Equality Now is an organization that I have supported for many years. Yesterday on Twitter I noticed their retweets of the hashtag #YesAllWomen and looked into what that was. In my research I found
this post by Joss Whedon. A few years old, the message it carries is still very much current, unfortunately. It made me think about some other research I did, about 20 years ago, about women in pre-historic times.
My reason for researching the topic back then was to verify the veracity of a book I had procured. The results of my research got me hooked on anthropology and I have been keeping up to date on new developments in the field. Strangely, those new developments are rarely broadcast to a larger audience. In fact, it can be downright difficult to find the articles in the first place as they are only published in specialized magazines, or even just as thesis papers.
What I have discovered during these 20 years of study is that not only did women have a vastly different role in pre-historic societies than we have been led to believe, but also that what initiated the changes that have led to the societal views we have today was the emergence of organized monotheistic patriarchal religion. The biggest culprit has been the semitic religion, by which I mean that which evolved into the three largest faiths in modern western society: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
From what I have seen of archaeological and anthropological findings over the past 20 years, I believe that before the semitic monotheistic faith began to spread people were considered equal, regardless of gender or anything else.
Firstly, common sense says that it would be completely counterproductive to have half the community doing nothing but popping out new mouths to feed and taking care of them. That would quickly lead to the extinction of the human race.
Secondly, with the oftentimes harsh climate and living conditions of pre-historic humans, I just don't see them wasting any kind of resource, whether material or labor. Even supposing women did no kind of hunting at all, they were still very much able to gather vegetable foods, like roots, fruits, berries, nuts, etc.
Thirdly, there is actually archaeological evidence that women, at least in some societies, held status equal to men. For example, women buried in graves of equal or greater opulence than men, with grave gifts of spears, knives and hunting nets.
Fourthly, for humans without the scientific knowledge we have today it would make sense to give women high status since they are the bringers of life. Humans have always tended to worship that which they cannot understand, such as natural phenomena (thunder, lightning, the sun and moon), it would follow logically that they would see the ability to produce new life as special and even sacred.
I believe the decline of equality began when men realized that they are needed to produce new life. My theory is that this made men stop seeing women as sacred, which was the first step toward the patriarchal society we have today. If women are not sacred, but merely equals, the next step would be to put men above women because men genetically have greater physical strength and a larger build. They can take women's ability to give life out of the picture entirely. After that it is easier to reduce female deities to lesser roles and raise male deities to a higher level, followed by the slow but inevitable eradication of female deities altogether, mirrored by the reduction of women's roles in society, until we are left with the skewed male dominatated patriarchal society we have today. Even as late as 1000 years ago, the Norse society held women in high regard. Women were priestesses and the keepers of the keys to their homes. This did not change until Christianity got a firm hold in their society.
We, every one of us, has to realize that we are all humans, that nothing else matters, not gender or skin color or sexuality or anything else. Change has to start somewhere and there is no better place to start this change than in your own home. Raise your children without the constricted views on gender roles that society pushes on us. Raise them to see all as humans, and not to put labels on others, or judge others. Raise them to be individuals.
Equality should not be a dream for the future. It should be a reality. Now.
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Some suggested reading:
Sons of the Mother: Victorian Anthropologists and the Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory
New Women of the Ice Age
Questioning Prehistoric Patriarchy & AnthropologyStone Age (.pdf document)
Cave Women Rocked: Science Shows Prehistoric Gender Equality
Women in Prehistoric Communities: The Start of the Division of Labor
Matrilineality (Wikipedia)
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