Hello dear readers, today we will be concluding our short three post jaunt down feminism and gender dynamics (four if you think that marriage and child rearing falls under that category)! In addition for my personal health and safety, we will never touch any sort of inflammatory politicized philosophies again! Hurrah!
But before we begin, I did want to make one quick announcement. Because of various schedule constraints and discrepancies, I will no longer be updating on a set schedule of Tuesdays and Thursdays. However, do not fear, for I will continue to update biweekly, one early in the week, the other late, and perhaps, like the grand phoenix, a new regular schedule may rise from the ashes. Until then, just look to the skies, and you will know my sign.
Now then, as I have alluded to before, today I will be discussing the historical evolution of gender dynamics, and my hypothesis on why Patriarchal societies seemed to be the rule among most of recorded history [Sadly, we must largely omit Subsaharan Africa and the Americas. I should note that the focus on Eurasia in history is largely based on the fact that these are the only cultures of which there are detailed written records for most of history (though the Maya and Aztec cultures are the exception to this). Archaeological evidence can only go so far when you can only vaguely wave around arrowheads and pottery fragments and say that a general trend happened over the space of several hundred years]. Also, because this is history, rather than philosophy, I will be citing sources. And yes, Wikipedia is a perfectly fine source for an informal treatise such as this, it's a blog not a dissertation. Deal with it
It seems that largely, patriarchy in its prime seems to have existed for about 6,000 years, and though this is basically all of recorded history, is small potatoes in terms of humans actually existing (about 3% of total human history). It would seem that most anthropologists think that pre-agricultural societies were rather more egalitarian. However, due to the natural progression of power after agriculture (as I described in On Tribes and Politics), it was necessary that the military become an integral part of the political system, as demonstrated in various parts of the world (the citizen soldiers of classical Greece and Rome, the private military emperors of the Roman Empire, Feudal Europe and Japan, the Shi and Kshatriya castes of China and India, ect.) This is where men got their advantage, I believe. Men are naturally more suited to war.
Now, hold on just a second there. I mean that in pre-modern war, men are more naturally suited, and not for the reasons you think. As warriors and generals, I would argue that there is little difference in a baseline, even before gunpowder. In an individual fight, a woman's disadvantage in strength is largely irrelevant, because fighting with weapons is more about technique and speed than raw strength (you can break just about anything in the human body with 8lbs of pressure which is literally childsplay, and a decent set of armor will deflect all but the strongest attacks with a weapon of equal metallurgical quality anyway). Likewise, strategy, tactics, and logistical management are all academic skills, and discipline and courage address areas of the mind which are equal between the sexes. Even if all of these things were true, women could still be of use as skirmishers, pioneers, scouts and as part of the baggage train. Rather, the two main traits of a man which makes them more suited to war are campaigning ability and expendability.
Campaigning ability is the ability of the soldier to endure long periods of sustained marching, heavy loads and adverse weather, illness and fatigue. The primary advantage that men have over women has to do with the fact that men do not get pregnant, nor do they have PMS. The problems in campaigning with pregnancy is obvious, and with a mixed sex army prior to contraception, pregnancy will be a thing that happens, probably quite frequently. However, even if a general was able to enforce such rigid discipline and somehow not experience a ridiculous amount of mutinies, PMS would still cause problems. Now, while I am not wholly familiar with the precise symptoms, I do know that they range from mildly irritating to physically debilitating, and having a not insignificant portion of your army not be able to march or fight because their uterus hates them for not having babies would put you at a major disadvantage. Of course, after effective hormone inhibiting contraceptive pills became commercially available, women were phased into the military proper not long after, and even before military doctrine and mechanization made campaigning less of an issue in any case.
The second major advantage that men have in the pre-modern military is that they are expendable, biologically speaking. As I described in On Marriage and Pedagogy, a society actively looks for large, growing populations because it is safer and more economically viable. While any given man can have a truly ridiculous number of offspring (as demonstrated by our good friend, Genghis Khan), any given woman could, at the most, have around 25 (which is pretty optimistic, considering how common death by childbirth was). Thus, being the inhibiting factor in the population equation, it is socially more important to keep women alive than men. Considering the preposterous number of casualties which could be sustained in a single day in pre-modern war, any failure of a mixed-sex army could be the ruin of the state even if they won the war. Male casualties are easy to bounce back from, female casualties are very hard. It should be noted that these advantages apply on a large scale. One or a few women would not cause a disadvantage, as was seen on occasion in history.
As a result, the male monopoly on military power disenfranchised women from the public sphere. However, this public disenfranchisement does not necessarily mean that women did not have power. While this article is largely speculative, it does remind us that we can't entirely rely on our modern perceptions of how things are to reconstruct the past. I won't go into detail about that, because this post is very long, and there's one more aspect of gender dynamics which is extremely important and that is the women as property thing.
Like with the disenfranchisement of women, I suspect that the objectification of women is derived from a side effect of power distribution. Before the industrial revolution, the primary source of wealth was land ownership. Land provided important raw and agricultural goods which made the owners very wealthy and very powerful. Of course, the owners don't live forever, and while inheritance is probably as old as humans ourselves, the steaks after the agricultural revolution had never been higher. Inheritance law and martial patriarchy probably developed relatively co-currently and thus it would have been natural for sons to inherit property, as they could defend it. While women played a key role in inheritance, they were largely used as an inter-household currency. However, like all currency, its value lay in its purity. The original utility of a virgin bride was to prevent the shady claims of half brothers from being a problem, as, even if they were successfully repelled, would probably be at a great expense of money and life. As time went on and the original purposes forgotten (a la the three monkey experiment), this value on virginal purity remained. While the male morality was being brave enough to die for the good of your state (e.g. the Roman Virtus, "courage," "virtue" or "manliness") the female morality was to not cause inheritance feuds by making a bunch of half-brothers (e.g. the Roman Pudicitia, "chastity," "shame," "womanly virtue"). While both of these moralities were originally for the good of the state, virtus (which is, amusingly, a feminine noun) commanded men to "do this politically empowering thing" while pudidictia commanded women to "don't do this thing unless we tell you it's okay." Because women were a more important part of a state's well being, the state appropriated more control over them.
To me, it is not at all surprising at all that feminism took off around the industrial revolution. Mechanization and industry decreased the value of real estate, corporate doctrine hugely lightened the importance of familial inheritance of the means of production, modern medicine and agricultural production caused the population to skyrocket, reducing the pressure to reproduce constantly significantly, contraception made pregnancy extremely controllable which loosened incentives for pudidictian morality, and the mechanization of the military broke down the primary causes for the male monopoly.
Over all, if present trends continue I would say that the blip of patriarchal rule within our history won't last for much longer, and we'll return to our natural state of largely egalitarian gender dynamics. Of course, cultural change is frustratingly slow, so though there is no longer any real purpose to patriarchal practices, the vestigial remains of them will last for quite a few generations to come.
(Or at least that's what the Phallo-Council wants you to think.)
Sincere Regards,
Michael Coffey
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