OUTTAKE: Þe Arrival of Modern Feminism
An outtake from my forthcoming "Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the 20th Century"...
In 1764, in Britain’s Massachusetts colony, Abigail Smith was 20. She had had no formal education at all: girls weren’t worth it. She married a man she had known for five years: the up-and-coming 30-year-old lawyer John Adams, future President of the United States. Children rapidly followed their marriage: Nabby (1765), John Quincy (1767), Suky (1768, died at 2), Charles (1770, died at 10), Thomas (1772), probably a miscarriage or two or three from 1774-6, then Elizabeth (1777, stillborn), then (perhaps) another miscarriage—but I suspect not. She spent five years pregnant. She was rich enough that she, probably, hired a wet-nurse for her children, but somebody or somebodies nursed her children for perhaps fourteen more years: some woman or women were thus eating for two for more than a full decade to raise the next generation of Adamses.
In 1776 she writes a famous letter to her husband in which she begged him to write laws providing women with legal personality in the new revolutionary country he was building:
Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable…. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands…. Such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend. Why then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity?… Regard us then as Beings placed by providence under your protection and in immitation of the Supreem Being make use of that power only for our happiness…
Her husband John Adams thought this was a great joke:
I cannot but laugh…. Your letter was the first intimation that another tribe, more numerous and powerful than all the rest, were grown discontented. This is rather too coarse a compliment, but you are so saucy, I won't blot it out. Depend upon it, we know better than to repeal our masculine systems…. We have only the name of masters, and rather than give up this, which would completely subject us to the despotism of the petticoat, I hope General Washington and all our brave heroes would fight…
Read the letter entire <https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-01-02-0241>, and you learn that Abigail Smith Adams:
Ran John Adams’s Boston-Braintree household and property operations while he played on the political stage;
dealt with death and disease of children and neighbors that were omnipresent, with “our Neighbour Trot… striped of two lovely children in one week…”, “Becky Peck they do not expect will live out the day…”, “your Brothers youngest child lies bad with convulsion fitts…”;
was desperate for news of what was going on in the wider world, for “I wish you would ever write me a Letter half as long as I write you…. Where your Fleet are gone? What sort of Defence Virginia can make against our common Enemy? Whether it is so situated as to make an able Defence?…”;
fears the alliance with Virginia as potentially subordinating them to those used to rule by the lash: “Are not the Gentery Lords and the common people vassals? Are they not like the uncivilized Natives Brittain represents us to be?…”;
thus warns her husband to be very, very careful of the Massachusetts rebels alliance with teh slaveholders of Virginia, for “the passion for Liberty cannot be Eaquelly Strong in the Breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow Creatures of theirs…”;
begs him for at least some fig leaf of legal protection from abuse and brutality for her sisters; and, of course;
is desperately desperate concern that more of her children not join the shades in their graves: “our own little flock… My Heart trembles with anxiety for them…”
A very talented, very energetic, very capable woman, confined to a much narrower sphere of life than she could have occupied—and patronized by her husband.
Why male supremacy was so firmly established back in the Agrarian Age is something that is not obvious to me.
Yes, it was very important to have surviving descendants. Yes, attaining a reasonable chance of having surviving descendants to take care of one in one’s old age meant that the typical woman spent 20 years eating for two: pregnant and breastfeeding.
Yes, eating for two is an enormous energy drain, especially in populations near subsistence.
Yes, Agrarian Age populations were near subsistence—my great-grandmother Eleanor Lawton Carter’s maxim was “have a baby, lose a tooth” as the child-to-be leached calcium out of the mother to build her or his own bones. And she was an upper-class Bostonian, born in the mid-1870s.
Yes, prolonged breastfeeding was a substantial mobility drain kept women very close to their children, and impelled a concentration of female labor on activities that made that easy: gardening and other forms of within-and-near-the-dwelling labor, especially textiles.
Yes, there were benefits to men as a group from oppressing women—especially if women could be convinced that they deserved it: “Unto the woman he said, ‘I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband; and he shall rule over thee’…”
But surely even in the Agrarian Age a shift to a society with less male supremacy would have been a positive-sum change?
Women as equal participants in society, rather than just chattels, classified as a little bit above slaves and cattle, can do a lot. We—optimistic—economists have a strong bias toward believing that people in groups will find ways to become, collectively, more productive and then to distribute the fruits of higher productivity in a way that makes such a more productive social order sustainable.
But apparently not.
The bio-demographic underpinnings of the cultural pattern of high male supremacy began to erode even before 1870. But it was over 1870-2016 that these underpinnings dissolved utterly. Reductions in infant mortality, the advancing average age of marriage, and the increasing costs of child raising together drove a decrease in fertility. The number of years the typical woman spent eating for two fell from twenty—if she survived her childbed—down to four, as better sanitation, much better nutrition, and more knowledge about disease made many pregnancies less necessary for leaving surviving descendants, and as birth control technology made it easier to plan families. And, after exploding in the Industrial Age, the rate of population growth in the industrial core slowed drastically. The population explosion turned out to be a relatively short-run thing. Human population growth rapidly headed for zero long-run population growth.
The path of within-the-household technological advance also worked to the benefit of the typical woman over 1870-2016: dishwashers, dryers, vacuum cleaners, improved chemical cleansing products, other electrical and natural gas appliances, and so on, especially clothes-washing machines—all these made the tasks of keeping the household clean, ordered, and functioning much easier. Maintaining a nineteenth-century, high-fertility household was a much more than full-time job. Maintaining a late twentieth-century household could become more like a part-time job. And so much female labor that had been tied to full-time work within the household because of the backward state of household technology became a reserve that could now be used for other purposes. And, as Betty Friedan wrote in the early 1960s, women who sought something like equal status could find it only if they found “identity…in work… for which, usually, our society pays.” As long as women were confined to separate, domestic, occupations which the market did not reward with cash, it was easy for men to denigrate and minimize
I see the centrality of the economic and the extraordinary upward leap in prosperity as the principal news that the future will remember from the history of the Long 20th Century, and the coming of feminism as one of—a very important one of—its ramifications. But I am male. If I were female, would I see the demographic transition—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?
Quite possibly.
I should note that if you collaborate with the right people, you have the beginnings of a book on the economic history of women's rights, and its connection to the technology of birth control. I'm sure there have been others. But you could do a good one. Gotta cross the quad and talk to the women's studies departments and the history departments though...
I have probably noted before that H G Wells stated that Margaret Sanger would have more impact than any other reformer on changing the future. I believe he was right.
"Why male supremacy was so firmly established back in the Agrarian Age is something that is not obvious to me."
In the era when upper body strength equated to military might, the organization of armies made it relatively straightforward for male armies to do this. The constant deaths in pregnancy and disability during pregnancy made it hard for female armies to do this, despite the Scythians. It was not a coincidence that armies were known for rape. It was, obviously, advantageous in Darwinian reproduction terms for a man to rape hundreds of women who were forced to bear his children... so certain men who could do this, did this.
Technological development in the military eliminated the physical advantage of men in conquest. No strength needed to shoot or bomb people. And widespread reliable birth control and abortion eliminated the disability of constant pregnancy for women.
What you're seeing after 1870 is that education and expertise become the sources of military power.