Prehistory of Patriarchy: Why do Women Weave and Cook?

Like many teachers, I wrestle with how to help students make sense of the near-omnipresence of patriarchy throughout history.  Even as I try to help students make sense of that fact, I continue to try to make sense of it myself.  I would greatly value any insights people may have when it comes to the history of male dominance, and how to teach it.

I hope this following piece I put together contributes a meaningful drop to that bucket.  I wrote it using information from Elizabeth Wayland Barber's wonderful book Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years.  I think it helps to make sense of patriarchy in a prehistorical setting - and may also complicate the notion of patriarchy at that stage in human history.  I would cherish resources that present solid discussions of patriarchy at different stages in history.      

Why did Women Weave and Cook?

In prehistorical times, all over the world, it was usually the mans job to hunt and perform other dangerous tasks, such as practicing metallurgy.  Many people assume this is because men are faster and stronger.  While it is true that male and female bodies differ in important ways, women can hunt and perform other dangerous tasks quite well.  If we look around us, we can observe with our own eyes that although the fastest and strongest people in the world are men, there are many women who are faster and stronger than most men.  Very few men on this planet can outrun the fastest women or out-lift the strongest.  Why haven't fast, strong women been given the role of performing dangerous tasks throughout history?  Why haven't men who are less fast and strong been given roles such as weaving and cooking? 

The answer doesn’t have to do with one genders body being tougher than the other.  It has to do with raising children.  Before modern times, most women in the world breastfed their children for two years, and often three, which is far longer than we do today.  Women had to do types of work that allowed them to care for their children at the same time.

Scholar Elizabeth Wayland Barber, in her book Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years, describes four things that most women’s work had in common, all across the globe:
 

1)  Women’s work usually doesn’t require focused concentration over long periods of time.  Imagine that you’re out hunting. You would have to stay very still and quiet for a long time.  You couldn’t do this with children.  They might not stay quiet.  And if they needed help you would have to break your concentration.   

2)  Women’s work can be easily interrupted and easily resumed. This is true for cooking and sewing, but not for hunting or other dangerous tasks.

3)  Women’s work does not place children in danger.  This is why men would do work like casting melted metal into weapons and farm tools.  Notice that this kind of metal work is also not interruptible and requires a great deal of focus! 

4)  Women’s work usually does not require moving far from home.  This not only means that women did not hunt, it also means that women did not usually trade. 

These four features of women’s work were true all over the globe before civilizations, but also after.  Once civilization started, what kinds of work could women do, and what could they not do based on these four points?  How might women's roles in the world be limited by these four?  Do you consider some of them more limiting than others?  

Thoughts on Religious Literacy/Illiteracy

I’ve recently been searching for good scholarship on how to help secondary school students explore and understand religion.  The on-line journal World History Connected has a volume dedicated to the subject.  In the first article, Overcoming Religious Illiteracy, Dianne L. Moore, of the Harvard Divinity School, discusses what religious illiteracy is, why it is a worldwide phenomena – including within the field of education – and what can be done about it.  In short, teachers need better support when it comes to understanding religion, so they can help students understand the subject rather than passing on their own illiteracy. Moore describes this illiteracy as existing in five primary forms: the points below are taken directly from her article:

1) Religious traditions are often represented inaccurately by individuals who define themselves as "religious" as well as those who self-define as "non-religious." For those who define themselves as "religious," this inaccuracy often manifests itself in relationship to their own traditions as well as the faith traditions of others.

2) Religious traditions are often represented as internally uniform and static as opposed to diverse and evolving.

3) Religion is deeply and nearly exclusively equated with sectarianism in ways that render the study of religion a difficult concept to grasp and apply.

4) Practitioners of a given religious tradition are assumed to be the best sources of information about the tradition and are often looked to formally or informally as "experts." This fails to recognize the distinction between an academic study of religion and the devotional expression of a particular religious worldview.

5) In some contexts, religion is interpreted as a "private" affair distinct from the secular "public" sphere of political, economic and cultural life.

Of these five points, number two jumps out at me more than the others: if “religious traditions are often represented as internally uniform and static”, they are also being presented in an ahistorical light – which is exactly what I have so often felt while looking at curricula or discussing religion with teachers.  Just a few weeks back, I was trying to find curricula that did justice to the depth and beauty of ancient Egyptian religion.  I felt like everything I found portrayed Egyptians as all believing the same thing – with the exception Akhenaton, Egyptian religion apparently stayed the same for thousands of years and all Egyptians apparently believed the same thing.  Egyptians believed that when you died, the gods weighed your heart before your soul could cross over to the afterworld, and that these gods for some reason were composite man-animals, and that this one god Osiris was killed by Seth but then his wife found him etc.   

Statements like “Egyptians believed…” “Persians believed…” or “Christians/Catholics/ Protestants believe” are already setting the speaker up to say something ahistorical.  I hope to develop that habit of saying, "many ancient Persians believed..." or "some Jewish people thought this, but others disagreed". Students should know the Osiris myth, as well as other foundational stories.  But they should also learn, for example, that the Osiris myth changed over time as Egyptian society changed, and how and why it did so: did religion change after a major invasion?  After certain cultural exchanges?  What is our evidence?  Did the changes (surely!) involve debates and multiple perspectives?  Did the changes involve some people having power and others not?  By exploring such questions, students can learn to analyze religion in a way that is highly relevant today, even if the religion faded long ago.

To quote Moore: 

Which perspectives are politically and socially prominent and why? Which are marginalized or silenced and why? Regarding religion, why are some theological interpretations more prominent than others in relationship to particular issues in particular social/historical contexts? (E.g., what are the factors that led to the Taliban's rise to power in Afghanistan and why did their interpretation of the role of women in Islam, for example, gain social legitimacy over other competing claims within the tradition itself?)

Moore hones in on the fact that religious literacy is one of the best ways to combat religious prejudice.  While it is not the subject of her paper, teaching religious literacy is, for me, also about helping students explore the profound thoughts and feelings of humanity.  As a history teacher I would hope to help students, via reflecting on history, also reflect on their own spiritual thoughts, feelings, and questions.  

Grain, state power, and peasant resistance

The standard narrative about grain production is that it is an immense step forward for humankind that allowed for civilization to take place.  We get the impression that there are so many benefits to grain cultivation that people would be crazy not to grow grain, in large quantities, once they knew how to.  And yet, it has been the case that many people around the world actively resisted doing this! 

As I first learned in Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, while grain is easy to store, this also makes it quite easy to steal, en masse.  The bandits in the movie had a practice of stealing as much as they could from the farmers while allowing them to be productive.  In the movie the farmers have a practice of hiding their grain.  Scott discusses how farmers across the world often bury their grain to keep it out of the hands of bandits, tax collectors, and armies.  He offers us some interesting facts that may give a twist to how we consider teaching the importance of grain for civilization: 

1) Because grain is less perishable than fruits and vegetables, it can be stored and used in military marches.

2) Military campaigns have typically been seasonal, planned to avoid the rains, and often in conjunction with the ripening of crops so armies could renew their food supply along the way.  In the Near East, China, and Southeast Asia - and I imagine in other areas as well - peasants with geographically accessible fields of grain would not be surprised to find an army stopping by once the harvest was over. 

3) In Scott's terms, grain is legible: fields of grain cannot be hidden, so the state knows exactly how much is being grown, knows when it ripens, when it will be harvested, and when it can be collected.

4) Grain can easily be destroyed: an effective form of punishment. 

5) Populations that grow grain are not mobile, and easy to keep track of.

6) It is easy to calculate the yield of a field of grain, meaning that a state can predict and plan for grain taxes.  When farmers produced less than the state predicted, they would typically not be cut a break.  This is true especially because from the states point of view, farmers have every reason to lie about their yield.  

All of these factors make grain an efficient crop for the state.  They also make life rather difficult for those who grow grain, and thus, many people have avoided the production of grain.  Root crops in particular are strategic in their illegibility to the state: only the community knows how much food is being grown.  Not only this, root crops can stay underground for a long time – they can be picked as needed by a community, meaning they are not at risk of being stolen en masse as is the case with sacks of grain.  In conjunction with this, many peoples have also chosen to live far from state centers, or in geographically inaccessible areas: the choice to be "uncivilized".    

   

A reflection on how we frame civilization

I recently began reading the work of James C. Scott, a political anthropologist who does a wonderful job at portraying the ingenuity and intelligence of peasants, especially as embodied through subtle acts of resistance to attempts at domination.  Scott's work is forcing me to reconsider many essential features of world civilizations, including the roles played by writing systems and grain cultivation.  As such, I hope to spend the next month or so reading his work and blogging their relevance to world history teachers.

James C. Scott discussing The Art of Not Being Governed 

In the first chapter of The Art of Not Being Governed, Scott points out that ancient civilizations were “in demographic terms, insignificant.  They occupied a miniscule portion of the world’s landscape… …their mark on the landscape and its people’s is relatively trivial when compared to their over-sized place in the history books.”  Perhaps this is strongly worded - I would need to look further into it.  Regardless, he asks us to consider the fact that vast numbers of people have lived outside of civilizations - even when they exist within an empires territory - and to consider exactly how effected people across the vast expanse of any empire actually were by that empire.  He asks us to reflect on why (or at least on if) history has tended to be about states, rather than about peoples. 

As a teacher, such considerations become reconsiderations of how I frame civilization for my students: if I show them a map of Mesopotamia, am I giving them the impression that all people living within that area are participating in the state?  Certainly peoples close to the cities did, but once you get a hundred miles away from the city walls, this may no longer be the case.  There are lots of people living farther out who may trade with various cities and states, but not be assimilated into them.  As Scott emphasizes, mass amounts of people lived in such a way as to actively avoid the state, its taxes, its conscriptions, and its forced labor practices. 

Text-books and teachers often point out that early civilizations grew up around rivers: the Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile, the Indus, the Yangtze and the Yellow.  I think it’s important to help students understand that the vast majority of human beings did not live along these rivers, and that many that did still did not participate in the civilizations that grew up around them.  Many lived, by choice, in regions that made it difficult for states to gain access to them, such as in mountainous or marshy areas.

Civilization tends to be portrayed as a great leap forward.  And while I don’t want to say that it’s not, I think it is important not to oversimplify things and portray it as a beacon of light.  The rise of civilization is fraught with complex moral problems for students to explore.  Scott reminds us that slavery is built into the foundations of civilization: “Some subjects were no doubt attracted to the possibilities for trade, wealth, and status available at the court centers, while others, almost certainly the majority, were captives and slaves seized in warfare or purchased from slave raiders.”   There is a tension at the foundation of civilization that we still experience today: the tension between specialized work and the knowledge and commodities it produces, and unfair, often horrific labor practices that untold numbers of people desperately wishes they could escape. What does progress mean in this context? 

Another question regarding the notion of progress is how we portray “civilized” vs. “uncivilized”.  While most teachers, I hope, don't use those terms anymore, they are often implicit in the way civilization is discussed.  Are we automatically setting up the notion that written systems are superior to oral ones?  That large fields of grain are superior to numerous small patches of root vegetables grown in a forest?  Most of us are still taught, and perhaps have an unconscious understanding that one is better than the other.  What I hope to do by examining Scotts work in coming months is to explore the other side: the benefits and utility of oral language and other features of traditional life that civilization is lauded as having transcended.