Anders has told me that too. He was on the local football team in his 20s and 30s, so I trust him as an authority on the matter, and he once said that female professional footballers make strategic mistakes on the level of his local football team.
It seems highly likely that patriarchy is the result of both genetic evolution and cultural evolution. There must be any number of behavioral traits and propensities that tend to promote or lessen the levels of male cooperation. Since every behavioral trait that has ever been studied has turned out to have somewhere on the order of 50% heritability.
Of course those 50% heritability numbers tend to come from studies that aren't cross cultural, so the percent heritability could be considerably higher or lower cross culturally. I would think that the genetic underpinings of male cooperation would be under strong selective genetic pressure as well as being under strong selective cultural pressure.
Yes. There probably is something in those heritability guesses. Which makes abolishing patriarchy a more complicated project than with zero heritability.
> In the 20th century, the societies that were good producers also won the wars. So not oppressing producers became a key factor to winning wars.
I don't know if that's a good description of Nazi Germany or the USSR. North Korea is perhaps the most oppressive regime in existence, and it still exists because it was able to fight the UN-backed south to a standstill. In the next North vs South east Asian communist struggle, my understanding is a LOT more people fled North Vietnam for South Vietnam, but the North won because their government could shrug off massive numbers of casualties without ever giving up. Nowadays the folks at Crooked Timber describe Vietnam as resembling a Marxist caricature of capitalism, a one-party state run for the benefit of shoe companies. More recently, the Taliban has retaken Afghanistan, and I don't think that's because it oppresses women less.
> 20th century societies that were open-minded enough to let women into the factories when the men fought the wars were the most successful warrior nations.
You may have bought too much into the myth of Rosie the Riveter.
There was a modest increase in female employment during the war, but there had already been a trend of increase before that, and most women were still in jobs like secretary. This is part of why by 1950 female labor force participation reverts back to the long-term trend.
> The mythologies of the Western Indo-Europeans were also more female-inclusive. For example, in western Indo-European branches the spirit of the domestic hearth was female (Hestia, the Vestal Virgins)
The ancient Athenians sequestered their women to a section of the house, somewhat like Afghans. The Spartans lacked seclusion of women, but that's because male Spartans were supposed to be dedicated to the military.
> I don't claim that female participation in the labor force was the sole reason for the West’s success.
Rather than "sole", I'd question it as a significant factor at all. Women working outside the home was relatively atypical even in the west until relatively recently. Most people were also peasant farmers until relatively recently.
Yes, production capacity is far from the sole predictor of winning a war. The will to fight and the acceptance of causalities is also extremely important. Nonetheless, a society with great production capacity can win wars also with a modest will to fight and a low acceptance of causalities. America for the last decades, for example.
>You may have bought too much into the myth of Rosie the Riveter.
I don't think the war was the reason Western women started working outside the home. I just think that societies flexible enough to use the labor of both sexes are better at winning wars.
>The ancient Athenians sequestered their women to a section of the house, somewhat like Afghans.
Yes, and that is very interesting. Holding women as prisoners inside houses is a very old tradition, maybe as old as houses themselves. That tradition really took hold in Afghanistan, to the detriment of Afghan society in this now. In Ancient Greece it was more of a upper middle-class phenomenon that never really spread to other parts of the population, as I have understood it.
>Women working outside the home was relatively atypical even in the west until relatively recently.
Yes, but there's still a very big difference between being a peasant farmer who is allowed to work outdoors under the sun and a peasant farmer who is not allowed to go outdoors unless circumvented by a tent. For example colonial expansion must have been much easier for populations where both sexes can work efficiently in agriculture.
What's an example in which a defeat in war can be partly attributed to a lack of labor flexibility?
Wouldn't the lower-class of Athens consist of slaves?
If you're really interested in societal differences in how involved women are in agricultural fieldwork, look at plow vs hoe societies. Men drive plows, whereas societies which farm using hoes rely much more on female labor.
From that link: "We know female employment is higher in places with traditions of labour-intensive production[*], shifting-cultivation, and wet paddy fields; much lower under plow-cultivation[**]."
Wet paddy fields are more characteristic of east Asia than western Europe.
Eventually, the side with the time won. But as long as a fraction of the American population was occupying Afghanistan, it could subdue the only Afghan army worth its name.
One thing I find difficult to understand with Dr Evans is her way of equalizing female agricultural work with gender equality. Slaves also work a lot. That doesn't make them equal.
I have read about the hoe agriculture/plow agriculture distinction and I find it very interesting. But I don't believe that toiling in the fields together with three co-wives while the men herd cattle/make alliances/drink beer is a cure against patriarchy.
Evans distinguishes between women working at home, and outside the home:
"Ethnographies, focus groups, and surveys tell us that rural women's contributions are scarcely considered 'work' by men, and sometimes, even by women themselves. Women’s farm-work does not guarantee women's esteem, autonomy or protection from violence."
Ok, then I guess Dr Evans means that hoe agriculture systems have the potential to free women because when women are supposed to work, they will sooner or later be allowed to work outside of their homes and there they will find autonomy and female solidarity. If I get it right, she means something like if Africa just finally develops modern labor markets, women will take formal jobs away from home and be liberated. Since there is already a culture of female labor, only a dose of economic development needs to be added to free those women?
In addition to her regular blog at her own domain (which I don't recall seeing people other than myself comment on), she has a Substack where you should be able to ask her yourself:
I would question the warrior male ruling class hypothesis.
"Those with the highest potential for violence have the most freedom of action" - that seems, straightforwardly false in any but the most primitive social organisations. It's a combination of might and brains, and over time, norms that preserve society prevail. Sometimes (actually, I would say often, this seems pretty common everywhere) this involves putting down the most violent members of society (most societies, literate or not, have laws against murder and most of them executed murderers).
Murder is violence against unsanctioned targets. Every society had a way to control it's most violent members (including putting them down when needed), to direct the violence outwards at sanctioned targets!
No, I'm not satisfied with the war hypothesis. I think the answer is much more likely to be related to sedentary agriculture vs nomadic societies. In this war, the nomads lost badly - because this wasn't a war you win with violence. This was population.
My hypothesis is matriarchal societies tend to have lower birth rates. In fact, anywhere and any time women have equality, birth rates tend to be lower.
This, I think, is because women as a population are rational. Birth is extremely risky and infant mortality was high. You do not want to have babies unless you can get something out of it.
In a nomadic society, everyone produces equally - every member got their own food and fibre and whatnot. Labour wasn't segregated by gender. Men rarely had much to offer that women couldn't get themselves.
In a patriarchal sedentary agri society, men had land to grow food on and a house to live in. You get to live there if you could reproduce with him, or if you were related. Therein lies the motivation to do this incredibly risky thing - food and shelter.
But how did the original patriarchy start, such that the land rights belonged to men to start with? Or maybe that's the wrong assumption. Maybe only patriarchal sedentary agriculture societies could sustain the population growth necessary to maintain those societies! People in these societies were constantly contending with disease - the standard of living was fucking terrible. Maybe the only way these societies managed to out-breed disease was if women had to provide children as a tax. Perhaps only patriarchal societies could achieve the thing that led to the farming land ownership based society dominating the whole world - population growth, which led to the formation of sophisticated nation-states, which could beat the much smaller populations of nomads.
Nomadic women had no such tax to pay - they reproduced pretty much exactly enough to keep their population going, and if the native born tribeswomen didn't want to have enough kids, they'd raid one of those agri societies, kidnap some peasant girls, so they wouldn't run out of people. Modern society is similar (minus the part about kidnapping peasants) - when given a choice as to how many children to have, educated, financially stable women usually want between 1 to 3 (I actually think childfree is a minority - most people want children). This is when the risk of dying in childbirth and losing children to high infant mortality isn't a factor.
(While we no longer kidnap women in raids, we entice people from other places with promises of better standard of living, and take our pick of the candidates - skewing young, able bodied, and culturally compatible)
> In a nomadic society, everyone produces equally - every member got their own food and fibre and whatnot. Labour wasn't segregated by gender. Men rarely had much to offer that women couldn't get themselves.
Are you not familiar with the nomadic Bedouin Arabs? They're precisely the sort of gender-inegalitarians that Alice Evans is complaining about.
> sophisticated nation-states, which could beat the much smaller populations of nomads.
Nomads (whose men tend to be better at warfare) tended to beat sedentary agriculturists until relatively recently. In fact, this was Franz Oppenheimer's theory of the origin of the state. Firearm technology blunted the horse-nomad tactic of attacking a relatively defenseless sedentary area and then riding away before the state can retaliate against you.
> Nomadic women had no such tax to pay - they reproduced pretty much exactly enough to keep their population going
Every society reproduced up to its Malthusian limits in the pre-modern area. Nomads just require a much larger area of land to support a large population, since they are constantly travelling from used-up to fresh grasslands.
That Bushman thing is very interesting. I think Marjorie Shostak wrote about 2 maternal death out of 500 deliveries, which is very low in a society lacking modern healthcare. Still, I wouldn't be sure that translates to all living humans. Bushmen might just be genetically lucky. Bantu peoples have rather few doctors and still die at rates of about 1 per 100 deliveries (it is about those levels in current South Susan, Niger and Sierra Leone).
>This, I think, is because women as a population are rational. Birth is extremely risky and infant mortality was high. You do not want to have babies unless you can get something out of it.
Seems more likely to me that it's because women pay a higher price for new children, in the form of labour and - often - rearing.
Potential for violence" wasn't meant to be interpreted in the narrow physical sense of the word. I consider Vladimir Putin a man with great potential for violence, despite him being small-bodied, old and possibly in fragile health.
In general, I think resources are overestimated as a force shaping human condition in prehistory, while violence is underestimated. Resources were extremely important in more recent, crowded societies. But before that, there was also a pre-Malthusian condition. I wrote more about it here. https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/violent-enough-to-stand-still
So I think the perspective that men couldn't rule over women because men didn't control the resources in nomadic societies is misguided. Even though men could not bribe women with resources they needed, they could simply kill or gravely injure women who did not obey them. In more advanced, crowded societies, men have mostly controlled women through starving them of resources and then bribing them into submission. In more primitive and less crowded societies, however, men have simply herded women through violence and threats of violence.
There are several examples in anthropology. One is the Australian Aborigines described by Carl Lumholz (whole book here: https://archive.org/details/amongcannibalsac1889lumh) Lumholz' informers had a very clear division of labor: Men hunted and made war, women gathered and cooked. Despite writing by the end of the 19th century, Lumholz describes the women as severely maltreated. Men lived off women's labor, he perceived. They only hunted when they felt like it and often ate the prey in all-male company. A man who managed to attain several wives was considered rich, because women's labor was the only resource to control. Men were very violent against women and hit them on the head with the first object they found for the slightest offense. Running away was the worst offense, which was often punished by death.
The Yanomamö, a horticulturalist people in the Amazon described by Napoleon Chagnon, were rather similar in that respect. They also treated women brutally, especially when they suspected infidelity. They also killed or gravely injured runaway wives. Yanomamö women also worked hard, harder than the men it seems, although Chagnon never made an exact comparison of working hours. Land was not scarce in the Yanomamö area. Women were not controlled indirectly by the threat of resource withdrawal as much as directly by the threat of violence.
The idea that women have fewer children the more of a say they have is interesting. Primatologist/anthropologist Sarah Hrdy says something like that in her book Mother Nature. Women tend to prefer investing more in every child, while men tend to prefer a faster-life strategy. In very patriarchal, polygynous societies, women are forced to adapt to the lower-investment preferences of their husbands.
But I'm not sure that means less patriarchal societies have a much lower birth rate. For example the Aché foragers of Peru, studied by Kim Hill and Magdalena Hurtado, had a high population growth during the decades before they abandoned their foraging lifestyle (it is all described in their book Aché Life History).
Actually, nomadic peoples probably had a pretty high sex-based labor division, with women dealing with the children and digging for roots, men hunting, fighting and maybe building shelters. I once read some anthropological finding (don't know how well that one has aged) that in contemporary hunter-gatherer societies women (especially old ones) are more highly respected when they produce a larger part of the society's foodstuffs (which is highly variable because of the variation in natural plants and animals and therefore diets in different places). Just a bit of info; I don't know if it means that all nomadic societies were still somewhat patriarchic, there was definitely some variation.
The treatment of old women is an interesting phenomenon. Among the Aché foragers of Paraguay, a man had taken as his task to kill women deemed too old to be useful. This activity, it seems, wasn't punished. (Source: Aché Life History by Kim Hill and Magdalena Hurtado), also mentioned on Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ach%C3%A9
And the Aché weren't especially patriarchal, although men obtained a majority of all calories consumed through hunting.
Among the very patriarchal, horticulturalist Yanomamö old women are treated with more respect than young women, although they are not considered suitable wife material if they are widowed. Since they are no longer considered sexually desirable, they can be used as messengers between tribes at war with each other. A man visiting an enemy tribe would be killed. A young woman would be kidnapped and taken as a wife. But an old woman could walk to the enemy village, convey a message and then return safely. (Source: Yanomamö by Napoleon Chagnon, page 126)
OK Tove! After digging carefully through Evans' sources and making it halfway through her article, I reached a point where I blinked and asked myself why I was doing that. Although I really love Wrangham as a stimulating source of ideas, Evans' work seems pretty cloudy and I have no idea how she made money from Scott Alexander to produce any of it. So I gave up and just read your own article on its own terms.
This may well be what I should have done to begin with! You've done a wonderful job of taking an extremely broad topic and giving it a thorough yet condensed overview, taking into account biological, economic, military, historical, and practical issues.
Your conclusion is probably most interesting, and touches on this question that many people are starting to ask - is the Western ideal viable? You say, "Currently, it looks like gender equality is a great contraceptive." But is this really true? The Apple Pie family isn't much of a patriarchy, and somehow I have trouble imagining that Anders spends much time telling you what to do, either. Both of our families seem to take sexual equality (or at least, sexual complementarity) as a given, and we've had plenty of kids. So is the idea of female emancipation *really* what makes most Westerners forego having children?
That is a very interesting question. I don't think it is gender equality in itself that causes low fertility, but individualism. Males exercise their individual right not to invest very much in their relationships and (future) children. Females exercise their right to reject too cheap offers. The result becomes few children at all.
Hitherto, the only attempt at complete gender equality has taken individualism as its framework. In theory, it should be possible to cultivate ideals of both gender equality and domesticity at the same time. Among high-fertility populations, the degree of gender inequality varies considerably. For example my favorite minority, the Amish, doesn't seem to be heavily gender-oppressive.
As you point out, a few individuals have found out how to form families with many children, high male investment and gender equality. In Anders' and my case, we are not even traditional. I mostly occupy myself with outdoor work while Anders spend significantly more time with childcare and housework. I somehow realize that this is due to our respective personalities more than generalizable principles, so I wouldn't dare to make any general recommendations based on our family constellation. It is too far off everything.
We're somewhat more traditional, in that Mrs. Apple Pie stays home and invests the money Mr. Apple Pie brings back from work. Little #6 is so demanding of her that lately I feel bad for Mrs. Apple Pie, but I don't lactate, and the best I can do to distract #6 is "pay pay" old video games while he watches and stuffs peanuts into his mouth.
The Amish women I know live highly submissive lives. I'll stress that they don't seem unhappy, but, their appearance and behavior is strikingly similar to that of a Muslim in her hijab. Indeed, to the extent that individualism can be measured sociologically, it goes hand-in-hand with equality.
For instance, Geert Hofstede likes to act as though his Individualism and Power Distance scales are unrelated, but even controlling for wealth doesn't reduce their relationship below statistical significance:
Inglehart was smarter, and he only attempted to pull out two factors; his postmaterialism dimension is measured by "self-expression values" which are essentially the tenets of Western individualism, including gender equality:
I *do* tend to think it's possible to have a high fertility culture that also gives respect and freedom to women, but, I don't think this can happen without valuing the production of healthy children as a special and important thing that only women can do. This is increasingly strange to most American women, who believe that child rearing is more important than childbearing, and frown at my wife when they realize how many babies she has had.
I think that basically, men's freedom lowers fertility much more than women's freedom. So for me, the question is: Is female submission necessary in order to make men invest? Do women need to act as submissively as your Amish acquaintances for average men to choose a high-investment lifestyle?
And I definitely agree that the production of healthy children should be seen as an important thing to do. Already when I was expecting my first child, I was astonished that childbearing is not considered a job. Sure, it is not a very qualified job, but that doesn't make it less of a job.
So I'm still looking at this, and I still don't know how convincing I find Evans' idea, but her source material (Wrangham, 2021) mentions something extremely interesting:
"Moral feelings associated with fairness were once thought to be present in non-humans such as capuchins (Cebus apella) and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) (Brosnan & de Waal, 2003). Experiments show, however, that only humans have a tendency to sacrifice personal gain for the sake of equality, whereas non-humans’ apparent concern for fairness reflects other motivations such as efforts to manipulate an experimenter (Engelmann et al., 2017; McAuliffe & Santos, 2018). Accordingly traits associated with fairness such as senses of responsibility, obligation, duty, guilt and shame appear to be restricted to humans, making their evolution a particularly interesting puzzle (Tomasello, 2016). In contrast moral emotions concerned with sympathy, such as compassion, concern and benevolence, are evidenced in non-humans (de Waal, 2006)."
These behaviors are not even universal in humans; rejecting unfair offers in the ultimatum game is much less common outside of WEIRD societies.
I came up with pretty much this analysis too. Notice the traits of toxic masculinity like repressing all emotion except anger, not showing weakness etc. - these are the ideal warrior traits.
Then the kind of guy who is used to gutting other guys on the battlefield is probably not averse to beating up his wife and then pretty much assured he is the head of the household.
Also the origin of war is either capturing sex slaves or looting wealth so one can afford a wife.
Today we can afford feminism precisely because we do not need to train most men into becoming warriors.
I'm not sure repressing all emotion except anger, not showing weakness etc. are ideal warrior traits. If we consider, for example, the Song of Roland (which I totally knew all about and didn't just search up right now and then cite from https://www.medievalchronicles.com/medieval-knights/code-of-chivalry-knights/ for the sake of argument), the knightly virtues are:
* Fear God and His Church
* Serve the liege lord in valor and faith
* Protect the weak and defenseless
* Live by honor and for glory
* Respect the honor of women
At the very least, the kind of warrior *I* would like by my side in battle would be someone who was strong, fit, skillful, prudent, courageous, and loyal. Someone who represses all emotion except anger and refuses to show weakness seems more like a gang member struggling to hold his position in a low-trust environment than an effective military man.
But before civilization, all humans were more or less gang members. So for primitive societies there could be something in the above theory of the warrior brute.
Even before civilization, people arranged themselves into clans which could be hundreds strong, organized by elaborate customs to enforce trust. If you have even a handful of disciplined warriors who are able to act as a unit, they will route much larger forces who lack such organization.
Isn't that kind of organization the very beginning of civilization? Small-scale societies are not only technologically primitive. They are also socially primitive, since they have not developed those elaborate trust-enhancing customs of more advanced societies.
I read Sudhir Venkatesh's Gangleader for a Day and Napoleon Chagnon's Yanomamö at the same time and I thought the similarities were striking. Like if there is some kind of basic human social structure that sets in when there are no valid rules of civilization. I think Carlos' assumption could be right for those small groups: A rough psychology could be advantageous both in gangs and gang-sized societies.
As I gave my reply, I did wonder what you meant by "civilized." I use it as most dictionaries do:" "a relatively high level of cultural and technological development; specifically : the stage of cultural development at which writing and the keeping of written records is attained" https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/civilization
(I'll stress that words only mean what the writer or speaker uses them to mean, so when I quote the dictionary I'm just giving my own definition; your English is good.)
I do think that one doesn't have to progress far from the behavior of the common ancestor with other primates before large clans appear. Yes, when societies are extremely small and social organization is minimal, then gang psychology may well be dominant. But clans are a kind of social technology that scarcely requires any material technology at all. The matriclan, arranged around female (not male) lines is quite old, predating what people here are discussing as "patriarchy:"
I guess I use the term "civilized" in relative terms, like in "civilization process". That is, something very gradual.
>clans are a kind of social technology that scarcely requires any material technology at all.
I think you're onto something very interesting here. I have thought more and more about what came first: social organization or technology. I think it was social organization. The evidence of socially complex forager societies points in that direction.
Matrilinearity is also an interesting phenomenon. Someone, I think it was Sarah Hrdy in Mother Nature, said that matriliearity is a way of handling low paternity certainty.
You know, one society that has sort-of worked through some of the issues with reproduction and equality is religious Judaism. I say "sort of" here for all of the obvious reasons. But if we look at modern Israel, we see a state with a mix of religious and secular traditions where the religious traditions are strong enough to influence overall birthrates and the state has, so far, maintained military superiority over its neighbors and universal conscription.
Unlike other conservative religious groups, Judaism has no particular norm of isolating women (at least not in the way of conservative Muslims,) because it's normal for Orthodox women to work in order to support their families while the men study Torah. The one stay-at-home-dad I know whose wife works to support the family is Orthodox Jewish. Last time I checked they had 4 kids, all quite young, and dad was holding down the hearth.
Obviously Orthodox Judaism is "patriarchal" and "oppressive" by the standards that liberal westerners are used to, but it's lightyears different from places like Afghanistan where the Taliban forbids women from working outside the home and women whose husbands aren't bringing in $$ literally face starvation for themselves and their children.
So, more or less, there needs to be some kind of patriarchy for people to procreate? But not necessarily the worst kind of patriarchy. And everyone doesn't need to be part of it, it is enough that some people take it seriously.
Yes, why not? Judaism has been a resilient meme for millennia, so it makes sense if it can survive current modern society too. But I read that entirely secular Jews in America have very low average fertility.
Rock-bottom fertility, yeah. But here they adopt American upper class cultural norms.
There's also a reasonable argument that the existence of Israel acts as a sorting agent for Jews who want Jews to keep existing as a people vs ones who don't care as much.
You are definitely on top of things - I just clicked Evans' article, and 30 seconds later, checked Wood From Eden to find this post!
Although I'll have more to say in a bit after I've read more, it's odd that her own article had no mentions of "matriliny" or "matrilineality," "uxorilocal," "virilocal," or similar anthropological terms; only "patrilineal," with no obvious sense of the correlates of patriliny or alternatives to it. Possibly she didn't need to discuss them? I'd recommend anyone interested in the topic check those terms in wikipedia and google scholar.
I simply dropped everything else I did and wrote a blog post about the origins of patriarchy as soon as I understood that that was the thing to do.
Judging from other things Alice Evans has produced, she is an economist. If she is not very into anthropology, it could be because that is not her subject.
So then, there is a possibility for women of a tribe to band together and create a matriarchy by taking advantage of men that don't band together. But that hasn't really happened. Maybe testosterone plays a part?
I think we have seen a lot of examples of women banding together during modern times. Human females are definitely psychologically capable of cooperating in defending each others' interests. Also chimpanzee females seem to be. I don't remember exactly in which book Frans de Waal wrote that, maybe in several books, but he wrote that chimpanzee females also create alliances in captivity, where there are concentrated enough food resources. According to de Waal, one important reason why Bonobo females cooperate better is that they live in an environment without gorillas. That means all the gorilla food is left to the bonobos. For that reason bonobo females with children can afford to live closer together with other females and children compared to among the chimpanzees, where females with children need to travel in smaller groups to find enough food.
I think groups of human females successfully banded together against the men in prehistory too. And I think those groups were crushed as soon as they encountered well-organized groups of male raiders. That's why we haven't heard of them.
This seems exactly right: research has shown that food competition structures the lives of female chimpanzees, seemingly far more than Bonobos. You see this in pretty much all the literature, but I think Jane Goodall demonstrated it best by comparing the female chimps' ranges in Gombe: relative status correlated strongly with range quality (in terms of size, food supply, and exposure to the border). Between that and the occasional infanticidal cannibalism, female cooperation seems to be far out of their reach.
That implies that abundance plays an important role in setting the conditions for female cooperation, with the addendum that both scarcity and plenty can drive violent conflict. I'd guess that violence surely plays a role modulating the effects of abundance, per your thesis.
It's interesting that Dr Evans brings up a theory that the patriarchy started 300k years ago. This is 285k years before there is evidence of warfare emerges: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_warfare
"In theory, human females could create strong coalitions and through sheer numbers stay in power in their respective groups." I wonder if this was the case before some cognitive developments allowed men to use their advantage for warfare.
It's controversial but not rejected to say that there was an abrupt phase change in Theory of Mind for humans sometime in the last 100k years. If we also accept that women have better Theory of Mind, it makes sense that they reached the phase change first. Would have fascinating implications for the balance of the sexes. We do see women far more represented in art up to about 15k years ago (no male analog of Venus Statue complex), maybe they were also better at forming alliances. We don't see warfare in that time period.
There is little evidence for everything more than 15 000 years ago. Whether there was war during a certain period also depends on which definition of "war" is used. Personally I would say that a war is when a group of people attempts to kill members of another group of people.
According to that definition, chimpanzees make war. Australian Aborigines definitely made war.
Richard Wrangham's book Demonic Males also doesn't really say that patriarchy started 300 000 years ago. It says that it was probably there all the way from the apes.
Chimps are definitely patriarchal. I remember in Jane Goodall's book, In the Shadow of Man, her description of chimp society. Essentially there are two parallel social structures, the female one and the male one. Within the female, there is a social hierarchy. Within the males, there is a hierarchy. But practically all females are hierarchically lower than all adult males. Adult males can just beat them. Females can make coalitions, but so can males, so that doesn't do much for them.
The really interesting thing, though, is inter-generational status: high status females have high-status sons.
Presumably there's something biological going on here. High-status females are high status because they are stronger, smarter, more competent than low-status females. Chimpanzee mating is largely a free-for-all, but males tend to prefer mating with high-status females, so they probably do mate more often with high-status males than low status females do.
There is likely also a small "cultural" or "environmental" aspect, as high-status females have better access to food for their offspring and their offspring are to some degree afforded more respect by the troop growing up. But chimps aren't all that social, so this is likely very small.
Since male chimps don't do any of the child-rearing (their utility to the troop as a whole is probably limited to keeping other hungry, baby-murdering chimps out of the territory), most of the baby's success seems to stem from the mom's, hence the "transmission" of the mom's social status. Hence males compete for the females, not the other way around. Females don't really care about the males. Also, the males prioritize mating with older, more established (ie, higher status) females. These are females who have already raised offspring (demonstrating that they're worth the effort of fighting to have a kid with!) and they gain further status from their adult offspring, with whom they can form coalitions, which in turn allow them to prioritize more resources for their future offspring, etc.
In essence, it's not actually as big a jump between regular chimp and pygmy chimp societies as I think most people think it is.
But Islam provides a real contrast. I've spent a long time researching the Ottoman Empire as part of the background for a book I'm writing, and there is just so very little information (at least in English; I don't speak Turkish,) out there on Ottoman "queens." Finally I ran across a source that said that the Ottomans really didn't care about the identities of the Sultan's wives. Social status in Ottoman society stemmed from the males, so the Sultan could marry practically anyone he wanted, slaves included. Often there was no particular marriage ceremony. They were just the sultan's women and they went into the harem, and whoever gave birth to the first child became his "wife." Islamic law says a man can have four wives, so the first four women who had children (or maybe it was sons) became his "wives" and all of the rest were just "concubines."
It's a stark contrast to the European system in which women actually matter. A king can't just start having sex with a random slave girl and declare her son his legitimate heir.
For a long time I have wanted to read more about family structure in historical Near Eastern societies. So far I have only found a book-chapter here and an article there. Do you have any tips?
I wonder if the all-male class society could push the genetics of a whole population in a more feminine direction. In pre-modern societies, the upper class always reproduces the most. Especially in polygynous societies. If the upper class is free to choose among the entire female population, they can select the girls they find the most beautiful.
The little I have read on the subject suggests that was the case in the Ottoman Empire: Old women toured public bath houses in order to find young women who fit in with certain beauty standards. That means there could be a selection pressure for the preferred kind of female body type and the genetics that lie behind it.
In more gender-egalitarian systems where social class is a phenomenon on both the male and the female side, upper-class men need to limit themselves to much fewer women to have any legal heirs. They can't choose as freely based on beauty. This should decrease the evolutionary pressure in favor of genes for an ultra-feminine build.
I have just started reading "Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village," by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea. It might be what you're looking for.
Well, I'm not sure how we define feminine, but Islamic societies don't seem to have more feminine or beautiful people overall.
I made a light version of what Elizabeth Warnock Fernea did when I was young: I spent three months in Damascus, studying Arabic. When I spent time in the Arab world, I thought people, men and women, looked more feminine, although people also looked very different compare to for example Scandinavians, who look more of the same.
It's not just strength. Human females also don't have the same situational awareness (in the Col. John Boyd sense) that human males typically do.
Watch females playing football vs males and you will see
Anders has told me that too. He was on the local football team in his 20s and 30s, so I trust him as an authority on the matter, and he once said that female professional footballers make strategic mistakes on the level of his local football team.
It seems highly likely that patriarchy is the result of both genetic evolution and cultural evolution. There must be any number of behavioral traits and propensities that tend to promote or lessen the levels of male cooperation. Since every behavioral trait that has ever been studied has turned out to have somewhere on the order of 50% heritability.
Of course those 50% heritability numbers tend to come from studies that aren't cross cultural, so the percent heritability could be considerably higher or lower cross culturally. I would think that the genetic underpinings of male cooperation would be under strong selective genetic pressure as well as being under strong selective cultural pressure.
Yes. There probably is something in those heritability guesses. Which makes abolishing patriarchy a more complicated project than with zero heritability.
> In the 20th century, the societies that were good producers also won the wars. So not oppressing producers became a key factor to winning wars.
I don't know if that's a good description of Nazi Germany or the USSR. North Korea is perhaps the most oppressive regime in existence, and it still exists because it was able to fight the UN-backed south to a standstill. In the next North vs South east Asian communist struggle, my understanding is a LOT more people fled North Vietnam for South Vietnam, but the North won because their government could shrug off massive numbers of casualties without ever giving up. Nowadays the folks at Crooked Timber describe Vietnam as resembling a Marxist caricature of capitalism, a one-party state run for the benefit of shoe companies. More recently, the Taliban has retaken Afghanistan, and I don't think that's because it oppresses women less.
> 20th century societies that were open-minded enough to let women into the factories when the men fought the wars were the most successful warrior nations.
You may have bought too much into the myth of Rosie the Riveter.
https://youtu.be/7XhK4QqkgSI?t=599
There was a modest increase in female employment during the war, but there had already been a trend of increase before that, and most women were still in jobs like secretary. This is part of why by 1950 female labor force participation reverts back to the long-term trend.
> The mythologies of the Western Indo-Europeans were also more female-inclusive. For example, in western Indo-European branches the spirit of the domestic hearth was female (Hestia, the Vestal Virgins)
The ancient Athenians sequestered their women to a section of the house, somewhat like Afghans. The Spartans lacked seclusion of women, but that's because male Spartans were supposed to be dedicated to the military.
> I don't claim that female participation in the labor force was the sole reason for the West’s success.
Rather than "sole", I'd question it as a significant factor at all. Women working outside the home was relatively atypical even in the west until relatively recently. Most people were also peasant farmers until relatively recently.
Yes, production capacity is far from the sole predictor of winning a war. The will to fight and the acceptance of causalities is also extremely important. Nonetheless, a society with great production capacity can win wars also with a modest will to fight and a low acceptance of causalities. America for the last decades, for example.
>You may have bought too much into the myth of Rosie the Riveter.
I don't think the war was the reason Western women started working outside the home. I just think that societies flexible enough to use the labor of both sexes are better at winning wars.
>The ancient Athenians sequestered their women to a section of the house, somewhat like Afghans.
Yes, and that is very interesting. Holding women as prisoners inside houses is a very old tradition, maybe as old as houses themselves. That tradition really took hold in Afghanistan, to the detriment of Afghan society in this now. In Ancient Greece it was more of a upper middle-class phenomenon that never really spread to other parts of the population, as I have understood it.
>Women working outside the home was relatively atypical even in the west until relatively recently.
Yes, but there's still a very big difference between being a peasant farmer who is allowed to work outdoors under the sun and a peasant farmer who is not allowed to go outdoors unless circumvented by a tent. For example colonial expansion must have been much easier for populations where both sexes can work efficiently in agriculture.
What's an example in which a defeat in war can be partly attributed to a lack of labor flexibility?
Wouldn't the lower-class of Athens consist of slaves?
If you're really interested in societal differences in how involved women are in agricultural fieldwork, look at plow vs hoe societies. Men drive plows, whereas societies which farm using hoes rely much more on female labor.
https://www.draliceevans.com/post/did-irrigation-entrench-the-patriarchy
From that link: "We know female employment is higher in places with traditions of labour-intensive production[*], shifting-cultivation, and wet paddy fields; much lower under plow-cultivation[**]."
Wet paddy fields are more characteristic of east Asia than western Europe.
* https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Endangered_Sex.html?id=0STaAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y
** https://scholar.harvard.edu/nunn/publications/origins-gender-roles-women-and-plough
I would say the Afghanistan-America war. "You have the watches, we have the time" it is said that an American commander was told. https://www.macleans.ca/news/fighting-in-afghanistan-you-have-the-watches-we-have-the-time/
Eventually, the side with the time won. But as long as a fraction of the American population was occupying Afghanistan, it could subdue the only Afghan army worth its name.
One thing I find difficult to understand with Dr Evans is her way of equalizing female agricultural work with gender equality. Slaves also work a lot. That doesn't make them equal.
I have read about the hoe agriculture/plow agriculture distinction and I find it very interesting. But I don't believe that toiling in the fields together with three co-wives while the men herd cattle/make alliances/drink beer is a cure against patriarchy.
Evans distinguishes between women working at home, and outside the home:
"Ethnographies, focus groups, and surveys tell us that rural women's contributions are scarcely considered 'work' by men, and sometimes, even by women themselves. Women’s farm-work does not guarantee women's esteem, autonomy or protection from violence."
https://www.draliceevans.com/post/does-it-really-matter-if-female-labor-force-participation-is-miscounted
What she actually regards as important is "paid work in the public sphere".
Ok, then I guess Dr Evans means that hoe agriculture systems have the potential to free women because when women are supposed to work, they will sooner or later be allowed to work outside of their homes and there they will find autonomy and female solidarity. If I get it right, she means something like if Africa just finally develops modern labor markets, women will take formal jobs away from home and be liberated. Since there is already a culture of female labor, only a dose of economic development needs to be added to free those women?
In addition to her regular blog at her own domain (which I don't recall seeing people other than myself comment on), she has a Substack where you should be able to ask her yourself:
https://draliceevans.substack.com/
I would question the warrior male ruling class hypothesis.
"Those with the highest potential for violence have the most freedom of action" - that seems, straightforwardly false in any but the most primitive social organisations. It's a combination of might and brains, and over time, norms that preserve society prevail. Sometimes (actually, I would say often, this seems pretty common everywhere) this involves putting down the most violent members of society (most societies, literate or not, have laws against murder and most of them executed murderers).
Murder is violence against unsanctioned targets. Every society had a way to control it's most violent members (including putting them down when needed), to direct the violence outwards at sanctioned targets!
No, I'm not satisfied with the war hypothesis. I think the answer is much more likely to be related to sedentary agriculture vs nomadic societies. In this war, the nomads lost badly - because this wasn't a war you win with violence. This was population.
My hypothesis is matriarchal societies tend to have lower birth rates. In fact, anywhere and any time women have equality, birth rates tend to be lower.
This, I think, is because women as a population are rational. Birth is extremely risky and infant mortality was high. You do not want to have babies unless you can get something out of it.
In a nomadic society, everyone produces equally - every member got their own food and fibre and whatnot. Labour wasn't segregated by gender. Men rarely had much to offer that women couldn't get themselves.
In a patriarchal sedentary agri society, men had land to grow food on and a house to live in. You get to live there if you could reproduce with him, or if you were related. Therein lies the motivation to do this incredibly risky thing - food and shelter.
But how did the original patriarchy start, such that the land rights belonged to men to start with? Or maybe that's the wrong assumption. Maybe only patriarchal sedentary agriculture societies could sustain the population growth necessary to maintain those societies! People in these societies were constantly contending with disease - the standard of living was fucking terrible. Maybe the only way these societies managed to out-breed disease was if women had to provide children as a tax. Perhaps only patriarchal societies could achieve the thing that led to the farming land ownership based society dominating the whole world - population growth, which led to the formation of sophisticated nation-states, which could beat the much smaller populations of nomads.
Nomadic women had no such tax to pay - they reproduced pretty much exactly enough to keep their population going, and if the native born tribeswomen didn't want to have enough kids, they'd raid one of those agri societies, kidnap some peasant girls, so they wouldn't run out of people. Modern society is similar (minus the part about kidnapping peasants) - when given a choice as to how many children to have, educated, financially stable women usually want between 1 to 3 (I actually think childfree is a minority - most people want children). This is when the risk of dying in childbirth and losing children to high infant mortality isn't a factor.
(While we no longer kidnap women in raids, we entice people from other places with promises of better standard of living, and take our pick of the candidates - skewing young, able bodied, and culturally compatible)
>Birth is extremely risky and infant mortality was high.
Infant mortality was high, maternal mortality was not until doctors got involved.
https://twitter.com/gcochran99/status/1527508653074370561
> In a nomadic society, everyone produces equally - every member got their own food and fibre and whatnot. Labour wasn't segregated by gender. Men rarely had much to offer that women couldn't get themselves.
Are you not familiar with the nomadic Bedouin Arabs? They're precisely the sort of gender-inegalitarians that Alice Evans is complaining about.
> sophisticated nation-states, which could beat the much smaller populations of nomads.
Nomads (whose men tend to be better at warfare) tended to beat sedentary agriculturists until relatively recently. In fact, this was Franz Oppenheimer's theory of the origin of the state. Firearm technology blunted the horse-nomad tactic of attacking a relatively defenseless sedentary area and then riding away before the state can retaliate against you.
> Nomadic women had no such tax to pay - they reproduced pretty much exactly enough to keep their population going
Every society reproduced up to its Malthusian limits in the pre-modern area. Nomads just require a much larger area of land to support a large population, since they are constantly travelling from used-up to fresh grasslands.
That Bushman thing is very interesting. I think Marjorie Shostak wrote about 2 maternal death out of 500 deliveries, which is very low in a society lacking modern healthcare. Still, I wouldn't be sure that translates to all living humans. Bushmen might just be genetically lucky. Bantu peoples have rather few doctors and still die at rates of about 1 per 100 deliveries (it is about those levels in current South Susan, Niger and Sierra Leone).
A similarly low rate was also found in the records of a German midwife, before doctors got involved in the birthing process.
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/06/07/the-breeders-equation/#comment-14508
>This, I think, is because women as a population are rational. Birth is extremely risky and infant mortality was high. You do not want to have babies unless you can get something out of it.
Seems more likely to me that it's because women pay a higher price for new children, in the form of labour and - often - rearing.
Potential for violence" wasn't meant to be interpreted in the narrow physical sense of the word. I consider Vladimir Putin a man with great potential for violence, despite him being small-bodied, old and possibly in fragile health.
In general, I think resources are overestimated as a force shaping human condition in prehistory, while violence is underestimated. Resources were extremely important in more recent, crowded societies. But before that, there was also a pre-Malthusian condition. I wrote more about it here. https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/violent-enough-to-stand-still
So I think the perspective that men couldn't rule over women because men didn't control the resources in nomadic societies is misguided. Even though men could not bribe women with resources they needed, they could simply kill or gravely injure women who did not obey them. In more advanced, crowded societies, men have mostly controlled women through starving them of resources and then bribing them into submission. In more primitive and less crowded societies, however, men have simply herded women through violence and threats of violence.
There are several examples in anthropology. One is the Australian Aborigines described by Carl Lumholz (whole book here: https://archive.org/details/amongcannibalsac1889lumh) Lumholz' informers had a very clear division of labor: Men hunted and made war, women gathered and cooked. Despite writing by the end of the 19th century, Lumholz describes the women as severely maltreated. Men lived off women's labor, he perceived. They only hunted when they felt like it and often ate the prey in all-male company. A man who managed to attain several wives was considered rich, because women's labor was the only resource to control. Men were very violent against women and hit them on the head with the first object they found for the slightest offense. Running away was the worst offense, which was often punished by death.
The Yanomamö, a horticulturalist people in the Amazon described by Napoleon Chagnon, were rather similar in that respect. They also treated women brutally, especially when they suspected infidelity. They also killed or gravely injured runaway wives. Yanomamö women also worked hard, harder than the men it seems, although Chagnon never made an exact comparison of working hours. Land was not scarce in the Yanomamö area. Women were not controlled indirectly by the threat of resource withdrawal as much as directly by the threat of violence.
The idea that women have fewer children the more of a say they have is interesting. Primatologist/anthropologist Sarah Hrdy says something like that in her book Mother Nature. Women tend to prefer investing more in every child, while men tend to prefer a faster-life strategy. In very patriarchal, polygynous societies, women are forced to adapt to the lower-investment preferences of their husbands.
But I'm not sure that means less patriarchal societies have a much lower birth rate. For example the Aché foragers of Peru, studied by Kim Hill and Magdalena Hurtado, had a high population growth during the decades before they abandoned their foraging lifestyle (it is all described in their book Aché Life History).
Actually, nomadic peoples probably had a pretty high sex-based labor division, with women dealing with the children and digging for roots, men hunting, fighting and maybe building shelters. I once read some anthropological finding (don't know how well that one has aged) that in contemporary hunter-gatherer societies women (especially old ones) are more highly respected when they produce a larger part of the society's foodstuffs (which is highly variable because of the variation in natural plants and animals and therefore diets in different places). Just a bit of info; I don't know if it means that all nomadic societies were still somewhat patriarchic, there was definitely some variation.
The treatment of old women is an interesting phenomenon. Among the Aché foragers of Paraguay, a man had taken as his task to kill women deemed too old to be useful. This activity, it seems, wasn't punished. (Source: Aché Life History by Kim Hill and Magdalena Hurtado), also mentioned on Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ach%C3%A9
And the Aché weren't especially patriarchal, although men obtained a majority of all calories consumed through hunting.
Among the very patriarchal, horticulturalist Yanomamö old women are treated with more respect than young women, although they are not considered suitable wife material if they are widowed. Since they are no longer considered sexually desirable, they can be used as messengers between tribes at war with each other. A man visiting an enemy tribe would be killed. A young woman would be kidnapped and taken as a wife. But an old woman could walk to the enemy village, convey a message and then return safely. (Source: Yanomamö by Napoleon Chagnon, page 126)
OK Tove! After digging carefully through Evans' sources and making it halfway through her article, I reached a point where I blinked and asked myself why I was doing that. Although I really love Wrangham as a stimulating source of ideas, Evans' work seems pretty cloudy and I have no idea how she made money from Scott Alexander to produce any of it. So I gave up and just read your own article on its own terms.
This may well be what I should have done to begin with! You've done a wonderful job of taking an extremely broad topic and giving it a thorough yet condensed overview, taking into account biological, economic, military, historical, and practical issues.
Your conclusion is probably most interesting, and touches on this question that many people are starting to ask - is the Western ideal viable? You say, "Currently, it looks like gender equality is a great contraceptive." But is this really true? The Apple Pie family isn't much of a patriarchy, and somehow I have trouble imagining that Anders spends much time telling you what to do, either. Both of our families seem to take sexual equality (or at least, sexual complementarity) as a given, and we've had plenty of kids. So is the idea of female emancipation *really* what makes most Westerners forego having children?
That is a very interesting question. I don't think it is gender equality in itself that causes low fertility, but individualism. Males exercise their individual right not to invest very much in their relationships and (future) children. Females exercise their right to reject too cheap offers. The result becomes few children at all.
Hitherto, the only attempt at complete gender equality has taken individualism as its framework. In theory, it should be possible to cultivate ideals of both gender equality and domesticity at the same time. Among high-fertility populations, the degree of gender inequality varies considerably. For example my favorite minority, the Amish, doesn't seem to be heavily gender-oppressive.
As you point out, a few individuals have found out how to form families with many children, high male investment and gender equality. In Anders' and my case, we are not even traditional. I mostly occupy myself with outdoor work while Anders spend significantly more time with childcare and housework. I somehow realize that this is due to our respective personalities more than generalizable principles, so I wouldn't dare to make any general recommendations based on our family constellation. It is too far off everything.
We're somewhat more traditional, in that Mrs. Apple Pie stays home and invests the money Mr. Apple Pie brings back from work. Little #6 is so demanding of her that lately I feel bad for Mrs. Apple Pie, but I don't lactate, and the best I can do to distract #6 is "pay pay" old video games while he watches and stuffs peanuts into his mouth.
The Amish women I know live highly submissive lives. I'll stress that they don't seem unhappy, but, their appearance and behavior is strikingly similar to that of a Muslim in her hijab. Indeed, to the extent that individualism can be measured sociologically, it goes hand-in-hand with equality.
For instance, Geert Hofstede likes to act as though his Individualism and Power Distance scales are unrelated, but even controlling for wealth doesn't reduce their relationship below statistical significance:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstede%27s_cultural_dimensions_theory#Dimensions_of_national_cultures
Inglehart was smarter, and he only attempted to pull out two factors; his postmaterialism dimension is measured by "self-expression values" which are essentially the tenets of Western individualism, including gender equality:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-expression_values
I *do* tend to think it's possible to have a high fertility culture that also gives respect and freedom to women, but, I don't think this can happen without valuing the production of healthy children as a special and important thing that only women can do. This is increasingly strange to most American women, who believe that child rearing is more important than childbearing, and frown at my wife when they realize how many babies she has had.
I think that basically, men's freedom lowers fertility much more than women's freedom. So for me, the question is: Is female submission necessary in order to make men invest? Do women need to act as submissively as your Amish acquaintances for average men to choose a high-investment lifestyle?
And I definitely agree that the production of healthy children should be seen as an important thing to do. Already when I was expecting my first child, I was astonished that childbearing is not considered a job. Sure, it is not a very qualified job, but that doesn't make it less of a job.
So I'm still looking at this, and I still don't know how convincing I find Evans' idea, but her source material (Wrangham, 2021) mentions something extremely interesting:
"Moral feelings associated with fairness were once thought to be present in non-humans such as capuchins (Cebus apella) and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) (Brosnan & de Waal, 2003). Experiments show, however, that only humans have a tendency to sacrifice personal gain for the sake of equality, whereas non-humans’ apparent concern for fairness reflects other motivations such as efforts to manipulate an experimenter (Engelmann et al., 2017; McAuliffe & Santos, 2018). Accordingly traits associated with fairness such as senses of responsibility, obligation, duty, guilt and shame appear to be restricted to humans, making their evolution a particularly interesting puzzle (Tomasello, 2016). In contrast moral emotions concerned with sympathy, such as compassion, concern and benevolence, are evidenced in non-humans (de Waal, 2006)."
These behaviors are not even universal in humans; rejecting unfair offers in the ultimatum game is much less common outside of WEIRD societies.
I came up with pretty much this analysis too. Notice the traits of toxic masculinity like repressing all emotion except anger, not showing weakness etc. - these are the ideal warrior traits.
Then the kind of guy who is used to gutting other guys on the battlefield is probably not averse to beating up his wife and then pretty much assured he is the head of the household.
Also the origin of war is either capturing sex slaves or looting wealth so one can afford a wife.
Today we can afford feminism precisely because we do not need to train most men into becoming warriors.
I'm not sure repressing all emotion except anger, not showing weakness etc. are ideal warrior traits. If we consider, for example, the Song of Roland (which I totally knew all about and didn't just search up right now and then cite from https://www.medievalchronicles.com/medieval-knights/code-of-chivalry-knights/ for the sake of argument), the knightly virtues are:
* Fear God and His Church
* Serve the liege lord in valor and faith
* Protect the weak and defenseless
* Live by honor and for glory
* Respect the honor of women
At the very least, the kind of warrior *I* would like by my side in battle would be someone who was strong, fit, skillful, prudent, courageous, and loyal. Someone who represses all emotion except anger and refuses to show weakness seems more like a gang member struggling to hold his position in a low-trust environment than an effective military man.
But before civilization, all humans were more or less gang members. So for primitive societies there could be something in the above theory of the warrior brute.
Even before civilization, people arranged themselves into clans which could be hundreds strong, organized by elaborate customs to enforce trust. If you have even a handful of disciplined warriors who are able to act as a unit, they will route much larger forces who lack such organization.
Isn't that kind of organization the very beginning of civilization? Small-scale societies are not only technologically primitive. They are also socially primitive, since they have not developed those elaborate trust-enhancing customs of more advanced societies.
I read Sudhir Venkatesh's Gangleader for a Day and Napoleon Chagnon's Yanomamö at the same time and I thought the similarities were striking. Like if there is some kind of basic human social structure that sets in when there are no valid rules of civilization. I think Carlos' assumption could be right for those small groups: A rough psychology could be advantageous both in gangs and gang-sized societies.
As I gave my reply, I did wonder what you meant by "civilized." I use it as most dictionaries do:" "a relatively high level of cultural and technological development; specifically : the stage of cultural development at which writing and the keeping of written records is attained" https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/civilization
(I'll stress that words only mean what the writer or speaker uses them to mean, so when I quote the dictionary I'm just giving my own definition; your English is good.)
I do think that one doesn't have to progress far from the behavior of the common ancestor with other primates before large clans appear. Yes, when societies are extremely small and social organization is minimal, then gang psychology may well be dominant. But clans are a kind of social technology that scarcely requires any material technology at all. The matriclan, arranged around female (not male) lines is quite old, predating what people here are discussing as "patriarchy:"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrilineality#China
I guess I use the term "civilized" in relative terms, like in "civilization process". That is, something very gradual.
>clans are a kind of social technology that scarcely requires any material technology at all.
I think you're onto something very interesting here. I have thought more and more about what came first: social organization or technology. I think it was social organization. The evidence of socially complex forager societies points in that direction.
Matrilinearity is also an interesting phenomenon. Someone, I think it was Sarah Hrdy in Mother Nature, said that matriliearity is a way of handling low paternity certainty.
Hm. Probably it is more about sociology than about psychology. I mean, many soldiers are nice husbands and fathers.
You know, one society that has sort-of worked through some of the issues with reproduction and equality is religious Judaism. I say "sort of" here for all of the obvious reasons. But if we look at modern Israel, we see a state with a mix of religious and secular traditions where the religious traditions are strong enough to influence overall birthrates and the state has, so far, maintained military superiority over its neighbors and universal conscription.
Unlike other conservative religious groups, Judaism has no particular norm of isolating women (at least not in the way of conservative Muslims,) because it's normal for Orthodox women to work in order to support their families while the men study Torah. The one stay-at-home-dad I know whose wife works to support the family is Orthodox Jewish. Last time I checked they had 4 kids, all quite young, and dad was holding down the hearth.
Obviously Orthodox Judaism is "patriarchal" and "oppressive" by the standards that liberal westerners are used to, but it's lightyears different from places like Afghanistan where the Taliban forbids women from working outside the home and women whose husbands aren't bringing in $$ literally face starvation for themselves and their children.
So, more or less, there needs to be some kind of patriarchy for people to procreate? But not necessarily the worst kind of patriarchy. And everyone doesn't need to be part of it, it is enough that some people take it seriously.
Yes, why not? Judaism has been a resilient meme for millennia, so it makes sense if it can survive current modern society too. But I read that entirely secular Jews in America have very low average fertility.
Rock-bottom fertility, yeah. But here they adopt American upper class cultural norms.
There's also a reasonable argument that the existence of Israel acts as a sorting agent for Jews who want Jews to keep existing as a people vs ones who don't care as much.
You are definitely on top of things - I just clicked Evans' article, and 30 seconds later, checked Wood From Eden to find this post!
Although I'll have more to say in a bit after I've read more, it's odd that her own article had no mentions of "matriliny" or "matrilineality," "uxorilocal," "virilocal," or similar anthropological terms; only "patrilineal," with no obvious sense of the correlates of patriliny or alternatives to it. Possibly she didn't need to discuss them? I'd recommend anyone interested in the topic check those terms in wikipedia and google scholar.
I simply dropped everything else I did and wrote a blog post about the origins of patriarchy as soon as I understood that that was the thing to do.
Judging from other things Alice Evans has produced, she is an economist. If she is not very into anthropology, it could be because that is not her subject.
From what I've read, female bonobos show high rates of gender solidarity, while female chimpanzees don't. https://www.insidescience.org/news/bonobo-matriarchs-lead-way
But this also depends on the male bonobos not also have gender solidarity, or else males in solidarity could subjugate females in solidarity.
But in humans, women do display strong ingroup preferences for other women, while men don't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women-are-wonderful_effect
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15491274/
So then, there is a possibility for women of a tribe to band together and create a matriarchy by taking advantage of men that don't band together. But that hasn't really happened. Maybe testosterone plays a part?
I think we have seen a lot of examples of women banding together during modern times. Human females are definitely psychologically capable of cooperating in defending each others' interests. Also chimpanzee females seem to be. I don't remember exactly in which book Frans de Waal wrote that, maybe in several books, but he wrote that chimpanzee females also create alliances in captivity, where there are concentrated enough food resources. According to de Waal, one important reason why Bonobo females cooperate better is that they live in an environment without gorillas. That means all the gorilla food is left to the bonobos. For that reason bonobo females with children can afford to live closer together with other females and children compared to among the chimpanzees, where females with children need to travel in smaller groups to find enough food.
I think groups of human females successfully banded together against the men in prehistory too. And I think those groups were crushed as soon as they encountered well-organized groups of male raiders. That's why we haven't heard of them.
This seems exactly right: research has shown that food competition structures the lives of female chimpanzees, seemingly far more than Bonobos. You see this in pretty much all the literature, but I think Jane Goodall demonstrated it best by comparing the female chimps' ranges in Gombe: relative status correlated strongly with range quality (in terms of size, food supply, and exposure to the border). Between that and the occasional infanticidal cannibalism, female cooperation seems to be far out of their reach.
That implies that abundance plays an important role in setting the conditions for female cooperation, with the addendum that both scarcity and plenty can drive violent conflict. I'd guess that violence surely plays a role modulating the effects of abundance, per your thesis.
They are fascinating creatures, those chimpanzees! Nice user name, by the way.
It's interesting that Dr Evans brings up a theory that the patriarchy started 300k years ago. This is 285k years before there is evidence of warfare emerges: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_warfare
"In theory, human females could create strong coalitions and through sheer numbers stay in power in their respective groups." I wonder if this was the case before some cognitive developments allowed men to use their advantage for warfare.
It's controversial but not rejected to say that there was an abrupt phase change in Theory of Mind for humans sometime in the last 100k years. If we also accept that women have better Theory of Mind, it makes sense that they reached the phase change first. Would have fascinating implications for the balance of the sexes. We do see women far more represented in art up to about 15k years ago (no male analog of Venus Statue complex), maybe they were also better at forming alliances. We don't see warfare in that time period.
edit: oh, Evan's own work does emphasize the patriarchy in the last 10k years: https://www.draliceevans.com/post/did-alpha-male-alliances-institutionalise-patriarchy-over-300-000-years-ago
There is little evidence for everything more than 15 000 years ago. Whether there was war during a certain period also depends on which definition of "war" is used. Personally I would say that a war is when a group of people attempts to kill members of another group of people.
According to that definition, chimpanzees make war. Australian Aborigines definitely made war.
Richard Wrangham's book Demonic Males also doesn't really say that patriarchy started 300 000 years ago. It says that it was probably there all the way from the apes.
Chimps are definitely patriarchal. I remember in Jane Goodall's book, In the Shadow of Man, her description of chimp society. Essentially there are two parallel social structures, the female one and the male one. Within the female, there is a social hierarchy. Within the males, there is a hierarchy. But practically all females are hierarchically lower than all adult males. Adult males can just beat them. Females can make coalitions, but so can males, so that doesn't do much for them.
The really interesting thing, though, is inter-generational status: high status females have high-status sons.
Presumably there's something biological going on here. High-status females are high status because they are stronger, smarter, more competent than low-status females. Chimpanzee mating is largely a free-for-all, but males tend to prefer mating with high-status females, so they probably do mate more often with high-status males than low status females do.
There is likely also a small "cultural" or "environmental" aspect, as high-status females have better access to food for their offspring and their offspring are to some degree afforded more respect by the troop growing up. But chimps aren't all that social, so this is likely very small.
Since male chimps don't do any of the child-rearing (their utility to the troop as a whole is probably limited to keeping other hungry, baby-murdering chimps out of the territory), most of the baby's success seems to stem from the mom's, hence the "transmission" of the mom's social status. Hence males compete for the females, not the other way around. Females don't really care about the males. Also, the males prioritize mating with older, more established (ie, higher status) females. These are females who have already raised offspring (demonstrating that they're worth the effort of fighting to have a kid with!) and they gain further status from their adult offspring, with whom they can form coalitions, which in turn allow them to prioritize more resources for their future offspring, etc.
In essence, it's not actually as big a jump between regular chimp and pygmy chimp societies as I think most people think it is.
But Islam provides a real contrast. I've spent a long time researching the Ottoman Empire as part of the background for a book I'm writing, and there is just so very little information (at least in English; I don't speak Turkish,) out there on Ottoman "queens." Finally I ran across a source that said that the Ottomans really didn't care about the identities of the Sultan's wives. Social status in Ottoman society stemmed from the males, so the Sultan could marry practically anyone he wanted, slaves included. Often there was no particular marriage ceremony. They were just the sultan's women and they went into the harem, and whoever gave birth to the first child became his "wife." Islamic law says a man can have four wives, so the first four women who had children (or maybe it was sons) became his "wives" and all of the rest were just "concubines."
It's a stark contrast to the European system in which women actually matter. A king can't just start having sex with a random slave girl and declare her son his legitimate heir.
From chimps to Islam!
For a long time I have wanted to read more about family structure in historical Near Eastern societies. So far I have only found a book-chapter here and an article there. Do you have any tips?
I wonder if the all-male class society could push the genetics of a whole population in a more feminine direction. In pre-modern societies, the upper class always reproduces the most. Especially in polygynous societies. If the upper class is free to choose among the entire female population, they can select the girls they find the most beautiful.
The little I have read on the subject suggests that was the case in the Ottoman Empire: Old women toured public bath houses in order to find young women who fit in with certain beauty standards. That means there could be a selection pressure for the preferred kind of female body type and the genetics that lie behind it.
In more gender-egalitarian systems where social class is a phenomenon on both the male and the female side, upper-class men need to limit themselves to much fewer women to have any legal heirs. They can't choose as freely based on beauty. This should decrease the evolutionary pressure in favor of genes for an ultra-feminine build.
I have just started reading "Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village," by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea. It might be what you're looking for.
Well, I'm not sure how we define feminine, but Islamic societies don't seem to have more feminine or beautiful people overall.
Thank you! Reading it.
I made a light version of what Elizabeth Warnock Fernea did when I was young: I spent three months in Damascus, studying Arabic. When I spent time in the Arab world, I thought people, men and women, looked more feminine, although people also looked very different compare to for example Scandinavians, who look more of the same.