Origins of Marriage and Traditional Gender Roles
A theory on how we came to adopt marriage and the typical roles of men and women
Lately I’ve been wrestling with some thoughts about feminism and planned to write a post explaining what I believe are the fundamental flaws of the movement. However, I’ve struggled to come up with anything concise, so I’ve decided to explore the subject with separate posts.
First I want to consider the potential origins of human social structures and mating relationships. Evolution-based explanations help bolster the argument against those who wish to overturn longstanding traditions in favor of a new normal. Here I present a theory of the origins of marriage and traditional gender roles, based on what I have gathered from my own (admittedly limited) study of social science and evolutionary biology.
One of the major anthropological puzzles concerns the origins of marriage and the primitive social structure. Humans have perhaps the most complex social structures in the animal kingdom. Not only is the social structure the result of biological factors, but also out of the unique human capacity for reason. Humans have the ability to understand cause and effect, and based on their comprehension of causal relationships, they recognize how to achieve certain ends through their own actions.
Social Hierarchies of Primates
In order to determine the origins of marriage and traditional gender roles, it is instructive to consider the social hierarchies and mating practices of those primates most closely related to humans, namely chimpanzees and bonobos. The behavior of these primates offer clues about the social practices of early human ancestors as well as the primitive instincts that we share.
Chimpanzees form tribes with dozens of members. As with many other large land mammals, males are larger, stronger, and more aggressive than females. This may be at least partially due to females spending long periods of time gestating and raising young. Strong, protective males were able to hunt and protect females and young during their long periods of vulnerability. Females also naturally selected for the largest, strongest males to improve their chances of bearing healthy offspring and for protection.
Though strong males typically lead and protect chimpanzee tribes, dominance may not be based solely on strength, but also on the ability to establish harmony and provide for the tribe. For instance, if an alpha chimpanzee is too oppressive against his tribe-mates, smaller males may ally together and gang up on the alpha to overthrow him.
Male chimpanzees frequently commit infanticide against young who are not their own. This could be to eliminate potential challengers to their dominance while the competition is still young. To avoid losing a child, female chimps try to mate with multiple males. This leads males to recognize that a female’s child may be their own, and they will not kill it. Generally, males exercise dominance in mating relations. They may coerce a desirable female into mating, or refuse to mate with an undesirable female who presents herself to the male.
Bonobo mating practices show what chimpanzee behavior can eventually evolve into. Female bonobos mate regularly with many other males in their tribe, and infanticide is practically nonexistent. Bonobos also have a less patriarchal social hierarchy than chimpanzees. Though a female chimpanzee can climb up the tribal hierarchy to become the dominant female, she will always be dominated by the tribe’s alpha male. Female bonobos on the other hand can become the leaders of their tribes. They can also be dominant when it comes to mating, sometimes coercing males into mating with them. This matriarchal structure could have arisen due to environmental factors unique to the bonobo habitat or to the strong alliances females form with one another.
Evolution of Marital Relations in Early Humans
The promiscuity of bonobos and chimps was likely a common feature among early human ancestors, and could explain some of the natural human urges for promiscuity. How could it be then, that out of these promiscuous instincts and mating practices, humans came to adopt monogamous marriage as the dominant mating relation?
Humans gradually discovered increased productivity when they divided tasks based on skill and comparative advantage. In a primitive tribe, the most important tasks were procurement of food, protection, and raising children. Due to their greater upper body strength, males were generally more capable of hunting and protecting the tribe. Females focused on bearing and raising offspring as well as foraging for food. Even though these tasks did not need to be exclusively delegated to a particular gender, tribes generally were more productive when tribe members focused on those tasks in which they had an absolute or comparative advantage. The more time they spent in a given task, the more they improved their skills in that area. This in turn bettered the odds of survival and led to increases in population.
With regard to comparative advantage, it is important to remember than even if someone of a particular gender were more skilled at a task than someone of another gender, the productivity of the group would increase if that individual focused on their most productive task. For instance, let’s say early humans were similar to bonobos and females participated in hunting. Even if some females excelled at hunting in comparison to males, they would be most valued for doing that which was most productive in comparison with males. As it turns out, females have the vital role of bearing offspring, something that males cannot do. A male who is an average hunter therefore has a comparative advantage in hunting since the female is needed for the more important task of bearing and nurturing children.
As females spent more time caring for children, the time allowed for their children’s brain development steadily increased, which snowballed into more demands on the female to care for her young. Additionally, as division of labor allowed the population to increase, demands on the males’ time to hunt larger game increased in order to feed a growing population. Since males and females devoted increasingly more time to their specific tasks, tribes with more promiscuous chimpanzee-like mating habits ran into a problem. When males would return from their hunt, how would resources be allocated? Since fathers would not know which offspring were theirs, they would have been devoid of any responsibility to ensure that their children were properly fed. Males would thus lack incentive to share the best parts of their kills with others or hunt for enough food to ensure the females and young were well fed. Females would then have to devote more of their time foraging, which would take time away from those other activities that would support offspring in their drawn-out developmental stages. Offspring would also have a harder time receiving the nutrition needed for advanced brain development.
When males and females exclusively mated with each other and stayed loyal to one another, males would have known which children they were responsible for and could thus ensure they were given proper nourishment. While it was possible for other family members to help raise children, total commitment from the male in providing for his mate and children allowed females to devote even more time to nurturing children. This eventually led to enhanced brain development and further lengthened the needed amount of time to raise young. Social cohesion in a tribe was also enhanced when males and females paired off, since males no longer had to physically fight each other for mating rights.
Marriage can thus can be viewed as having emerged out of a process of social evolution. Males and females took on roles in which they (based on their unique biological makeup) had either an absolute or comparative advantage. Humans that divided tasks and pledged commitment and fidelity to partners created the conditions allowing for longer and more advanced brain development in offspring. They established trust within the most basic social unit, the family, and this trust within the family led to trust between families, thereby facilitating social cooperation. Those early ancestors with more advanced cognition and who were more socially cooperative outperformed and displaced others with alternative social arrangements.
Gender Roles
Gender roles arose not as a result of sexism, but as a result of the division of labor. It is very apparent throughout nearly all cultures that the predominant role of women has been to bear and nurture children. The predominant role of men, to provide and protect, has complimented the woman’s role. These primary roles are not entirely exclusive, meaning that men and women have had to support each other in their respective primary duties.
Secondary roles sprouted from these primary roles. These duties came about not necessarily because men or women had a particularly special knack for them. Rather, as they devoted more time to their primary roles, it became necessary to master tasks that helped them carry out their primary role.
For instance, since women were generally at home with children, they generally spent time doing work at home such as cooking, cleaning, and gardening. Men on the other hand, may have taken on political or military roles in order to ensure that their community, and by extension their family, was protected externally from invaders and internally from criminals. Thus, men tended to be more involved in politics, while women focused their efforts on improving their household.
Effects of Early Matrimony on Physiological Evolution
As marriage (or something resembling what we today call marriage) became integrated into the lives of early human ancestors, they selected mates who would be the most suitable partners. Since marriage required a great deal of trust and commitment, human emotions evolved to become more complex in order to navigate these conjugal relations. Feelings of betrayal, love, satisfaction, etc., would guide males and females in their mating decisions as well as communicate to partners what behaviors needed to be corrected or maintained in order to forge a lasting bond.
Since females had to bear and nurture children for lengthy periods of time, and because of their increasing dependence on males for sustenance, they had more at stake in an exclusive bilateral relationship. This led to females becoming very selective in choosing a mate. Not only did females look for certain physical attributes, but they looked for mates who demonstrated an ability to provide and protect, as well as showed they would be trustworthy and faithful. In order to succeed in her selection, and to effectively communicate with her partner once the relationship was finalized, females developed more intricate emotions than males. Increasing female dependence on male partners meant that females needed to communicate their desires and needs, and over time they developed a broad range of emotional responses to communicate these desires.
Males also had a stake in marital relations and developed complex emotions to navigate these relations. Since males committed to provide for children in a marital relationship, they had to choose a mate who would not be promiscuous. If the female was unfaithful to her mate, then the male could possibly be providing for children who were not his own. Males could however pull their support of an unfaithful mate. Thus males had less at stake than females if a mate was unfaithful, since the female and her children would be dependent on the male. This being the case, males did not have to develop as broad a range of emotions as females. Also, since they were more likely to be dealing with outside threats, and since these threats often elicited only a few kinds of emotions (fear, anger), they developed narrower emotional responses to various situations.
Like many other mammals, human males have a strong physical drive in their desire for the opposite sex. A man can be aroused merely by seeing a physically attractive woman. From an evolutionary perspective, males possess this trait in order to be capable of having as much offspring as possible, which ensures their traits are passed on to the next generation.
Arousal in most women is less straight forward than for men, and is more dependent on subjective factors, such as emotion or mood. This could be for the same reasons that women developed more intricate emotional responses than men. Women must be very selective, and choose partners who they know they can trust and who demonstrate the ability to provide and protect. The thousands of iterations of female selectivity evolved into the ability to associate positive emotions with a sexually desirable partner.
Though humans harbor promiscuous instincts, our emotional circuitry has been shaped by the longstanding practice of marriage. Both genders tend to benefit emotionally more so in a healthy marriage than in promiscuous relations, but women benefit in particular due to their having had more at stake when selecting a mate. Perhaps that’s why in this piece by Bridget Phetasy, she records feelings of emptiness while experimenting with promiscuity, only to discover that when she was in a healthy relationship did she feel more fulfilled. The initial desire to be promiscuous in her case was in part the desire to be as free from emotion in sexual relations as promiscuous men are (or at least seem to be). What she found at the end of her disappointing experiment was the emotional circuitry inherited from her ancestors, which had developed as an evolutionary byproduct of long-standing marriage-like mating practices.
(Even though men may appear to be less affected emotionally when pursuing promiscuous, non-committal relations, I think they do in fact tend to be worse off emotionally than if they were married.)
Power Balance
So were early humans similar to modern chimpanzees? Did males coerce females into subordination?
In mainstream feminism, the prevailing view is espoused in the following quote by John Stuart Mill in The Subjection of Women:
From the dawn of human society every woman was in a state of bondage to some man, because she was of value to him and she had less muscular strength than he did.
While it certainly seems that men could coerce women due to their superior muscular strength, Mill forgets one important aspect of marriage. Conjugal relations are cooperative in nature, meaning both male and female have to work together in consensual agreement to harmoniously and successfully achieve certain goals. Married men and women have desires unique to their sex which their spouses are able to satisfy. Only by cooperating, by engaging in continual exchange, giving and receiving, can spouses get what they want out of their relationship and achieve harmony.
Married couples today who are faithful, serve each other, communicate, and work together to resolve conflicts cultivate strong relationships that last. They establish healthy home environments for their children, who grow up observing the habits of their parents and learn how to cooperate socially with others. Abusive, coercive, or unfaithful partners tend to be miserable, are likely to abandon each other, and put their children through emotional distress. Children raised in these kinds of environments are more likely to be untrustworthy or resort to crime.
We recognize that these sorts of family situations exist today. I think most people today, men and women, want a happy, healthy relationship. Anyone married for a significant amount of time can tell you that it takes effort and teamwork to create a successful marriage. How would this have been any different for our predecessors? Which types of marriages, coercive or cooperative, would have needed to be most prevalent for the building up of society? Could the social cooperation needed for the buildup of civilization have existed if men treated their women as slaves?
This is where I find the portrayal of marriage as a type of bondage to be misleading. It depicts women throughout history as helpless slaves, only to be liberated by the “stunning and brave” feminist movements of the past 150 years. It ignores how marriage is a cooperative relationship, and that this cooperative aspect of marriage is critical to the buildup of civilization.
It also ignores the power that women actually wield in their relationships.
Though there are many abusive or coercive men whose actions ought to be condemned, the overwhelming majority of men are not like this. In fact, the overwhelming majority of men try to please women. Perhaps that’s why we often hear humorous aphorisms like “Happy wife, happy life,” or “the man is the head of the house, but the woman is the neck, and she can turn the head any way she wants”, or how the two most important words in the English language are “Yes, Dear” (when the expected answer is “Thank You”). Due to natural traits that developed over thousands of years, men have a strong incentive to please women, to be considerate towards them, to protect them, and to work together with them to form healthy relationships.
Conclusion
The division of labor succeeded as a societal structure when men and women pledged total commitment to one another in providing for their children. Full commitment from mothers and fathers is what I believe contributed significantly to the advancement of early humans’ cognitive abilities.
Contrary to what modern feminists may claim, marriage is not an arbitrary social arrangement, and gender roles did not originate because of sexism. Marriage is instead a product primarily of social evolution that eventually had an effect on physiological evolution. Gender roles developed over time due primarily to physical differences.
Marriage has been the most widely accepted mating relation throughout the history of civilization. The success of civilization has long been dependent on its widespread practice, as the trust it engenders within families helps facilitate social cooperation. This is why nearly every culture on Earth has adopted social restrictions that point men and women towards marriage and fidelity, and away from the “natural man”, or those promiscuous instincts inherited from our ancestors and apparent in our distant primate relatives.
In a subsequent post, I’ll examine how the roles of men and women progressed throughout history up to the modern era, and hopefully dispel some of the more misleading claims touted by mainstream feminism.