Despite images of cave men dragging women off
by the hair, it is quite clear that hunting and gathering
societies did not subordinate women systematically. Women's
economic contributions were reflected in a religious culture that
often stressed the female creative principle. This situation
changed as agriculture be- came established, and the trend
occurred everywhere that farming spread. (interestingly,
nonagricultural societies, like the herding peoples in Central
Asia, continued to give women greater voice, which led to some
important culture clashes when they encountered agricultural
civilizations.)
The signs of change abound.
Men did the heaviest agricultural work; Middle Eastern art by
3000 B.C.E. showed
men always responsible for plowing. Because men's relative
economic importance grew, male children were favored and men had
primary rights of property ownership. While religions long
continued to feature gods and goddesses, emphasis on a primary
male creator god, like Marduk in the Middle East or Zeus in
Greece, increased; goddesses became more peripheral. The Jewish
religion, emphasizing a single god, pushed this principle of a
masculine divinity still further. Laws and social habits often
followed suit. By 2000 B.C.E., many Middle Eastern women were
veiled to help ensure that they would remain sexually faithful to
their husbands--who were not placed under any such controls.
The question, of course, is
why this happened. The rise of women's history and new debates
about women's rights today open the gender inequality of the past
to explanation; it no longer seems self-evident. Current
explanations include several components, and it is unlikely that
such a basic shift resulted from one factor alone. Agricultural
societies, needing to defend from attack and not infrequently
seeking to conquer, organized more formal military forces, which
gave new emphasis to male power. The birth rate went up, as
agricultural societies found uses for more labor and also needed
to compensate far higher disease rates; this meant that women
spent more of their lives bearing and caring for children. Men
may have pushed for greater power to compensate for the decline
of the hunt. In the upper classes, at least, establishment of
agricultural property made determination of inheritance more
important: men wanted to know which children were theirs and so
tried to regulate women's sexual behavior. We do not know how
these various causes mixed together, but the result is clear. And
in most agricultural societies, women's inferiority tended to
increase with time, as success prompted more male groups to
demonstrate their status by lording over women.