The Mother of All Questions Page 11
There was even a 1966 conference at the University of Chicago titled “Man the Hunter” that resulted in a book of that title. In a Google search of the online version of the book, the word woman first occurs on page 74, in this sentence: “The non-moving members are less able-bodied persons or the aged, women, and children.” The word gatherer is similarly rare, though the book is supposed to be about hunter-gatherers. All this would be only a historical curiosity were it not that the stories stuck. People from the mainstream to our own era’s misogynist fringe peddle them as facts about who we used to be, and, too often, who we are now.
I learned something about this bizarre fantasy of evolutionary biology at the end of the nineties, while writing a book about the history of walking. I came across the work of anatomist C. Owen Lovejoy, who had been writing about the evolution of human walking in academic journals for over a decade. He deployed a more technically complex version of Morris’s tale about pair-bonds: “Bipedality figured in this new reproductive scheme because by freeing the hands it made it possible for the male to carry food gathered far from his mate.” The walking thing and the hand thing were for the guys. Women stayed home, dependent.
A much-cited essay Lovejoy published in 1981, “The Origin of Man,” actually has a section called “The Nuclear Family,” in which he posits that Man the Hunter—who is more monogamous than Morris’s hunter with “his females”—brought home meat for his faithful ladyfriend and their children, not the whole group. This seems dubious when you’re talking about a big dead animal in warm weather or anything hunted in the company of friends. Wouldn’t you be more likely to share your kill and maybe have a community feast? In any case, Lovejoy argues that men provided and women waited. Lovejoy theorized about the “lowered mobility rate of females.” In summary: “The nuclear family and human sexual behavior may have their ultimate origin long before the dawn of the Pleistocene.”
There is ample evidence to contradict the Man the Hunter story. In the 1950s, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas lived with the people of the Kalahari, sometimes known as the San. They are thought to have maintained, until recently, a more ancient way of life than almost anyone else on earth. Morris’s claim about the “extremely long periods of dependency of the young” that kept the females “almost perpetually confined to the home base” is patently untrue in the case of the San, as Thomas learned.
The whole group moved regularly, and families could also move independently of the group. The women Thomas met went out and gathered food almost daily. Children who were too large to be carried and too small to keep up were often tended by someone staying at camp while their mothers roamed. Thomas makes clear that hunting and gathering are not completely separate activities and speaks of “slow game—the tortoises, snakes, snails, and baby birds that are often found by people who are gathering.”
Not only were men not the sole providers of food, they weren’t even the sole providers of meat. Which is not to say that men didn’t bring home meat or that they weren’t important. It’s just that everyone brought home food, even kids. It was all important. Thomas mentions an exceptional hunter, an athlete who could run down an eland. One day he killed three big animals. He stayed with his carcasses while his wife and her mother recruited others to help carry the meat back to camp. He was truly a great hunter, but he relied on highly mobile women and his extended community for help with his bounty. Thomas notes that “meat united people. A meal of life-giving meat was meant for all.” San males didn’t hunt as the heads of nuclear families following an individualist way of life; they hunted as part of a community.
The Inuit also shared meat, according to Peter Freuchen, a writer and explorer who lived among them for decades early in the twentieth century. He tells a story about how his Inuit wife furiously mocked a woman who was stingy in sharing a seal her husband had killed. Sharing was etiquette as well as survival. Even among the Inuit, some of the most carnivorous people on earth, women sometimes accompanied men on long hunting trips, because the hunters could die of cold in the subzero weather if their clothing was damaged. Women took care of their food, clothing, and shelter.
The familiar “just-so” stories about male independence also misrepresent the family dynamics of settled farmers and artisanal, industrial, and white-collar workers. Most farmers worked at home—an extended home with fields and orchards—and their families often worked alongside them. The wives and kids of craftsmen often participated in the work in various ways. During the Industrial Revolution, working-class women and children toiled in factories and sweatshops, as they do in the factories of Guatemala and China and Bangladesh today.
Everyone contributes. You could call women dependent, but only if you were willing to call men the same thing. Dependency isn’t a very helpful measure; interdependency might be better. Useless and dependent isn’t what most women have been, and it isn’t what most women are now. Stories about Man the Hunter that contain the notion that men are givers and women are takers, that men work and women are idle, are nothing more than justifications of present-day political positions. A perfect specimen of a men’s-rights ranter wrote on social media earlier this year that women have not evolved at all
because women never worked. . . . And now we have ended up with this cancerous cesspool of female degeneration we all suffer from, day in day out. We need to put women into the world all alone and without help and let them die or survive without any sort of help or interference, so they can catch up on evolution and reach the state of being human too.
His fury is based on a fiction, which would be ridiculous if it were not the extreme form of a widely shared belief, one that paints a fairly sad picture of the human species, with both men and women inhabiting fixed and alienated roles.
There is an interesting contradiction built into this picture: it suggests, on the one hand, that women never worked, and, on the other, that bearing and raising children was such overwhelming work that women were housebound—or cavebound, or treebound. It’s as if all women literally had their hands full of babies at all times, like Madonnas in paintings, when it is more likely that those who did become mothers spent concentrated time with babies and toddlers for a while but not forever, and that they led unparalyzed lives before, after, and quite possibly during this phase of motherhood.
Stories that promote the idea of the patriarchal nuclear family have little to do with what women have actually done throughout most of history or prehistory. They suggest that the human condition has always resembled what middle-class, married, stay-at-home women were expected to do in the twentieth century. Even Hannah Arendt describes the female condition as something that involved little more than baby production. She was talking about the specifics of classical Athens, where the women of means, the wives and daughters of citizens, were largely confined to the house, which limited their productivity and participation. Athenian men weren’t necessarily producing much, either; food came from the countryside and from far-flung colonies, and most of the manual labor was done by slaves and peasants. Which means that Athenian women continued producing children while the men of the city discontinued producing food. Nevertheless, Arendt writes in The Human Condition, “That individual maintenance should be the task of the man and species survival the task of the woman was obvious, and both of these natural functions, the labor of man to provide nourishment and the labor of the woman in giving birth, were subject to the same urgency of life.”
Arendt apparently couldn’t resist the neat symmetry between “the labor of man” and “the labor of the woman.” But we should. For most of history, housework was much harder than it is now. It involved shoveling coal or chopping wood, stoking fires, pumping water, emptying chamber pots, washing everything by hand, butchering or tending animals, and making bread, thread, fabric, clothes, and much else besides from scratch. There have often been women of leisure, of course. But they were usually married to men of leisure. And their leisure was made possible not by hunter-mates but by servants, many of wh
om were also women.
In any case, leisure was not the primordial human condition, nor is it the condition of most women around the world now. There was a brief era in the Western world when industrialization had made running a household easier and many middle-class women weren’t part of the wage-earning economy. You could look at some of these women as nonproducing consumers, though to do that you’d have to discount the labor involved in raising children and keeping a house and supporting a working spouse. This period lasted several decades, but it didn’t start five million years ago, and it tapered off when declining wages sent many more women into the workforce.
Right now, in the United States, women constitute 47 percent of wage earners; 74 percent of these working women work full time. Throughout much of the industrialized world the numbers are similar or higher. Elsewhere, women are growing food, carrying water and firewood, herding livestock, pounding cassava root, grinding corn by hand.
Patriarchy—meaning both male domination and societies obsessed with patrilineal descent, which requires strict control over female sexuality—has, in many times and places, created many versions of dependent, unproductive women, who are disabled by dress or body modification, restricted to the home, and limited in their access to education, employment, and profession by laws and customs backed by threats of violence. Some misogynists complain that women are immobile burdens, but much misogyny has striven to make women so.
Antiauthoritarian and feminist anthropologists have attempted to upend some of these stories. Elaine Morgan countered the arguments of the Man the Hunter posse with a 1972 book called The Descent of Woman; in 1981, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy wrote a more scientifically solid book, The Woman That Never Evolved, which also proposed alternative theories. Even Marshall Sahlins, who participated in the Man the Hunter conference and contributed to the book of the same name, published Stone Age Economics, a 1972 treatise that argued hunter-gatherers lived lives with an abundance of free time and food.
But there’s an underlying assumption in all these stories: that we are doomed to remain who we were a very long time ago. By that logic you could argue that since we used to eat our food raw, we ought not cook it, or that because we once walked on all fours, this two-legged thing isn’t meant to be. Not long ago human beings lived on almost entirely vegetarian diets in some warm places and on almost entirely carnivorous diets in the Arctic.
We are a highly adaptable species. We live in cities and nomadic bands and nuclear units; we’re polygamous or polyandrous or practice serial monogamy or take vows of celibacy; we marry people of some other gender or the same gender or never marry at all; we raise our biological children or adopt or are devoted aunts and uncles or hate kids; we work at home or in an office or as migrant farmworkers or visiting nurses; we live in societies where gender apartheid is the norm or where everyone mingles or where the idea of gender itself as something binary and oppositional is being rethought.
There are givens in our biology, and there are particularly common patterns in our past. But we are not necessarily who we once were, and who we once were is not necessarily what the “just-so” stories say. The present is not at all like the past recounted in those just-so stories, but neither was the past. We need to stop telling the story about the woman who stayed home, passive and dependent, waiting for her man. She wasn’t sitting around waiting. She was busy. She still is.
The Pigeonholes When the Doves Have Flown
It is not actually possible to say anything, I occasionally notice. Words are general categories that lump together things that are dissimilar in ways that matter; blue is a thousand colors and horse is thoroughbreds and ponies and toys; love means everything and nothing; language is a series of generalizations that sketch out incomplete pictures when they convey anything at all. To use language is to enter into the territory of categories, which are as necessary as they are dangerous.
Categories leak. I was going to write that all categories leak, but there are surely things that can be said of prime numbers or stars that are true without exception. All muskrats are mammals, and all US presidents to date have been men, but so many other categories are complex, containing truth but also contradictions and exceptions to that truth. Even the category men is open to question right now, if not usually when we contemplate our forty-five presidents to date.
Someone recently told me that all Jews support Israel. When I objected, he asked if I’d been to New York lately, convinced that this was a clincher in favor of his argument. I remarked that I had, and had just completed a book about the city. One of its maps is about Jews, or rather about how the category Jew contains all sorts of people who sort of cancel each other out, Zionists and anti-Zionists, gangsters and humanitarians, Harpo Marx and Sandy Koufax and Hannah Arendt and Bernie Madoff and Elena Kagan; the map’s subtitle is “from Emma Goldman to Goldman Sachs,” just in case anyone missed the contradictions within the category. My interlocutor was possessed of the idea that Jews are a homogenous mass with one mind, like sentient halvah or slime mold.
The word discrimination means two contradictory things.Perceptually to discriminate is to distinguish clearly, to perceive in detail; sociopolitically, it’s to refuse to distinguish clearly, to fail to see past the categorical to the particulars and individuals. Racism is a discrimination driven by indiscriminateness or at least by the categorical. Of course this is a categorical statement that contains its opposite. Categories are also useful and necessary to antiracism: subprime mortgage sellers targeted people of color who therefore lost a far higher percentage of their net worth in the 2008 crash; schools, recent studies conclude, often punish Black children more harshly. But these are descriptions of a group’s conditions, not its essence.
The idea that a group is an airtight category whose members all share a mindset, beliefs, eventually culpability, is essential to discrimination. It leads to collective punishment, to the idea that if this woman betrayed you, that one can be savaged; that if some people without homes commit crimes, all unhoused people can and should be punished or cast out. The Supreme Court once found that “distinctions between citizens solely based because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality. For that reason, legislative classification or discrimination based on race alone has often been held to be a denial of equal protection.” That was in the case of Fred Korematsu, who protested the effort to imprison him and West Coast Japanese Americans like him during the Second World War, but the court upheld it despite those fine words. Since then, discrimination has been increasingly made illegal, but habits of mind are not regulated by laws.
Antiracist narratives can also be indiscriminate. Some people now like to assert that the Nineteenth Amendment didn’t give all women the right to vote, because many (but not all) southern Black women—and men—were denied that right through the 1960s. Sometimes that’s phrased as Black women didn’t get the vote until the 1960s, though women in some northern parts of the country got the vote before the Nineteenth Amendment. Black women were voting in, for example, Chicago in 1913, while Wyoming gave women the vote in 1869 (and in an even greater anomaly, women of property, presumably white women, were allowed to vote in New Jersey until 1807).
Technically the Nineteenth Amendment gave all adult women who were citizens the right or rather said that none should be denied it “on account of sex”; it’s more accurate to say that that right was denied in some places—and to note Native Americans who maintained tribal identities didn’t get voting rights until the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act. Are these exceptions big enough to undermine the rule; are the leaks in these categories important to acknowledge? How finely should we parse who got the vote in 1920? On what scale do we sift accuracy?
Paleontologists and evolutionary biologists are sometimes divided into lumpers and splitters—into categories according to whether they tend to read the evidence as indicating a single species with wide variations or distinct and separat
e species. For paleontologists the evidence they have to work with is scant; sometimes it’s contradicted or enhanced by later evidence; even careful study can result in unresolvable questions or contested interpretations. But the judgments we render about each other are often made by avoiding the evidence. Categories become containment systems for some of us. Who we are and what we do is routinely packaged in dismissive ways. All Jews support Israel. All Muslims are jihadis. All lesbians hate men. You wrap up the world in a tidy package, and thinking can stop.
Undiscriminating discrimination also leads to ideas of collective punishment: when you perceive the other as a single organism—Muslims, Jews, Blacks, women, gays, homeless people, lazy poor people—you can strike at any part of that organism. It’s what Dylann Storm Roof, the murderer in that church in Charleston, South Carolina, meant when he shot nine men and women in 2015 and explained that Black people were raping “our women,” without framing the situation as one in which white men—himself in particular at that moment—were murdering Black women and men.
Any individual woman is liable to be treated as a walking referendum on women—are we all emotional, scheming, math-averse?—while men are relatively free of being thus measured. We don’t hear a lot of generalizations about whiteness, and Roof or Charles Manson is not considered a disgrace to his race or gender. Being treated as beyond or outside category may be a kind of privilege, a status as an individual rather than a specimen. It’s to be allowed to define yourself and given room to do so. And certainly the refusal to see patterns is an important part of the discourse or lack thereof in our society, where every mass shooting is a shocking anomaly, even when mass shootings come every few days now.
To be free of discrimination is to be allowed to be an individual assessed on the merits. But this becomes a form of freedom that can allow important data to fall through the cracks. For example, the thing that until very recently was almost never said about modern mass shootings is that almost all of them have been by men, and most of the men have been white. Instead, such incidents are usually framed either as mysterious and terribly surprising, or about mental illness and other specifics that make each shooting unique, like snowflakes.