>>> Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari at phoenix.princeton.edu> 11/30/99
Yet in *human foraging societies* there *seems* to have been an apparent
iron law which universally prohibited women from hunting on a regular
basis, from having gender-specific weapons and equipment for hunting, and a
further total prohibition against the pursuit of large and dangerous game
(lit review in Tim Megarry Society in Prehistory: The Origins of Human
Culture, p. 307). Engels seems to have understood foraging societies in
such terms of a sexual division of labor. Is this accurate? Was Engels
wrong to see this sexual division of labor as neutral; or did it really
serve as as the basis for sexual asymmetry?
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Charles: Did the iron "law" also prohibit men from raising children ? You know Engels also points out that there was no law , but custom in these societies, meaning there was very little coercion. And Engels anticipates that this non-coerced cooperation will be the condition after the whithering away of the state .
This aspect of the discussion is an opportunity to point out that, although we analyze gender in today's society as mainly not only political , but bad politics, the socially constructed aspects of gender in ancient society may be positive. I don't know ( empirically or ideologically) about the iron law level Rakesh describes above, but without male supremacism there is not necessarily anything wrong with the division of labor in between predominantly productive and predominantly reproductive labors. Although, pregnancy and breast feeding may have been the only labors which biology strictly limited to women, there is a certain "momentum" or inherent connection between these labors and the other labors of child rearing. In other words, if you carry the child for nine months and then breast feed the child, why suddenly go out and start foraging and hand the child over to a man to care for ? Even though we now we know that these further caring labors are "gender" and not "sex"!
( although I don't necessarily think there isn't some instinct in child rearing and maybe even maternal instinct, culture can override this instinct), so what, from the standpoint of early people ? It might just be more convenient for early people to institutionalize women continuing childcare tasks beyond pregnancy and breastfeeding, especially if there was equivalence between the two aspects of the main original division of labor. There is nothing inherently "superior" about foraging and hunting over child rearing. In fact, given the prominence of fertility goddesses, the latter might be a privileged activity, especially in the context of small populations when the prospect of being wiped out was much more significant than today ( keeping my fingers cross about us not wiping ourselves out today).
Furthermore, what about the question of women as the inventors and maybe even creators of the long period of human childhood ? Is not this invention as important as the invention of the wheel or discovery of how to control fire ? Stephen Jay Gould points out that the long period of human childhood is a unique species characteristic. We can speculate further that this long childhood in integrally related to the whole invention of human culture, language and "socially constructing capacity". In other words, part of the reason other species are more directed by instinct and biology is that individuals must be prepared to act as adults much more rapidly than human individuals are. So, there is little time to teach all the culture that humans learn. Thus, the long childhood of humans is necessary for them to be so historically constituted and socially constructed (rather than biologically and instinctively directed) in their behavior. Given the division of labor based on sex of ! early human society, who but women invented this long childhood ? Early women may even have somehow consciously lengthened the biological aspect of human childhood, by selecting for slower developing children or something like that.
This issue also reminds that not only is sex more than reproduction in that not all or even most sex is for reproduction, but reproduction is more than sex-conception-pregnancy-birth. Human reproduction is mostly childrearing in terms of time. That reproduction, in the broader sense, is a necessary condition or premise for all the social constructing or social discoursing or symbolic or cultural/non-biological activity which postmodernists and others, rightly, place so much emphasis on.
No biologically and culturally long childhood, no socially discourse dominated humans.
CB