Questions: (a) Is it right? (b) Does it hit the right notes? Were I female, would I see the shift of the typical woman’s experience from one of eating for two for twenty years (and of having one chance in seven of dying in childbed) to eating for two for four years—and the rise of feminism as the biggest news of 1770-2020? Quite possibly.
You make a lot of good points and cover a lot of ground, but I am having trouble figuring out the driving theme. The bulk of your notes cover the last 200-300 years which have had unusual demographics as the food supply has improved and public health measures have cut mortality. This is actually a good choice, and I would focus even more on it. The story of modern feminism and the story of the scientific and industrial revolutions are intertwined.
I would drop the section with the Yamnaya and their apparent restrictions on the male reproductive population. I'm not sure how this ties in with feminism or demographics. As you point out, the high resource demands of bearing and nursing a child have always been a constraint that women have had to deal with. Whether it made better sense, from a resource point of view, to share a husband with other women, find a husband for oneself or ignore the whole husband issue completely had limited demographic impact. (There was a group in South America where most women choose two husbands, but that's rather rare.)
If you look at the position of women and demographic pressures, there really wasn't all that much change for thousands of years. As more than one feminist has pointed out, men tend to be larger and stronger than women, so whatever the societal structure, women had to deal with this reality. There were tradeoffs. Violence might reduce one to property, but when one is moderately valuable property, if only through one's ability to bear children, that can be used to demographic advantage. History is full of tales of the male component of a social group collapsing or being killed and the females moving in with some other surviving social group or the killers.
When you get to the more modern era with its rising food supply and, later, a falling mortality rate, you get to see feminist progress. Women, even married women, were granted more legal and property rights as the 19th century progressed. It is no coincidence that the 1920s saw urbanization, farm automation, and women getting the vote. I think you cover this era pretty well, but I'd call out the driving thread. There was an agricultural revolution - look at the pressure to enclose the commons, fertilizers, controlled breeding, McCormick's harvester and then the tractor. The surplus labor was absorbed by the industrial revolution. All of this drove urbanization, and women have always done better in cities, even back when urban living was a rare thing.
Maybe that thread doesn't work for you. You could view feminism as an outflow of the scientific revolution that started in the 17th century and led to the Enlightenment in the 18th which led to a more scientific approach to production, politics and society. You could build on Landes idea that societies that gave women a place, albeit limited, in public life were more likely to be economically successful.
P.S. One feminist wrote a humorous article on trying to estimate how many tampons a Neolithic woman would need in her lifetime, assuming they had tampons back in the Neolithic era. Menarche started later back when food supplies were more precarious. Then, after menarche, women would spend most of their reproductive lives pregnant or nursing. A few might live to menopause, but most would die first. She figured a six pack would be plenty.
Was pondering the pre ag times. Wondering if in those times humans were "pack" animals or "herd" animals. When did women go from yearly fertility cycles to monthly.
I think that two things are missing. First, the role of war, which probably created some male scarcity. (Women and children were more likely to be enslaved than killed in the bad old days, unless they were Amalekites.) Second, the decreasing fit of masculine socialization to the modern workforce. I think the latter trend is a major driver of Trumpism.
You make a lot of good points and cover a lot of ground, but I am having trouble figuring out the driving theme. The bulk of your notes cover the last 200-300 years which have had unusual demographics as the food supply has improved and public health measures have cut mortality. This is actually a good choice, and I would focus even more on it. The story of modern feminism and the story of the scientific and industrial revolutions are intertwined.
I would drop the section with the Yamnaya and their apparent restrictions on the male reproductive population. I'm not sure how this ties in with feminism or demographics. As you point out, the high resource demands of bearing and nursing a child have always been a constraint that women have had to deal with. Whether it made better sense, from a resource point of view, to share a husband with other women, find a husband for oneself or ignore the whole husband issue completely had limited demographic impact. (There was a group in South America where most women choose two husbands, but that's rather rare.)
If you look at the position of women and demographic pressures, there really wasn't all that much change for thousands of years. As more than one feminist has pointed out, men tend to be larger and stronger than women, so whatever the societal structure, women had to deal with this reality. There were tradeoffs. Violence might reduce one to property, but when one is moderately valuable property, if only through one's ability to bear children, that can be used to demographic advantage. History is full of tales of the male component of a social group collapsing or being killed and the females moving in with some other surviving social group or the killers.
When you get to the more modern era with its rising food supply and, later, a falling mortality rate, you get to see feminist progress. Women, even married women, were granted more legal and property rights as the 19th century progressed. It is no coincidence that the 1920s saw urbanization, farm automation, and women getting the vote. I think you cover this era pretty well, but I'd call out the driving thread. There was an agricultural revolution - look at the pressure to enclose the commons, fertilizers, controlled breeding, McCormick's harvester and then the tractor. The surplus labor was absorbed by the industrial revolution. All of this drove urbanization, and women have always done better in cities, even back when urban living was a rare thing.
Maybe that thread doesn't work for you. You could view feminism as an outflow of the scientific revolution that started in the 17th century and led to the Enlightenment in the 18th which led to a more scientific approach to production, politics and society. You could build on Landes idea that societies that gave women a place, albeit limited, in public life were more likely to be economically successful.
P.S. One feminist wrote a humorous article on trying to estimate how many tampons a Neolithic woman would need in her lifetime, assuming they had tampons back in the Neolithic era. Menarche started later back when food supplies were more precarious. Then, after menarche, women would spend most of their reproductive lives pregnant or nursing. A few might live to menopause, but most would die first. She figured a six pack would be plenty.
Was pondering the pre ag times. Wondering if in those times humans were "pack" animals or "herd" animals. When did women go from yearly fertility cycles to monthly.
I think that two things are missing. First, the role of war, which probably created some male scarcity. (Women and children were more likely to be enslaved than killed in the bad old days, unless they were Amalekites.) Second, the decreasing fit of masculine socialization to the modern workforce. I think the latter trend is a major driver of Trumpism.