Why do we need feminism? Why is there a need for a movement that champions the rights of one gender but not the other? It’s the kind of question that gets asked – usually by the same person – along side “Why is there a ‘Black History’ month?” or “Why is there a ‘Gay Pride’ festival?” or “Why can’t I buy and sell people anymore?”
I like to ask myself these questions from time to time because it’s good to continuously challenge your own point of view. Sometimes you learn things and in this case, I really have. I always thought that feminism was an evolutionary idea, like communism or socialism. That the notion that women and men should be treated and viewed equally was an idea that we came to realise was true because technology and progress had allowed it to finally happen.
Originally I intended to write a journal entry about the history of feminism for men, as explained by a man. In the process of doing some reading and research for that topic, I came to realise the below: That feminism isn’t an idea whose time has come, it’s a log of claims. Feminism is a liberation from thousands of years of oppression
A brief history of humans
Our evolutionary ancestors probably became ‘social’ about 52 Million years ago. About 8 million years ago, there was a genetic forking with one branch leading to Bonobos (the creature most genetically like us) and Chimpanzees. The other fork lead to *Ardipithecus ramidus* who started walking upright full time about 4 million years ago. About 3.3 million years ago, either *Australopithecus gahri* or *Australopithecus aethiopus* or *Homo habilis* started to use stones tools. Then around 1.75 million years ago *H.erectus* or *Homo habilis* learned to control fire. Even more than stone tools, control of fire was the critical, game changing technology to master.
Fire allowed early hominids to stay warm when they would have frozen to death. It allowed early humans to fight off predators more easily. Fire provided light when it was dark, extending the usable hours of the day. But probably most importantly fire allowed for the cooking of food.
Cooked food is easier to digest and freer of bacteria or microbes that kill the eater. This in turn lead to higher daily calorie counts and diversity of diet which allowed these early hominids to thrive. And thrive they did. It is likely that when *Homo sapiens* emerged in Africa roughly 350,000 years ago, they did so along side existing populations of H.habilis, H.erectus and with Homo neanderthalensis emerging on the European peninsula
Gaining control of fire and being able to manipulate its usage also lead to another by-product: the ability for tribes or social groups to become larger and to stay in a single place for longer periods of time. This in turn lead to role specialisation and – ultimately – to the subject of this piece of writing.
The Prehistoric Woman
Nowhere, from our common ancestors with the apes to the emergence of h.sapiens, is it suggested that there be rigidly defined gender based roles. Yet for most of my life, the orthodoxy in anthropology was ‘Man hunt! Woman care for baby!!” But it’s likely that perspective is complete bullshit. “Lady Sapiens: breaking stereotypes about prehistoric women”, a book and TV series by Thomas Cirotteau, Jenifer Kerner & Eric Pincas (translated by Philippa Hurd) seeks to widen the perspective on the roles women would have filled in prehistoric groups.
They make the compelling argument that all the first researchers into prehistory were 18th and 19th century men who already had rigid, gender based role ideas and they simply projected those onto their work. When these men would unearth a burial mound and find a skeleton surrounded by weapons, the immediate assumption was that it was a man. When they found a skeleton close to a fire, or surrounded by cooking implements, they would assume it was a woman. They simply found what they were looking for.
In 2018, Randall Haas and his team from UC Davis, found a burial site from 9,000 years ago in Peru where the warrior they thought was a man, actually turned out to be a biological woman. This then lead teams of researchers to go back and look at old finds. These researchers applied more advanced science like DNA analysis and lo and behold, somewhere around 40% of ‘male’ hunters turned out to be women.
The ‘Feminist’ Bit
French pre-Historian Marylène Patou-Mathis points out “No, prehistoric women did not spend all their time sweeping the cave and looking after children until men returned from hunting”. In her essay “The Prehistoric Man is also a Woman” Patou-Mathis attempts to challenge the notion that patriarchy MUST be baked into the origins of h.sapiens. Similarly Sofia C Samper Carro, a researcher at the Australian National University makes the point that if we want to be honest about the roles women take in modern life we have to be honest about the roles they had in prehistory.
Women were hunters. They were carers, They were the first people to realise that the moon follows a monthly cycle (like they do) and that the sun also follows a predictable movement across the sky and that the cold and warm seasons follow each other with dreary regularity. Prehistoric woman knew when in the year it was a good time to get pregnant and when it was not. Fertility gods are all female. No doubt the first pseudo religious orders were based on the planning of pregnancy so as not to over burden the tribe.
So many toxic men try to justify their misogynistic, gender based view of the world by talking about how humans are just animals and that prehistoric people had roles defined by biological sex. “It’s natural” they claim.
It’s an inescapable fact of biology that some humans can get pregnant and that some can’t. Everything else is determined by environment and behaviour. Some women are horrible carers and excellent hunters. The reverse is true for men. Forcing someone into a role based on their gender isn’t just bad for the person, it’s bad for the tribe….even if that tribe is 7bn people large.