Bookmark1995
Banned
So was the agricultural world built around "might makes right?" And this gave men an advantage?
Agriculture made the most food.
Under what conditions could a matriarchal world have emerged?
- Thread starter Bookmark1995
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So was the agricultural world built around "might makes right?" And this gave men an advantage?
Agriculture made the most food.
Bookmark1995
Banned
The theory goes like this: the backbreaking labor on an early farm and need to defend one's produce was a task men could do. This is said to be the origin of patriarchy.
SwampTiger
Banned
Catherine the Great was a woman in a Patriarchy, not a Matriarchy.
Where does good and bad come into this discussion.
I could only guess as the source of a societal choice.
Where does good and bad come into this discussion.
I could only guess as the source of a societal choice.
Catherine was in a patriarchal society. And? So why would a matriarchal society change her?
I think that it is important to note that matriarchy is not the same (and far less common to say the least) as matrilinearity/matrilocality. This varies immensely across cultures, but as far as I know, it is not clear that an actual matriarchy, as in, a society where prestige, power and (greater) freedom are normatively associated with being female as such actually ever existed anywhere.
Many (usually small-scale) societies, including hunter-gatherer ones, have been closer to gender equality in that they are "non-patriarchal" (as, ones where being born female does not near-automatically imply less power, prestige and relative freedom) but even there, there's a tendency to normatively define separate social functions/roles by gender (with arguably a basis in the difference of biological roles). A far cry for the situation in some large scale settled societies where women were sometimes considered, well, akin to property... still not gender equality as currently understood.
As a side note, many societies had also cultural strategies to accomdate people whose individual vocation contrasts with societal expectations about their gender, which is often true to some extent even in the most patriachal traditional societies.
EDIT: not all societies have or had a strictly binary view of gender.
Many (usually small-scale) societies, including hunter-gatherer ones, have been closer to gender equality in that they are "non-patriarchal" (as, ones where being born female does not near-automatically imply less power, prestige and relative freedom) but even there, there's a tendency to normatively define separate social functions/roles by gender (with arguably a basis in the difference of biological roles). A far cry for the situation in some large scale settled societies where women were sometimes considered, well, akin to property... still not gender equality as currently understood.
As a side note, many societies had also cultural strategies to accomdate people whose individual vocation contrasts with societal expectations about their gender, which is often true to some extent even in the most patriachal traditional societies.
EDIT: not all societies have or had a strictly binary view of gender.
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The problem with that is if you look at agricultural societies, farm work wasn't that segregated. Sure you might need the strongest to plow, which would generally favor men, but all the other agricultural work can and was done by women and children; it was very much all hands on deck. Its hard to see why that would lead to male dominated societies.
If i had to guess the leading cause is because men are generally better warriors, and not even because men are stronger (thats only on average and the differences are often exaggerated) or more aggressive (its one thing to get men to fight, and quite another to get them to kill. Its taken modern psychology for armies figure out how to train their people to be more okay with killing and even now it still leaves scars).
Simply the fact that pregnancy and women's monthly cycles can be debilitating for women in an era before birth control. It'd be asb but if a plant evolved that contained a safe and fairly reliable natural contraceptive it would change the game just as radically as it did in our modern world
That is not unique to the east. Even in very patriarchal Greece and Rome (and in the post roman world) women had enormous control over the running of the household and the early education of their children and were generally left to their own devices even if the man of the house had final say.
Regarding men as "better" warriors, I think that the structural point is that women bear most of the burden in the task of social reproduction, making them less "sacrificeable" for other forms of dangerous tasks such as fighting or hunting (although historically they did both indeed; and giving birth in pre-modern conditions was possibly riskier than either anyway).
A pre-modern society that routinely puts a large percentage of its childbearing women population in harm's way on the battlefield would quickly be demographically at disadvantage facing a society who does not, all other things being equal (and admitting polygamy).
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The problem with this is the 'large percentage' bit. Now admittedly small tribal societies tend to have many of their men fighting, but is that the case for an agricultural society as well? Or is it the case that, baring dire need, they relied upon a relatively small warrior class
IIRC the Muosuo are matrilineal, not matriarchal, but play up matriarchy for sweet sweet tourism revenue. Can't find a source for this though--and even if I could, it'd probably be in Chinese.
Mosuo - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Not really IMHO. Specialised tasks (such as the military) being tendentially differentiated by gender is not in principle the same as patriarchy (even there, the division was not absolute: even thoroughly patriarchal medieval Europe had cases like Jeanne D'Arc for example).
Bookmark1995
Banned
But what leads to horrifying traditions like "woman not being allowed to read" or "woman not being allowed to drive" or "woman being blame for their own rape"? Are those things the conscious choices of power-seekers in the pre-science world? Or are they born from societal evolution?
Considering pre-modern death rates (and how deadly was childbirth for women), "large percentage" does not need to be that large to have an impact.
Agricultural societes tend to tie the vast majority of population of either gender into, well, agricultural production, and usually have a specialised (and privileged) warrior class, but in many cases this is also supplemented by "part-time" fighters (basically conscripts). However, if the warrior class is hereditary (very often the case), the same problem of men being more "disposable" from a social reproduction standpoint holds for that class as a subset.
That said, relatively small specialised classes of female warriors are historically attested: I am thinking of pre-colonial Dahomey for instance, - but I think there are other examples - which I'd say was still patriarchal anyway.
I would be shocked if humanity was ever truly matriarchical save for a few isolated cases. In the absence of a strong state forcing non-violence on its subjects, human pre-history was a violent bloodcraze and it's not like hunting doesn't take strength either. Contemporary Amerindians tribes like the Yanomamo or the Jivaro (with half of their men dying violently) paint a more accurate overall picture of the tribal way of life. As Malthus dictates, life in its natural state is a struggle for existence, and men always wielded more power due to their physical attributes, if nothing else.
In a pre-modern world, societal norms were largely born out of societal evolution and far less codified than it is the case in modern contexts. Basically, you had more or less implicit societal agreements on gender roles - which usually allowed for exceptions. Urban life, writing, then modernity brought about codification and therefore, sometimes, conscious choices to enshrine custom and social norm into things such as law... thence stuff like the Saudi gender segregation and bans on women drivin (until very recently) which would have been arguably regarded as ridiculous in traditional Islamic law (which was, of course, still deeply patriarchal).
To a deeper level, I suppose that the importance of women for social reproduction in a regime of private property (and therefore the importance of controlling their sexual behaviour for inheritance purposes) was the basic force that led to women, in many settled pre-modern societies, to be regarded as an asset, and thus as something akin to property - if this creates the premise that women are not exactly "people" the same way (free) men are, all subsequent horrors can ensue. In this sense, patriarchy is only the major epiphenomenon of a broader structure - social stratification. After all, most patriarchal societies also had slavery for example.