So much of a woman’s sex life in the US today, so much of what happens to and is possible for and is not available to the Annikas and the Sarahs, is linked to an unlikely-seeming moment in the past. Like butterflies pinned, or bugs caught and preserved in amber, our libido and our superego, our sense of freedom and of propriety, the expansive pulsing of our desire and the contraction of our self-censure, are present-day artifacts of an unfurling of events long ago, when highly mobile foraging women were “pegged” as if onto the paper of history, literally immobilized into another way of being and thinking and living…and having sex.
The momentous change in female fortune was put into motion approximately ten to twelve thousand years ago, in the Jordan Valley of the Fertile Crescent in what is today the Middle East. There, a shift in human activity was under way. Hunter-gatherers began to domesticate plants, increasingly depending on food they grew rather than food they foraged for subsistence. This transition culminated in what we think of as a great watershed moment in human history: the rise of agriculture. The narrative goes that as humans began to focus more on crops and less on freewheeling hunting and gathering, we settled down (literally), grew up (figuratively), and created the circumstances conducive to “progress.” With crops, we are taught, there was no more harum-scarum, will-there-be-enough, hand-to-mouth business. And with more food for more people, and more resource predictability, population size increased. In addition—boon of boons!—with the cultivation of crops came the unprecedented luxury of intermittent food surpluses. We began to store what we could—grains—for the long term, thumbing our noses at the droughts and floods and other disruptions that had previously caused catastrophic food shortages. With this steady supply of food in reserve, population levels could remain high consistently over years and years. And thus we not only multiplied, as the story goes, we “civilized.” No longer needing to range far and wide for sustenance, we built permanent villages, establishing larger, denser communities than ever before in order to be close to the crops and those who harvested them, and complexifying our endeavors beyond “merely” foraging for survival.
As societies learned to produce, store, and distribute food, they developed the characteristics of modern civilizations: densely populated cities, centralized government, organized religion, private property, specialized occupations, public works, taxation, technology, and science. People lived as hunter-gatherers for tens of thousands of years before they began to plant crops and domesticate animals. Once this happened, however, the transition to modern civilization was rapid and fundamental.
Storing food to stave off famine was without a doubt one of agriculture’s benefits. That did indeed lead to some significant lifestyle improvements: skeletal remains of early farmers show they had less osteoarthritis than hunter-gatherers, suggesting less repetitive joint use and hardship overall. And there is no doubt that agriculture bolstered the human population.
But our belief that agriculture was the lynchpin of our “progress” is difficult to justify given relatively new findings by historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists. Archaeological evidence and human remains suggest that the shift from foraging to farming was anything but a straightforward improvement for our ancestors on measures like lifestyle and health. Indeed, the popular anthropologist and author Jared Diamond, pulling no punches, has called the shift to agriculture “a catastrophe from which we have never recovered” and “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.” Our new diet—carbohydrate intensive, iron deficient—led to reduced growth and development. It didn’t help that soil depletion and soil exhaustion eventually created crops low in nutrients. Meanwhile, neighboring farmers competed for resources, including water and farmland. Such competition and food storage birthed the concept of property; this in turn led to conflict over who controlled it. Living in close proximity to other humans, farm animals, and human and animal waste exposed our Holocene ancestors to new diseases—TB, syphilis, and nonspecific bone infections, to name a few—and polluted their water sources. Heavy dependence on a diet of grains changed facial morphology—smaller jaws meant malocclusions of teeth and infections that created serious health threats.
In fact, the agricultural, or Neolithic, revolution represents not inevitable, inexorable progress so much as a comprehensive reorganization of economic and social relations along more hierarchical and stratified lines, for good and for bad, mostly for bad. Especially for women. Simply put, a shift toward growing crops intensively for subsistence and later for profit changed everything between the sexes. Three linked beliefs—that a woman is a man’s property; that a woman’s place is in the home; and that women especially ought to be more “naturally” monogamous—are seeds that were planted in our early harvests. Stranger still, a woman’s most personal decisions were transformed into a matter of public concern and her sexual autonomy subjected to social control and legislation, owing to the ox and the horse.
Farming made women more sedentary and easier to control than your average ranging, roaming female forager, who was likely to spend a good part of several days per week far from her husband or partner. In a more subtle but no less effective shift from female autonomy, being less active on the farm increased a woman’s fat stores and jacked up her fertility, which in turn shortened interbirth intervals. This meant having more children more quickly and even more dependence on men for subsistence for oneself and one’s now more numerous dependent offspring.
Crucially, patterns of residence and social configurations also changed in the transition to agriculture. There is growing consensus among anthropologists that we evolved not as monogamous dyads but as cooperative breeders. In this way of life, loose bands of men and women raised young collectively, and very likely mated with multiple partners as well. Such an arrangement conferred many benefits. Multiple mating established and continually reinforced social bonds, so there were low levels of conflict. Enhanced cooperation meant all were more likely to look after one another and their young, thus improving each individual’s reproductive fitness (the odds that their offspring would go on to produce offspring). There’s ample supporting evidence of this theory among present-day hunter-gatherers and foragers, many of whom raise their young cooperatively and whose mating patterns are less strictly monogamous than our own, as well as in historical documents about aboriginal peoples everywhere from North America to the South Pacific. But it runs contrary to our cherished, 1950s-inflected notion that “early man” hunted, supplying meat for his female partner, who waited for him in the cave with their baby, whom they raised in what anthropologists call a “biparental, monogamous pair bond.” Nonetheless, there is now consensus that a very different social strategy—coalitions of cooperating females, and of cooperating males and females—was favored by natural selection and characterized early Homo life history. Indeed, cooperative breeding may well explain, at least in part, why Homo sapiens flourished while earlier hominins bit the dust. What better way to survive and thrive than to have one another’s backs? As Saint Louis University associate professor of anthropology Katherine C. MacKinnon told me, “We had predators. And we didn’t have claws or long, sharp teeth. But we had each other. Social cooperation, including cooperative breeding, was a social and reproductive strategy that served us well.”
Evidence also suggests that our early hominin ancestors, like so many contemporary hunger-gatherers who give us a window into how we likely lived in the Pleistocene, often lived matrilocally, meaning each female stayed with her kin for life. Thus highly invested relatives and other “alloparents,” or helpers, who had known her since birth were there to look out for her interests, including helping to provision and safeguard both her and her offspring. Under such conditions, females contributed mightily to subsistence, had strong social support, and were relatively unconstrained by the exigencies of rearing young—others held, provisioned, and even nursed her offspring. Female autonomy was a given.
Such living practices continued among indigenous people in many contexts worldwide, giving women a measure of social and sexual autonomy that both bewildered and scandalized European settlers who stumbled upon them. Captain Samuel Wallis, who traveled to Tahiti in 1767, was agog at the beautiful women and even more shocked that “their virtue was not proof against the nail.” Fascinated by the iron objects the Europeans brought with them, and accustomed to forging social bonds with sex, Tahitian women indulged with the sailors so frequently that soon Wallis’s entire crew was sleeping on the boat’s deck at night: they had traded all the nails from which to hang their hammocks for sexual favors. Two years later, James Cook was scandalized by the sight of Tahitians going at it in broad daylight, with neither the sense of decorum nor concerns about privacy he himself felt. The older Tahitian women apparently called out good-humored and salty instructions to a young girl who was having sex with a young man in full view of Cook’s crew and an assembly of Tahitians; Cook noted, with considerable shock, that she hardly seemed to need their advice. What is clear is that, in stark contrast to Cook’s own expectations, in Tahiti sex had implications for the group and was in this sense everyone’s “business” to view and comment on. Nearly a century and a half earlier, in 1623, a Recollect friar (their order was later known as Franciscan), Brother Gabriel Sagard, spent some time among the Wyandot (or Wendat), Iroquois speakers who lived along Lake Huron in matrilineal, matrilocal clans. The Wyandot depended on maize cultivation, hunting, fishing, and gathering for subsistence. Women tended to the crops and were in charge of the longhouses, where groups of several families linked through the female line lived together. At one point, Sagard witnessed a traditional Wyandot healing ceremony that drew on the culture’s most potent medicine: sex. He wrote:
There are also assemblies of all the girls in a town at a sick woman’s couch, either at her request according to…[a vision] or dream she may have had, or by order of the Oki [shaman] for her health and recovery. When the girls are thus assembled they are all asked, one after another, which of the young men of the town they would like to sleep with them the next night. Each names one, and these are immediately notified by the masters of the ceremony and all come in the evening to sleep with those who have chosen them, in the presence of the sick woman, from one end of the lodge to the other, and they pass the whole night thus, while the two chiefs at the two ends of the house sing and rattle their tortoise-shells from evening till the following morning, when the ceremony is concluded.
“Sleep” is here a euphemism. The ceremony is called the endakwandet, which translates as “to be enveloped in sex for me.” The healing aspects of the ceremony were thought to derive from female desire, which in this cosmology was not only not to be controlled; its expression was literally lifesaving. In fact, Wyandot sex practices were basically driven by Wyandot women, who had a remarkable-seeming-to-us degree of sexual self-determination:
The Huron considered premarital sexual relations to be perfectly normal and engaged in them soon after puberty…Girls were as active as men in initiating these liasons [sic]…Young men were required to recognize the right of a girl to decide which of her lovers she preferred at any one time. Sometimes, a young man and woman developed a longstanding, but informal, sexual relationship. This did not prevent either partner from having sexual relations with other friends.
Trial marriages were another aspect of indigenous life in the Americas before the arrival of Europeans (and are also typical in many present-day hunter-gatherer societies). A young woman was free to test-run a potential husband for several nights—a young Wyandot man “proposed” by presenting her with a beaver robe or a necklace of wampum—and then she would decide whether she wanted to commit or not. Either way, she got to keep the stuff. Such exchanges, like sex itself, created social adhesion and give us a clue to a worldview in which a woman had the power to choose, change her mind, and choose again. And again. Men served at their pleasure. Jesuit missionaries wrote with astonishment and sometimes horror of the agency of Wyandot women and could not wrap their minds around the fact that Wyandot parents were particularly overjoyed upon the birth of a girl. Later, missionaries sought to suppress the customs of premarital sex, trial marriages, and the endakwandet, but this was not easy to do; as the Wyandot were matrilineal and matrilocal, their egalitarian notions about women and the power of female sexuality and female choice were deeply rooted. Only the Indian Act of 1876, with its comprehensive imposition of European beliefs and social organization, could extinguish it, by changing underlying patterns of residence and of clan inheritance.
The pre-contact Wyandot and Tahitians were no noble savages, and their lifestyle was not some exemplary Eden. In an ecology that favored hunting and gathering, in a context where women were primary producers, cooperative breeding was in fact efficacious, and being generous—with one’s food, capacity for child-rearing, and sexuality—was in everyone’s individual best interest. Selflessness was, in a sense, selfish as it went the distance to ensure group cohesion, safety, and a degree of security, social and child support, and ease that present-day mothers, isolated in our suburban homes or apartments with bored children, can only dream of. And a lifestyle that anthropologists tell us was characterized by radical egalitarianism and “deliberate social intensity” meant that if men attempted to be violent, coercive, or even unreasonably possessive toward women, others would be there to see and to eventually intervene. A woman in a dense kin network could also always “vote with her feet,” to use anthropologist Sarah Hrdy’s phrase, and simply leave a partner she no longer wanted.
In stark contrast, in cultures more intensely agrarian than the Wyandot and their aboriginal predecessors, a woman was likely to leave the support system of her own family to live with an unrelated man—her husband—and his kin. And live in a situation of more or less privacy with him and his kin network. Today, nearly 70 percent of agricultural and post-agricultural societies are patrilocal. Under the watchful eye of these strangers, far from the protections of parents and siblings and aunts and uncles, female sexuality was also reorganized, as women got a clear message: you’d better behave. With the notion of property in place, and in concert with these other shifts, it was a short leap in logic to the belief that women were the property of men, and that having sex with a married woman, or a married woman having sex outside her marriage, was an act of “trespass” against her husband. Isolated from their families of origin and invested alloparents, with higher fertility rates and more dependent children than their non-farming ancestors, women had every reason to conform to these beliefs and to yield to implicit and explicit rules about female propriety. And in contexts where couples broke from larger groups to live on their own, yet another layer of protection was stripped away, rendering women more dependent than ever on the goodwill and support of their male partners. Even worse, much of the time no one with her best interests in mind was there to see. Privacy cloaked male actions, freeing men of supervision and releasing them from direct accountability to a greater social unit.
Thinkers like Helen Fisher, Natalie Angier, Christopher Ryan, and Cacilda Jethá have in recent years reiterated and expanded on the idea that agriculture played a critical role in transforming female autonomy into dependence, and in undermining female self-determination through its abetting shifts in patterns of residence and patterns of production. Part of farming’s legacy is that, among other things, it “gendered” us in fundamental, comprehensive, and long-lasting ways. It sexed us as well; we are no longer Wyandot.
But putting the blame on agriculture, like putting the blame on Mame, may miss a finer, even more revealing truth about the hows and whys of more or less compulsory monogamy as experienced by women like Sarah in the US today. The more nuanced reality is that under certain forms of agriculture, women did pretty well. In fact, experts tell us that where there were hoes and digging sticks, and where there was irrigated agriculture with matrilineal and matrilocal social structures in place, women were important primary producers, contributing significantly to their families’ subsistence. As far back as 1928, in an essay called “The Division of Work According to Sex in African Hoe Culture,” anthropologist Hermann Baumann noted, “It suffices to state that a connexion between woman and hoe culture, nay more, between that social system where the woman rules, matriarchal society, and primitive soil cultivation is universally acknowledged to exist.”
In hoe agriculture worldwide, women weed, till, and aerate the soil—all crucial steps to ensuring a successful crop. And because the hoe can easily be picked up and put down, these women could keep an eye on kids who were outside pitching in at the same time. Working in concert with men and performing the essential work of primary production gave women clout and a meaningful say in personal, family, social, and political matters. Meanwhile, paddy agriculture required many hands, including those of women and children. As in hoe crop economies, what women did mattered, and they did it outdoors. In both paddy and hoe fields, female labor was critical to the well-being of the entire group, and a woman’s social status mirrored her indispensable contributions. Without her, no one would eat.
Economists and sociologists tell us that the agriculture practices that prevailed in a given area had a long tail. In some parts of Southeast Asia where women played such a vital part in the agricultural economy, they also retained the advantages of matrilineal inheritance and matrilocal living, or “female philopatry”—another way of saying they stayed with their families of origin in the place where they were born. It also meant men basically had to “audition” their way into a marriage and then live surrounded by a wife’s kin, so that checks against power imbalances and male control of and violence toward women were built into the society at the most basic level. Rae Blumberg, chair of sociology at the University of Virginia, has written extensively on different types of agriculture and female fates. She tells us that in places where women’s ancestors worked in rice paddies, including parts of Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand, they continue to have a meaningful measure of power and self-determination.
[In these places] women are included…in the labor force, and women control at least some economic resources, such as income, credit, land, and/or other inheritance. Southeast Asian women long have been entrepreneurs and own-account market traders. This gave them economic power over and above what they acquired through inheritance via the generally woman-friendly kinship/property system.
In contrast, where there was irrigated agriculture with male philopatry—that is, where men stayed with their families of origin and women moved to them—women did not fare so well. For example, in East Asia—including northern China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—and in many areas of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh in South Asia, with their male-dominated kinship and property systems, women tended and tend to toil as unpaid family labor. And since local markets in these places were male-dominated like inheritance, it was and still is difficult for women to earn by their own-account trade.
But nowhere, it seems, are conditions more dire for women than where plough agriculture prevails. Or prevailed. Wherever there was plough use for intensive agriculture, the fate of women took a turn for the disempowered, even abject. They became uniquely dependent, their autonomy comprehensively undermined, circumscribed, and in many cases even extinguished by a rudimentary piece of equipment and the host of social changes it ushered in.
Oxen-powered ploughs may have been used as early as the sixth millennium BC by Mesopotamians in the Fertile Crescent region. Use of smaller ploughs began as early as two thousand years before. Later, Egyptians and then the Romans and Greeks also used domesticated mules to pull heavier, larger ploughs. Unlike implements of what Danish economist Ester Boserup called “shifting cultivation”—digging sticks and hoes—the plough required significant grip strength, and enough upper and overall body strength to push/pull the plough, or to control the draft animal dragging it.
Anthropologist Agustín Fuentes tells us that one study of forty-six different meta-analyses shows that among the differences between the sexes that we tend to think of as “essential,” there are only a very few that hold across cultures. !Kung boys focus on tasks as well as !Kung girls. Girls in three Middle Eastern countries—Jordan, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—outpace boys in math. But worldwide, men have greater grip strength, throwing velocity, and throwing strength than women. For these reasons men suddenly had and continue to have a physical advantage in plough-farming settings. In addition to requiring upper body strength, ploughing activity, which also introduced the unpredictability and relative danger of large animals, was incompatible with childcare. These two aspects of plough farming led to a new and rigidly gendered division of labor: men outside doing the farming; women specializing in secondary production, including childcare and food preparation inside the home. This distinction—outdoor/primary production versus indoor/domestic/secondary production—in turn gave rise to beliefs about the “natural role of women,” including that they should be “inside the home,” that mothers were “just naturally” primary parents, and that a woman’s labor was less vital to subsistence and income than a man’s.
In newly stratified settings where women were no longer primary producers, their fortunes were literally reversed. Now, instead of paying bride wealth—an amount exchanged for the privilege of marrying someone’s daughter—men could demand dowries, and parents were obliged to pay others to take their daughters away and make them their wives. In some cultures, having girls became so “costly” that families began to practice female infanticide. In other places, parents gave their daughters away as concubines or secondary wives—the best they could hope for. A preoccupation with virginity also arose with use of the plough and the gendered division of labor that put women below men. Anthropologist Shere Ortner has observed that female chastity literally has a monetary value in some highly stratified societies where a low-ranking family’s only strategy to move up may be a daughter’s marriage into a higher-ranking family. And so “enforcement of virginity…becomes a family affair guarded violently by men and mythopoetically by women,” Natalie Angier notes. If women were no longer primary producers, their secondary value had to be rigorously policed. And it was, in ways at once creative and comprehensive, by men and not infrequently by women themselves.
According to Stephanie Coontz, the work of the plough’s gender hierarchy and stratification was soon abetted by female ornamentation. Initially in the Middle East and then worldwide in plough contexts, heavy jewelry, restrictive, elaborately decorative clothing, and long fingernails all communicated that a women did not work—it would be impossible to—and by extension, that her husband was wealthy and successful. And, not coincidentally, that women were not free. In this sense, the woman’s decorativeness, ostensibly a “celebration” of this new version of femininity, also functioned as a figurative sequestering. In some areas, there was literal sequestering as well. Separation of the sexes, a widespread practice in the Middle East by 2000 BC, kept women out of public view and allowed high-ranking men to demonstrate to the world that they were so rich their wives and daughters not only didn’t have to work; they didn’t even need to leave the house. This, like their ornamentation, was an explicit demonstration of their surplus value and shored up the idea that they were property rather than people or producers, costly objects to maintain by men wealthy and powerful enough to do so. Conveniently and not coincidentally, literal containment and separation from men—as in a zenana, or “women’s quarters,” of a household, inner areas where no men were allowed—was also a way to ensure women could not stray sexually. Beware, everything from laws, moral beliefs, and literature now suggested to men, “lest the seeds of others be sown on your soil.”
If that happened, if women were wayward, progeniture might be muddled in ways that mattered as never before: fathers might bequeath wealth, land, and power itself to sons not their own. Female monogamy—coerced, enforced, mythologized, celebrated, institutionalized, legislated—became the bedrock without which this new version of society, in which resources were passed down from patriarch to patriarch, would crumble.
Counting on women to be true became the highest-stakes gamble man has ever known.
The story of Jezebel epitomizes how preoccupations with progeniture, female ambition, and female sexual autonomy were gradually mapped together in the tradition of Western thought and religion. As Lesley Hazleton has suggested in her masterful biography, Jezebel is a tissue of representations over time as much as she is an historical personage. Old Testament “editors” revisited that text repeatedly over centuries, and part of what emerged was the larger story of female fates, in the form of the story of one queen, the wife of Ahab and mortal enemy of Elijah.
A Phoenician princess who worshipped Baal, Jezebel is portrayed in the Old Testament’s Book of Kings as a crafty, cunning, and power-hungry beauty. Her love of ornamentation—she is often represented looking coyly into a mirror, the original selfie-snapping Kim Kardashian—was only equaled, legend goes, by her craving for influence. Specifically, she wanted to convert her husband Ahab’s people—northern Israelites and disciplines of Yahweh—to her own religion. She was allegedly ruthless in her pursuit of this goal, “destroying” as much of Yahwism as she could (the language, Hazleton points out, is vague, and even in the most negative rewritings, Jezebel is never accused of killing Yahweh’s prophets or worshippers). Another critical detail of the Kings version of Jezebel: when Naboth, owner of an exquisitely beautiful vineyard, refused to sell it to Ahab, putting Jezebel’s husband into a profound funk, she falsely accused the reluctant vintner of blasphemy out of spite. He was stoned to death. Having made so many enemies and earned the righteous wrath of Yahweh, once Ahab died and she was no longer under the protection of a powerful man, Jezebel’s days were numbered. For a time, Jezebel ensured that her older son ruled, but he was pushed off a balcony in an “accident” that was convenient for Jezebel’s enemies, to say the least. She quickly installed her younger son, but he was killed as well. According to legend, on the last day of her life, knowing she was to be killed, Jezebel applied full makeup, donned an elaborate wig, and dressed in her finest clothing. What may have been an attempt to appear queenly and noble was read by history as a ploy to seduce her murderer, Jehu.
Now when Jehu had come…Jezebel heard of it; and she put paint on her eyes and adorned her head, and looked through a window…
And he looked up at the window, and said, “Who is on my side? Who?” So two or three eunuchs looked out at him. Then he said, “Throw her down.” So they threw her down, and some of her blood spattered on the wall and on the horses; and he trampled her underfoot. And when he had gone in, he ate and drank. Then he said, “Go now, see to this accursed woman, and bury her, for she was a king’s daughter.” So they went to bury her, but they found no more of her than the skull and the feet and the palms of her hands. Therefore they came back and told him. And he said, “This is the word of the Lord, which He spoke by His servant Elijah the Tishbite, saying, ‘On the plot of ground at Jezreel dogs shall eat the flesh of Jezebel and the corpse of Jezebel shall be as refuse on the surface of the field, in the plot at Jezreel, so that they shall not say, “Here lies Jezebel.”’”
Such a spectacularly humiliating fall, capped by the assertion that “they shall not say, ‘Here lies Jezebel,’” was necessary in a text like the Old Testament, which was at pains to undo the legitimacy of previous religions and social arrangements. A certain amount of overkill was required to thoroughly void the authority of the prior world order, one embodied by a woman with power who attempted to backseat drive a patriline and who worshipped the old, established way. Baal was a god of the earth and of fertility, likely based at least in part on earlier fertility goddesses. And in Jezebel’s native Phoenicia, royal women were commonly high priestesses with active roles in temple and palace relations. Jezebel represented not just the old ways but a pre-plough version of ultimate female power. Jezebel was also, by many accounts, a cosmopolitan and pragmatic polytheist, like many Phoenicians of her time and economic class, and believed that religious tolerance was important and efficacious. For the more fundamentalist prophets of Yahweh, in contrast, there was only one male God; he and his proselytizers would tolerate no others. As the story is written and rewritten in the age of the plough, there are repeated metaphors of adultery and out-of-control female desire to describe the worship of any other than the One God, who was represented as the rightful Husband of a wayward Bride Israel. When she “cheats” with other gods, she is denounced for adultery. In the words of Jeremiah, enraged about idol worship: “Have you seen what unfaithful Israel had done? She committed adultery with lumps of stone, and pieces of wood” ( Jeremiah 3:2). Isaiah, Hosea, and Ezekiel similarly assert that Israelites have become “seed of an adulteress and a harlot.” Israel is compared to a she camel running around in heat; Judea is “infatuated by profligates with penises as big as those of donkeys, ejaculating as violently as stallions.” Yahweh is the jealous husband of a wife who is habitually untrue:
Let her rid her face of her whoring,
And her breasts of her adultery
Or else I will strip her naked
expose her as on the day she was born…
I mean to make her pay for all the days
when she burnt offerings to the Baals
and decked herself in rings and necklaces
to court her lovers,
forgetting me…
She will call me “my husband”…
I will take the names of the Baals off her lips.
—Hosea 2:2–3, 2:13, 2:16–17
“Say my name,” says this One God to the woman in his bed. And what if she will not? The price of infidelity is death. In the words of Ezekiel: “They will uncover you, take your jewels, and leave you completely naked…You will be stoned and run through with a sword…I will put an end to your whoring. No more paid lovers for you. I will exhaust my fury against you” (Ezekiel 16:39).
As against Jezebel.
Our contemporary use of the term “jezebel” to mean “an impudent, shameless, or morally unrestrained woman” demonstrates not just our indebtedness to the notion that monogamy is a sacred covenant that flourished in religious soils tilled by the plough. It also shows the fates of women who upset the order of things—religious, dynastic, political—in settings where agriculture was doing its earthly and conceptual work. Debased like Jezebel, women who do not toe the line will share her legacy: their grandest, most ambitious acts will be associated with and reduced to unseemly sexual appetites. It is telling that Jezebel’s punishment for her assertion of power resulted not only in her death but in the defilement of her reputation and hence her authority: her very name came to be associated with prostitution (in which a woman is for sale) and false prophesy (in which a woman cannot be trusted). Her story dramatizes how, once anxieties about inheritance and paternity took hold in plough-centric contexts, authoritarian versions of possessive husbands were deified, and deities began to draw their conceptual power from what husbands felt compelled and emboldened by a newish world order to be. Female autonomy became ever more linked to cultural disorder and ever more perilous for its individual practitioners.
Jezebel’s story and its subsequent rewritings are just one example of how female power was increasingly linked with sexuality and with deception. If women could trick men, men would expose their cheating and their supposed essential duplicity for all the world to see, sometimes literally. This prerogative was one harvested through the work of the plough. In ancient Greece, where the most widely cultivated crop was wheat—the most plough-positive of all crops—adultery was considered a serious crime, with repercussions at the level of couple, family, and the state. The man committing adultery with a married female citizen could be murdered on the spot, with a likely reprieve for his killer; the wife was immediately and automatically divorced. Interestingly, from 470 BC onward, the price for interfering with the transport of grain was also death. Just as meddling with the distribution of grain could lead to famine, a woman’s adultery could result in illegitimate children, the thinking went, and only legitimate children were allowed to become Athenian citizens. Thus it was an offense with social consequences for married female citizens and men other than their husbands to have sex. This meant the transgression had to be “aired” in public, at once atoned for and displayed to the adulterers and the world at large as a matter of concern to all, and the site of rightful intervention. According to Aristotle, adulteresses in the Peloponnese were required to stand in a transparent tunic without a belt in the town’s center for eleven days. This was an explicit assertion that what these women had tried to claim as their own—their naked bodies and sexuality—literally belonged to all who looked. In other areas, adulteresses were paraded around on a donkey with their lovers in a humiliating public display that made it clear that when it came to married women and sex, there was no zone of privacy, no act of self-determination that was not linked to the larger world and its power to determine her fate. As she sowed, so would she reap.
These fates were less terrifying than that of the adulterous, vengeful, and ambitiously unsympathetic Clytemnestra as told by Aeschylus in The Oresteia, the 458 BC tragedy and cautionary tale. Clytemnestra repartnered over the course of her husband Agamemnon’s long absence during the Trojan War, rendering her the polar opposite of the faithful, monogamous, and good wife of Odysseus, Penelope. Clytemnestra was enraged that Agamemnon had sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to the gods on his battleship in a bid for favorable winds. During his long absence, the text implies, she took solace in her power to rule Argos, and in sex with her illegitimate “husband” Aegisthus. Again, she was no Penelope, who held her ardent suitors at bay by weaving and unweaving at her loom for years. Upon Agamemnon’s return with his lover Cassandra, who crouched and lowed outside, knowing what was to come, Clytemnestra purred her welcome, drew a bath for her husband—and proceeded to ax or stab him to death. But rather than being protected by the ages-old rule of cyclical justice represented by the Furies, who sided with Clytemnestra because she was avenging the murder of her child, she was murdered by her own son, Orestes, at the urging of Apollo. Apollo then successfully argued his case against the Furies, absolving his client of the crime he had committed in Athenian court. There could be no more literal enactment of a new world order that did not tolerate women taking matters—whether sexual or legal—into their own hands. Female power and female privileges like those Clytemnestra represented were extinguished in a number of ways, including through the work of texts like The Oresteia, which flourished in the cultural soil tilled by plough use, enriching it in return. In this emerging new masculinist Order of Things, the death of a girl by her father’s hand not only isn’t a crime; it’s a right.
Ancient Romans, notorious for their sexual excess, were more likely to consider adultery a basically private matter to be resolved within the home rather than the courts. It was a personal rather than a criminal offense. During the reign of Augustus, however, new moral codes were implemented, including one that permitted the paterfamilias to put both adulterous parties to death. It is no coincidence that during this period, Virgil penned his Georgics, a paean to agriculture and farming life, reciting it to Augustus around 30 BC. Nor is it insignificant that the Roman way of life was often symbolized by a loaf of bread—wheat was a plough crop and a household staple. Against this backdrop and Augustus’s consolidation of power as he transitioned Rome from a republic to an empire with himself at the head, Augustus had his own daughter, Julia—vivacious, witty, and later the maternal grandmother of Caligula—exiled to a remote island of Campania for her many affairs, conducted openly while she was married to Tiberius. When asked why all her children resembled their father, she had famously quipped that she only took on new passengers when the boat was already loaded—that is, when she knew she was already pregnant by her husband. Noble though she may have been, in the reorganization of Rome under her father her own libido became a site of social control, and her deceptions and autonomy her undoing. Augustus called his intelligent daughter, beloved by the Romans for her generosity, “a disease in my flesh.” Later, when Tiberius succeeded Julia’s father as emperor, he withheld her allowance, and she died of malnutrition at age fifty-three in AD 14, the same year Augustus passed away, almost as if her fate, like Iphigenia’s, could not be unlinked from her father’s. In a context where female sexual autonomy was associated with lawlessness and potential chaos, even royal standing could not protect a woman from the consequences of alienating powerful men with her independent actions, now infidelities. Julia’s exile was presumably a powerful lesson for other women: do not, in the words of Natalie Angier, behave in ways that risk “the investment and tolerance of men and the greater male coalition.”
What does any of this have to do with women today? Everything, it turns out. In a uniquely comprehensive analysis published in 2013, a group of Harvard and UCLA economists established that the plough has had as great an impact on our beliefs about men and women and about female self-determination as it did on the soil it tilled so efficiently. Where there is or has been plough agriculture, the effects are deep and wide-ranging: these societies have markedly lower levels of female participation in politics and the labor force, and they rank high on the embrace of markedly gender-biased attitudes. Perhaps most remarkably, the researchers discovered that even generations later and thousands of miles away, in utterly changed ecologies and regardless of religion, income, and intervening progress—medical improvements, economic development, technological change, and the production structure of an economy—we continue to reap attitudes sown by historical use of the plough.
The study’s authors complied data from the Ethnographic Atlas, a worldwide database that contains information on 1,256 ethnic groups; the World Bank’s World Development Indicators (2012) and Enterprise Surveys (2005–2011) for information on female labor force participation and female entrepreneurship; and the UN’s Women’s Indicators and Statistics Database (2000) for statistics on the proportion of women in seats in national governments. They also turned to the World Values Survey, a compilation of national surveys on attitudes, beliefs, and preferences, including beliefs about the role of women based on two statements: “When jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women” and “On the whole, men make better political leaders than women do.”
In areas where there were or had been ploughs and dependence on plough-positive crops—including barley, wheat, teff, and rye—respondents overwhelmingly agreed with the statements about men being more deserving of jobs and better suited to political leadership. And their agreement mattered. There were fewer female entrepreneurs, fewer women in politics, and fewer women with jobs. Remarkably, though, this wasn’t just in places where the plough was currently or had recently been in use. Or places where it had been used at all. By studying the responses of the children of immigrants worldwide, the researchers were able to document the remarkable persistence of these beliefs and biases as well as their “spread.” Even having a heritage of traditional plough agriculture predicts more comprehensive gender-biased attitudes and fewer women working outside the home. When the heritage is from both the mother’s and the father’s side, the impact is even stronger. If a woman’s husband’s ancestors were from a plough culture, that will also negatively impact her participation in politics and the workforce.
But how can the plough’s influence still be felt in cities as modern as New York, Beijing, Tokyo, and London, places where farmers’ markets are as close as we get to our (albeit recent) intensive agrarian roots? The study’s authors point out that norms persist after the economy moves out of or beyond plough agriculture in part because these biases—“A woman’s place is in the home” among them—are reinforced not only by individuals who learn from their parents and grandparents but also by a given society’s policies, laws, and institutions. The authors also suggest that countries where people believe a woman belongs in the kitchen tend to have legislation and practices that uphold unequal property rights, asymmetrical voting rights, and scanty parental leave policies, even as attitudes about equality begin to change for the better. In that “lag,” women continue to live their lives as second-class citizens in spite of surface ideologies of parity and equal opportunity. These societies may also create industrial structures that mirror their beliefs, specializing in the production of capital or brawn-intensive industries that shore up notions about gender inequality and reinforce the belief that women are fundamentally linked to the domestic sphere (“Women can’t lift those heavy boxes or operate that machinery like men can!”). Finally, plough-culture beliefs about the role and “natural place” of women are inherently “sticky,” the study authors observe—they persist because it’s faster and easier to act on them than it is to evaluate every situation and decision based on, for example, an individual’s personality, merit, or qualification. It’s much more efficient to simply decide, informed by beliefs already in place, “Women aren’t good at X.”
The study controlled for dozens of other potentially determining factors: What if already-sexist cultures chose the plough? Does religion have as great an effect as the plough? And so on. But a thorough regression analysis led them to rule out these other potential factors and to conclude that, in fact, it was the plough itself that did women in, by creating conditions of female oppression. Further proof: the researchers found that anywhere in the world that was a better environment for growing plough-negative crops, such as maize, sorghum, tree crops, and root crops, today has more equality of gender roles and attitudes, as well as increased female social and labor force participation.
How free and enlightened are we? Not so much. It may not surprise us to learn that, during World War I, the British and US governments had a second war on their hands, on the domestic front, when they formed the Women’s Land Army in an attempt to replace male farmworkers who had enlisted to fight overseas with women. There were angry denunciations in opinion columns and among farmers, economists, and everyday citizens. In spite of the desperate need for agriculture workers, crops that needed tending if the nations were to be fed, and thousands of women ready and able to do the job, public outrage was pronounced and difficult to turn. It seemed that, given the heritage of plough agrarianism, many would rather see food wither and spoil and risk starvation than see women crossing the line from home to field. A public education (read propaganda) campaign was quickly undertaken, based on the primary objection of farmers who turned eager female workers away: they were wearing pants. Thousands of US and British government pamphlets and posters were put into production; they showed women in skirts and dresses ploughing fields, with messages beneath such as “God Speed the Plough and the Woman Who Drives It” and “Get Behind the Girl He Left Behind Him,” with the ghostly outline of a soldier behind a woman standing in a field (she was wearing trousers, but perhaps as a concession to male outrage, she was yielding a “womanly” hoe, rather than “manning” a plough). After the world wars, a genre of jokes about “farmers’ daughters” flourished. The farmer’s daughter as a stock character was dumb and sexy. But she was less dumb than she looked when it came to sex; in fact, she was often “promiscuous,” indulging with traveling salesmen and others who visited the farm. The conceptual punch line of the farmer’s daughter joke as a category is always that when it comes to farm work, a woman’s place is on her back. And that women are for reproduction and recreation, not production. They are also sexually bold and indiscriminate, and so in need of precisely the kind of controls that agriculture allowed men to exercise over women. Let them out of your sight, the jokes imply, and they will confound paternity faster than you can say “Daisy Dukes” or “Elly May Clampett.” Gendered hierarchy and paranoid laughs courtesy of the plough.
We might tut-tut previous generations’ deep and irrational investment in the cultural logic of the plough and presume that we are beyond such biases and jokes, but even now it continues to impact our day-to-day lives in remarkable ways. The US, though slightly above average, lags when it comes to gender parity. For example, as recently as 2000, we ranked 47th of the 181 countries for which information on female labor force participation was available. In the same year, women held a startlingly low 13 percent of political positions—ranking us a lackluster 50th out of 156 countries for which there was data. The Harvard and UCLA study authors note that these statistics “appear even less equal when we factor in the high per capita income of Western nations.” Plus ça change: the International Labour Organization tells us that by 2017, the rank of US women in the workforce tumbled to 76th out of 180 countries; and for political participation, we earned an unimpressive rank of 100th out of 193 (though a record number of women registered to run for office in the 2018 midterms). In another study, this one compiled by Save the Children to commemorate International Day of the Girl in 2016, the US, the world’s largest economy, ranked below Kazakhstan and Algeria for gender equality due to a low representation of women in political office, among other factors. (These included high teen pregnancy rates and a high rate of maternal deaths—14 per 100,000 in the US in 2015. Black women are three to four times as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes as white women.)
Such soil yields crops that are eerie, familiar repetitions. Slanderous mischaracterizations, remarkably vitriolic verbal attacks, and threats of physical harm against Hillary Clinton—all harkening to the spectacularly choreographed public containments and punishments of Jezebel—turned the tide against a woman reaching for the ultimate golden ring. She and all of us learned a lesson about incurring the wrath of the greater male coalition, including that masculine privilege is often mercilessly enforced by other women in settings where it is a better strategy to align oneself with those who have so long been victors. Fifty-two or -three percent of white female voters saw it thus in 2016.
As to sexual liberation per se, in spite of all the progress of second-wave feminism and the cultural inroads made by inspiring anthems by icons like Beyoncé and Janelle Monáe, and forthright sex-ed pieces on TeenVogue.com by Gigi Engle that make important information available to women while they make the Right cringe, and the current wave of women in sex tech led by amazons like Bryony Cole, and the trendy yet arguably subversive interest in polyamory among millennials who refuse to buy into mainstream gender binaries and roles, when it comes to sex, women remain, in some sense, fucked. As the authors of the Harvard-UCLA plough study put it succinctly, “Part of the importance of the plough arises through its impact on internal beliefs and values.” We live the plough’s unforgiving legacy every day, an inheritance that, for many of us, has come to feel logical or natural. It is not. Not only is the plough to thank or to blame for our monthly menstrual cycle; in our evolutionary prehistory, anthropologist Beverly Strassmann has found, our fat levels were lower from the constant effort of gathering, and so our cycle was more of a quarterly event. But our understanding that we “belong” to one man at a time if we are heterosexual women, or one person at a time if we are not, is something else we can pin on the plough. So are everyday realities like women being raised to sit with our legs crossed—what is between them is not ours to advertise or act upon, any more than outdoor space is our legacy or right to take up or even inhabit.
What looks like propriety is, from another angle, a culturally specific form of social censure, a lesson relentlessly and falsely imparted as “etiquette.” “Some girls sit like this,” other girls told me when I was an adolescent, placing their second and third fingers together tightly. “And some girls sit like this”—here they crossed their fingers. “But girls who sit like this”—they separated their second and third fingers wide—“get this”—their third finger held up in the air, obscene—“like this!”—here they snapped their fingers quickly. They were speaking the language of the plough. So are the guys who man-spread aggressively on the subway or public bus. This can feel like an assault against our personal space and our very right to be there, because it is. If we fail to remember that the legacy of the plough is that we stay inside, or minimize ourselves when out, there are always the containment strategies of street and workplace harassment, frotteurism on the subways and buses, and sexual assault. In 2012, the World Health Organization reported that among the main risk factors for a woman experiencing sexual violence, either by an intimate partner or a stranger, were living in a culture with attitudes of gender inequality and sexual purity; having or being suspected of having multiple partners; and the prevalence of ideologies of male sexual entitlement—that is, beliefs that men are “naturally” and by right more sexual than women, that they have more of a right to be out and about, and that women should stay home. If not, they will by rights be brought back into line. Beliefs of the plough.
When I was a young girl in Grand Rapids, Michigan, we played a game in our backyards and on the school playground as we sang a song called “The Farmer in the Dell.” We stood, a whole big group of us, holding hands in a circle, with one boy in the middle. “The farmer in the dell, the farmer in the dell, hi-ho the derry-o the farmer in the dell,” we sang at him. Then, as we sang, “The farmer takes a wife, the farmer takes a wife,” the boy who had been transformed into the farmer in the dell chose a girl to stand in the middle of the circle with him. She was thus transformed into the wife. Next we sang, “The wife takes a child, the wife takes a child,” and another of us was chosen. The child took a nurse. The nurse took a cow. The cow took a dog. The dog took a cat. The cat took a rat. And so on. Soon, several children stood within the diminished circle. The group inside might look like a collective, but it was clear that the farmer and his wife and the child were its conceptual center. We ourselves, the players, had been reorganized along the lines of a song, one about a farm, about agriculture. As we played this game, we rehearsed and repeated the social reorganization of our ancestors and the birth of the peculiar and novel family form that we lived in—pair-bonded, presumably monogamous parents and their offspring alone together. We reinforced for ourselves its naturalness, its righteousness, its normativity, every time we recited the words and acted them out. It was child’s play, literally, and it was an education. It is a measure of the power of the plough that every single one of us longed to be chosen, to stand within the warmth of the circle. The boys wanted to be the farmer. The girls wanted to be the farmer’s wife, the child, the pet, even the vermin, because we were all, in some deep sense, farmers’ daughters.
Grown-ups also practice rituals that reveal truths about the culture we live in. In a number of privileged metropolitan niches, including the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where I lived, sent my children to school, and studied rites of femininity and motherhood for several years, there is a growing fixation on retrofitted virginity, the ultimate accessory in a culture that at once overtly objectifies women and romanticizes mothers. Self-described “medi spas” have opened to serve the well-turned-out inhabitants of New York City’s richest zip code and its summer migratory setting, the Hamptons. These “spas” offer what they promise is a “quick, easy” procedure to “rejuvenate” a woman’s vagina. Doctors use lasers with names like FemiLift, MonaLisa Touch, IntimaLase, and, my favorite, ThermiVa (why not just call it ThermiVag?) to allegedly “improve the laxity” of the vagina because so many women are worried that after kids “they are loose ‘down there,’” in the words of one soi-disant vaginal rejuvenator MD. This procedure is distinct from labiaplasty, which promises—in the age of Brazilian bikini waxes, in which it is all out there for every lover to see—“prettier” exterior parts. Nor is it one of the surgeries that addresses medical conditions such as uterine prolapse or incontinence. No, “rejuvenation” is about “improved sensation” and “increased tightness,” often after a woman has had several children. Well might we ask, Really? And, Improved sensation for whom? In 2017, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists reaffirmed their dim view of such procedures, describing them as “not medically indicated.” Further, they warned that “the safety and effectiveness of these procedures have not been documented.” They also urge doctors to tell women who request the procedures about “potential complications, including infection, altered sensation, dyspareunia, adhesions, and scarring.” Dyspareunia means “painful sexual intercourse.” It is extraordinary to consider that this is a risk women under certain conditions are not only willing but eager to take in order to engineer what they hope, with no guarantee, will be even more pleasurable sexual intercourse not for themselves but for their men. In 2017, at an ACOG symposium, Cheryl Iglesia, MD, said there was not enough “formal evaluation for both efficacy and safety” of numerous vaginal enhancement procedures and surgeries.
Anthropologists might marvel to learn that in one corner of the peculiar economic and social ecology of the industrialized, post-plough West, women who are no longer virgins feel compelled to re-create that condition. They are supposed to pull off something along the lines of the miracle of the immaculate conception—to be multiparas, or women who have had more than one child, with the bodies and vaginal elasticity of nulliparas, women who have never given birth. They want not to surgically replace or fortify their hymens (as some women in the Middle East feel pressured to do before their wedding nights) but to “rejuvenate” their own eroded value in an environment where women may be conditionally respected for other things—beauty, motherhood, intelligence—but are arguably ultimately objects for enhanced male pleasure. Dr. Dennis Gross, a cosmetic dermatologist on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, told me that he is getting more questions regarding vaginal rejuvenation. “Patients are asking for referrals, as well as my opinion regarding the effectiveness of the procedures,” he says. Gross, who lasers and Botoxes some of Manhattan’s richest, most powerful residents and has a popular skincare line, is at heart a skin-cancer nerd and a stickler for research. All this vajay business, which is potentially big business, strikes him as “currently more fad than science. As a scientist and laser specialist in dermatology, I very much doubt the validity of claims that lasers can permanently tighten the vagina and labia…or another common claim, that they can restore lubrication,” he told me. He tells his patients as much. Some may go ahead and do it anyway: surgeons and ob-gyns continue performing the procedures, saying that their female patients insist on them. But mightn’t we ask, “What do these doctors expect?” After all, these women’s requests are in line with a culture that prioritizes male sexual pleasure and male sexual privilege. Are these doctors’ allegiances firmly with their patients?
What if they, like the Wyandot, revered female sexual pleasure and autonomy so highly and viewed it as so important, so precious and vital to health, and even so powerfully healing to the larger community that their first instinct were to tell a female patient that when it came to that aspect of her being, there was no risk worth taking?
And what social circumstances might lead us from the examination room of a vaginal rejuvenation clinic—with its vapid reading materials and insipidly colored walls—to a place where female pleasure takes precedence, and men are so eager to provide it to women that they dutifully attend workshops and devour magazine articles and present their genitals to doctors for procedures for which there is a scarcity of data on safety and efficacy, all in a bid to please us? In this parallel universe, women run the world, have all the money, and birth the babies that propagate the species. And a plough has never been seen.
Our vaginas are not our own. And our very language speaks to our agrarian heritage and is inextricably entwined with our sexual selves, as if to suggest there is no escape. A woman who is having sex with a man is “getting ploughed” by him. And one who wants to be in charge of her own sexual destiny, who refuses to submit to the law of the plough—that she stay home, that she be monogamous, that she be dependent—is a ho (or is she a hoe?).
We are worn down by our culture’s tendency to universalize and naturalize the gender divisions of the plough, the assertion that men everywhere just logically want and have always wanted women, lots of them, who are servile and nubile and fertile and good hearth attendants. And that women everywhere logically want men who are powerful and have resources, and that more than anything we want one of them, an alpha male, of our very own. “Men Want Beauty, Women Want Money: What We Want from the Opposite Sex,” one headline typical of these stories pronounces, summarizing a study of 27,600 straight Americans, published in the “peer-reviewed academic journal Personality and Individual Differences,” the all too familiar “news” article quotes an evolutionary psychologist who says that when it comes to mate choice, men
maximize their genetic contribution to further generations by partnering with women possessing cues of youth and fertility, and so have evolved to find such cues attractive and important, whereas women can do this by partnering with men with resources to maximize the survival and mating prospects of their children.
The expert in question says the alleged results of the study about gendered mate preferences are “unsurprising” and “demonstrated by numerous other such studies.”
In fact, there is nothing universal or timeless or natural or scientific about these retroactive projections of our current-day conundrums. What these studies elide is perhaps the most important factor of all: context. Sociologist Rae Blumberg has pointed out that it is only in this one type of agrarian society, and for less than 3 percent of Homo sapiens’ history, that women have been transformed from competent, self-sufficient primary producers who make their own decisions relatively autonomously into secondary producers and costly consumers who are, in some circumstances, fundamentally dependent on men. Female chimps and bonobos, our closest relatives, never stop foraging for themselves and their offspring. Female hunter-gatherers often continue to gather while pregnant; some even nurse and gather simultaneously. Mbuti women in the Ituri rainforest and Aka women of the Central African Republic are competent net hunters, working on their own and alongside their husbands to provision their families. All these practices give important clues about our evolutionary prehistory: dependence is new. It is human females of the Anthropocene—even and perhaps especially those living in the industrialized West post-plough—whose well-being and in some cases very lives are uniquely contingent on the support of males.
Might there be real change once plough-specific circumstances are comprehensively reversed? As women continue to make critical contributions to subsistence, as they have been doing since the 1970s; as we complete the transition from farming and industry and workplaces that value physical strength to workplaces that place a premium on thought, collaboration, and innovation; as we segue from the factory and the farm to contexts like developing apps and remote workplaces and flexible work schedules—in short, when ecological circumstances are right for women to flourish as men long have, when the advantages of upper body and grip strength and all the institutions that reinforced that advantage begin to fade—then the future starts to look a lot like the long ago, pre-plough past. And we see the outlines of the possibility of a world—like Oz on the far horizon—where attempts to control women’s movements, bodies, and appetites seem at once audacious, misguided, and laughably futile.