Women In Patriarchal Societies
The Origins Of Civilizations
Date: 1992
Most agricultural civilizations downgraded the status and potential of
women, at least according to modern Western standards and to the implicit
standards of hunting-and-gathering societies. Agricultural civilizations were
characteristically patriarchal; that is, they were run by men and based on the
assumption that men directed political, economic, and cultural life.
Furthermore, as agricultural civilizations developed over time and became more
prosperous and more elaborately organized, the status of women deteriorated
from its initial level. Individual families were normally set up on a
patriarchal basis, with the husband and father determining fundamental
conditions and making the key decisions, and with humble obedience owed to
this male authority. Patriarchal family structure rested on men's control of
most or all property, starting with land itself; marriage was based on
property relationships and it was assumed that marriage, and therefore
subordination to men, was the normal condition for the vast majority of women.
A revealing symptom of patriarchal families was the fact that, after marrying,
a woman usually moved to the orbit (and often the residence) of her husband's
family.
Characteristic patriarchal conditions developed in Mesopotamian
civilization. Marriages were arranged for women by their parents, with a
formal contract being drawn up. The husband served as authority over his wife
and children just as he did over his slaves. Early Sumerians may have given
women greater latitude than came to be the case later on. Their religion
attributed considerable power to female sexuality and their early law gave
women important rights, so that they could not be treated as outright
property. Still, even in Sumerian law the adultery of a wife was punishable by
death, while a husband's adultery was treated far more lightly - a double
standard characteristic of patriarchalism. Mesopotamian societies after
Sumerian times began to emphasize the importance of a woman's virginity on
marriage and imposed the veil on respectable women when in public to emphasize
their modesty. These changes showed a progressive cramping of women's social
position and daily freedoms. At all points, a good portion of Mesopotamian law
(such as the Hammurabic code) was given over to prescriptions for women,
assuring certain basic protections but clearly emphasizing limits and
inferiority.
Patriarchal conditions also could vary from one agricultural civilization
to another. Egyptian civilization gave women, at least in the upper classes,
more credit and witnessed a number of powerful queens. The beautiful
Nefertiti, wife of Akhenaton, seemed to have been influential in the religious
disputes in this reign. Some agricultural societies gave women a certain
importance by tracing descendants from mothers rather than fathers. This was
true, for example, of Jewish law. But even these matrilineal societies held
women to be inferior to men; for example, Jewish law insisted that men and
women worship separately. So while variety is truly important, it usually
operated within a framework of basic patriarchalism. It was around 2000 B.C.
that an Egyptian writer, Ptah Hotep, put patriarchal beliefs as clearly as
anyone in the early civilizations: "If you are a man of note, found for
yourself a household, and love your wife at home, as it beseems. Fill her
belly, clothe her back. . . . But hold her back from getting the mastery.
Remember that her eye is her stormwind, and her vulva and mouth are her
strength."
Why was patriarchalism so pervasive? As agriculture improved using better
techniques, women's labor, though still absolutely vital, became less
important than it had been in hunting-and-gathering or early agricultural
societies. This was particularly true in the upper classes and in cities where
men frequently took over the most productive work, craft production, or
political leadership, for example. The inferior position of women in the upper
classes was usually more marked than in peasant villages where women's labor
remained essential. More generally, agricultural societies were based on
concepts of property, beginning with the ways land was organized. Early law
codes were based on property relationships. It seemed essential in these
circumstances for a man to be sure who his heirs were - that is, to try to
make sure that he monopolized the sexual activities of his wife or wives. This
situation helps account for the strong legal emphasis placed on women's sexual
fidelity and the tendency to treat women themselves as part of a man's
property. Within this framework, in turn, it became possible to think of women
as inferior and partly ornamental, so that when groups achieved a certain
prosperity they often tried to demonstrate this by further reducing the status
of women. This was a very clear pattern in Chinese civilization and may have
operated also in India and, later, in western Europe. Patriarchalism, in sum,
responded to economic and property conditions in agricultural civilizations
and might deepen over time.
Patriarchalism raises important questions about women themselves. Many
women internalized the culture of patriarchalism, holding that it was their
job to obey and to serve men and accepting arguments that their aptitudes were
inferior to those of men. But patriarchalism did not preclude some important
options for women. In many societies a minority of women could gain some
relief through religious functions, which could provide a chance to operate
independent of family structures. Patriarchal laws defined some rights for
women even within marriage, protecting them in theory from the worst abuses.
Sumerian law, for example, gave women as well as men the right to divorce on
certain conditions when their spouse had not lived up to obligations. Women
could also wield informal power in patriarchal societies by the emotional hold
they gained over husbands or sons; this was behind the scenes and indirect,
but a forceful woman might use these means to figure prominently in a
society's history. Women also could form networks, if only within a large
household. Older women, who commanded the obedience of many daughters-in-law
as well as unmarried daughters, could powerfully shape the activities of the
family.
The fact remains that patriarchalism was a commanding theme in most
agricultural civilizations, from the early centuries onward. Enforcing
patriarchalism, through law and culture, provided one means by which these
societies regulated their members and tried to achieve order. While women were
not reduced to literal servitude by most patriarchal systems, they might have
come close. Their options were severely constrained. Girls were raised to
assume patriarchal conditions, and boys were raised with full consciousness of
their distinctiveness. In many agricultural civilizations patriarchalism
dictated that boys, because of their importance in carrying on the family name
and the chief economic activities, were more likely to survive. When
population excess threatened a family or a community, paariarchal assumptions
dictated that female infants should be killed as a means of population
control.
Conclusion
The Issue Of Heritage
The centuries in which early civilizations took hold and spread in
Mesopotamia and Egypt, and then in surrounding regions, provide a fascinating
insight into the ways civilization took shape, the reasons it developed, and
the mixtures of advantages and disadvantages it involved. The period of early
civilization, stretching over more than 2000 years, also allows a clear
understanding of the mixtures of diversity and contact that would long shape
history in the Middle East, northern Africa, and southern Europe. Separate
centers arose, particularly along the Tigris-Euphrates and the Nile, that had
relatively little interaction and differed in numerous ways.
Civilization, though it grouped unprecedented numbers of people in common
cultures and common political structures, was also a separating phenomenon
because of its diverse points of origin. Because of the way in which two
distinct civilizations began in the Middle East and North Africa, supplemented
by successive invasions and the formation of smaller regional cultures, the
area would be permanently marked as a complex, vibrant, but often disputed and
disputatious part of the world.
As a new set of civilizations began to emerge to replace the societies
born of the river-valley achievements, it is important to ask more
specifically what traces of the river-valley civilizations would survive.
Diversity in the region is one important trace, as is the persistence of
specific developments such as the Jewish religion. So too, at another level,
were the monumental achievements of the early civilizations, notably of course
the great Egyptian structures.
Beyond specifics, however, there were two levels of heritage from the
river-valley civilizations, one vital and precisely measurable, the other
vital but harder to assess.
Techniques
The basic apparatus of civilization never had to be reinvented in the
Middle-Eastern or Mediterranean regions, or in those areas that received
civilization from these regions. This apparatus includes the idea of writing,
calendars, basic mathematical and scientific discoveries, and improved
technologies, such as irrigation, iron use, more productive grain seeds, the
potter's wheel, and the wheel. Money and the idea of written, collected law
did not have to be rediscovered in this part of the world, nor did the use of
certain medicinal drugs. A large number of the attributes or consequences of
civilization were so obviously advantageous that they would be taken over by
any successor society and carefully preserved amid vast political or cultural
change. Other parts of the world had to invent some of these civilization
features separately, but in this considerable region the river-valley
civilizations produced a framework that never had to be redone.
Cultures
Whether the early civilizations also produced a set of basic political
and cultural impulses that would survive into later societies is harder to
determine. Certainly there are some important traces. The flood story of
Mesopotamia passed into the Jewish Bible and so into the cultural arsenal of
both Christian and Muslim civilizations in the world today--some of them far
distant, geographically, from the story's place of origin. We use words that
come directly from the ancient Middle East or Egypt--such as the
Sumerian-derived word alcohol--that suggest important transmissions. It is
increasingly believed that modern music owes much to discoveries in early
Mesopotamian civilization in the form of specific instruments (harps, drums,
flutes) as well as in the development of the seven- and eight-token scales now
used in the West and passed from Mesopotamia through Greece. Towers and
columns now common in Muslim and in European and American architecture were
based on the ziggurats and perhaps Egyptian columns. These continuities in
style or vocabulary were not of course unchanged as they were transmitted, but
they show the omgoing influence of the early civilizations on societies that
succeeded Mesopotamia and Egypt.
The heritage of the early civilizations in politics, though incomplete,
is fairly obvious. Ideas of divine kingship, worked out in Mesopotamia and
Egypt, were remembered and revived in the later Roman empire, and may also
have influenced later African monarchies. The importance of regional
city-states recurrently marked Middle-Eastern history, with some bearing on
the political fragmentation of the region even in recent times.
Some historians have gone further still, in suggesting an ongoing link
between certain modern civilizations and their river-valley progenitors. It
has been argued, for example, that cultures that accepted Mesopotamian
influence, including classical Greece and later Christian cultures, emphasized
a division between humanity and nature quite different from the civilization
traditions launched by early societies in India, China, and probably
sub-Saharan Africa. Instead of seeing humanity as part of a larger natural
harmony, the Mesopotamian tradition held humans separate from nature, capable
of observing and exploiting it from a different vantage point, seeing nature
as antagonistic rather than seeking a peace within it. From this basic
division in early cultures would come different scientific approaches,
religions, and religious goals. The Middle East and Europe have long been
centers of religions that encourage action and anxiety, as opposed to
religious traditions of greater tranquility that arose in India; some of these
characteristics may go back to the Sumerian world view. Distinctive attitudes
toward women might even result, as the Mesopotamian tradition tended to argue
that women were closer to nature than men and so more inherently inferior.
Whether this basic cultural divide holds up in general may be debated; it may
presume too much on what is known about later scientific or religious
outlooks, not on what is known about the early civilizations themselves. Much
would depend, of course, on how any Mesopotamian core tradition was
transmitted into subsequent cultures such as the Greek, the Christian, and the
Muslim.
Nevertheless, the idea of some basic guidelines passing down from the
early civilizations is a fascinating one. Not fully provable and certainly not
definite fact, the idea legitimately suggests the power and complexity of the
values, not just the specific technical and social inventions, that early
civilizations developed. There is one point that might give support to the
idea of distinctive, durable frameworks of values: The civilizations that
inherited from Egypt and Mesopotamia were not all the civilizations in the
world. Other, quite separate early civilization centers, notably those in
India, China, and later the Americas, would send out different signals,
duplicating through separate invention some of the practical features of Egypt
and Mesopotamia but inevitably producing quite different versions of culture
and politics. More people in the world today look back to these other early
civilizations for points of origin, than lay claim directly to the heritage of
the Middle East and North Africa.
Further Readings
Two excellent studies can guide additional work on early civilization in
Mesopotamia: C. L. Redman's the Rise of Civilization: From Early Farmers To
Urban Society in the Ancient Near East (1988); and J. J. Nissen's The Early
History of the Ancient Near East, 9000-2000 B.C. (1988). See also S. N.
Kramer's History Begins at Sumer (1981). Two fine studies of Egypt are A.
Gardiner's Egypt of the Pharaohs (1966), a very readable treatment, and A.
Nibbi's Ancient Egypt and some Eastern neighbors (1981). Patterns of life with
some useful comparison are the subject of J. Hawkes' Life in Mesopotamia, the
Indus Valley, and Egypt (1973). Two recent books deal with important special
topics: M. Silver's Economic Structures of the Ancient Near East (1987); and
T. Jacobsen's The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion
(1976).
Two studies of Israel are J. Bright's A History of Israel (1981); and the
first two volumes of W. D. Davies and L. Finkelstein, eds., The Cambridge
History of Judaism (1984, 1987). For a study of Phoenicia, see N. K. Sandars'
The Sea Peoples (1985). Early civilization in the Upper Nile is the subject of
Roland Oliver, ed., The Dawn of African History (1968).
