The world has changed fundamentally during the ninety years of my life and will continue to change at an accelerating pace. I was born into the American White working class during the Great Depression, grew up in the prosperity that followed the end of World War II and the rise of U.S. dominance; became educated and middle class; married Ravi, a student from India and later a professor; had two children and adopted another; taught at a university; followed Ravi to live abroad; did sociological research projects then consultancies in a number of countries. It was a path of wifehood and motherhood mixed with being a professional woman that was unusual for my generation but quite ordinary for a young woman today. Women are no longer restricted to life within the family, as wife and mother, in a strictly male ordered society.
I look back over history, and given my anthropological perspective, the role of women in each of the major ages from prehistory to historical times to contemporary life, the various ages being defined by the level of technology.
The Digital Revolution has been with us for a while, having begun in the late 1950s with computers and digital computing. I was approaching my thirties by then, but being in or around a university while living in the States, in Ankara, and in Paris I was an early adopter. In 1983, in a French research institute, I saw one of the first DVDs, tried and failed to get a grant to develop, with a young computer guy, a program on one for a health care application. No one where I applied could imagine the technology I proposed to use. In 1985 I bought my first computer, a Macintosh. Throughout this time I read and was aware of the personal computer’s effects on bureaucracies. It was hollowing out middle management; fewer managers, usually middle-class, were needed for supervising front-line, often working-class, workers. The computer certainly lessened the importance of the secretary, a middle-class job for non-college educated women.
In 1995, Ravi and I retired to a city with three major universities and I used their libraries while writing Tales of Mogadiscio. By 2012, at 82 years old, driving to the libraries became too inconvenient for me to manage. Today, without the internet I would go crazy. We have entered the Information Age, an age of societal change brought on by essentially new technologies and comparable in its magnitude to that of the Agricultural Revolution, the Neolithic, some 12,000 years ago, and the Industrial Revolution, from the late 1700s to the mid-1800s, the age when the steam engine expanded our sources of energy beyond human, animal, water and wind. In between were the Bronze Age and cities, when metal tools replaced stone tools, and the Iron Age, when a stronger metal smelted from a more widely available ore came into use.
Each of the Revolutions and Ages resulted from new technologies for producing more food more efficiently, producing more surplus, allowing more people to survive and freeing more of them to produce more goods, manage larger and denser societies, be creative and advance the culture. Of course, the individuals freed to participate in these more complex societal activities were, for better or for worse, male. Despite profound technological, social, and cultural change, women continued in their primordial narrow range of roles. They had babies, raised children, tended to family needs and participated in public activities if and when doing so supported the roles their male family members were playing outside of family life. Until very recently and in only a few societies, the great historical revolutions, agriculture and the civilizations, have not favored women. Women fared far better in hunter-gatherer societies, the sort we lived and evolved in for over tens of thousands of years. The average woman had better health, a longer life expectancy and certainly a higher social status in a hunter-gatherer band than in the Neolithic or any other form of society that followed.
I discovered this reassessment of the original form of human societies when returning to one of my favorite books, a history of what we humans were as hunters-gatherers for tens of thousands of years, of how and why and where agriculture began and how and where our world civilizations developed. The book is Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies, published in 1997, by Jared Diamond, professor of geography and biology. It is encyclopedic in range, brilliant in its basic thesis and fascinating in detailed expositions based on scientific evidence. Additionally, Diamond being a great storyteller, it’s a good read, but written in modules, so I take it in stages, skipping sections and returning to them when some relevant question or idea particularly interests me. A readable summary and discussion of Guns, Germs, and Steel is here.
In 2005, the National Geographic Society made a documentary film based on the book. Episode One is available on-line, here. It is about the hunter-gatherer society Diamond lived with. Episode two is here. It is about the Spanish conquest of the Peruvian civilization, informative, enlightening and beautifully photographs but not within my concerns at the moment. Outlines and explanations of the two documentary films are here and here.
Here for an engaging and informative interview with Jared Diamond.
Diamond’s passion for studying birds in all their variety lead him into Papua New Guinea and living in the jungle with the Kaulong, a hunter-gatherer band-level people who knew the environment. He soon realized that as individuals they were essentially no different from people in his own society, obviously equally intelligent and certainly more resourceful. The question then arose of why they are still hunter-gatherers and why his society is more complex, or as Yali, a man in the local government asked him: “Why is it you white people developed so much cargo, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”
Diamond decided to find out why, to discover the causes of societal differences. He begins his book with a history of Homo sapiens hunter-gatherers and why some invented agriculture and others did not, moves on to why some societies with a Neolithic village level of technology, economy, social organization or a Bronze Age/urban level of complexity continued to develop and others ceased changing or went into decline. He argues that the gaps in power and technology between human societies originate primarily in environmental differences, which are amplified by various positive feedback loops. He views Europe, Asia and the Mediterranean area as one continuous landmass with environmental conditions that gave it a number of advantages over other areas of the world and that advances there, such as written languages and dominance in trade, occurred through the influence of geography on societies and cultures.
In accounts of his New Guinea hunters-gatherers, a band-level society of about thirty persons, he covers where and in what context a woman gives birth, how a child is weaned and how children are raised, but mostly he writes of the men’s activities.
I recently watched a television program on the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer people living today in the vast grassland area of Tanzania’s Rift Valley, on land not yet taken over by other people for raising cattle or farming. They are the indigenous people, and except for using steel knives instead of stone tools and wearing clothing, they live much as did their ancestors.
Seeing them took me back to the 1960s when I taught Anthropology 101 and showed my students John Marshall’s 1957 documentary film, The Hunters, of the Kalahari Bushmen, the San people in South Africa. I remember the scenes of San men shooting a giraffe with a poisoned arrow and tracking it down as the poison took effect, then the activities that followed as everyone in the band shared in the eating and celebrating.
The TV program on the Hadza began with a journalist entering their camp with her interpreter, a young man, introducing her to a group of men who were sitting under a tree, doing men’s things, such as making arrows for the hunt, and talking. Diamond and other observers of hunter-gatherer people remark on their continual talking, comparing notes, being social. The journalist chatted with the men, interviewed them and after some time asked, “Where are the women?” They were, of course, taking care of children and out gathering food, picking berries and fruit and using the digging stick to bring up tubers, the band’s basic food. Men hunt and women gather. Both activities require skill and knowledge of the environment, but the men’s side of the culture is more dramatic, less time-consuming, more fun to watch and more likely to be studied and recorded. In this simple band level society there is no social hierarchy; all are equal, but men dominate. For the woman, from her first menstruation until menopause she is likely to be either pregnant or lactating while also caring for a child, and she stays separated from others when and if she ever menstruates. My own pregnancies and having babies (and menstruation) taught me why women are less mobile, mostly do the work compatible with childcare. Besides, men are bigger and stronger. In a very readable account of the Hadza society Michael Finkel wrote “Gender roles are distinct, but for women there is none of the forced subservience knit into many other cultures. … women are frequently the ones who initiate a breakup—woe to the man who proves himself an incompetent hunter or treats his wife poorly. … some of the loudest, brashest members were women. …”
Here for a 7 minute video and here for photos, all of men.
In 1987, after having lived in the New Guinea forest with his friends, Diamond wrote for Discover Magazine a brief, widely read article in which he called the adoption of agriculture “the worst mistake in human history,” a mistake from which we have never recovered. Humans as hunter-gatherers, he wrote, living in bands of around thirty individuals, were more successful, as measured by increase in population and territory, than any other animal ever, but agriculture, the Neolithic Revolution, was the beginning of our taking over the earth.” — through our continual, accelerating population growth. Archeological evidence shows that band level people had more leisure, were healthier and longer lived than people growing their food and living in villages. Diamond notes that circumstances for women changed with settled village living, and not for the better.
The Neolithic entailed making new sorts of stone tools, growing food that could be stored, domesticating animals, building substantial housing, living in settled village communities of a hundred or more households, making pottery, weaving cloth. In a hunter-gatherer mode of life a woman can manage only a carrying baby and a walking child; pregnancies and births were/are spaced (lactating suppressing ovulation, abstinence and infanticide. A child is not quite human until it proves likely to live and is therefore given a name.) Settled village life made it possible for a woman to have a baby every two years and for children to have a better chance of survival into adulthood. In band level society population increased; with agriculture, the rate of increase increased. The larger community needs a more complex social organization. In the hunter-gatherer band everyone was/is equal (although Diamond does mention that a girl new-born is more likely than a boy new-born to be put to death). In the settled village community one man, a chieftain, from a particular family or lineage ranked above other individuals and families/lineages and became the center of social organization. As the population increased, villages split, sending families out to establish new villages and the founding family usually held a special, often religious role in that village as it grew in population. The number of villages increased and they became a tribal unit. A tribal chieftain could organize men and take military action against other villages/tribes to take for themselves the others’ food/produce and/or to expand into their territory.
During the Bronze Age and onwards, technological innovation continued, societies grew in size and cultures became more complex and diverse, social/political power concentrated in elites who could control and tax the peasantry, craftsmen and traders. All this happened for men. The lives of women remained much the same. They had babies, raised children, tended to family needs and participated in public activities primarily through their family or lineage roles.
Not all women were pleased with their limitations. The Queen of Sweden and Norway, wife of King Charles XIII and II, known for her beauty and vividness, kept a diary, 1738 – 1788. Since she either miscarried or her children died soon after birth, she was not absorbed in the usual woman’s occupation. She wrote in her diary, “You have to admit, my dear friend, that woman is truly an unhappy creature: while men have their complete freedom, she is always burdened by prejudice and circumstance; you may say that men also have that hindrance, but it is not in equal degree. I am convinced that most women would ask for nothing more than to be transformed to men to escape the unhappy bondage and enjoy their full freedom.”
In my comments here on the Cyrano de Bergerac movies I include Roxane’s words as written by the playwright Edmond Rostand, 1897. Cyrano and Christian moon over Roxane but that does not change her status. She will have to marry some man or be a nun. All she asks for, most eloquently, is some say in her fate. Rostand’s wife, Rosemonde-Étienette Gérard, was a poet and playwright, and it shows.
In my 1970 study of a traditional town in Central Turkey, I decided to record and call attention to the unrecognized, unappreciated women’s contribution to the town economy. It is here in a three-part essay – “Surviving the Patriarch” – Part I is on middle-class Ankara, Part II on women’s work and the traditional family, Part III on the women’s day in the hamam.
As a girl growing up I was certainly aware of my lower status as female but had no mother to enculturate me into the attitudes and behaviors expected of a woman or how to value being female. It was evident to me that my father wanted a son. No one I knew ever questioned standard male/female roles. Everyone accepted that a woman hold a job after high school, then quit it to become a housewife when she married. In the 1940s and ‘50s I heard both middle-class White women and a middle-class Mexican-American woman say they liked having a man dominate them; it made them feel feminine and loved. Which puzzled me. I wonder how many middle-class women today think or feel that way. As a girl I always had a boyfriend, and more than most girls, friends who were boys, always as equals, or so I believed. The rule for girls, a rule respected by nice boys for the sort of girls they might marry, was no sex before marriage, so by teenage we had lots of what was called “necking,” or “petting” but no genital contact.
In 1951, I read, in English translation, the 1949 book The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. Given my educational background, most of it went over my head but I did remember Beauvoir asking, “What is woman?” She argues that man is considered the default, while woman is considered “The Other … Thus humanity is male and man defines woman as not herself but as relative to him.” She stated what I knew to be true.
In 1960, The Pill came onto the American market. The first reliable, convenient and discreet contraceptive. For the first time in human history a woman could easily, dependably decide if and when she would become pregnant. It was the beginning of a slowly growing revolutionary force.
In my early blog posts I wrote of why, in 1953, not yet 23, I married Ravi. He and I went on to graduate school together. I had two unplanned pregnancies, and as much as I loved my babies, always feared having another. Then the Pill arrived. It transformed my life, and Ravi’s. I had been using the diaphram as our contraceptive. If there had been a third pregnancy and baby, I could not have continued in school, could not have done research or written my M.A. thesis. We could not have lived twice in Somalia as a family. I could not have taught even part-time as a Lecturer in a university. Ravi could not have accepted the position that took him and us to Turkey and eventually to Paris. Another baby, maybe two, would have meant spending my life managing our family on a professor’s modest salary. And Ravi did not want to spend his life as a professor. The Pill saved us. I did not have the academic career I dreamed of, but I did all right.
Other young faculty wives in the 1960s were reading Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. The first chapter of the book concludes by declaring “We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: ‘I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.
In 1957, American women had an average of 3.7 children. Catholic women had an average of 4.5 children. Those numbers began to fall immediately after the introduction of the pill. Today, American women have an average of 1.9 children, an all-time low.
All is not ideal. The rate of unintended pregnancies in the U.S. is higher than the world average, and much higher than that in other industrialized nations. Almost half (49%) of U.S. pregnancies are unintended, more than 3 million per year. In 2001, of the 800,000 teen pregnancies per year, over 80% were unintended.
Jonathan Eig tells the history of The Pill in his 2004 book The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution. The four people who created this revolution were: Margaret Sanger, who believed that women could not enjoy sex or freedom until they could control when and whether they got pregnant; scientist Gregory Pincus, who was fired from Harvard for experimenting with in-vitro fertilization and bragging about it to the mainstream press; John Rock, who was a Catholic OB-GYN and worked with Pincus to conduct tests of the pill on women; and Katharine McCormick, who funded much of the research. Women’s control over when and how many children they have is indeed revolutionary.
I suppose my form of feminism is a concern for how and when a woman becomes a mother. Nothing is more important than being a mother but one must also participate in society as a full individual. How does one manage that? In 1972, I returned to graduate school at the U. of Chicago into a specialty for the management of family planning programs, followed by the MBA in hospital/healthcare management. All but one of my consultancies were on health care programs but family planning and population concerns were always with me.
On the broader population concerns, demographers have noted the Demographic transition. In the 1800s in Western European advanced industrial societies, urban middle-class families were already having fewer children, even without effective contraception. Poor women still lacked control of when they got pregnant and upper class families could afford as many children as came naturally, Overall, the fertility rate, roughly the number of births per woman, declined. Nevertheless, since the number of young women in the population was still high and the death rate was decreasing, the population continued to increase.
I remember the women I knew while doing sociological research. In the 1950s it was my friend in the Mexican-American community who was having a baby every two years. In Somalia it was the woman who scolded me for having only two children. What would I do, she asked, when they died, as her children had died? And Savamma, the poor woman in a South Indian town where I was doing a study and my failed attempt to get her into proper care for an abortion. And I think of the poor women in so many countries and refugee camps who do not have contraceptive services available.
The empowerment of women. And the changed circumstance for the family and children. And the complexities for nations and women in every country everywhere, numerous beyond my even listing them. I discussed The Intern, A Movie for Our Time here. Robert de Niro is great. The situation of the young woman and her husband would have been unimaginable a decade or two earlier.
On another aspect of controlling the timing and number of births — I do believe the greatest threat to the earth’s environment is overpopulation. That next.
Wow Iris this is one amazing blog. I will have to re read it several times over but so much of it resonated with my life experience. I love Diamond’s work. The computer – I did my dissertation on an Apple in 1981 and it had only 48k – I believe a calculator has more memory nowadays! The pill was definitely huge giving us so many more possibilities. I do wanted to have an academic career but well, it didn’t happen. I agree overpopulation is perhaps the biggest problem and as I write I wonder too about people’s attachments to hard objects, basically the smart phone, computers etc. I am concerned that the objects interfere with better interpersonal skills. time will tell. I look forward to your next post. They are gems.
Nancy, I’m always grateful for your response. This took me a long time to write but behind my hesitations is a question I’ll put to you, the psychoanalyst. Can we know what is true, basic human nature? Even the hunter-gatherer societies have some cultural differences, not many but some. I’ll return to this, but do think about it for me. Then I’ll tell you what I think.
Iris, You describe so well some of my life and that of my mother. I was born in 1965 to a woman who was 18 and on her way to university until an unplanned pregnancy derailed her life. She went back later and got her degree (first person in her family to go to college). But I remember all the pressure on her to stop working and stay home. All the childcare responsibilities were hers and on top of that she held a full time staff position at a university.. When she divorced and married again they chose not to have more children; four (2 each) they said) was enough.
When I left the US for France I was not expecting to find myself going back in time. My French mother-in-law was adamantly opposed to me working while my children were still at home. Looking for work was quite an adventure since at that time employers wanted marital status and children on the CVs. I was refused a raise at one French company because (they said) I was so fortunate to have been promoted at all given that I had children at home and my husband worked. Happily my spouse did not agree with his mother and we shared the childcare responsibilities.
Human nature. That’s a question I have asked many MANY times as I have gone from the US to France to Japan. Is there a “me” that does not change from one culture to the next?