There is an interesting question posed in Yuval Noah Harari’s excellent book Sapiens about why almost all human societies seem to have been patriarchal in nature, and he admits that there seems to be no known answer.

A reason that may well explain this was mentioned, seemingly in passing, by Louise Perry in her interview by Chris Williamson in one of his podcasts. Here she suggests that perhaps in order for a (pre-modern) society to be successful it could only be a patriarchy. This makes a lot of sense and provides an interesting perspective on recent culture, because the reasons are really no longer factors in the modern world.

So why would a pre-modern society really have no other path than a patriarchy?

1. Early agricultural societies led to the gradual effective extinction of hunter gathers largely because such structures could support many more individuals in a given group, and could thus push out hunter gathers just by weight of numbers. Organised aggression from a 200 strong group will mostly beat a group of 50. So although it can be argued that the life of a hunter gatherer was better than an early farmer, the farmers were the ones that won that history
2. In order for an early society to grow and be successful, it needed quite a few children, and given the level of child mortality 10,000 (or even 100) years ago, each woman would on average need to have a lot of children.
3. Being pregnant, giving birth and raising a baby are all extremely hard on a woman’s body as well as taking up a significant amount of time and mental resources. Obviously there was no access to effective pain medications, and complications would have been common place.  This would have effectively removed women from decision making forums and leadership roles for extensive periods.  Given that men are generally more aggressive and physically stronger that women, those men who would have taken these roles in their place would probably not have been keen to give those back as and when the woman was ready. The woman would not have been able to force that either, however much more competent she may have been.
4. There would have been little opportunity for women to develop and prove themselves either. Child bearing and rearing would have happened from a young age. When young men would have been being mentored and developed as potential leaders, young woman would have been out back having their next baby or feeding their last one.
5. There is then a circular path between men being in positions of power and ‘masculine’ activities being more revered than traditional feminine ones, and for men to put themselves into positions of influence and thought leadership.

Some of the factors that may explain the shifts in expectations that today’s societies have for women’s contributions in leadership roles in all walks of life, include;

• The choices that women now have when deciding on how many children to have and when
• The dramatic reduction in infant mortality
• The pain and after effects of giving birth and breast feeding (as well as maternal mortality) have been mitigated to a significant extent by modern medicine
• The ability for men to look after children and feed them with formula and for organised day care options

At least on the surface there seems to be a direct correlation between number of children born per woman and the level of gender equality in a society.  This may change in very modern, urban societies, but does seem to hold true over recent history and between developed and developing nations.

MT