Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture

http://www.economist.com/node/18986073?

by antoviaque • 13 years ago

72 58 13 years ago

jostmey2• 13 years ago

The author fails to present any serious evidence for their claim. I suspect that sexism began long before the invention of farming.

bradddd• 13 years ago

It's a slippery slope, but I don't think they're directly claiming the cause of sexism. Instead, the point they're claiming is: "Women descended from plough-users are less likely to work outside the home, to be elected to parliament or to run businesses than their counterparts in countries at similar levels of development who happen to be descended from hoe-users."

So the bulk of the argument stems from some initial qualitative assessment of the region's agricultural state (i.e. hoe or plow) and then comparing it to present day stats for the metrics he outlines.

Your suspicions are probably right, but I don't think the author would even disagree necessarily. I think this is just an interesting look into one of the factors that may have been responsible.

jostmey2• 13 years ago

If anything the invention of farming may have lead to less violence and greater equality. This was a period of time when humanity transitioned from the Hunter to the Farmer.

Farming promoted development. It did not hold it back.

cschmidt• 13 years ago

Which author? The Economist author, or Alesina, Giuliano, and Nunn, the authors of the academic study? The Economist is just giving description of the results for a popular audience, so I don't think they have to provide serious evidence.

The original academic article can be read here:

The Quarterly Journal of Economics http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/02/19/qje.q... (open access full text, at least for now)

I haven't read it, it is a peer reviewed publication, so I imagine they do have some evidence.

yarrel• 13 years ago

Idiocy of opinion piece journalists correlates inversely with penis size.

epochwolf• 13 years ago

So.. Opinion pieces by women are all completely flawless?

redrocket• 13 years ago

They're completely irrelevant.

tokenadult• 13 years ago

A claim about "all-powerful mother goddesses" before the end of the fifth millennium BC is inherently unhistorical. The submitted article notes, "For each group, the data included a description of its agricultural methods as far back in time as it was possible to go using historical evidence or, in the case of groups which did not have a written language, the first time they were observed by outsiders." That's much nearer in time than the transition to plowing the article refers to.

There was no writing anywhere during the earliest part of that transition, and if we saw statues of voluptuous female figures in some places (as we do) from that far back, it is at least as likely that the statues are porn as that they are representations of powerful goddesses. Archeology has historically systematically underestimated, perhaps for delicate readers, the amount of sheer erotic art that was produced by early human beings. The oldest surviving human art on at least two continents is crude drawings of vulvae, so the working hypothesis until additional evidence is found is that ancient human beings did not have a highly developed religion of "all-powerful mother goddesses" but rather incoherent local folk religions that didn't exclude teenage boys (the ancient artists of surviving ancient art were mostly teenage boys) from producing crudely drawn and crudely sculpted porn.

See The Nature of Paleolithic Art by R. Dale Guthrie (published by the University of Chicago press)

http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Paleolithic-Art-Dale-Guthrie/dp...

for much more about the evidence, as analyzed by an author who is a specialist in Pleistocene megafauna (including Homo sapiens) and himself a fine visual artist.

AFTER EDIT: It boggles my mind that I can link to a source in my comment and still have "readers" here ask what my source is for a factual statement in this comment. The source I linked is the source. (The book I link to is by a research scholar, and itself cites dozens of thorough sources about all aspects of human prehistory.) The book I link to is a lot better than any Wikipedia article. (I am a Wikipedian, painfully aware of how many good sources are missed when amateurs edit articles on Wikipedia.)

jgj3• 13 years ago

> it is at least as likely that the statues are porn as that they are representations of powerful goddesses

I'm not so sure there is or needs to be a distinction between the two. Penis goes in, life comes out. You can't explain that. Well, paleolithic man couldn't. But they could draw/sculpt it and revere it for both its pleasure- and life-giving properties.

mmatants• 13 years ago

Reverence is the debatable aspect here. Statue of a goddess implies respect, pornography implies objectification and a very different power relationship. So if we draw conclusions about the role of women in that society, interpreting statues as porn versus pedestals makes a difference.

zeteo4• 13 years ago

>Penis goes in, life comes out. You can't explain that. Well, paleolithic man couldn't. But they could draw/sculpt it and revere it

It was not until 1677 [1] that people started to discover how reproduction works beyond "penis goes in, life comes out". Yet there are no major religions documented before that (in about 5000 years of recorded history) which revered crude vulva drawings. Whereas pornographic graffiti has been widespread everywhere from the streets of Ancient Rome [2] to modern boys' bathrooms.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonie_van_Leeuwenhoek#Discove...

[2]http://www.pompeiana.org/resources/ancient/graffiti%20from%2...

rada• 13 years ago

It sounds like your problem with the article is that its "mother goddess" interpretation is baseless because there is no written record of that time period. That's valid, except you then proceed to offer your own modern interpretation that is equally as baseless. Just because we are inordinately pre-occupied by porn today, doesn't mean pre-historic people were. If anything, they were hungry, hand-to-mouth wilderness survivors so those big-bellied women are much more likely to symbolize a well-fed person than a pornographic ideal (especially since breasts were not the sex symbol they are today for much of human history, and neither was masturbation to external visual sources). Or they could be literally anything else - kids toys, voodoo dolls, whatever. Like you said, no written record = speculation.

Also:

the ancient artists of surviving ancient art were mostly teenage boys

Sources?

Edit: Anyone care to reply instead of downvoting?

mdakin• 13 years ago

History and truth are often out of synchronization (esp. in these days of pervasive propaganda/active manipulation of the population using mass communication technology). The chapters of the human story that played out 15,000 to 5,000 years ago in Africa/Europe/Near East/India are still being figured out by a combination of archeological, genetic, and linguistic research. Concerning the worship of "Earth/Mother Goddesses" vs. "Sky Gods" (e.g. Yahweh, Zeus, Thor, etc.) and the interactions of the different groups of people who preferred (and oftentimes forced upon others) their own visions of deity, if you want to engage rationally on this topic, I recommend researching and understanding (and contesting in an actual rational manner if you believe that the hypothesis is false) the "Kurgan Hypothesis."[1] There are some good books about it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan_hypothesis

yk• 13 years ago

In Guns, Germs and Steel Jarred Diamond mentions that there were less than ten places were farming was invented, and that cultures descended from these centers usually retained their selection of crops. So with the link between the plow and some specific crops, it seems that the sample size could potentially be as low as less than ten ( instead of 1200 language groups).

Jun8• 13 years ago

"Their primary source of information was a detailed ethnographic description of over 1,200 language groups across the world."

This method could be extremely error-prone, due to borrowings, etc. between languages, e.g. see some of the criticisms against gluttochronology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottochronology#Discussion) which uses similar techniques to determine relation between languages.

zeteo4• 13 years ago

>The plough was heavier [...] it gave men an advantage over women. [...] Women descended from plough-users are less likely to work outside the home, to be elected to parliament or to run businesses

And this is why North European countries, which used the heaviest plows [1], are the most backward in their treatment of women. Oh wait...

In any case, as anyone who has had a serious conversation with a farmer can attest, the bulk of the work in agriculture is by far in harvesting and not in plowing. Pretty much all traditional societies "allow" women to do that.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carruca

stygianguest2• 13 years ago

Also interesting is their assertion that society first changes very quickly after the introduction of the plow, but then has very long lasting effects. Why did the first change quickly but the second have long lasting effects?

voxfrege• 13 years ago

That, exactly, was my thought also.

hackinthebochs4• 13 years ago

I don't understand your critique. Can you explain it more?

mseebach4• 13 years ago

Harvesting is a surge-activity that has to be completed in a very narrow timespan for maximal yield. Also, harvesting primarily requires stamina, not strength.

Tilling, on the other hand, is less time sensitive, and can better be the job of a smaller group spreading their effort over a longer period of time.

Also, the research doesn't claims any relation between the weight of the plow and the mindset beyond for the passing of a threshold where men gain a physical advantage.

zeteo4• 13 years ago

>the research doesn't claims any relation between the weight of the plow and the mindset beyond for the passing of a threshold

So let's see, the research is about the relationship between two variables, both of them naturally continuous: weight of farming tools and degree of discrimination against women. The correlation doesn't quite hold for some sections of the graph, so what do you know: let's just separate the first variable into two arbitrary buckets, "light" and "heavy". Voila, case proved! Except if we happened to place the division at a "heavier" point, leaving only the Nordic countries in the "heavy" bucket, we'd obtain the exact inverse correlation.

s_baby5• 13 years ago

A) That's a straw man argument. North European countries are no longer agrarian societies. Compare pre-enlightenment northern europe to their counterparts and you'll have a more honest comparison.

B) The separation of work due to existential needs was not sexist. It's just the initial condition that created the asymmetry in gender roles. That's to say a more agrarian society isn't necessarily more sexist than a less agrarian one. It's all the other factors that mold this asymmetry.

bitwize2• 13 years ago

Plows were usually drawn by animals, not people. If this hypothesis holds, horses and oxen should have even higher status than men.

This is all an exercise in intellectual wankery that reminds me of the bit in Cryptonomicon where Randy's girlfriend publishes a paper correlating Unix beards with female oppression.

Oh, and by the way, 'twas Margaret Mead -- a woman and hardly an apologist for the patriarchy -- who put the lie to the myth that preagricultural human society was matriarchal. There have been matrilineal societies, but in these the property tended to pass from father to daughter's husband rather than father to son.

jfoutz• 13 years ago

you should take a long look at those handles on a plow and think about how you steer that around, and keep it ploughing, rather than sliding over the top of the fields.

s_baby5• 13 years ago

You must not remember the story of the golden calf. There are plenty examples of worshiping domesticated animals.

bitwize2• 13 years ago

No, I've heard of it; in fact after typing that I thought "does that explain sacred cows in India?"

But worshiping domesticated animals isn't as universal or persistent as patriarchy supposedly is.

benmmurphy• 13 years ago

history is perfect for data mining. just search for interesting correlations and then publish when you've found one. it's not like anybody can run a fresh experiment to see if it is spurious or not.

scarmig• 13 years ago

People seem to be a bit overly upset by the mention of the mother goddess, which I agree is certainly an outmoded hypothesis. But that's a throwaway line in the article, which fundamentally is about how different technology can create different social norms and institutions. It's like half the comments on the article bitching about a capitalization error.

If the authors of the original article dotted all their is and crossed their ts, that's really something extraordinary: peoples whose ancestors were plough users show a strong correlation with regressive views on gender. That's remarkable.

That original paper can be found here:

On the Origins of Gender Roles: Women and the Plough http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/02/19/qje.q...

Note also that the strong correlation here lends itself to a variety of causal claims. Maybe ploughs led to higher population densities and strong states, which enforce gender roles. Maybe it's the strength based argument offered by the Economist. Maybe they became manufacturable only once society had developed strong states, which would make the correlation purely a one of shared cause.

Spooky23• 13 years ago

I think the explanation here is much simpler that it needs to be.

Pre-agriculture, everyone's job #1 was getting food on the table. Post-agriculture, you had a surplus of food, so people began to specialize. Economic and market forces started to become more sophisticated, as people were secure enough that daily survival wasn't an issue.

So economically speaking, before the advent of modern farm machinery, what did a farmer need to prosper? Answer: Labor.

Where did this labor come from? Answer: Children.

Farm families are historically speaking very large. Much larger than what a hunter/gatherer could possible support.

A woman might have 12-15 children, and since you have a food supply, many of them will survive to adulthood. So if you have 15 term pregnancies, starting at age 15, you're talking about being almost continuously pregnant until age 30.

In primitive surroundings, pregnancy is deadly. Today, the lifetime risk of maternal death in sub-Saharan Africa is 1/16. (vs. 1/2800 in the developed world).

mseebach4• 13 years ago

It's definitely a case of specialisation, but your explanation doesn't address the correlation between the ancient methods of agriculture and current day labour force participation that the study does:

But in countries like Rwanda, Botswana, Madagascar or Kenya, whose people are predominantly descended from hoe-users, women are far more likely to be in the labour force than those in historically plough-using places like India, Syria or Egypt.

s_baby5• 13 years ago

This "historians" theory is a version of anthropology. Except it's missing one key piece. The orthodoxy holds that heavy plows and other strenuous activity leads to miscarriage. People can call all the other evidence as speculative but this assertion is much harder to dismiss.

codex• 13 years ago

The beauty of evolution is that it not only produces a wide variety of human offspring (via sexual reproduction and sexual selection) but also a _homo_ _sapien_ family unit in which each individual (male + female(s), usually) has different strengths.

This surplus of skills has allowed humans to survive under a wide variety of circumstances and environments. Evolution does not guarantee long term survival of the fittest--it guarantees long term survival of the most adaptable.

In some environments, the female may be more critical to the success of the family (or extended clan, or tribe, or what have you). In others, it's the man. Sometimes it's equal. But just because a particular skill set isn't the most valuable at any point in time doesn't mean that the individuals with those skills should be second class citizens. Eventually, years or decades or millennia from now, or thousands of miles away, their time will come again.

redwood• 13 years ago

It's worth noting that at the same time, with the rise of agriculture came the rise of property and with it --- the rise of ownership of not just the here and now, but also the future... who will own the land in the future?

The focus on thr future ownership gave rise to the focus in single inheritance: a son. And tbe importance of knowing whose son was your's. To ensure lineage men suppressed women as an extension if their property.

Now both theories are complimentary because the reason sons (not daughters) became the targtarget for inheritance probably boiled down to these same issues of strength.

The key change thwt occured is we became more monogomous and suppressive of women even though it was not a natural way to be, to preserve property after death.

Source: "Sex at Dawn", an interesting read on post-religiously framed anthropology

Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture

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