Gender in History

Paleolithic Society and Spirituality

Small bands of humans – 20 or 30 people was a standard size for foragers in harsh environments – were scattered across broad areas, but this did not mean that each group lived in isolation. Their travels in search of food brought them into contact with one another, not simply for talking, celebrating, and feasting, but also for providing opportunities for the exchange of sexual partners, which was essential to group survival. Today we understand that having sexual relations with close relatives is disadvantageous because it creates a greater risk of genetic disorders. Earlier societies did not have knowledge of genetics, but most of them developed rules against sexual relations among immediate family members, and sometimes very complex rules about allowable partners among more distant relatives. Some natural scientists argue that incest taboos have a biological or instinctual basis, while most anthropologists see them as cultural, arising from desires to lessen intergroup rivalries or increase opportunities for alliances with other lineages. Whatever the reasons, people sought mates outside their own band, and bands became linked by bonds of kinship, which in a few places has been traced through the study of bone chemistry and DNA. Mating arrangements varied in their permanence, but many groups seem to have developed a somewhat permanent arrangement whereby a person – more often a woman than a man – left her or his original group and joined the group of a mate, what would later be termed marriage.

Stereotypical representations of Paleolithic people often portray a powerful fur-clad man holding a club and dragging off a (usually attractive) fur-clad woman by her hair, or men going off to hunt while women and children crouch around a fire, waiting for the men to bring back great slabs of meat. Studies of the relative importance of gathering to hunting, women’s participation in hunting, and gender relations among contemporary foraging peoples have led some analysts to turn these stereotypes on their heads. They see Paleolithic bands as egalitarian groups in which the contributions of men and women to survival were recognized and valued, and in which both men and women had equal access to the limited amount of resources held by the group. This may also be a stereotype, overly romanticizing Paleolithic society as a sort of vegetarian commune. Social relations among foragers were not as hierarchical as they were in other types of societies, but many foraging groups from more recent periods had one person who held more power than others, and that person was almost always a man. In fact, anthropologists who study such groups call them “Big Man” societies. This debate about gender relations is often part of larger discussions about whether Paleolithic society – and by implication “human nature” – was primarily peaceful and nurturing or violent and brutal, and whether these qualities are gender-related. (See the later section on the origins of patriarchy for more on this debate.) Like much else about the Paleolithic, sources about gender and about violence are fragmentary and difficult to interpret; there may simply have been a diversity of patterns, as there is among more modern foragers.

Whether peaceful and egalitarian, violent and hierarchical, or somewhere in between, heterosexual relations produced children, who were fed as infants by their mothers or by another woman who had recently given birth. Breast milk was the only food available that infants could easily digest, so mothers nursed their children for several years. Along with providing food for infants, extended nursing brings a side benefit: it suppresses ovulation and thus acts as a contraceptive. Foraging groups needed children to survive, but too many could tax scarce food resources. Many groups may have practiced selective infanticide or abandonment. They may also have exchanged children of different ages with other groups, which further deepened kinship connections between groups. Other than for feeding, children were most likely cared for by other male and female members of the group as well as by their mothers, as they are in modern foraging cultures.

Within each band, and within the larger kin group, individuals had a variety of identities; they were simultaneously fathers, sons, brothers, and mates, or mothers, daughters, sisters, and mates. Each of these identities was relational (parent to child, sibling to sibling, mate to mate), and some of them, especially parent to child, gave one power over others. The interweaving of these relationships and their meaning varied from culture to culture, but one’s status in one relationship affected one’s status in the others, and often changed throughout one’s life. A woman’s situation as daughter or sister in a specific kin group, for example, shaped her relationship with her mate; her becoming a mother often further altered her status vis-à-vis the father of her child or other kin group members. A man’s relationship with his father and his status in the kin group often changed when he took a mate, and in some areas changed again if he became the father of a son. Judging by later ethnographic parallels, how kin groups were defined and understood varied tremendously, but they remained significant power structures for millennia, and in some areas still have influence over major aspects of life, such as an individual’s job or marital partner.

Burials provide evidence of social differentiation and social connections. The people who buried a young adult woman near Bordeaux in southern France about 19,000 years ago, for example, dressed her in clothing, covered her with ochre pigment, and placed her in a container made of stone slabs, along with a few perforated shells, a bead, some tools made of bone and stone, bones of antelope and reindeer, and 71 red deer canine teeth that had holes drilled in them for stringing and may have been on a necklace. Red deer did not live near Bordeaux at this time of worsening climate, so the teeth had most likely been brought there over many years through networks of exchange, perhaps given as gifts in marriages or in trade for other goods. Something about this young woman or her death led those who buried her to decide to include so many valuable grave goods; through this they referenced both her individual identity (and perhaps high social position) and her links to a social network that ranged across time and space.

Bands of foragers may have been exogamous, but as humans spread out over much of the globe, kin groups and larger networks of interrelated people often became isolated from one another, and people mated only within this larger group. Thus local exogamy was accompanied by endogamy at a larger scale, and over many generations humans came to develop differences in physical features, including skin and hair color, eye and body shape, and amount of body hair, although genetically there is less variety among them than among chimpanzees. Language also changed over generations, so that thousands of different languages were eventually spoken. Groups created widely varying cultures and passed them on to their children, further increasing diversity among humans.

Over time, groups of various sizes came to understand themselves as linked by shared kinship and culture, and as different from other groups. Words were devised to describe such groups, which in English include people, ethnic group, tribe, race, and nation. Shared culture included language, religion, foodways, rituals, clothing styles, and many other factors, whose importance in defining membership in the group changed over time (though language was almost always important). Because of extensive intermarriage within the group over many generations, the differences between groups were (and are) sometimes evident in the body, and were (and are) often conceptualized as blood, a substance with deep meaning. Kinship ties included perceived and invented ones, however, as adoption and other methods were devised to bring someone into the group, or traditions developed of descent from a common ancestor. At the heart of all such groups was a conscious common identity, which itself enhanced endogamy as people chose (or were required) to marry within the group. These groups came into being, died out, morphed into other groups, split, combined, lost and gained in significance, and in other ways changed, but their fluidity and the fact that they were constructed through culture as well as genetics does not make them any less real. They came to have enormous significance later in world history, but developed before the invention of writing and appear to have been everywhere.

The burial of the young woman in southern France was a social occasion, and it was also a way to express ideas and beliefs about the material world and perhaps an unseen world beyond. Paleolithic mortuary rituals created social and political messages, and conveyed (and possibly distorted) cultural meaning (as have funerals ever since). They marked membership in a group, which might have been understood to continue after death took one from the realm of the living. Together with paintings and decorated objects, burials suggest that people thought of their world as extending beyond the visible. People, animals, plants, natural occurrences, and other things around them had spirits, an animistic understanding of the spiritual nature and interdependence of all things. The unseen world regularly intervened in the visible world, for good and ill, and the actions of dead ancestors and the spirits could be shaped by living people.

Rock art from around the world and a wide array of ethnographic evidence suggests that ordinary people were thought to learn about the unseen world through dreams and portents, while messages and revelations were also sent more regularly to shamans, spiritually adept people who communicated with or traveled to the unseen world. Shamans created complex rituals through which they sought to ensure the health and prosperity of an individual, family, or group. These included rituals with gender and sexual imagery, and shamans in some places may have constructed a transgender role through which they harnessed power that crossed gender boundaries, just as they crossed the boundary between the seen and unseen world. Many cave paintings show groups of prey or predator animals, and several include a masked human figure usually judged to be a shaman in a gesture or pose assumed to be some sort of ritual. Sometimes the shaman is shown with what looks like a penis, and such figures used to be invariably described as men. More recently the suggestion has been made that these figures may have been gendered male, but could have been a woman wearing a costume, as gender inversions are often part of many types of rituals and performances. Or the figure – and the actual shaman who it may have represented – was understood as a third gender, neither male nor female, or both at the same time. Shamans in many cultures wore masks that gave them added power, and were understood to take on the qualities of the animal, creature, or spirit represented by the mask; transcending boundaries was thus their role.

Interpreting what certain objects that appear to have had ritual purposes might have meant to those who made or possessed them is just as contentious as other aspects of early human history. For example, small stone, ivory, bone, or clay figures of women, often with enlarged breasts, buttocks, and/or stomach, dating from the later Paleolithic period (roughly 33,000–9,000 BCE) have been found in many parts of Europe. These were dubbed “Venus figures” by nineteenth-century archaeologists, who thought they represented Paleolithic standards of female beauty just as the goddess Venus represented classical standards (Figure 3.1). Some scholars have interpreted them, as well as later Neolithic figurines of women, as fertility goddesses, evidence of people’s beliefs in a powerful female deity. Others view them as aids to fertility, carried around by women hoping to have children – or perhaps hoping not to have more. Perhaps they were made by women looking at their own bodies in mid-life, with the rounded form of most women who have given birth, and represent hopes for good health during aging. Or they were sexualized images of women carried around by men, a sort of Paleolithic version of the centerfold in a men’s magazine. Or perhaps they might have represented different things to different people. Small clay figurines of women from Mesoamerica and coastal Ecuador in the second millennium BCE have been similarly interpreted in a range of ways: as fertility emblems, ritual objects, models of sexuality, and aids to pregnancy.

Figure 3.1 Venus of Willendorf, c. 23,000 BCE.

This small limestone figurine of a woman, made about 25,000 years ago, was unearthed at an archaeological site at Willendorf, Austria. Its large breasts and stomach, and the plaited hair that continues across the face, have given rise to many theories, but like all “Venus figures,” who made it and for what purposes are unknown. Wikimedia Commons. Source, Bjørn Christian Tørrissen.

The painted, carved, and otherwise decorated objects and locations from the later Paleolithic may have had ritual purposes, but they are also products of imagination, reason, pride, mischeviousness, and a range of emotions (including boredom). Objects modified in a particular way or by talented individuals – what we might now call “luxuries” or “art” – conveyed status and prestige, which is why they show up in burials, including those of women.

Domestication

Foraging remained the basic way of life for most of human history, and for groups living in extreme environments, such as tundras or deserts, it was the only possible way to survive. In some places, however, the natural environment provided enough food that people could become more settled. About 15,000 years ago, as the earth’s climate entered a warming phase, more parts of the world were able to support sedentary or semi-sedentary groups of foragers. Archaeological sites in many places begin to include storage pits, bins, and other sorts of containers, as well as grindstones. They show evidence that people were intensifying their work to get more food from the surrounding area, preparing a wide range of foods out of hundreds of different ingredients, acquiring more objects, and building more permanent housing.

Sedentism used to be seen as a result of the plant and animal domestication that scholars use to separate the Neolithic from the Paleolithic, but in many places it preceded intentional crop-raising by thousands of years, so the primary line of causation runs the other way: people began to raise crops because they were living in permanent communities. Thus people were “domesticated” before plants and animals were. They developed socioeconomic and sociopolitical structures for village life, such as ways to handle disputes or to make decisions about community resources.

Sedentary villages grew first in an area archaeologists call the Fertile Crescent, which runs from present-day Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan north to Turkey and then south to the Iran–Iraq border. Here beginning about 10,000 BCE, people built houses and larger buildings, and used digging sticks, hoes, and other tools to gather wild wheat, barley, and legumes, along with flax, with which they made linen cloth. The population grew, but when they needed more food, instead of moving to a new area – the solution that foragers relied on when faced with the problem of food scarcity – people chose to stay put, with the physical and social structures of the sedentary villages they had built. They developed a different way to increase the food supply to keep up with population growth – plant and animal domestication – thus beginning cycles of expanding population and intensification of land use that have continued to today. They saved some seeds for planting, selecting certain ones in order to get crops that had favorable characteristics, such as larger edible parts or kernels clustered together that ripened all at one time and did not just fall on the ground, qualities that made harvesting more efficient. Through this human intervention, certain crops became domesticated, modified by selective breeding so as to serve human needs.

A similar process – first sedentism, then domestication – happened elsewhere as well. By about 8000 BCE, people were growing sorghum and millet in parts of the Nile River Valley, and perhaps yams in western Africa. By about 7000 BCE, they were growing domesticated rice, millet, and legumes in China, yams and taro in Papua New Guinea, and perhaps squash in Mesoamerica. Crop-raising spread out from areas in which it was first developed, and slowly larger and larger parts of Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas became home to farming villages. Domesticated foods often included cereals or other crops that could be ground and cooked into a mush soft enough for babies to eat. This mush – for which there is widespread archaeological evidence – allowed women to stop nursing their children at a younger age. By doing this, women lost the contraceptive effects of breastfeeding, and children were born at more frequent intervals, which contributed to population growth.

A field of planted and weeded crops yields 10 to 100 times as much food – measured in calories – as the same area of naturally occurring plants, a benefit that would have been evident to early crop-planters. It also requires more labor, however, which was provided both by the greater number of people in the community and by those people working longer hours. In contrast to the 20 hours a week foragers spent on obtaining food, farming peoples were often in the fields from dawn to dusk, particularly during planting and harvest time, but also during the rest of the growing year because weeding was a constant task. Farming increased the division of labor within communities, as families and households became increasingly interdependent, trading food products for other commodities or services.

At roughly the same time as plant domestication, certain animals were domesticated in parts of the world where they occurred naturally, and then, like crops, taken elsewhere. Dogs were the first, then sheep and goats, and somewhat after this cattle, water buffalo, horses, llamas, and poultry. People learned from observation and experimentation that traits are passed down from generation to generation, and they began to breed animals for qualities they wanted, including larger size, greater strength, better coats, increased milk or egg production, and more even temperaments. Animal domestication shaped human evolution; groups that relied on animal milk and milk products for a significant part of their diet tended to develop the ability to digest milk as adults, while those who did not remained lactose intolerant as adults, the normal condition for mammals.

Where terrain or climate made crop-planting difficult, animal domestication became the primary means of obtaining food; people raised flocks of domesticated sheep, goats, cattle, reindeer, or other grazing animals, a system termed pastoralism. In some areas pastoralism can be relatively sedentary, and so easily combined with crop-raising, while in others flocks need to travel long distances from season to season to obtain enough food, so pastoralists became nomadic, sometimes using horses to travel further. In Eastern and Southern Africa, many groups were pastoralists, with the men typically caring for cattle (the higher-status animals), and the women caring for smaller animals such as goats. In later periods, cattle often formed the bridewealth that husbands presented to their wives’ families on marriage, with fathers and male elders retaining control over young men’s marriages through their control of the cattle. (The introduction of wage labor with colonialism would later upset this control as then the young men could buy cattle for bridewealth or present this in some other form.)

Nowhere do archaeological remains alone answer the question of who within any group first began to cultivate crops, but the fact that, among many foragers, women have been primarily responsible for gathering and processing plant products suggests that they may also have been the first to plant seeds in the ground. In many parts of the world, crops continued to be planted with hoes and digging sticks for millennia, and crop-raising remained primarily women’s work, while men hunted or later raised animals. In these places, which include large parts of North America and Africa, women appear to have retained some control of the crops they planted, sharing them with group members or giving them as gifts. They developed means of storing and transporting the harvested seeds, including skin bags, carved wooden vessels, baskets, and pottery. Women in these areas occasionally inherited land or the rights to farm certain pieces of land directly, or boys inherited land through their mother’s brothers, both of which are termed matrilineal systems of inheritance. This division of labor and these systems of inheritance were often misunderstood by colonial conquerors, who then tried to enforce their own division of labor. In North America and Africa, for example, Europeans assumed men were the primary agricultural producers, and developed various plans to make indigenous men better farmers; they often introduced patrilineal inheritance laws at the same time, through which land passed from father to son. Such schemes generally failed to convince men that they should farm, though male elites generally welcomed patrilineal inheritance systems.

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1

Joan Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review, 91:5 (1986), 1053–75; citation 1067.

2

In Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983), pp. 264–74; citation 264.

3

Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era (New York: Norton, 2015), p. 39.

4

Translated and quoted in Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, 960–1665 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), p. 45.

5

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (London: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 293.

6

Nancy Ward (Nanye’hi), “Speech to the U.S. Treaty Commissioners,” in Lisa L. Moore, Joanna Brooks, and Caroline Wigginton, eds., Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 180.