Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy (25 page)

To understand the first transition, we turn again to other species. Two important studies published in the summer of 2013 addressed the question of how monogamy evolved, one for mammals generally and the other for primates in particular.

Zoologists Dieter Lukas and Tim Clutton-Brock looked at more than 2,500 species of mammals. They constructed a
mathematical evolutionary tree that allowed them to see where and when something evolved independently. Monogamy
independently
arose sixty-one different times, yielding 229 monogamous species, or 9 percent of mammals. (This contrasts dramatically with 8,000 species of birds, about 90 percent.) Primates, at 29 percent, more than triple the mammal average. Although fathering is far more common in monogamous than other mammals, in over a third of monogamous mammals males don’t act like dads. In fact, the only social trait present in almost every case where monogamy arose is that the ancestral females started out dispersed and solitary, probably due to food availability. This meant males could gain more by staying with them than by visiting and then leaving to search for others.

In the other study, Christopher Opie and his colleagues looked at 230 nonhuman
primate
species. Their tree also linked monogamy with female dispersal and fathering, but this time the most consistent background for pairing was infanticide. Because primates lactate for a long time, reducing their fertility, males (as we saw) may kill the infants of other males. In these situations it pays for the male who
did
beget the infant to stay with the mother and baby and protect them. In this account, females living separately followed rather than heralded the rise of monogamy. This is not necessarily a contradiction; since primates have more monogamous species than is typical for mammals generally, the pattern may have evolved by a different process in primates than it did in other mammals.

The controversy continued in 2014, with technical exchanges that are beyond our scope. Lukas and Clutton-Brock believe that in primates, as in other mammals, female dispersal is what leads to monogamy, while Opie’s group insists on the difference, citing the greater prevalence of monogamy in primates and pointing out that because the slow development and late weaning of primate infants interferes more with aspiring males’ reproductive success, infanticide is a more likely strategy for them.

In any case, this is probably more relevant to us, and not just
because we are primates; our mated pairs live in social groups with other couples and individuals. Almost all other mammals that have monogamy have an isolated breeding pair or a pair with nonreproductive helpers (often older offspring). This last is
cooperative
breeding, and we humans have it—siblings and grandmothers hang around and help but don’t reproduce. However, we also have
communal
breeding, meaning that several pairs reproduce within a larger group. In mammals, including primates, it’s a rare combination, but it makes us humans who we are—the most cooperative primate species by far. It promotes formal alliances between groups through marriage, and it fosters cooperation within them. It takes a proverbial village—or, rather, a nomadic band—to raise a child, including grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts, uncles, older siblings, and cousins, but it also helps to have a man.

After departing from the mostly monogamous hunter-gatherer pattern, and after several millennia of dallying with extremes of polygyny, humans began, first in Greece and Rome, to revert to our starting point. But why didn’t the rise of monogamy in Europe make women’s status much better? Why was the relative egalitarianism of our hunter-gatherer past still unattainable?

First, as we’ve seen for the Greco-Roman world and the medieval chiefdoms of Britain and Scandinavia, practical polygyny remained (literally) in force. As long as successful men could own slaves, keep concubines, and seize women in war, the male quest for control of uteruses found many direct outlets. Lesser men could be allowed to marry, but they also could be lured by the bright lights of campfires after battles, beside which they could have their way with captive women—at least for those men who hadn’t been killed. Male battle deaths supplied surplus women for surviving males in many settings without the inevitable resentment of hordes of men frustrated by the (unofficial) hoarding of women by men at the top.

Second, when a man could have only one legal wife, suitable
grooms became scarce, and brides’ fathers came up with dowries. Instead of gaining bridewealth, which in other systems eased the loss of daughters, they were losing not just a daughter but also a small fortune. As Mildred Dickemann cogently argued, these fathers were probably paying for the future reproductive success of their grandsons; the daughters were a conduit that needed to be placed as high as possible in the social scale. Husbands, for their part, could not legitimize their offspring from other unions, so they depended on the one wife they could get and she bore a big weight on her shoulders. At the same time, the marital bond remained an alliance between groups, as it had been throughout history.

To get an idea of what was at stake, consider the speech Juliet’s dad makes when she rejects his chosen groom:

Graze where you will you shall not house with me:

Look to’t, think on’t, I do not use to jest. . . .

An you be mine, I’ll give you to my friend;

And you be not, hang, beg, starve, die in the streets,

For, by my soul, I’ll ne’er acknowledge thee,

Nor what is mine shall never do thee good.

We know, as he does not, that she has already married another, his enemy’s son. What he would say and do if she revealed that, we can only guess. In the end she has to die for him to get the point.

Thus did countless millions of fathers for more than two monogamous millennia dispose of their daughters on a handshake, making an alliance between two families and two fortunes that no one could put asunder, even the bride herself. There are other Romeo-and-Juliet stories with happier endings; falling in love has been called a “discourse of defiance,” a sort of temper tantrum by which two impassioned young people sometimes derailed arranged marriages—but not the ones in which important alliances were at stake, and not if you fell in love with a current enemy.

Women in those monogamous European centuries were as dependent as they had been under polygyny. In ancient Greece, where imposed monogamy began, they got little advantage from it in most places. Sparta was an exception; there, women could be educated and own and manage property—probably because men were so much away at war. In “democratic” Athens, on the other hand, women had no legal personhood. Until marriage, they were under their father’s guardianship, and after it, their husband’s. They were allowed to enter contracts up to the value of about a hundred pounds of barley so they could engage in petty trade. Male slaves had a path to Athenian citizenship, but no woman, slave or “free,” could achieve that status. Aristotle said that wives were bought, and he denied that their household labor had value.

Roman women
were
officially citizens but could not vote, hold office, or serve in the military. Marriage transferred them from their fathers’ to their husbands’ legal power until Julius Caesar’s time, after which they remained in their fathers’ power throughout life. Adultery was defined as sex between a married woman and a man not her husband, as in the Ten Commandments of the disdained Jews and Christians. Wife beating was grounds for divorce, but women who became entertainers or prostitutes gave up their right to be protected from abuse.

From the twelfth century on in English common law, a woman who married gave up all her property to her husband. Married Frenchwomen were subject to legal restrictions not officially lifted until 1965. Although Shakespeare’s fictional Lord Capulet was mistreating his daughter centuries earlier in Italy, the speech could have been made by a father in Shakespeare’s England—or in almost any country in civilized (and very violent) Renaissance Europe.

Two centuries later, in the early 1800s, all the drama of Jane Austen’s novels stemmed from the unchanged, dismal facts of life for women. Lizzy, the protagonist of
Pride and Prejudice,
is one of
five Bennett daughters who will be destitute unless they find rich husbands; her sardonic but fond father and their relationship are something like the opposite of the situation with Lord Capulet and
his
star-crossed daughter, but his hands are tied. The law says his estate goes to a distant cousin, a self-important nerd who clumsily woos Lizzy without success but with the smug fallback assurance that he will own her legacy. She and her four sisters are at the mercy of unmet men.

Or take the most accomplished and beautiful young woman in
Emma,
Jane Fairfax, pitied by all because her adoptive parents can’t leave enough to marry her off; she must become a governess—a celibate slave by the lights of her mean-girls social set. Will an unnamed possible beau save
her
? In the two hundred years since Austen’s genius found improbable public expression by edging her hand across a little desk in a busy family room, women have seen more change than in the previous two thousand.

The Enlightenment laid a foundation of
ideas
about rights, and the American and French revolutions set some in law. But American rights were for property-holding white males. The prodigiously gifted Abigail Adams, wife of our second president, wrote him in 1776, when he was just a brash rebel, that she longed to hear independence declared.

And by the way in the new Code of Laws . . . I desire you would remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.

These were nearly the same words in which the men themselves, three months later, would define their relationship to England’s
laws. Her “by the way” proved sadly apt: they did not “remember the ladies,” so this brilliant woman’s influence was in the end through her husband and son, who would also become president. A day when
she
might take the office and be wisely advised by
them
could barely be dreamed of.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the ocean, in 1791 Olympe de Gouges published her
Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne
—Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the [Female] Citizen—which mimicked the
Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen,
parodying that great decree of the French Revolution point by point. She knew how unlikely it was to extend to her. The preamble cites “the natural inalienable and sacred rights of woman” and decrees, “The sex that is superior in beauty as it is in courage, needed in maternal sufferings . . . recognizes and declares . . . the following rights.”

Seventeen articles, as in the “Rights of Man” declaration itself. In place of “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights” she proclaimed, “Woman is born free and remains equal to Man in rights.” In the tenth article, she all-too-presciently declared, “Woman has the right to mount the scaffold; so she should have equally the right to mount the rostrum.” She would not achieve the latter right, but she did keep the former. She was guillotined two years later, equal, in this way at least, to many out-of-favor male revolutionaries.

But women were making claims that could not remain abstract forever. In 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft had published
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,
arguing in favor of educating girls. And in 1819 Emma Hart Willard wrote a “Plan for Improving Female Education”; her ideas were implemented two years later in a school in Troy, New York, with municipal funds. Soon high schools for girls opened in Boston and New York City, and some colleges admitted women within a decade. Jane Austen had exposed the plight of dependent women in the early 1800s, but by the 1840s, laws were
passed in Britain and the United States shielding a married woman’s property from her husband and his creditors.

In 1848, a year of revolt in Europe and the publication of the
Communist Manifesto,
the first women’s rights convention was quietly held in Seneca Falls, New York, producing a declaration in favor of equal treatment and voting rights for women. Olympe de Gouges had declared as much two generations earlier, but now a movement began, and it included men.

The next year Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to graduate from medical school in the United States, and women were legally allowed to practice. In 1865 the University of Zurich became the first in Europe to admit women undergraduates. In 1869 Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony founded the National Woman Suffrage Association, which, half a century later, would win women’s right to vote.

Also in 1869, John Stuart Mill, a distinguished British philosopher and member of Parliament, published his essay “The Subjection of Women”: “We are continually told that civilization and Christianity have restored to the woman her just rights. Meanwhile the wife is the actual bondservant of her husband; no less so, as far as the legal obligation goes, than slaves.” Mill was mocked for introducing a bill that would change the word “man” to “person” in British law; it failed by more than two to one. In the United States, the slaves had been freed and in the previous year granted citizenship by the Fourteenth Amendment. The next year the Fifteenth would give black men the vote, but neither amendment applied to women of any color.

Very slowly, men were won over—as they had to be if they were going to vote to dilute their own power with women’s suffrage. Of the 272 men who made up Mill’s Parliament, 76 voted for “person” even while the rest of them were laughing. Men
had
to vote in favor of letting women vote. This happened in New Zealand and several U.S. states in the 1890s, and, as a result of steady, brave, nonviolent
activism, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, giving all American women the vote—behind their sisters in Finland, Norway, Canada, and Britain.