An outtake from my forthcoming "Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the 20th Century"... 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
"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.
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.
> But surely even in the Agrarian Age a shift to a society with less male supremacy would have been a positive-sum change?
The entire point of the Agrarian Age is "someone goes and develops armies; now everyone must extract the surplus to feed one because there's no one left unconquered".
We see this in the Y-chromosome diversity bottleneck; if you're a man, and you don't control an army, your reproductive fitness drops into "lineage extinct" territory.
What we don't see directly but can surely infer from other parts of history and the evidence that X-chromosome diversity doesn't even blip is that one of the core ways you create an army is by supplying women to the troops. Like control of reproduction by men being foundational -- rather than consequential -- with respect to patriarchy, "women, cattle, and slaves" are foundational loot categories for the creation of armies.
What you're seeing since 1870 is the product of agricultural productivity; the limit is no longer how many troops you can _feed_ but how many troops you can _arm_. Which gives us the mass armies of the Napoleonic Wars and by 1870 gives us sharp industrial constraints; cartridge firearms, interchangeable parts, and industrial chemistry create an education contest. There's no reason you can't educate women to do these things (women have been doing difficult complex labour all along), and once it's a pure numbers game you pretty much must do so.
Power matters as much as exchange. (Exchange may create power, but the types of exchange you can have are constrained by the structures of material and political power.)
"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.
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.
> But surely even in the Agrarian Age a shift to a society with less male supremacy would have been a positive-sum change?
The entire point of the Agrarian Age is "someone goes and develops armies; now everyone must extract the surplus to feed one because there's no one left unconquered".
We see this in the Y-chromosome diversity bottleneck; if you're a man, and you don't control an army, your reproductive fitness drops into "lineage extinct" territory.
What we don't see directly but can surely infer from other parts of history and the evidence that X-chromosome diversity doesn't even blip is that one of the core ways you create an army is by supplying women to the troops. Like control of reproduction by men being foundational -- rather than consequential -- with respect to patriarchy, "women, cattle, and slaves" are foundational loot categories for the creation of armies.
What you're seeing since 1870 is the product of agricultural productivity; the limit is no longer how many troops you can _feed_ but how many troops you can _arm_. Which gives us the mass armies of the Napoleonic Wars and by 1870 gives us sharp industrial constraints; cartridge firearms, interchangeable parts, and industrial chemistry create an education contest. There's no reason you can't educate women to do these things (women have been doing difficult complex labour all along), and once it's a pure numbers game you pretty much must do so.
Power matters as much as exchange. (Exchange may create power, but the types of exchange you can have are constrained by the structures of material and political power.)