examine how anyone ever imagined that the gender roles that had made us so successful had, in some way, become so much dross. After all, why abandon something that’s worked so well?
That “something” of course was the division of labor between men and women. From far, far back in our hominid pre-history, males and females occupied different roles in society. Generally speaking, men’s job was to establish resource-rich territory and defend it against enemies, and women’s was to conceive, gestate, give birth to and nurture offspring. Both sexes gathered food, but mostly men hunted it.
Women’s sexual choices made sure that males tended to be bigger, faster and stronger than females. They did that by preferring to mate with males that fit that description. Those males were the most effective at defending territory, protecting the group and hunting game and, unsurprisingly, tended to belong to the dominant male hierarchy that passed on their genes to future generations. Historically, only 40% of males did so. Female sexual selection produced the sexual dimorphism that’s far older than our species and persists today.
That placed males in the more dangerous role which made sense because of the nature of our reproduction. One male could impregnate many females, but females tended to give birth to but a single offspring who took a long time to gestate and far longer to reach sexual maturity. Add to that the fact that women often died in childbirth and children seldom lived to adulthood, and the imperatives for both sexes were clear. If we were to survive, men had to be more expendable than women.
We’re the last of the genus Homo on Earth. Homo heidelbergensis, Homo floresienses, Homo neanderthalensis, etc., all died out long ago. That strongly suggests that Homo’s “strategy” for survival isn’t favored by the process of selection, so we have to be extra careful. We’re the “last man standing,” so why would we tinker with what got us here? Why “fix” what’s so far not broken?
Until about the mid-19thcentury, we didn’t. That’s when feminism, as a movement, first began to claim, at Seneca Falls, New York, that women should step out of their traditional role. Of course prior to that, a few individuals had made assertions that might be called proto-feminism, but very few. And those who did criticize existing social contracts on the basis of sex rarely argued for abandoning sex roles. For example, Christine de Pizan in the 15th century argued that women should be better educated than they were, but never claimed that they should abandon their roles, only that, with improved education, they could perform them better.
Against those few-and-far-between lonely voices stood the huge majority of women and men who, for millennia, never argued for abandoning sex roles. The most intelligent, best educated, most powerful and privileged women in human history, from Sappho and Hypatia to Catherine the Great and Jane Austen, never even considered the idea. And of course neither did the others.
So feminism’s call to women to abandon their traditional roles was revolutionary. Essentially, never before in human history had anyone suggested that male and female sex roles were anything but a given, something that, from generation to generation, century to century went all but unquestioned. But feminists did question at least the female role. So who were those feminists, why did they raise the question when and where they did?
Human societies change when circumstances demand or allow it. Consider feudalism in Western Europe. Feudalism came into being due to the collapse of Roman power in the first centuries of the first millennium, C.E. Wealthy and powerful nobles fled Rome and other cities that were being sacked by various military powers. They fled to the countryside where they owned land that could be defended if necessary. The poor and landless went with them in the hope that the power of the nobles could protect them. Soon they found themselves owing feudal duties to the local lord in exchange for that protection, plus a bit of infrastructure, access to land, a system of laws, markets, etc. That lasted for centuries. Changed circumstances begat feudalism.
And circumstances killed it. Eventually, nation states with powerful monarchs became better able to provide all the things feudal lords could and more, so those lords and their vassals came under the thumb of a king who ruled a much larger geographic area. The feudal system had outlived its usefulness.
Since social change comes about due to changed circumstances, what circumstances had changed that produced, in the minds of feminists, the notion that the whole edifice (or perhaps just half of it) of sex roles on which human existence had been built could be scrapped? Recall that those sex roles had been established to promote the survival of the species, i.e. to optimize reproductive success, so they were of the utmost importance.
Or were they?
By 1848, the year of feminism’s birth at Seneca Falls, the world’s human population had risen to about 1.5 billion. Medical science had developed the germ theory of disease and was far more adept than ever at seeing mothers through pregnancy and childbirth and at keeping children alive. Industrial capitalism was producing enough “surplus value” to create a leisure class that made up a far larger percentage of the population than ever before. Education was far more widespread and the idea of individual rights had taken hold.
In short, sex roles had served a necessary purpose that was perhaps no longer needed. Who in 1848 would have argued that Homo sapiens was in such danger of extinction that we had to cling to sex roles to avoid disaster? No one. So perhaps feminists had a point.
Or did they? More on that next time.
