Is feminism caused by a lack of male investment?

Illustration from Christine de Pizan's The Book of the City of the Ladies (1405)

I'm currently reading a book about the Hutterites, the Anabaptist agricultural socialists. The Hutterites are interesting in many ways. Most of all, they are testing the limits of human existence: Is socialism possible after all? It seems so, as long as groups are family-based and get no bigger than 150 people and there is an outer world that people can spill into if things get intolerable.

However, what I was going to talk about was the Hutterites' sex ratios. Like most conservative religions in the US, the Hutterites have more young women than young men. Young men simply defect more than young women and take longer time to return from ventures into the outside world. 

Why is that? Women have explicitly subordinate roles in Hutterite society. Labor is gender-segregated. Women handle tasks like washing clothes and dishes in large-scale facilities, while men do work that makes money for the colony. Women can't hold leadership positions. The highest a woman can reach is the head chef. 

Hutterites are not Muslims: leaving the faith results in no formal penalty in this life. They also don't track down and kill female members who do not conform to Hutterite code of conduct, as some Middle Eastern cultures are infamous for. It is not fear of violence that makes Hutterite females choose a life of doing dishes dressed in long dresses and impractical headgear. 

It is all about investment, stupid 

The Hutterites are not alone. Many traditionalist religions have skewed sex-ratios among young adults. The Mormons are especially female dominated. 

Feminism said women want freedom and equality. So why do women actively choose to remain in religions where they do not even formally hold equal rights?

One woman might have held the answer to that question: Marcia Guttentag, a psychologist who lived between 1932 and 1977. In the 1970s Marcia Guttentag went to the opera with her family and saw The Magic Flute. There the male protagonists sang out their longing for his beloved ladies. Why did they do that? she asked herself and her teenage daughter. The popular songs of the 1970s were more about the male wish for having casual sex with many women.¹

Marcia Guttentag wondered if it could have anything to do with supply and demand. Were there fewer women to compete for in the 18th century, when The Magic Flute was written? Guttentag dived into the issue and found out that there actually were unusually many young women around in the 1970s. In the large cohorts of baby boomers, it was normal for females to marry males a few years older than themselves. This created a surplus of potential mates for the males of the growing cohorts. There were more 18-year old females than 22-year old males, because there were more 18-year-olds than 22-year-olds. And 18-year-old females and 22-year-old males saw each other as potential partners. That meant that 22-year-old males could pick and choose. And they often chose women who didn't demand too much from them.

Guttentag gathered data about as many historical societies she could find and observed a general rule: When females were short in supply, they were carefully guarded. Female chastity and fidelity was considered very important and women were highly valued in their roles as wives and mothers. Contrarily, when there were many women compared to men, men became reluctant to marry. Prostitution and cohabitation increased. Surplus women found themselves with no provider. This led to the rise of the feminist movements of the 14th and 15th century, according to Guttentag. 

Marcia Guttentag died in 1977, at the age of 45, from a sudden heart attack. She didn't have the time to finish her book. Her husband Paul Secord finished it seven years later. It didn't get much attention (at least not until Jon Birger wrote about it in Date-o-nomics (2015), where I got to know about it). 

Anything but that

Women put up with a lot of things. Feminists have built crisis center after crisis center in order to convince women that they don't need to put up with abusive husbands. As David Buss says in When Men Behave Badly (2021), sometimes women's fear of leaving abusive partners is rational: In many environments, credibly threatening to kill a partner if she leaves is a winning reproductive strategy. But far from all women who stay in abusive relationships do so because they see a realistic risk of getting killed if they leave. Many just find it difficult to leave.

Also on a collective level, women perpetuate cultures of male dominance. It is more or less a rule that when people of different cultures are asked whether a man is justified to beat his wife if she burns the food, leaves the house without permission etc, more women than men will answer in the affirmative (results of such surveys are summarized in Youthquake (2021) by Edward Paice). 

Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon observed that Yanomamö women were afraid of severely abusive husbands. But they also seemed rather positive to the lighter forms of violence they had to endure: Chagnon observed two young women inspecting the scars on each others' shaven scalps. One of them commented to the other that her husband must really care for her since he had beaten her on the head so frequently.²

In Mauritania in West Africa, a young woman complained to a journalist that her mother told her:
“You’re the daughter of a woman whose husband broke her hands. Your grandmother’s legs were fractured by her husband. You must be loved”. 

What came first?

Obviously, women put up with rather many shades of disagreeable behavior from the side of men. They are not always happy with it, but they also surprisingly seldom revolt. 

According to Marcia Guttentag's observations, the only thing that actually made women revolt on a collective level is a lack of male investment. So the question is: Is the ongoing female revolt also a result of lack of male investment?

According to mainstream wisdom, women have fewer children because they become feminists. According to Marcia Guttentag's observations, causality works the other way round: Women become feminists because men seem uninterested in investing in women’s children.

Which one is true? Birth rates obviously plunged between 1959 and 1975 in the US, when the growing cohorts from 1939 onwards came of age. But why did birth rates fall? Were men unwilling to invest because there were so many eligible women pursuing them? Or were females unwilling to give birth because they had become feminists?

Did women start pursuing careers and education because they preferred those options to the life of a traditional wife? Or did they pursue careers because they were forced to provide for themselves when men no longer were to trust as providers? 

Going mainstream 

I think the answer lies more in the first hypothesis. Most of all because feminism seems to have been mostly an elite phenomenon until the 21st century. I was born in the mid 1980s. That means that I am old enough to remember a time when the label "feminist" was reserved for females who took a countercultural stance. 

I was one of those countercultural young women, and I felt rather alone in it. Not only did girls of my own age seem rather complacent. Women of my parents' generation, those born in the 1950s and 1960s, appeared to readily accept to first work at their jobs and then go home and do almost all the housework. Correctly or incorrectly³, I held the impression that men had much more leisure time than women and women in general didn't seem to be too sad about that.

In general, people seemed much less angry in the early 2000s compared to now. Woke-style anger simply wasn't invented. It exploded during the last two decades, as we are all too well aware of. As a part of that general trend, female anger against men went mainstream. 

Barren and angry

During those 20 years, birth rates have also collapsed in much of the civilized world. There are at least three possible explanations to this:

1. Women are so angry that they don't want children.

2. Women are so angry that men don't want children with them.

3. Women are so angry because men don't want to invest in having children. 

For several reasons, I believe the most in explanation 3. Women actually don't seem that unwilling to have children, giving the right level of support: Just look at the Hutterite or the Amish. And male investment really has plummeted during the last 20 years. Not male investment in children born. That has probably increased. But offers of male investment in future children have declined rather drastically. 

I mostly don't blame men for that. Most men lose as much as women from the system of male non-investment. Promises of high levels of investment is a very classical way for men to attract women. When our culture speaks badly about such arrangements, it simply decreases most men's opportunities to attract women. Women care about long-term intentions. When speaking about long-term intentions becomes unfashionable, the minority of men who are good enough at impressing women without such sweet talk will get a disproportionate number of mates and those who are not will get none. 

A dowry society

There is another sign of low male investment in current Western society: The rise of the dowry economy. Yes, I know, that sounds weird. Western parents don't pay dowries to get their daughters into favorable unions! 

No, they don't. They pay tuition fees to make their daughters self-supporting or even high-earning. Such income-generating women have much better chances in the marriage market. Not better chances at getting married per se. But better chances in getting married to a high-earner. It is in no sense a certain path, because the high-earning men are free to choose someone who is more pretty and less dowried. Still, if you are an 18 year old woman who hopes to find a good match, working on becoming a high-earner is probably your best bet. The outlooks are uncertain, but just waiting for Prince Charming will not take you any closer to him. 

In the High Middle Ages, the number of women exceeded the number of men. So men could pick and choose. They chose the women with which they could have the best lives: that is, women with dowries. So in order to get a daughter decently married, parents and the girls themselves had to sweeten the deal and make a contribution to the joint household. 

We have a similar situation today. In the more educated ranges of society, women outnumber men. Men can pick and choose and they choose women who don't demand too much investment and who can contribute to the joint household themselves. So, in order to get the always so sought-after good marriage deal, today's women above all need to be independent. In order to get married well, they shouldn't really need men. Men should be nice to have rather than necessary to have. Women are supposed to be happy about not being particularly appreciated as wives and mothers.

If Marcia Guttentag was right, women clearly don't get happy from not being appreciated as marriage partners. After millennia of putting up with a gallery of abuse within marriages, women finally become enraged when they are met with borderline indifference. 

The central question is: For what purpose does the average woman use her equal rights? Is it to have an equally interesting life as men? Or is it to amass a dowry and to provide for her children? If it is mainly for the latter reason, that explains why women are attracted to systems where they do not hold equal rights, but where men invest without being coaxed to: everything that provides for the children is good, whatever it is. 

If women most of all are after resources for their children, that could also explain why equal rights never get equal enough. If women's motivation for succeeding in the world of paid work most of all is to make up for men's unwillingness (or inability) to invest, they will never be successful enough. However hard women work and however fairly they are treated on the labor market, the results can never make up for the dearth of male investment. 

We too! 

It has been widely suggested (although not proven) that men become more violent when there are vastly too few women on the market. In evolutionary psychology, the idea that a lack of marriageable women leads to social insubordination is well established. Joseph Henrich wrote a whole chapter about it in The WEIRDest People in the World (2020), for example.

With Marcia Guttentag's theory, men don't hold a monopoly on revolting in case of unfavorable reproductive opportunities. Men might become unruly when there are too many of their kind to compete with. But there is such a theory for the female side too. Whatever the differences between the sexes, slim reproductive chances enrage us all.

1. Marcia Guttentag and Paul Secord, Too Many Women? 1983, page 10-11

2. Napoleon Chagnon, The Fierce People, 1992, page 125

3. I can't easily find data on whether men had more leisure time than women in the late 1990s. This academic article claims that there actually wasn't much of a gender leisure gap. Maybe I got the wrong impression because paid work seemed more rewarding, or maybe women had boring spare-time interests that I thought looked like work.