To start, there are few things in the world that irritate me more when people try to justify a shitty argument using science or "the natural order" of things when they actually have zero fucking idea of what they're talking about. Basically, when these people talk about "natural law" or "traditional values" or something, they're referring to 10-15 thousand years ago and onward, aka at the development of agriculture or anything that led to the white male's rise to political/social power. If you want to survey the time anatomically-modern humans have been around (or even earlier), you'll notice that there has NEVER, EVER EVER been anything "natural" or "traditional" about:
- The nuclear family/"traditional" marriage
- Monogamy (sorry =| )
- Females being anything less than equal in social status to males.
- Males being "smarter" than females
- White people being "smarter"/more productive/better than colored people
- Homosexuals choosing their sexual orientation.
Okay, so…women being breadwinners. Totally against the natural law, right? When I first saw this video, I thought, "This is totally wrong! In hunter-gatherer (HG) societies, men hunted and women gathered! And that meant women brought back 60-80% of calories consumed for the tribe!". Well, while that is the true for some HG groups, the real story is more complicated than that. Where had I gotten that statistic? From a TED talk Helen Fischer gave, but it's backed up by some studies of indigenous groups like the bushman groups of Africa (Lee 1968, Tanaka 1976), the Australian Aborigines (Gould 1977), etc. Murdoch's 1967 "Ethnographic Atlas" indicates that only around north of the 40° latitude do hunter-gatherer males start making the majority contribution to subsistence from hunting/fishing.
Then in 1978, Ember publishes this paper "Myths about Hunter-Gatherers" that basically said more HG groups have males being the primary provider for subsistence than females. Great. Conflicting data. What now? Well after Googling around last night, I found this anthology, "Ethnobotany: a reader" edited by Minnis (published in 2000). There's a chapter by Hunn titled "On the Relative Contribution of Men and Women to Subsistence among Hunter-Gatherers of the Columbia Plateau: A Comparison with Ethnographic Atlas Summaries" in which he says
- Ember claims more HG groups have males being the primary provider, but that's not surprising since 77% of the HG groups she studied were…north of the 42° latitude!
- Some studies on groups of the Columbia Plateau by Hewes assume that men bringing back salmon meant that, hey, obviously they're providing majority of the calories for their group, right? WRONG. When you actually compare the nutritional content of the foods these people eat, the starchy roots and vegetables that the women gathered provided more calories than the salmon the men fished.
- The argument of who provides more calories is actually kind of stupid…humans obviously need more than just calories to survive. Even when women in the Columbia Plateau provided more calories in the vegetables they gathered, we all know how healthy fresh fish is for us (and is/was to indigenous people of the Plateau).
Hunn sums it up in this awesome passage:
To single out one resource, one nutritional requirement, or one sex as the key to understanding the success of hunting-gathering adaptations is to miss the point entirely. Human foragers survived to colonize nearly the entire land surface of the earth by virtue of judicious selection of an ample and varied diet from an extensive, empirically sound folk biological inventory of the flora and fauna. To argue that either men or women were of paramount importance in the evolutionary history of the human species is to ignore the most human ecological characteristic, familial economic cooperation.
So what has happened since our HG days? Agriculture happened. Before agriculture, HG societies could live off whatever was around them. There was no real concept of personal property because there was no property, no really valuable thing anyone could own. All of the sudden, when you have agriculture, where you can farm land or raise livestock, the size of your land directly determines how much food you can produce, which directly determines your social status. Now, instead of everyone being equal, you have haves and have-nots. And how would you be able to grow your wealth? By owning more land! By farming! And who would do the farming? Not women. No, you don't want those frail, delicate creatures working the fields! You want MEN! All of the sudden, with the advent of agriculture, the primary provider was made a position exclusively for men. Women belonged at home. In the kitchen. Or raising the kids. Preferably boys.
I will probably rant about this at greater length later, but after developing the concept of personal property with agriculture, we could get to view PEOPLE, like WOMEN (and other races!), as property, too! Neato, right? Now we can do all sorts of fun things like
- Exchange women for goods according to a contract between families (yay for "traditional" marriage!")
- Control all aspects of womens' lives since they're now relegated to strictly domestic duties
- Regulate their sexuality and have it be totally cool to punish your woman for coveting another man (which, biologically, THEY WILL, at least if she is heterosexual) or punishing another man for coveting your woman. After all, you're really not supposed to covet any of your neighbor's property either - "You shall not covet your neighbor's wife. You shall not set your desire on your neighbor's house or land, his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor." (Deuteronomy 5:21).
- Rape them. Beat them. They're your property; you can do whatever the fuck you want with them!
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Sorry, that was a really long tangent on the historical event that began totally fucking over women. Bringing the discussion back to "breadwinning", humans are…just…amazingly resilient creatures. We have people living in outer space for months at a time in the ISS, so obviously we are able to adapt new environments. It shouldn't be a surprise that in different environments, we will use different survival strategies. So if we're talking about "breadwinning", in different parts of the world, different plants and animals inhabit different regions which will require different hunting/gathering strategies and different divisions of labor.
So does sexual division of labor exist? OF COURSE IT DOES. Are/were there societies where men provided the bulk of calories/nutrients? OF COURSE. Are/were there societies where women provided the bulk of calories/nutrients? OF COURSE. Contrary to what these Fox News dumbfucks are telling us, this idea that men were always the de facto primary providers is total bullshit. It shouldn't surprise anyone that when our environment changes (from hunter-gatherer to agriculture to industrialization to knowledge-based economy), our behaviors adapt accordingly (more women are able to provide for themselves and others). If you're a dude whose out of a job in this economy, and your ladyfriend is winning the bread (or starchy roots), you better be fucking thankful. The alternative is that you both starve. So just like men, women, as they have been for tens-to-hundreds-or-more thousands of years, at very minimum, ALWAYS BEEN CAPABLE OF BEING THE BREADWINNERS.
*sigh* as a guy, this world still sucks.
Oh, and I managed to find the whole Ethnobotany book online. It was an EPUB, so I had to convert it to PDF, but the conversion quality is not the best. Here's the Hunn chapter about male/female contributions to subsistence on my Dropbox: Link.
