First, here is the Hajnal Line
HBDChick's post from a few years ago will give you plenty to chew on in terms of where this all came from and what advantages it created. Just for openers, it seems to have been worth a few points of IQ and a reduction in internal violence in modern Western, especially Northwestern Europe, with exceptions. She leans heavily on the system of manorialism favoring the development of nuclear versus extended families. Authority came from the lord, not the clan leader. Her additional theory is that the Roman Catholic Church forbidding cousin marriage was for unclear reasons only obeyed in NW Europe beginning about 1200 or so, even though it was supposedly in play everywhere, and this had cumulative effects. Cousin marriage solidifies extended family holdings rather than nuclear. Men had to prove some worth to the family in order to be allowed to marry, and thus tended to be older. Women were married off younger because there were no further resources they were going to acquire before marriage, so they might as well start off having the necessary children for agricultural purposes right away.
Women who marry later and have skills and resources of their own, that they have earned as servants or in home crafts such as spinning or brewing, create a familial foundation for small businesses and thus a merchant society. A 30-year old man has a different attitude toward a 26-year old wife than a 16 year-old one, even in what we would experience as a deeply patriarchal society. The older bride, who had helped her mother manage her father's business and might be in line to inherit it, would see herself differently and have expectations as well. She would have fewer children, but a greater percentage of them would live to adulthood. There would then be increased trade, as men could feel more confident leaving a business in the hands of their wife while they went to London or the Continent to see about importing and exporting, or learning new industrial or agricultural techniques.
And perhaps that is the foundation of the industrial revolution and western civilisation, more than other things we usually credit. We usually see rights for women as being a result of those societal changes. Maybe they were the cause.
Suppose we try the fashionable exercise of "gender-flip:" What matriarchal societies have prospered? I read of some isolated tribes here and there, but in the larger scale nothing but the apparently mythical Amazons comes to mind. The Hopi are--or aren't; it depends on who does the estimating and how.
ReplyDeleteFew of the claims are unambiguous. If I assume that a thriving matriarchy would be applauded the the skies by the usual interested parties, the absence of such applause suggests there isn't such a thing. There might be a reason for that.
To ask the question is to answer it. There haven't been any. The physical limitations of pregnancy and childbirth meant that in few societies, or none, were women safe to rely on as hunters or warriors, so upper-body strength was not as necessary. In primitive competition, this mattered. Their skills in remembering where resources were were an advantage, and their skills of persuasion and negotiation were if anything, more necessary to a tribe.
ReplyDeleteStill, that was not immediately obvious to anyone, male or female. This is trial-and-error stuff, where some societies prospered but attributed it to completely irrelevant things.