Even when the division of labour was first developed it wasn't inegalitarian and because of women's role and it's importance, they often did have social/political leverage in a lot of primitive societies.
Chapter 2. Analyzing the Persistence of Gender Inequality: How to Think about the OriginsEven given these parallel causes, the degree of gender inequality varies considerably across societies. In particular, gender inequality appears to be least pronounced in the simplest societies. This suggests that the original causes of gender inequality do not, by themselves, produce much inequality. Rather, the inequality traceable to the effects of biological differences in simple societies becomes exacerbated through the attempts of men to maintain and extend their initial advantages when societies become more complex.
It just so happens though that this division precedes more patriarchal relations because men are able to consolidate more sociopolitical power and then transfer that power as society makes shifts, whilst maintaining exclusion of women.
It's only upon industrialization that women are brought more fully into the economic sphere and able to collectively organize themselves and develop the political means to advocate for their perceived self interests.
HE GENERAL PROBLEM OF REPRODUCING POWER
To persist, status inequality must have mechanisms that transfer power reliably from past to future members of the dominant group. The natural cycle of birth and death creates a continuous turnover of people. Each type of status inequality bestows its advantages on the chosen and denies them to all others.
Sex inequality is an instance of status inequality. Status inequality separates types of people. For example, racial discrimination preserves whites' advantages over blacks. Status inequality distinguishes people by their personal attributes and the amount of inequality between people reflects the differences in opportunities available to status groups. In contrast, positional inequality divides locations within social structures. For example, organizational authority divides managerial positions from staff or wage labor positions. Status inequality has many faces. The advantaged may be distinguished from the disadvantaged by race, class, age, or even intellectual achievement.
In the relationships between individuals and between groups, positional inequality is based on structural resources and rights that are transferable. For example, organizations repeatedly fill the same position with new personnel; similarly, people transfer personal wealth to their heirs. In contrast, exclusionary status inequality is based on nontransferable personal attributes. A person's sex or race, even a person's educational attainment, cannot be passed on to another person.
A system of status inequality must be embedded in one or more systems of positional inequality. People in one status group have preferential access to positions that offer prestige, authority, resources, and rewards. The economic and political orders constitute the most important forms of positional inequality.
In simple terms, a stable system of status inequality must consistently give people resources and motives that match the status of their group identity. These should predispose dominant people toward actions that consistently reinforce inequality. To achieve stability, a system of inequality must deny subordinate people the means to overcome their disadvantages. These are functional necessities for systems of status inequality in a simple logical sense: without them, inequality would wane.
Systems have no general, inherent tendency to meet these needs. If anything, they tend to do just the opposite, making the preservation of inequality universally problematic. In all systems of inequality, subordinate and disadvantaged people have an intrinsic propensity to rebel against their circumstances. This constant pressure will erode inequality unless some group effectively defends it. A system of status inequality preserves itself if, and only if, it gives dominant people the means and will to prevent disadvantaged people from successfully pressing their claims.
ECONOMIC POWER
In most societies, women's work has long been overlooked or underestimated. Although many ofen think that throughout history men have been the workers while women have been the mothers and wives, anthrpological research indicates that among early civilizations women were the primary labor force in teh vast majority of gathering and cultivating societies (Murdock 1967; cited from Blumberg 1984). Even today, statistics on labor tend to ignore the work of poor rural women (Donahoe 1999). Therefore, it is clear that women's labor alone is not sufficient to give them economic power. Specifically, economic power is based in control over the means of production and control over the allocation of surplus. It is control over surplus (in money, goods, land, or the labor of others) that leads individuals to have resources to pursue and acquire political power. So though women's level of labor force participation or income may be important, gender stratification theorists argue that it is control over labor or income that matters (Blumberg 1984; Chafetz 1984). For example, Staudt (1986) explained that although women in Africa have control over money within their households, they cannot own land, putting them at a serious economic disadvantage compared with men in that society.
Although economic power does not guarantee that women will gain formal political power, gender stratification researchers argue strongly that women's economic power must precede political power. For example, according to Rae Lesser Blumberg (1984), a power hierarchy exists - political power rests at the top, and other types of power, such as economic power, appear below. Achievement of power at the lower levels of power, such as in the labour force, must occur before power can be reached at the next highest level (cited from Paxton 1997)> IN an ethnographic analysis of 61 preindustrial societies, Blumberg (1984) found only one instance in which women had significant political input without autonomous economic power. (The exceptional example was the Mende of Liberia. Although the women did not do much of the productive labor, they were organized in a secret society and used their clout to influence the political sphere.)
Chapter 4. The Reproduction of Economic and Political
PowerAnd gender roles aren't merely abstractions, but many abstractions find substance in the concrete relations in which people live. It's just from this that people make the mistaken assumption that one's behaviour originates purely within one's biology rather than seeing that the essence of things is derived by it's relations.
http://69.195.124.91/~brucieba/2014/04/13/ilyenkovs-dialectic-of-the-abstract-and-the-concrete-i/For Hegel the essence or content of objects of investigation cannot be known by examining them in isolation. The thing cannot be known in itself as its essence exists outside of itself and in relation to, or in its connectedness with, other objects or phenomena.
p.9Consider another example showing how beliefs about sex differences cloud people's analytical vision. How often have we heard question like: will women who enter high-status jobs or political positions end up looking like men or will the result of their entry be a change in the way business and politics is conducted? Implicit in this question are a set of strong assumptions: men have essential personality characteristics and cultural orientations that have shaped the terrain of high status jobs and women have different essential personality characteristics and cultural orientations. The conclusion is that and women's entry into these positions unleashes a conflict between their feminine essence and the dominant masculine essence that has shaped the positions. Either the positions must change to adapt to women's distinctive characteristics or the women must become masculine. (It is perhaps telling that those who raise this issue usually seem concerned only with women entering high-status positions; it is unclear if women becoming factory workers are believed immune or unimportant.) The analytical flaw here i assuming that masculinity has shaped the character of jobs rather than that jobs have shaped masculinity. In her well-known book Men and Women of the Corporation, Rosabeth Kanter argued persuasively that the personality characteristics associated with male and female corporate employees really reflected the contours of their positions. The implication is simple and straightforward. Women who enter high-status positions will look about the same as men in those positions not because they are becoming masculine, but because they're adapting to the demands and opportunities of the position, just like men.
p. 42Rosabeth Kantor has effectively assessed this misperception in her work Men and Women of the Corporation. Many authors have suggested that feminine personality characteristics (including a lack of drive) explain women's lack of success in climbing corporate ladders. Kantor has persuasively argued that these characteristics are really a direct result of structural conditions. Men placed in positions with no opportunities for advancement and with no effective power show the same personality and behavior characteristics as women in such positions. In the past, however, all women were condemned to occupy the positions without futures. Only men could realistically aspire to rise. Therefore we have good evidence that inequality produces differential motives to dominate weighed against no evidence of any inherent sexual difference in such motives
Which is why efforts to find the content of our behaviour by merely examining biological mechanisms and then speculating their relation to observed behaviours and social phenomenon is weakly founded. Because its methodological ontology is limited to the biological and is unable to appropriately consider the biosocial nature of humans.
And leads to strange results for evolutionary psychology when they speculate an enduring biological adaption to explained observed behaviour upon emergent changes in social relations, like how men and women of similar positions of power share similarities in their preference for infidelity and sexual expression.
Power Increases Infidelity Among Men and WomenGENDER
Third, we aimed to determine whether the power-infidelity link was as strong for women as for men. Many researchers have found that, overall, women are less likely than men to be unfaithful. This effect has been explained by the fact that for evolutionary reasons, women should be more oriented than men toward binding to one powerful partner in a stable relationship. Other researchers have proposed that this often found gender difference in infidelity is at least partly due to differences in the socioeconomic position of men and women. According to this proposal, if women were to obtain independent sources of income and power, their dependence on their partners would decrease, and their likelihood of being unfaithful would increase (Buller, 2005; Eagly & Wood, 1999; Smuts, 1992; Wood & Eagly, 2007).
Our findings clearly support this latter view. Gender did not moderate the effects we found. Among women who had an independent source of income (as all our female respondents did, because they were working professionals), power had a positive relationship with infidelity, and this relationship was comparable to that found among men. These findings were not likely caused by a statistical artifact; our sample was large and included similar numbers of men and women. If social desirability had affected the responses, it most likely would have suppressed responses more strongly for women than for men (Whisman & Snyder, 2007). It also seems unlikely that the observed effects are specific to the Dutch culture. Although The Netherlands is often seen as a liberal country in regard to sexual issues, most Dutch people find adultery unacceptable (Kraaykamp, 2002). According to the World Values Survey Association (2000), the opinion of the Dutch on adultery ranks 30th among the 47 countries investigated. The Dutch score, 2.7 on a 5-point scale ranging from unacceptable to acceptable, is similar to the scores of the Belgians, Germans, Canadians, Japanese, and Russians.
Clearly, power increases infidelity among women, as it does among men. An emerging literature demonstrates that this is not an isolated finding; researchers studying the effect of (manipulated) power on participants’ attention to attractive individuals (Brady et al., 2011), tendency to overestimate the degree to which other people are sexually interested in them (Kunstman & Maner, 2011; Lerner, 2011), and sexual approach behaviors (Wilkey, 2011) have also found equally strong effects of power for women and for men. Together, these findings suggest that women in high-power positions are as likely to engage in infidelity as are men in high-power positions.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics
- By Tainari88
- By FiveofSwords
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