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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
We are experiencing an anthropological revolution. We see it in the #MeToo movement, in the denunciation of femicide and in an increasingly vociferous critique of patriarchal domination. Why this sudden rise of an antagonistic conception of the relationship between men and women, at the very moment when progress is accelerating and when the goals of first- and second-wave feminism seem on the verge of being achieved? In this book, the anthropologist and historian Emmanuel Todd, while not underestimating the importance of crucial inequalities that remain, argues that the emancipation of women has essentially already taken place but that it has given rise to new tensions and contradictions. As women gain more freedom, they also gain access to traditional male social pathologies: economic anxiety, the disorientation of anomie, and individual and class resentment. But because they remain women, with the ability to bear children, their burden as human beings, although richer, is now more difficult to bear than that of men. In order to understand our current condition, Todd retraces the evolution of the male/female relationship through the long history of the human species, from the emergence of Homo sapiens a hundred thousand years ago to the present. He also conducts a broad empirical study of the convergence between men and women today and of the differences that still separate them - in education, in employment and in relation to longevity, suicide and homicide, electoral behaviour and racism. He explores the relations between women's liberation and other changes in contemporary societies such as the collapse of religion, the decline of industry, the decline of homophobia, the rise of bisexuality and the transgender phenomenon, and the decline in a sense of the collective life. And he shows how and why Western countries - and especially the Anglo-American world, Scandinavia and France - are, in their new feminist revolution, perhaps less universal than they think.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Notes
Introduction: The future is now
The singularity of the original human couple
Research versus ideology
The power of women today
Economics and anthropology
Women’s liberation and the antagonism between (or abolition of) the sexes
Notes
Part I. The contribution of historical anthropology
1 Patriarchy, gender and intersectionality
The fog of patriarchy
The emergence of the concept of gender
Gender: a useless and ideologized duplication
For a generalized intersectionality
French intersectionality
Notes
2 Degendering anthropology
A tribute to female anthropologists
Julian Steward: sexual equality among hunter-gatherers described by a classical anthropologist
Martin King Whyte: anthropology just before gender
Henrietta Moore: The first disruptions
Marilyn G. Gelber: the monstrous man
Janet Carsten: Decomposition
An insufficiently feminist history
Notes
3 The tools of historical anthropology
The nuclear family
The stem family
The communitarian family
The local group and marriage
Notes
4 In search of the original family
Classical anthropology and the original family
The block in anthropology
The conservatism of peripheral zones: English, Americans, French, Shoshones, Bushmen, Eskimos, Chukchi and Agtas in one humanity
Saving Private Murdock
A new geography of the world
Notes
5 The confinement of women: history comes to a halt
Nomads and the history of the family
Patrilineality and social stratification
The patrilineal impasse
Notes
6 A detour by way of Australia
The debate on the Aborigines
The role of New Guinea
Notes
7 The sexual division of labour
Ideology versus reality
Ideology against itself
Collectivist men versus individualist women
The issue of equality: we are not chimpanzees
Notes
8 Christianity, Protestantism and women
Early Christianity and women
The Church and sexual security
Protestant patricentrism
Notes
Part II. Our revolution
9 Liberation: 1950–2020
1950–1965: the height of petty-bourgeois conformism
The educational and sexual revolution: 1965–2000
Women, services and industry
Educational matridominance: 2000–2020
From hypergamy to hypogamy
Differences according to social class
Poverty and single-parent families
Poverty, family disorganization and pro-life attitudes in the US
The middle classes in survival mode
Women at the risk of anomie
The concept of soft anomie
Women’s liberation and the demographic convergence of the two sexes
Notes
10 Men resist but the collective collapses
The persistent sexual division of labour, yet again
The sex of the state
The medical profession
Mathematics
The top 4%: a residual patridominance
Even higher: capital has no sex
Divorce at the heart of the system
The masculine collective and its disintegration
Notes
11 Gender: a petty-bourgeois ideology
France in the face of the Anglo-American world
The sex of social classes
Anger as a general social phenomenon
Ideological hegemony in the feminine: doctorates
Matridominance at the OECD as well as at the INED
Farewell to reality
A provisional summary
Notes
12 Women and authority
Women as less racist
The weakening of the collective, but not of authority
The origin of Prohibition?
Ideological anomalies
Swedish family types
The riddle of authoritarian feminism
No paternal authority without maternal authority
The mother at the centre of the family
Constructed authority and natural authority
Notes
13 The mystery of Sweden
Against the myth of an original matriarchy
The Sweden of the origins
Interpreting the runic steles
Peasant patrilocality from the seventeenth to the twentieth century
The birth of the ‘Swedish woman’: literacy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
Sweden and Denmark
Notes
14 Homophobia: a male business
Orders of magnitude and causal sequences
LGBT: a tactical alliance
Words before things
Homosexuality, a natural human behaviour
Mapping homophobia: the BBO axis yet again
Homophobia: a male business
Notes
15 Women, between Christianity and bisexuality
Simple Protestant homophobia and Catholic ambivalence
The collapse of religious sentiment and homophobia
Are gays zombie Christians?
The objection of Eastern Europe
Marriage for all men and all women
The rise of female bisexuality
Notes
16 The social construction of transgender
The case of the berdaches
Berdaches and transgender people
‘My new vagina won’t make me happy’
Ideological centrality …
… but statistical weakness
Women and identity
The omnipotence of mothers
Does society think through individuals?
The Christian taste for extraordinary sexuality
Notes
17 Economic globalization and the deviation of anthropological trajectories
Globalization and the tertiarization of the economy
Economic or anthropological specialization?
The worker nations of Eastern Europe
Sweden, yet again …
The cost of rejecting liberation
Notes
Conclusion: Has humanity come of age?
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Figure 0.1.
Female homicide rate in Europe and Japan
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1.
The terms ‘patriarchy’ (English) and ‘patriarcat’ (French) since 1950
Figure 1.2.
Evolution of the frequency of use of the terms ‘gender’ and ‘genre’
Figure 1.3.
Evolution of the frequency of use of the terms ‘gendered’ and ‘genré’
Figure 1.4.
Evolution of the frequency of use of the English term ‘vibrant’
Figure 1.5.
Evolution of the frequency of use of the terms ‘déconstruction’ and ‘deconstruction’
Figure 1.6.
Evolution of the frequency of use of the English term ‘intersectionality’ and the French term ‘int…
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1.
The conservatism of peripheral zones: typical diagram
Figure 4.2.
The stages of patrilineality in history
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1.
Female suicide rate
Figure 9.2.
Male suicide rate
Figure 9.3.
Sex ratio of suicide rates
Figure 9.4.
Gap between male and female life expectancies
Chapter 11
Figure 11.1.
The sex ratio of French theses
Figure 11.2.
‘Gendered’ sociology theses by sex since 1985
Figure 11.3.
‘Sexed’ sociology theses by sex since 1985
Chapter 14
Figure 14.1.
Evolution of the frequency of use of the terms ‘homosexuel’ (‘homosexual’) and ‘pi…
Figure 14.2.
Evolution of the frequency of use of the term ‘gay’ in English and in French
Figure 14.3.
Evolution of the frequency of use of the terms ‘lesbienne’ and ‘lesbian’
Figure 14.4.
Evolution of the frequency of use of the terms ‘bisexuel’ and ‘bisexual’
Chapter 16
Figure 16.1.
Evolution of the frequency of use of the terms ‘transgender’ and ‘transgenre’
Chapter 17
Figure 17.1.
East/West dialectic of relocation/denunciation–reaffirmation
List of Maps
Chapter 1
Map 1.1.
Kinship systems before urbanization
Map 1.2.
The sex ratio in 2020
Map 1.3.
The status of women today
Map 1.4.
The rate of patrilineality by state
Chapter 4
Map 4.1.
Residence of spouses: after their marriage
Map 4.2.
Residence of spouses: neolocality and ambilocality
Map 4.3.
The nuclear or independent family
Map 4.4.
Exogamy and endogamy
Chapter 5
Map 5.1.
The original hubs of agriculture
Map 5.2.
The role of women in agriculture
Map 5.3.
Residence of spouses in intensive agriculture
Map 5.4.
Residence of spouses in extensive agriculture
Map 5.5.
Residence of spouses among pastoralists
Chapter 6
Map 6.1.
Polygyny among hunter-gatherers according to Binford (in %)
Map 6.2.
Differences in age at marriage among hunter-gatherers according to Binford
Map 6.3.
Australian Aborigines in 1788
Map 6.4.
Kinship systems in Australia and New Guinea
Map 6.5.
Residence of spouses in Australia and New Guinea
Map 6.6.
Kinship systems in the Americas
Map 6.7.
Residence of spouses on the American continent
Chapter 7
Map 7.1.
Role of men and women in hunting
Map 7.2.
Role of men and women in gathering
Map 7.3.
Role of men and women in fishing
Map 7.4.
Role of men and women in boat building
Map 7.5.
Role of men and women in pottery
Map 7.6.
Role of men and women in house building
Map 7.7.
Role of men and women in leather work
Chapter 12
Map 12.1.
The three major Swedish regions
Map 12.2.
Nuclear and stem hubs in Sweden around 1900
Map 12.3.
Agricultural employees in Sweden in 1960
Map 12.4.
Workers in Sweden in 1970
Map 12.5.
Social democracy in Sweden in 1968
Map 12.6.
Exceptional women
Chapter 14
Map 14.1.
Homophobia
Chapter 16
Map 16.1.
Berdaches in North America
Chapter 17
Map 17.1.
Proportion of industrial jobs in 2019
List of Tables
Introduction
Table 0.1.
Top stratum of organizations in the West by sex
Chapter 1
Table 1.1.
Voting in the 2020 US presidential election
Chapter 4
Table 4.1.
Survival of original traits
Chapter 8
Table 8.1.
The religiosity of men and women in the mid-1990s
Chapter 11
Table 11.1.
Class structure according to sex: a first approach
Table 11.2.
Class structure according to sex: ideal-types
Table 11.3.
Theses: proportion of women by university discipline and year of thesis defence
Table 11.4.
INED researchers by sex and age around 2019
Chapter 12
Table 12.1.
Parent–child communication around the age of 15
Table 12.2.
Proportion of women in the judiciary, 2016
Chapter 16
Table 16.1.
The berdache phenomenon in North America
Conclusion
Table C.1.
The National Front vote by sex
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Introduction
Begin Reading
Conclusion
Index
End User License Agreement
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Dedication
For Marc and Sophie
Lineages of the Feminine
An outline of a history of women
Emmanuel Todd
With the collaboration of Baptiste TouvereyTranslated by Andrew Brown
polity
First published in French as Où en sont-elles ? Une esquisse de l’histoire des femmes © Éditions du Seuil, 2022.Figures 4.1, 4.2, 17.1 and maps 12.1, 12.2, 12.3, 12.4, 12.5 by Légendes Cartographie.
This English edition © Polity Press, 2023
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5510-9
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022948023
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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PREFACE
If I had been asked to choose a concept to characterize the West, fifty years ago, when I was starting to do research, I would probably have given the banal answer: progress. The physical and human sciences were advancing, the standard of living was rising, decolonization was coming to an end, the emancipation of women was beginning. My first book, La chute finale (The Final Fall), published in 1976,1 expressed this optimism since it predicted (within ten, twenty or thirty years – it actually took fifteen) the collapse of the Soviet system, undermined not simply by the inefficiency of its economy but above all by educational progress and the change in mentality which accompanied it. The declining birth rate in the Muslim world today shows that the latter is modernizing despite the persistence of many despotic regimes within it. But even those who are not enamoured of Islam have to accept that, at present, the birth rate is 2.0 children per woman in Turkey, 2.1 in Iran, 2.4 in Morocco and 2.2 in Saudi Arabia. Even if people cannot vote there, or only in an imperfect way, the term ‘progress’ therefore still applies to the Muslim world. And to India, too, where the birth rate is 2.2. With a birth rate of 1.3, China is already, in spite of its low standard of living, demonstrating problems of post-modernity which make the use of the term ‘progress’ problematic for it. The inability to produce enough children to sustain the population prevents us from using the word ‘progress’, a word which presupposes the certainty of a future. The number of children per woman is 1.9 in France, 1.7 in Sweden, 1.7 in the United States, 1.65 in the United Kingdom, 1.5 in Germany, 1.5 in Russia, 1.4 in Japan, 1.2 in Taiwan and 0.9 in Korea. The two countries which dominate the production of the semiconductors necessary for current technologies are, demographically, in the process of disappearing.
If I were asked this same question today – what concept can be seen as characteristic of the West? – I would answer without hesitation: false consciousness. And I would place the status and emancipation of women at the centre of our false consciousness.
We have allowed our industries and our working classes to be destroyed. Inequalities are soaring and our standard of living is falling. In the United States, mortality is increasing, life expectancy is decreasing. The power of finance capital and the individualistic pulverization of ideologies have transformed our political systems. The new educational stratification into college-educated and the rest has led to the emergence of separate mental worlds for the former, on the one hand, and for the semi-citizens who leave education after high school, on the other. If economic and cultural transformations have allowed the institutions of democracy to subsist, they have destroyed the mores that animated these institutions. The populace no longer decides. Communities no longer act. A democracy is as much a group as it is a sum of citizens with the right to vote; and without the ability of individuals to feel that they are also a group, democracy dies.
Western democracies have mutated, they have become, without realizing it, ‘something else’, different from democracies. A Western nation without a false consciousness should define itself (without value judgement) as a liberal oligarchy rather than as a liberal democracy. But we still believe, for the most part, that we are liberal and democratic, and continue to affirm our superiority and the universality of our values.
The Trump phenomenon, Brexit, the reversal of the Roe v. Wade decision on the freedom of abortion and the paralysis of the French political system, however, all suggest that our political false consciousness is crumbling. It is recognized that a crisis of democracy is looming. The successive waves of Covid have, for their part, shaken our false economic consciousness by exposing our industrial deficiencies. The economic sanctions imposed on Russia following the invasion of Ukraine, added to Covid, and against a background of industrial underproduction, have tipped the West into inflation. This should bring us to a better economic consciousness of ourselves. But the heart of our false consciousness lies elsewhere, and it is intact. It lurks in the anthropological foundations of our societies: family life with, at the very heart of this core factor, the status of women and the dramatic changes it has seen in the last seventy years. I am here defining Western women as our primary false consciousness (this ‘our’ includes women). We do not realize that the status of Western women has always been specific, and that the emancipatory revolution that we have been experiencing for seventy years is taking us a little further away from the rest of the world (75% of the total) whose anthropological trajectory has been different for millennia, since this trajectory has granted women a lower status, a historical movement associated with the rise (as the anthropological term puts it) of the patrilineal principle. We therefore underestimate the socio-historical importance of the emancipation of these Western women whose status had not been all that low. It is in this anthropological unconscious that the cause of our paralysis, of our inability to think and act collectively, must be sought. Putting women at the centre of recent history is the purpose of this book.
I have spent most of my life as a researcher constructing a model that links the diversity of family structures with the diversity of the historical development of nations. In my Lineages of Modernity, I presented the condensed results of this lifetime of research.2 But it dawned on me during the #MeToo crisis that I had remained blind to one of the most important elements of the story. While I had placed the family structure at the heart of the economic, political, educational and religious life of peoples, I had not been able to fully grasp the specific role of women in the great transformation that we are experiencing. Lineages of the Feminine: An Outline of the History of Women describes this feminine side of history, over the same long-term period (longue durée), ever since the emergence on earth of the species Homo sapiens. We can only understand the extent of the feminist transformation of Western societies if we situate it correctly in history, i.e. as a direct transformation of the system of mores of the first society of Homo sapiens, one that was certainly patridominated but in which women enjoyed a relatively high status. Never in the past have English (and therefore American), French or Swedish societies resembled today’s patrilineal Russia, China, India, Arab-Persian world or Africa, within which the status of women is the outcome of ten thousand years of history, ever since the emergence of agriculture. Only a historical study over the long term, and taking in the surface of our entire planet, will allow us to escape our false family and sexual consciousness.
Our family lifestyle is obvious to us, it defines our existence as human beings – it is indisputable, in exactly the same way that our relationship with women (I am a man, but I would write ‘our relationship with men’ if I were a woman) defines our existence (and I would write the same if I were gay or transgender). All this is even truer and even more significant for us because our system of mores is undergoing a radical change, indeed a revolution. It is even more immediate, close to the centre of our life and, as such, even more difficult to perceive correctly. We cannot see what defines us the most. We have to gaze into a mirror to see what we look like. We need to look at the rest of the world to understand who we are, to escape narcissism. This is an intellectual but also a psychological exercise. It is characteristic that for the first time in my life, in Lineages of the Feminine, certainly the most scholarly of all my books (and this is rather to be expected after half a century of research), I have allowed a few ironic remarks about myself and my own family of origin to find their way into the text. Historical anthropology, however, allows us to move away from ourselves by contemplating the whole of human history in all its geographical scope and by dealing with the French, the English, the Americans and the Swedes in the same way that classical anthropology dealt with the peoples of colonized countries, each one being provided with a system of mores – an irrational, non-universal and indisputable system – invented to give meaning to life. Analytical philosophy helps us to admit that these values are in no way ‘provable’. This difficult exercise of distancing ourselves from ourselves requires an enormous work of empirical accumulation of objective data. But it allows us to escape from our false consciousness. Basically, long-term history (the longue durée) and planetary exhaustiveness make it possible for us to develop a kind of psychoanalysis of our own society.
The feminist revolution is a great thing (I’m an ordinary Westerner on the point) but we are not yet able to see how much the emancipation of women has radically altered the whole of our social life. Because we always see women as minors, as victims, we do not place them, for better or for worse (i.e., like men) at the centre of our history: they are the protagonists, for example, in the rejection of racism and homophobia, but they are also the unconscious protagonists of our neoliberalism, our deindustrialization and our inability to act collectively. Substantial and no doubt crucial inequalities persist between men and women. I will study them at length in this book; but we must accept that the inequalities between human beings in general, in the West, have increased at the same rate as the decrease in inequalities between men and women. I will therefore present in this book a critical analysis of antagonistic feminism, because this, despite its goodwill (it is essential to fight against inequalities between the sexes, against sexual harassment and femicide), basically erases women, and abolishes them as protagonists in history.
Antagonistic feminism distorts present history and past history, and cannot serve as a guide for future history. It is typically a phenomenon of false consciousness. It prevents us from seeing in particular that the advances have been of such a kind that the category ‘woman’ is now becoming divided, more and more clearly, according to a class criterion (where class is increasingly defined by education).
In fact, women themselves, independently of men, are increasingly defining the class structure of society. I have long believed that the petty bourgeoisie, rather than the proletariat, is the potentially destabilizing class for any society: in France in 1789, in Russia in 1917, in Germany in 1933.3 I had always rightly thought of this petty bourgeoisie as male. In this book, I identify a whole new female petty bourgeoisie, the source and site of the flourishing of antagonistic feminism. The working classes themselves cannot be defined today as matridominated, but in the United States, as in France, the dissidence of the working classes reveals a specific role for women, in the anti-tax movement of the Yellow Vests as much as in the pro-life, anti-abortion movement. However feminized it may be, history remains diverse!
I would like to end this preface with an apology for some of the shortcomings of this book. In particular, you will not find in it a nuanced description of current neo-feminist debates, which would in fact deserve a whole book to themselves: I content myself with an evocation of the antagonistic atmosphere which now characterizes the ideological debate on the relationship between men and women. I am simplifying here, admittedly. But everything in this book is a simplification. To describe the history of women (and therefore of men) by defining five fields – the familial, the religious, the educational, the economic and the political – in order to grasp their interaction, throughout the whole of history and across all of the earth’s inhabited spaces, presupposes a simplification, to say the least. It is a rich but sketchy story that I offer and I know from experience that such an exercise can give the impression that the author is arrogant and unfair. I can well understand that perceiving the current world as being organized into two blocs, one patrilineal and the other feminist (quite simply!), may create a feeling of annoyance in the reader. But one has to simplify in order to understand. This is even one of the basic principles of the scientific method. Here lies the ultimate flaw: I admit that putting forward the concept of simplicity to understand the relationships between women and men brings us dangerously close to an absolute oxymoron. I want to point out, however, by way of conclusion, and to defend myself against the accusation of arrogance, that the starting point of this book was, after all, admitting to an error, to the existence of a blind spot in Lineages of Modernity: the fact that I had not understood the importance of women in the upheaval of Western societies in the last seventy years. This book is an atonement.
2022
Notes
1.
Emmanuel Todd,
La chute finale: Essai sur la décomposition de la sphère soviétique
(Paris: Robert Laffont, 1976); English translation:
The Final Fall
:
An Essay on the Decomposition of the Soviet Sphere
, translated by John Waggoner (New York: Katz Publishers, 1979).
2.
Emmanuel Todd,
Lineages of Modernity: A History of Humanity from the Stone Age to Homo Americanus
, translated by Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity, 2019).
3.
Emmanuel Todd,
Le Fou et le prolétaire
(Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, 1978).
INTRODUCTION: THE FUTURE IS NOW
It’s clear that we’re living through an anthropological revolution. Here at the beginning of the third millennium we have seen the emergence of the #MeToo phenomenon, which was given global momentum by the Harvey Weinstein affair in 2017. In its (less elegant) French version, this wave turned into #BalanceTonPorc.1 On the walls of Paris and provincial towns, denunciations of what has been called ‘femicide’ have flourished. The paradox of this renewed protest against men, a protest violent in its expression and evocative of a structural antagonism between the two sexes, lies in the fact that it began just as the women’s liberation movement seemed on the point of achieving its goals.
I am not claiming here, which would be absurd, that all the goals of feminism have been achieved. Far from it. Women have certainly gained massive access to the labour market, but significant wage inequalities remain. Their share in low-paid temporary work is still much higher than that of men in Western countries, where a thin layer of male domination in the highest positions remains. The top stratum of organizations is still mostly occupied by men: in politics, in public administration and in the private capitalist sector of the economy (see table 0.1). But the general trend is clear: these remnants of domination are being rapidly eroded.
The positive acceleration between 2000 and 2022 is impressive. The number of women entering elected assemblies in the West is increasing according to a curve that seems exponential. Since the publication of the French edition of this book, the war in Ukraine has mobilized a multitude of women actors at the highest level in the Western camp: prime ministers in Scandinavia, directors of intelligence and Ukrainian affairs in the United States, heads of foreign affairs in the United Kingdom and Germany, a minister of defence in France, a top representative of the European Union in Brussels. I am only mentioning a few examples but here, for the first time in history, is a global conflict in which men are not the only actors. Some sectors, such as private capitalism, are resisting the rise of women, but others, such as the cultural sector, are already showing a predominance of women right up to the top of the ladder. I will explain this resistance by new contradictions in the female condition, brought about by emancipation, rather than by a masculinist plot.
Table 0.1 Top stratum of organizations in the West by sex
It is true that in the United States, the Supreme Court’s reversal of the Roe v. Wade ruling on freedom of abortion, which has made it possible for some American states (a minority among states and an even smaller minority in terms of population) to actually ban abortion, is a serious attack on women’s right to control their own bodies. But I’ll give a detailed, and tragic, interpretation of the pro-life regression, in terms of social class and increased mortality rather than of a lowering of the status of women in the states concerned. This book will suggest that we give the north–south divide or the influence of the religious right too much importance in our interpretation of the conflict over abortion. Educational stratification and class conflict have emerged as the dominant factors in the recent aggravation of the conflict.
The fact remains that in the global context of an accelerating emancipation of women, the antagonistic feminist revival, a new revolutionary upsurge at heart, is not logical, even if it must be admitted that the development of concrete history is rarely ‘logical’. To better understand the problem, let’s go back to the history of a previous revolution, the rise of socialism, and to the opening of the revisionist quarrel that divided Marxists from the end of the nineteenth century. Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932) pointed out, from an empirical perspective, that concrete capitalism, far from leading to an ever-increasing concentration of capital and impoverishment of the workers, as predicted by Marx, in fact led to an increase in the standard of living of the masses, allowed for a diversity of sizes of enterprises and did not prevent the development of the middle classes. Any revolutionary catastrophism could only lead, in his view, to the justification of an anti-popular and anti-democratic reaction. Current data on the status of women in the West should have led to the emergence of a feminist (and female) Bernstein, but what we are seeing is the rise of a new antagonism, a logical cousin to Leninist-style catastrophism, yet without any 1914–18 war-like catastrophe to explain the new antagonistic trajectory of feminism.
At the deepest and hardest level of antagonistic feminism, we find the theme of femicide, which evokes an evil essence of man in his relationship to woman, just as Leninism considered the bourgeois as inherently evil, incapable of accepting the humanity of the proletarian.
The existence of a specifically masculine violence is indubitable; it can be verified in all its atrocity back to the mists of time. But confusing random fluctuations with long-term trends often entails serious errors in analysis. Caution was needed, for example, when analysing the observed increase of 21% in the number of women killed in France by their partners or ex-partners between 2018 and 2019 (146 as against 121); this increase was not statistically significant. The number of women killed by their partners had been 148 in 2006, when measurements began, and 179 in 2007.2 An article by Cédric Mathiot in Libération, written before the publication of the figures for 2019, quite rightly noted a drop in cases of femicide from 2006 onwards, and a stagnation over the last six years.3 In 2020, 90 femicides were committed.
Let’s extend the area studied to Europe and Japan. While it’s true that at least half of the women who are victims of homicide are killed by their partners, a global demographic approach indicates that the trend, since 1985, has shown a significant decline (see figure 0.1).
Without wishing to minimize the horror of these crimes, there is evidently a considerable gap between the rising emotions stirred by this subject and the reality of its downward trend, and we must also note the ideological indifference that prevails vis-à-vis other much more socially and sexually significant phenomena of violence. Suicide rates, for example, are heavily biased against men: 1,985 female suicides and 6,450 male suicides took place in France in 2016. Yes, men are more violent (to deny this would be absurd), but most of their violence is turned against themselves, or against other men: let’s look at wartime fatalities, which are very masculine in nature despite indiscriminate bombardments, or, in peacetime, all of the homicide data, where men account for 65% of victims in France. Still, while the emotion associated with femicide doesn’t seem linked to any aggravation of the problem, it’s a social fact that we can’t ignore.
Let’s take a step back. We must first consider the statistically more massive phenomena that demonstrate the considerable historical progress in the situation of women. Of course, we can still measure, as I said, differences in salary, in the distribution of part-time jobs, and the remnants of male dominance in the economic and public spheres, but the empowerment of women through employment remains the fundamental phenomenon. The most recent years have seen a decisive ascent of women in the political field in France, the Anglo-American world and Scandinavia, if we stick to the three main hubs of women’s liberation in the developed world.
Figure 0.1 Female homicide rate in Europe and Japan
Above all, for the first time in human history, the educational relation between the sexes has shifted. All upsurges in literacy have involved men taking the lead. In Sweden, women caught up with and overtook men especially early, in the eighteenth century, but they had to catch up with them first, of course. Even Sweden, a country where feminism has become a matter of identity, and one that is proud of its leading position in women’s liberation in terms of all the parameters of the Gender Gap Global Report, did not escape an initial male predominance. The only groups and societies where women have become literate faster than men are Black American, Brazilian, Colombian and West Indian, but this is because the family and the status of fathers had been deliberately destroyed in those cultures by slavers, who were White and male. I will return to the particular family situation of Black women in the New World later in this book.
What are we now seeing in advanced countries? Women more often go into higher education, for shorter or longer courses, than men. The latest figures from the OECD tell us that in 2019, among 25–34-year-olds, in France, 52% of women had followed shorter or longer higher education courses, as compared to 44% of men.4 In the United Kingdom, it was 55% of women as compared to 49% of men. In the United States, the figures were 55% women and 46% men. In Italy, there was a significant gap, but at lower levels: there were 34% higher educated women aged 25–34, and 22% men. In Japan, the difference was small but at high levels: 64% women and 59% men. Russia has a surprise up its sleeve for us: the figures were 69% for women and 55% for men, although it’s not clear whether the definition of higher education there is directly comparable to that of the countries of the OECD. Germany deviates from the common law: the rates here were fairly low and not very different by sex: 34% for women, 32% for men. China, finally, had 18% men and 18% women with a higher education. But this is a less advanced country – one in which, as we will see, the status of women has been brought down particularly low by a very lengthy history, one that we will study. Although we can still find, everywhere, an over-representation of men in the very upper levels of higher education, something I’ll discuss later in this book, we still have to admit that the uneducated masses are predominantly male today.
An individual’s education largely prefigures his or her profession and these figures tell the crystal ball gazer that the basic problem of feminist demands will be solved in the not-too-distant future. This, at least, is what a feminist and female Bernstein would have deduced from present trends. It’s true that all types of higher education are not professionally equal and that there are important areas of male resistance, particularly in France when it comes to the sciences and the highly selective grandes écoles. I will discuss the meaning of these resistances, their causes and their consequences, in due course. But we’re now in a situation where friendly and reformist thinking should dominate, rather than any perception of men as murderers. Such progress could not have happened without the existence of fathers (and mothers, of course) concerned about the education of their daughters, or rather of fathers who did not view the education of their daughters as any less important than the education of their sons. Yet it is among these educated women that an antagonistic conception of the relations between the sexes is often born and flourishes.
The struggles of third-wave feminism may not be the crux of the problem. The success among the French middle classes of a book like Mona Chollet’s In Defence of Witches points, rather, to a sense of disorientation.5 How can so many modern women these days identify with the almost 40,000 women massacred by male fury in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? There’s something strange here, a kind of glitch in the process of women’s liberation.
Whenever there’s a paradox, contradiction, or some strangeness in a social phenomenon, my instinct as a researcher is alerted – as here. It’s often by observing anomalies and making them part and parcel of one’s reflection in order to explain them that science progresses. The glitch we observe in women’s liberation must be explained.
Hitherto, I have to admit, the question of feminism hadn’t interested me. One might say that there’s another – minor – paradox here, since my job is the analysis of family systems, the heart of which is precisely the relationship between men and women. Historical anthropology analyses the evolution of this relationship. It focuses on patrilineality (the priority given to the male lineage) and to matrilineality (the rarer equivalent for the female lineage – a phenomenon that does not imply any feminine power), patrilocality and matrilocality (when a young couple settle near the family of the husband or wife), etc. I have devoted several books to these problems, tracing in particular the long history of the family systems of Eurasia and resulting in the definition of an original form of the family of Homo sapiens.6 I have identified correspondences between forms of the peasant family and the type of ideology emerging as a result of literacy and secularization.7 I showed that some aspects of long-term cultural dynamism could be explained by a relatively high status afforded to women.8 I ended up diagnosing, in my last book, the disappearance of the regional family systems that for centuries had organized the territory of France.9 I had clearly perceived how women had overtaken men educationally in the majority of European countries, but I had not made much of this transformation, even though it is highly surprising – after all, in Sapiens, it abolished between 100,000 and 300,000 years of patridominance, to use the concept defined by American anthropology.
But precisely, women’s liberation was well underway, and I didn’t see what I could have contributed to something that wasn’t actually a problem, even if I realized that a certain Western narcissism prevented us from perceiving the cause of the resistance that Chinese, Indian, Arabic, Afghan and even, to some extent, Japanese, German and Russian patrilineal societies evinced towards our ‘values’. The emergence of internal contradictions, of a glitch in women’s liberation in the Western world in the strict sense – mainly the Anglo-American world, France and Scandinavia – has made me change my mind. Historical anthropology can help us to understand our present and future difficulties.
The singularity of the original human couple
To understand the importance of the transformation we are undergoing, we will first need to track the status of women over the last 5,000 or even 10,000 years – ever since the appearance of writing or even agriculture. In this way, we will realize that the feminist evolution of the Western world has, since the 1920s, reversed a major historical trend towards giving women a lower status, a trend observable in its fullness at the centre of the Eurasian mass, just as in Africa and New Guinea. But because the most recent feminism includes a new antagonism between the sexes, we will need, if we are really to understand the importance of these issues for the future of the species, to go even further back in the history of the human couple.
As an animal species, human beings differ from their cousins, the chimpanzees, by their ability to establish long-term ties between the two sexes. Monogamy – a tempered monogamy – has statistically dominated the species Homo sapiens since its appearance between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago, in Africa.
This observation of a stable original link between men and women – of which I am here giving merely an outline, reserving a more detailed analysis for chapter 4 – is relatively recent. It was not the conclusion reached by late nineteenth-century anthropologists. The founding fathers of the discipline believed in a primitive sexual communism. These seriousminded middle-class men projected onto the savages of the past a sexual life contrary to their own morality – one that was a vaguely pornographic fantasy.
The breaking of the pansexualist consensus was brought about by a Swedish-speaking Finn, a teacher at the London School of Economics, Edward Westermarck (1862–1939), who, ethnographic data in hand, with his The History of Human Marriage (1891) destroyed the idea of a primitive sexual promiscuity.10 We owe him not only one of the first formulations of the most commonly accepted thesis today, but also the explanation which remains the most convincing and the most fundamental: the idea of an original nuclear family that was naturally selected for its effectiveness in bringing up the young. This is the conclusion to which I myself came, after many other people and by a different methodological path, in L’Origine des systèmes familiaux (The Origin of Family Systems).
The nuclear family is simply a father and a mother with their children, and it is the basic unit of hunter-gatherer societies, heirs to the lifestyle of the original Homo sapiens, the surviving representatives of which we have been able to study, mainly in America and Australia but also in southern and eastern Africa and in Southeast Asia. Here, the single household is part of a group that contains several other nuclear families, most often related via the men or the women (it doesn’t matter which). The young couple, once married, form their own household, but they can co-reside for a time with a related couple. They are quite capable of taking in the elderly, widowers and this or that isolated individual. Such a couple is most often monogamous, but marriage, in its customary sense, with two wives is possible (polygyny) though it doesn’t involve more than 15% of cases – as is the case, as I am increasingly convinced, with the marriage of one woman with several men (polyandry). An examination of the Shoshone groups of the inner basin of the Rocky Mountains, which I will examine in detail, strongly points to an originally natural polyandry.
Westermarck sees the nuclear family as following a Darwinian-type evolutionary logic. Why do human beings, unlike chimpanzees, not live in sexual promiscuity where everyone sleeps with everyone else, even if a few dominant males breed more efficiently than others? What advantage is there for the species in a lasting bond between a man and a woman? The key is the long time it takes to bring up a human child. A baby comes out of its mother’s womb in a remarkable state of unpreparedness (primary altriciality) and it takes about fifteen years to rear it (secondary altriciality). Collaboration between the two members of the couple is a condition for the possibility of this exceptional upbringing. Unlike the male chimpanzee, who doesn’t know whose father he really is, a man can invest time in his children’s upbringing because the bond he maintains with their mother allows him to be their father.
Two invariants characterize the original human family. First of all, there is an undeniable ‘political’ male predominance in the local group. It’s not an overwhelming predominance, far from it, but it does exist. Then there is a sexual division of labour. When we examine all the examples of hunter-gatherer societies that have been ethnographed, we find that men hunt and women gather. In some cases, the men also gather, but the women almost never hunt. The men and women who these days are disturbed and exasperated by the way men monopolize hunting invariably cite the case of the few Agta women (the Negrito group in the Philippines) who sometimes go hunting. These marginal cases do not represent much statistically, when you look closely at the data. I will come back to this.
The original human family type is efficient and flexible, and it has ensured the success of the species. We therefore find at its heart a stable, economic and emotional bond between a man and a woman, a bond that can usually tolerate divorce, abortion, infanticide and a certain degree of polygyny or polyandry. The element of inequality in favour of the males that we have found cannot counterbalance the weight of collaboration and solidarity within the couple, necessary for survival in the environment specific to the hunter-gatherers.
Research versus ideology
The now dominant ideology of the Western world, third-wave feminism, has distorted the history of relations between the sexes. By no means all historical propositions put forward by this kind of feminism are absurd. Its vision of witchcraft trials as a war on women by power-hungry men seems to me essentially correct. It is verifiable that the berdache phenomenon – in which American Indian men are able to take on a woman’s economic and sexual status – is primordial to human beings, as I will explain later. But third-wave feminism, with its central but uncertain concepts of ‘gender’ and ‘patriarchy’, flattens history out, mixing together all levels of masculine dominance without really understanding them.
The first part of this book is a reorganization of the concepts of the relations between men and women, and of the history of these relations. I have worked in a methodical way, producing a critical examination of the feminist contribution to my two basic disciplines, anthropology and history. My conclusion is simple: feminism has had a dynamic effect on history and has positively destroyed anthropology with the force of dynamite.
I then retrace the history of the status of women through the history of family systems, to place the West narrowly understood – the Anglo-American world, France and Scandinavia – within the general evolution of humanity. We will then be able to perceive Westerners as the direct legitimate descendants of the hunter-gatherers; here, women’s status has never been lowered as it has in Japan, Germany and Russia (level 1), in China (level 2) and in northern India and the Arab world (level 3). The low status of women in Africa and New Guinea can be considered as intermediate between levels 2 and 3. To describe this historical pattern, I will be making a new cartographic use of the Ethnographic Atlas of George Peter Murdock (1897–1985) and the tabulations of Lewis R. Binford (1931–2011) on hunter-gatherers, two databases digitized and posted on the D-PLACE platform by a team from the Max-Planck Institute for the Science of Human History at Jena.11 The reader will of course find our mapping of data from the Atlas throughout the pages of this book, but also in a form that he or she will be able to explore in detail thanks to an app that we have put online.12
Defining a starting point for the history of the human family is crucial. After ten years of reflection, I have chosen the North American model of the original family instead of the Australian Aboriginal model dear to Durkheim, Freud and, more recently, Alain Testart. I will explain why. The problem is not so much the economic and emotional association between men and women which is common to both models, but the status of women, a status that was high among the Indians of northwest America but very low among the Australian Aborigines, where it combined very significant age differences between spouses and a very large degree of polygyny.
Without this in-depth historical examination, we could not understand the violence of the shift we are experiencing, or feel how disorienting it is in magnitude, even before we ponder the viability of the anthropological system which is now trying to establish itself. In seventy years, conceptions more than 100,000 years old have been reversed. But not everywhere on the planet. The patrilineal world, which after all still includes three-quarters of humanity, is still resisting.
This book integrates religion with historical anthropology. The co-evolution of religion and family seems more and more obvious to me. To understand the differences between the current feminisms of the three hubs of the West as narrowly understood, I will need to examine how Christianity, followed by the Protestant Reformation, changed family forms and impacted on the status of women in those areas. The United States, the United Kingdom and Scandinavia are, more than France, the dominant hubs of Western feminism. They are also countries with a Protestant tradition. This fact, so obvious and simple, nonetheless confronts us with a paradox. Protestantism, born in Germany in the sixteenth century, was clearly patricentric and included an anti-feminist nuance to which English-speaking and Scandinavian societies had to adapt, accepting it, attenuating it, rejecting it or all three at the same time.
I must here recognize an intellectual debt to feminism, a movement that is absolutely right to denounce history as a discipline which has long been blind to women. I have in mind not just the history of events, made up of wars and conquests, all the endless agitation of men in arms, but also the study of all the elements of social life. In my Lineages of Modernity,13 I failed to fully realize the historical importance of Protestant patricentrism, and thus the problems that this patricentrism raised for the Anglo-American world. The present book can be considered as a rebalanced, even feminized, complement to my previous outline of human history. The experience is fascinating for me as I have realized how much my self-identity as an anthropologist involved paying attention to women, while my self-identity as a historian was masculine in the most banal sense of the word.
The power of women today
Now that we have set out the history of the longue durée, it will be quite easy to talk about our present. The glitch in women’s liberation will make sense.
What we are experiencing is the accentuation of a rather high status given to women and not the overthrow of some fantasized ‘patriarchal’ order. I will show how liberation is possible and even natural once the technological conditions of safe and secure contraception and economic abundance have been met. The absence of a serious and solid male rejection of this liberation will have been a fundamental element in anthropological evolution. I would be tempted to say that the destruction of patriarchy was easy for us because it had never really existed. Some fathers (and mothers) were afraid that their daughters might fall pregnant, yes; men and women specialized economically to survive in harsh conditions, yes. But were men truly convinced of their intrinsic superiority? No. I’m fully aware that I’m exaggerating things a bit here to make my argument clear. Still, no blood-stained revolutionary confrontation was necessary to pave the way for the educational and sexual liberation of women, simply because men – husbands, fathers and brothers – benefited from it too. The first two waves of feminism certainly gave many men the opportunity to utter many silly generalities about women, but the speed of the shift shows how tenuous and fragile masculine dominance was, and how it hardly counted given the extent of the habits of cooperation between men and women. This collaboration is the basis of human nature when it has not been reoriented by the patrilineal principle.
I will here summarize the three feminist stages or waves, of which the first two aimed to correct the imbalance of the initial masculine domination, moderate in nature (as I have said), in bilateral kinship systems.
First, the citizenship phase. From the end of the nineteenth century, suffragettes claimed the right to vote. This first demand was satisfied in the United States in 1920 by universal female suffrage. In England, it took two steps: in 1918, suffrage was granted to women, but at a later age than that of men, 30 rather than 21; from 1928, the minimum age changed to 21 for both sexes. In Sweden, experiments in women’s suffrage in municipal elections took place from the eighteenth century, with various extensions, going backward and forward until the end of the nineteenth century; women’s suffrage in national elections to the Riksdag was granted in 1919, in time for the 1921 elections. France was particularly conservative here since French women had to wait until 1944 to have the right to vote. The French delay cannot, however, be interpreted as the expression of direct anti-feminism. The ‘radical socialist’ (meaning extremely moderate) Left feared that the link between women and Catholicism might give the Right undue influence. If we accept that the Church had established a special bond with women, and, in a way, represented them, we can understand that anxiety. The connection between women and Christianity will be discussed in chapter 8.
The interplay between gaining the right to vote and the savage masculine violence of the two world wars is obvious. However, the entry of women into political life did not lead to any immediate upheavals.
The second phase was that of ‘sexuality’. It opened with Pincus’s invention of the contraceptive pill in the United States; this was put on the market on the American side of the Atlantic in 1961, and authorized by the Neuwirth law in France in 1967. When we worry today about the status of women, we don’t always fully measure the risks of the sexual act for them before the pill. This opened up to them – but also to their masculine partners – the possibility of a different sexual life.14 Parents no longer needed to fear for their daughters. This second phase culminated with the legalization of abortion. Here, Britain led, with the passing of the Abortion Act in 1967 (note that ‘Britain’ is the appropriate term, as Northern Ireland was left out). The United States followed, on a national scale, in 1973, with the Supreme Court passing its decision in Roe v. Wade. France quickly followed the Anglo-American world, with the Veil Law of 1975.15 The main progress was made between the 1960s and the 1980s. This period was also that of a massive entry of women into the labour market.
In the mid-1980s, a third phase began, and the debate shifted from women’s liberation to a questioning of what men and women actually are – a re-examination of their essential natures. Biological? Social? Antagonistic? Stable? Negotiable? This was the period of ‘identity’, which came to France later than in the United States.
Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble should be seen as an important ideological step because it took to its most absurd consequences the use of the concept of gender, which became popular during feminism’s phase II. This text, as fundamental as it was obscure, appeared in 1990.16 It was an academic text inspired by French Theory (Derrida, Foucault, Wittig, Kristeva – a guarantee of opacity), and it had an unparalleled impact in the United States. It is still a marvellous illustration of the conceptual difficulties that arise, necessarily and without limits, if the binary opposition masculine–feminine – an opposition that has contributed, with many other conceptual pairs (top–bottom, left–right, day–night, past–future, hot–cold) to the structuring of human thought – is undermined.
The very obscurity of the text was programmatic, because it prefigured the confusion of the debates involving changes in sex, gender and sexual orientation. Thanks to it, we are prepared for the present-day world in which lesbians on noisy Gay Pride marches in San Francisco and London denounced transgender women as masculine ‘submarines’ who have infiltrated the feminist movement.
At this point, let me sincerely announce that I will be a conceptual conservative in this book, perhaps even a reactionary, since the term ‘gender’ has now supplanted that of ‘sex’ in the human sciences. In spite of this, I will stick to the opposition of two ‘sexes’, the one feminine, the other masculine, defined by the ability (except in cases of accidental sterility) or the inability to carry a child. But the concept of gender does exist socially, and I will study its meaning and spread in chapter 1
