Did Men Actually “Build the World”?
A look at the larger context indicates it’s not that simple
I hear from time to time defenses of patriarchy that essentially come down to “Well, men built the world” — as if this somehow mitigates or erases all the social inequality that has come out of a patriarchal dominance hierarchy system, not just for women, but for all sorts of people. Such a system is steeped in social stratification obtained and maintained by violence, coercion, and intimidation. But apparently, that’s OK if you got a magnificent palace built out of it.
Historians note that the rise of patriarchy, about 5k years ago, is the first time that we see gross wealth disparity, class distinctions, and a wholesale disregard for your community in favor of aggrandizing yourself and your own family — as well as male control, domination, and marginalization of women. A history of barring some people from opportunity, often by law, as well as a history of oppression and commoditizing human beings, isn’t really something to brag about.
The American railroads were built primarily on the backs of low-paid Chinese laborers who faced a lot of violence and discrimination. We can thank the Robber Barons for planning and financing the railroads and appreciate the philanthropy that their profits produced, but the reality of it is a lot more complex than just “rich guys use their wealth to make a whole lot more” so we should laud them. So too is the naive notion that without men, civilization would have never existed. For one thing, civilization was already well-established before the rise of patriarchy.
The agricultural revolution is often considered the impetus for the rise of male-dominated dominance hierarchies, but this doesn’t take into account the 5k years after agriculture arose where such hierarchies mostly didn’t exist. From 300-hectare settlements in China’s Shandong Province that predate the earliest royal dynasties by 1000 years, to enormous ceremonial centers of the Maya which also predate the rise of the kings by 1000 years, we have evidence of many large communities with no evidence of central government or top-down hierarchy.
One of the best-known and most thoroughly studied of these is Çatalhöyük, a large proto-agricultural settlement in what is now Turkey that existed from approximately 7100 BCE to 5700 BCE. The settlement was on a wide and open plain on either side of a river, with no defensive properties and although they were the first to smelt ore to make lead, no thrusting weapons have been found. In other words, this large settlement existed for over a thousand years without defensive capabilities or weapons that could have been used to fight off invaders.
Eighteen layers of successive buildings signifying various stages and eras of history have been uncovered. The settlement was comprised of mudbrick houses built closely together, with no streets between them. Instead, residents used the rooftops to get where they wanted to go. There were only homes, all similar in size and layout, with no public buildings in evidence.
Catalhoyuk was a place where true gender equality flourished. An examination of male and female skeletons show that both sexes ate the same diet, performed the same work, and spent the same amount of time outdoors. In life, they inhabited the same physical space; in death they were given the same kind of burials. BBC
Along with the structures themselves, a wealth of art and artifacts have also been discovered. These also help to formulate a picture of what life was like at Çatalhöyük. Painting, pottery, and other clay modeling of various types, as well as stonework indicate a culture rich in spiritual tradition as well as focus on decorative arts, including obsidian mirrors and textile fragments, which have been found during the excavation. And this was thousands of years before the rise of Egypt or Sumer.
In other words, there was plenty of “world” before the onset of patriarchy and from the earliest stages of human societies, many of these inventions and discoveries are now recognized as having been made by women. The notion that man the hunter drove evolutionary developments is now considered to be scientifically anachronistic. Besides the fact that we now have ample evidence of ancient women as also being hunters, there are other considerations as well.
Scientists from a wide variety of disciplines currently view the bond between relatively hairless mothers and babies as the impetus for everything from bipedalism to early tools and carrying devices. Human babies need their mother’s care longer than almost any other species on earth, but unlike with other primates, babies couldn’t cling to their mother’s fur — hence, women needed to have their hands free and so they learned to walk upright and created technologies that assisted with both gathering and preparing food for their offspring.
Moreover, the impetus for the development of our much larger and more efficient brain and its use to both make tools and more effectively process and share information was not the bonding between men required to kill. Rather, it was the bonding between mothers and children that is obviously required if human offspring are to survive. According to this theory, the first human-made artifacts were not weapons. Rather, they were containers to carry food (and infants) as well as tools used by mothers to soften plant food for their children, who needed both mother’s milk and solids to survive.
This theory is more congruent with the fact that primates, as well as the most primitive existing tribes, rely primarily on gathering rather than hunting. It also is congruent with the evidence that meat eating formed only a miniscule part of the diet of ancestral primates, hominids, and early humans. It is further supported by the fact that primates differ from birds and other species in that typically only mothers share food with their young. Among primates we also see the development of the first tools, not for killing, but for gathering and processing food.
Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade (p. 117). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Naturally, early men were making tools as well, scrapers for processing meat and tanning hides, and later more developed ones such as axes and spears. However, the long-held notion that men were the only doers, active catalysts of progress, and that Paleolithic women contributed little except to cook and care for children is now scientifically viewed as quite silly. It was never a theory based on evidence but rather on assumptions made by male scientists operating out of Victorian scripts that they assumed were universal.
In addition, most scholars now agree that plant domestication probably originated with women. Gatherers were primarily responsible for food processing and would have had wider access to seeds and a greater understanding of the plants they gathered.
It is believed that agriculture was invented by women. The women of the preagrarian societies collected wild fruits, berries, tubers, and roots and had generational experience in identifying edible plants and knowledge about plants’ life cycles and how they grow. It has been suggested that women’s extraordinary vision, more developed motor skills, and ability to process finer details evolved due to the importance of their involvement in foraging activities for millions of years. For example, the average woman’s eyes can distinguish about 250 shades and hues, while an average man’s can only see 40–50. Oregon State
In addition, the myths of many ancient religions attribute agriculture to goddesses — under a wide variety of names, from Isis to Ninlil, even up until Greek times when Demeter and Hera were associated with grain.
Based on extensive research of prehistoric myths, scholars like Robert Briffault and Erich Neumann have also concluded that pottery was invented by women. It was at one time regarded as a sacred process associated with the worship of the Goddess and is generally associated with women. The weaving and spinning of cloth is likewise in most ancient mythologies associated with woman and with female deities, who, like the Greek Fates, are still said to spin the destinies of “men.” There is also evidence from Egypt and Europe, as well as the Fertile Crescent, that the association of femininity with justice, wisdom, and intelligence dates back to very ancient times. Maat is the Egyptian Goddess of justice. Even after male dominance was imposed, the Egyptian Goddess Isis and the Greek Goddess Demeter were both still known as lawgivers and sages dispensing righteous wisdom, counsel, and justice. Archaeological records of the Middle Eastern city of Nimrud, where the already martial Ishtar was worshipped, show that even then some women still served as judges and magistrates in courts of law.
Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade (p. 119). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
In the myths of many ancient cultures, the Goddess brings not only the understanding of law and justice but also the knowledge of healing. She is associated in many cultures with snakes (who symbolize both prophecy and healing), and undoubtedly the caduceus, the modern symbol of medicine, derives from this.
Women’s knowledge of healing herbs and midwifery would have made them early leaders in the medical arts and undoubtedly the skills attributed to various goddesses must have reflected the world around them. Clearly, women were integrally involved in all the key aspects of civilization — from things like pottery, weaving, art, and agriculture to justice, law, and medicine.
Beer is thought to have been invented by the Sumerians, who lived in what is now Iraq, around 8,000 BC and ancient tablets have been unearthed showing the original brewers were women. The Sumerians even had a goddess of beer, Ninkasi. Did Women Create Beer?
Even after women were primarily relegated only to the sphere of the home, largely barred from upper education and participation in scientific endeavors, they still continued to invent and discover important things. Linda Caroll has written a marvelous story touching on just a few of the many important inventions and discoveries made by women.
Since marriage was considered largely an economic and social institution until the beginning of the 20th century, women were often recognized for what they brought to the economic table. They were helping to run the farm, keep the shop, or whatever the family business was. Only very rich women were expected to simply bear and raise children.
Women were not necessarily impoverished by divorce in the medieval world. Because no one in the Middle Ages ever claimed that the man was the main breadwinner, a divorced wife was entitled to a percentage of the household estate in line with the labor she had contributed to it.
Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, a History (pp. 112–113). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Moving into the “dirty and dangerous jobs” corollary to this claim about men building the world, the history of women in mining in America notes that:
- In the nineteenth century, women worked in mining as prospectors, ore processors, miners, managers and mine owners. Women “grubstakers” sometimes financed the initial cost of prospecting in return for part-interest in any claim. In 1863, Mrs. Robert K. Reid discovered a vein of silver ore and filed a claim in her own name in Bingham Canyon, Utah, the site of one of our nation’s largest mines.
- Though no federal law prohibited women from working in the mining industry, tradition, cultural restraints and employer resistance all limited women’s opportunities for employment in mining. This began to change in the 1960s.
- As more opportunities became available, the number of women coal miners increased from zero in 1973 to 33,730 in 1983 when women made up 8.6 percent of the mining workforce.
- Today, women hold every type of job available in the mining industry, from general laborer to mining engineer in underground and surface mines, and coal metal and nonmetal mines.
In fact, worldwide, about 40% of entry-level mining jobs are filled by women. Fewer women stay in mining because they still experience a lack of opportunity to advance as well as an unwelcoming “boy’s club” atmosphere.
Interviews with leading women in mining highlight that women experience being sidelined, particularly in technical roles. There is a sense that opportunities for operational experience and frontline mentorship are created proactively for men, while women are expected to have acquired frontline experience “elsewhere” in order to qualify for advanced technical and leadership roles.
Women were barred from Ivy League colleges (except for Cornell) until well into the 1970s. Columbia didn’t admit women until 1983. Women in STEM fields still experience extraordinary levels of harassment and hostility, as do too often women surgeons, police officers, and other women seeking to work in traditionally male fields.
Don’t tell me how “Men built the world” when for most of the past 5k years women have been barred from education, from opportunity, from even being considered a person in their own right and not just an extension of their husband, and have faced unbelievable and often violent resistance to being allowed to compete with men.
While it may seem that women have simply chosen to steer clear of the construction field because it is so physically demanding, that may not have been the case. In all actuality, many cultures placed a major stigma on women who chose to venture into construction.
For instance, for hundreds of years, female construction workers were put on a social level that was only slightly higher than that of prostitutes.
Women weren’t allowed to control their own money or to make choices about what to do with their lives, and yet we’re supposed to look at men as the great innovators and the great builders when they very literally kept women from having almost any opportunities whatsoever.
Instead, women were expected to do all of the things that freed up men’s time so that they could build and innovate. Even bachelors had sisters or mothers who kept their house, made their food, did their laundry, and otherwise allowed them to focus on their work without the drudgery of daily chores. And we’re supposed to believe that if women hadn’t been given those same opportunities they wouldn’t have similarly succeeded?
History indicates otherwise.
Women have always been discovering, inventing, creating, building, and doing what they needed to do in order to contribute to the lives of their families as well as their community. Women demonstrably paid an integral part in the formation of civilization well into the patriarchal era. The places where that is truncated are due to social norms that severely limited women from any further opportunity to do so. Don’t crow about that like it’s some great achievement of men’s because it’s not. In the US, everyone but white men were second-class citizens by law up until just a few decades ago. What white men achieved under those conditions isn’t exactly indicative of intrinsic superiority.
Sure, we can appreciate all of the marvelous architecture, art, music, business, and legal achievements of the many men who brought them to life, but only when we also recognize the context that took place in — a world where women and non-dominant men had few opportunities and instead had extensive resistance to their abilities being fostered or even recognized. Essentially asking why slaves didn’t design and bankroll the building of more cathedrals is a clueless hypothesis, steeped in patriarchal privilege.
Go have a beer (kept cold in a device invented by Florence Parpart) and rethink this narrative, because it’s tired, silly, and completely unnecessary. Human beings are creative, innovative, curious, and driven to make new discoveries and new technologies. We should celebrate all people, male and female, of all races and nationalities, of all socioeconomic classes, who have contributed to “building the world” and who continue to do so.
© Copyright Elle Beau 2023
