Green, ed., Making Space for Indigenous Feminism (New York: Zed Books, 2007); Karen Offen, ed., Globalizing Feminisms, 1789–1945 (London: Routledge, 2010); Amanda Lock Swarr and Riacha Nagar, eds., Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis (New York: SUNY Press, 2010).
For some of the newest currents in feminism, see Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists (New York: Anchor Books, 2015); Amrita Basu, Women’s Movements in the Global Era: The Power of Local Feminisms (2nd edn., Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2017); Nicola Rivers, Postfeminism(s) and the Arrival of the Fourth Wave: Turning Tides (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Lynn Fugiwara and Shireen Roshanravan, eds., Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2018); June Eric-Udorie, ed., Can We All Be Feminists?: New Writing from Brit Bennett, Nicole Dennis-Benn, and 15 Others on Intersectionality, Identity, and the Way Forward for Feminism (London: Penguin Books, 2018); Katherine M. Marino, Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019); Daisy Hernández and Bushra Rehman, eds., Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism (2nd edn., London: Seal Press, 2019).
CHAPTER THREE
Early Human History (to 3000 BCE)
Studying early human history on any topic means relying primarily on material remains: tools made from hard materials; fossilized bones, teeth, and other body parts; evidence of food preparation, such as fossilized animal bones with cutmarks or charring; holes where corner-posts of houses once stood; rock art and pigments; bits of pottery and metals. To this, scholars add evidence from linguistics, primatology, ethnography, neurology, and other fields, reports from ethnographers and missionaries, and written sources from cultures that existed centuries later in the same area. Physical remains gave the earliest human era its name – the Stone Age. Nineteenth-century scholars divided this further, into the Old Stone Age, or Paleolithic Era (to about 9500 BCE), during which food was gained largely by foraging, followed by the New Stone Age, or Neolithic Era (about 9500 to 3000 BCE), which saw the beginning of plant and animal domestication.
Using material evidence to analyze gender is difficult. By themselves, tools and other objects generally do not reveal who made or used them (though sometimes this can be determined from the location in which they were found), nor do they indicate what they meant to their creators or users. Tools made of hard materials survive far longer than those made from softer materials such as plant fibers, sinew, and leather, or from organic materials that generally decay such as wood, which gives us a skewed picture of early technology and lifeways. Evidence gets rarer and more accidental in its preservation the further back one goes, so interpreting the partial and scattered remains of the early human past involves speculation. This is particularly true for gender and other social and cultural issues.
This chapter reviews the basic outline archaeologists, paleontologists, and other scholars have developed about early human history, although just as in physics or astronomy, new finds spur rethinking. It surveys some generally accepted ideas about gender roles and relationships, as well as key controversies about them, beginning with the evolution of hominids and ending with debates over the origins of patriarchy.
Early Hominids
The eighteenth-century European scientists who invented the system we now use to classify living things placed humans in the animal kingdom, the order of Primates, the family Hominidae, and the genus homo. The other surviving members of the hominid family are the great apes – chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans – and the family includes a number of species that have become extinct.
Between seven and six million years ago some hominids in Africa began to walk upright at least some of the time, and over many millennia the skeletal and muscular structures of some of them evolved to make upright walking easier. About 3.4 million years ago, some of these hominids – who paleontologists place in the genus Australopithecus – began to use naturally occurring objects as tools to deflesh animals, as evidenced by cutmarks and scrapes on fossilized animal bones. This gave them greater choice about when and where they would eat, as they could cut meat into portable portions. At some point, certain groups in East Africa began to make tools as well as to use them; the earliest now identified are 2.6 million years old, but archaeologists suspect that older ones will be found. Hominids struck one stone against another to break off sharp flakes that contemporary archaeologists have found are capable of butchering (though not killing) an elephant, and carried the rocks from one place to another to make these stone tools.
Like making anything, making these stone flakes required intent, skill, and physical capability, the latter provided by a hand that was able to hold the “hammer” stone precisely, with an opposable thumb and delicate muscles that could manipulate objects. Why austrolopiths developed this hand that was very different from the less flexible (but much stronger) hands of other primates is not clear, but what is clear is that they already had it when they began making tools. The human hand did not evolve to use or make tools, but used tools because it had already evolved. It is thus what paleontologists call an “exaptation”: something that evolved randomly or for a reason that we do not yet understand, but was then used for a specific purpose. Other structures within the body that became essential in later developments – such as the larynx, which allowed more complex speech – were also exaptations. (Many social structures and cultural forms were exaptations as well – they developed for reasons that are unknown, or perhaps simply as experiments, but then became traditions; explanations for how they originated were invented later that probably have little to do with how they had actually developed, as we will see with patriarchy shortly.)
Australopiths seem to have eaten anything available, and to have lived in larger groups than just a few closely related individuals. Living in larger groups would have enabled them to avoid predators more effectively – for hominids were prey as well as predators – and may have encouraged more complex communications and behaviors.
Around two million years ago, one of branch of australopiths evolved into different types of hominids that later paleontologists judged to be in the genus homo, including homo ergaster (“working human”). They made multipurpose sharpened stone tools generally called handaxes and then slightly specialized versions of these, which they used for a variety of purposes, including chopping plants as well as meat. This suggests greater intelligence, and the skeletal remains support this, for these early members of the genus homo had a larger brain than did the australopiths. They also had narrow hips, longer legs, and feet that indicate they were fully bipedal, but here there is an irony: the slender upright pelvis made giving birth to a larger-brained infant difficult. Large brains also take more energy to run than other parts of the body, so that large-brained animals have to eat more calories than small-brained ones.
This disjuncture between brain and pelvis had many consequences, including gendered ones. The pelvis puts a limit on how much the brain can expand before birth, which means that among modern humans, much brain expansion occurs after birth; humans are born with brains that are only one-quarter the size they will be at adulthood. Humans thus have a far longer period than do other animals when they are completely dependent on their parents or others around them. Those parents also have a long period during which they must tend an infant or it will die. Judging by brain size, that period was shorter in homo ergaster than in modern homo sapiens, but it may still have been long enough that groups developed multigenerational social structures for the care of infants and children. Perhaps homo ergaster mothers might have even helped one another to give birth, just as they (and the males as well) helped one another gather, hunt, and prepare food, activities that are clearly evident in the fossil record.
Along with a larger brain and narrower pelvis than austrolopiths, homo ergaster also had other physiological features with social implications. Their internal
