Mother's Day Series Pt2 - Gender Roles

This is the second installment of the Mothers' Day series on women and sexism.

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            The feminists’ brief story of history goes something like this:

“SINCE THE DAWN OF TIME, males have been oppressive! They have stolen wymmins’ right to equality! To currency! Wymmin have been forced to tend the home and the children in a nuclear family setting! They have been reduced to the lowest of the low! We must rectify this brutal social injustice and eliminate gender roles!”

Needless to say this is quite wrong. Western European-style ‘gender roles’ developed over hundreds of years after the latifundia period when farms organized into estates and were governed politically. The lord or manorial boss would usually assign jobs without reference to gender, but for war-making and childbearing. When it came to being a soldier, a man’s (in the male sense) superior strength and bone density far better bore thick metal armor. This clean organization went back to the first Western soldiers who, for example, wielded tree trunks as excessively long pikes (up to 30’) in Alexander the Great’s armies. Soldiers marched and bore insanely heavy weapons and armor through an advanced age beyond the onset of osteoporosis in many women (also note how that says nothing of a brutally consistent-performance environment conflicting with menstruation). For pregnant women and those who had just given birth, local administrators would designate them less strenuous tasks indoors or in herb gardens, etc. We thus see the beginning of a split.

            This split continued to develop in the 13^th and 14^th centuries as kingdoms took on more aspects of private property and what the Germans call landflucht (‘flight from the land’): urbanization. There was an astounding increase in production and wealth that enabled people to have more children. If you’re having more children, your wife is more pregnant, more often, and taking on more and more tasks that are less physically strenuous as that’s the physiologically sensible and seven-centuries-plus established way of doing things. The established pattern had women tending equal economic responsibilities except for times of war when they took on more and childbearing when they took on less. For five hundred more years, people organized themselves like that (give or take a few, tiny, and radical sects) until the economy changed.

            Very few people ever took note of (and bothered to write down) how comfortable people were with these developing roles. Such comfort worked its way into official policy as the few vocal supporters of expected norms got said norms declared as law. Nobody cared that much as there was no reason to care…until the economy changed.

            Industrialization meant static employment that was physically demanding and remote from the home. Corporate life became and is far more militarized than self-employed or homestead existences. Employment for a wage, a new concept at the time, became a man’s realm for these reasons. As more and more of life became interfaced with industry, it strained the increasingly only politically-ascribed family framework. 

           People started making decisions around the late 19^th century that conflicted with policies made a hundred years before. We thus got feminism as a political vehicle to change those policies. It increased in strength as the societal strain increased in intensity. Early feminists were very effective in changing those policies until, after less than half a century’s work, the strain has been almost entirely alleviated…but the politics continue.
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My take:

            No, there shouldn’t be politically ascribed gender roles. That much is easy to say. What’s harder is proposing there shouldn’t be policies that enforce a lack of gender roles. Let people decide for themselves and let the market punish them if they’ve made bad decisions.

            If, for example, an employer does not hire a group of people based on some characteristic like their sex, that employer is pushing away skilled workers that would make him quite a bit of money. Those workers would then be inevitably employed by his competitor who in turn has a market advantage over the sexist. Eventually the sexist would be put out of business. It’s not as if this isn’t happening: do you really think the government is so effective that it bars all discrimination just because it says it does? Don’t make me laugh: the market has cleaned up discrimination, not the government’s impotent and blithe policy gestures.

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For further information:

-Thomas Sowell (I have a feeling this blog will have a LOT of the Great One) interview clip on gender differences.

-Carol Platt Leibau's "Prude: How the Sex-Obsessed Culture Damages Girls"