Fascinating

[airportkid]

From an NPR article this morning:

For instance, one of the most surprising findings in this field came from a study which found that modern gender norms might have been influenced by the adoption of the plow. Plows are heavy and require much more strength to use than other early farming instruments like hoes and digging sticks. So, in societies that used the plow, men had a natural advantage in farmwork. This contributed to a gendered division of labor – men started disproportionately working in the fields while women worked in the home. And this division of labor in turn influenced beliefs about the appropriate roles of men and women in society.


By contrast, this didn’t happen as much in societies which didn’t adopt the plow. Men had no natural advantage in using other farming tools, so everyone there was involved in farmwork. There was no reason to think of work outside the home as “men’s work”, so gender norms regarding work developed differently too. Amazingly, economists found that these historical differences affect gender norms to this day. It turns out that societies that did not adopt the plow still have higher gender equality and higher female labor force participation!

[Dānu]

The evidence for the Xia dynasty in China suggests that there was little differentiation between the genders, yet the succeeding Shang dynasty was dimorphic. There's no change in agricultural practices between the two.

[pattylt]

The evidence for the Xia dynasty in China suggests that there was little differentiation between the genders, yet the succeeding Shang dynasty was dimorphic.  There's no change in agricultural practices between the two.

Was there a religious or some other change that would explain it?

[Dānu]

The evidence for the Xia dynasty in China suggests that there was little differentiation between the genders, yet the succeeding Shang dynasty was dimorphic.  There's no change in agricultural practices between the two.

Was there a religious or some other change that would explain it?

I don't know. The Xia dynasty itself is controversial. China says it definitely existed, others aren't so sure. But evidence from graves during the period tend to accord women and men comparable status.

[Rhythmcs]

If this sort of social organization is a consequence of the adoption of the plow we'd be talking warring states, no?

[jerry mcmasters]

I had always understood (without giving much thought to whether it was really valid or not) that it was the pre-agricultural Hunting (big strong manly men) and Gathering (chicks identifying and picking wildlife to go with the man-provided main course) to be a major gender-splitter. Is the idea here that once agriculture (we'll assume no-plow to begin with, just human labor) was discovered and developed, this split reverted to zero gender distinction, disappearing completely, only to reassert itself (manly-man dominant) with the invention of the plow?

[Rhythmcs]

The first plows they used were drawn by people.

[jerry mcmasters]

? I'd assumed that was the point of the original speculation of gender divide. Though even with animals it would still be more of a manly endeavor hooking up the mule or whatever.

[Rhythmcs]

Maybe, though I don't see what advantage men have in the plow or in working animals that they wouldn't also have with hoes and digging sticks. I suspect the adoption of the plow in chinese agriculture was a consequence of the period of history it arises in and makes possible. Frankly, I think that almost every culture that has ever turned to the plow did so, initially, because it was necessary industry for organized conflict. Particularly so when you have heavy and poor soils and huge manpower requirements.

[jerry mcmasters]

Maybe, though I don't see what advantage men have in the plow or in working animals that they wouldn't also have with hoes and digging sticks.  I suspect the adoption of the plow in chinese agriculture was a consequence of the period of history it arises in and makes possible.  Frankly, I think that almost every culture that has ever turned to the plow did so, initially, because it was necessary industry for organized conflict.  Particularly so when you have heavy and poor soils and huge manpower requirements.

I agree with your initial speculation, the effort pre-plow still seems very needy of, err, manpower.  Regarding conflict- not an area I know much about but it seems the opposite might be the case, it's only once you have agriculture and what it produces- a stationary and organized product and populace- that you need to either defend what you got or add to it by attacking and absorbing the others'.  Pre-agriculture, you have conflict but unorganized and sporatic, there's always more foraging and hunting grounds when neighbors press up and threaten you (except in small isolated areas).  So it would seem to be the cause of organized conflict, an unfortunate offshoot and side-effect, rather than a purposeful means to that end.

[Rhythmcs]

Pre and post plow, not pre and post agriculture. Still, I don't know how to make it add up in the case of china. It's pretty clear that there were gender divisions in the warring states period, and it was not a particularly egalitarian time prior, during, or after.

[Thumpalumpacus]

I had always understood (without giving much thought to whether it was really valid or not) that it was the pre-agricultural Hunting (big strong manly men) and Gathering (chicks identifying and picking wildlife to go with the man-provided main course) to be a major gender-splitter.  Is the idea here that once agriculture (we'll assume no-plow to begin with, just human labor) was discovered and developed, this split reverted to zero gender distinction, disappearing completely, only to reassert itself (manly-man dominant) with the invention of the plow?

It's my understanding, via Jared Diamond, that in most human prehistory somewhere around 70-80% of human nutrition was garnered by females gathering fruits, nuts, roots, and so on, pre-dating organized agriculture.

I don't think the invention of agriculture overturned gender roles, myself. Even farmers or shepherds had to be quick and on the ball because wildlife. And because of our sexual dimorphism -- human males are usually larger and stronger than females -- I think those roles were sorted out long before humans settled on agriculture as a means of survival. By the time farming was invented, I think gender roles had already been established.

There's also simple biology -- it's hard to plough a furrow with a baby strapped on your back, and in the days before formula, the baby literally had to suck a teat. Try doing that while managing a mule-team. Try stalking prey with your brat crying out and giving away your position. That sort of thing.

[jerry mcmasters]

Pre and post plow, not pre and post agriculture. 

The plow allows more efficient agriculture, therefore they could reasonably allocate resources that would have been spent on agriculture to military purpose to gain advantage over plow-less neighbors, sure.  But would not any innovation or improvement in societal organization not have that effect?  Nothing purposeful to it.  Military advantage would be an unintended side-effect, the main effect being "more food for more of us, less chance of famine and starvation."

[Paleophyte]

The advent of the plow may have further skewed the roles, but there's an even older biological imperative at work. Men are expendable. It takes us minutes to do our part to ensure that the next generation happens. By contrast, women need a minimum of 9 months, and preferably a few years.

If half of a tribe's male population is wiped out in battle, hunting gone awry, or other calamity then the tribe can carry on easily enough. The surviving men might be a little more tired but that's about it. If half the tribe's women are killed then it's much more difficult to recover from.

Interestingly, there's some evidence to suggest that the advent of agriculture ~10,000 years ago led to much more significant social change than just gender roles. Analysis of Y-chromosome transmission (link) suggests that polygyny was significantly more common prior to the agricultural revolution. When nomadic peoples settle down to take up agriculture you get all sorts of fun problems like land inheritance that lends itself to a more monogamous system. So back in the day, the gender roles may have been very different!

[Rhythmcs]

The plow allows more efficient agriculture, therefore they could reasonably allocate resources that would have been spent on agriculture to military purpose to gain advantage over plow-less neighbors, sure.  But would not any innovation or improvement in societal organization not have that effect?  Nothing purposeful to it.  Military advantage would be an unintended side-effect, the main effect being "more food for more of us, less chance of famine and starvation."

The plow eventually allows for that, sort-of...but there's a constellation of supporting technologies, cultivars, and cultural practices that had to be developed to make that a reality in china (or anywhere else).  In the event, in china, the adoption of the plow did not lead to more food for more of us and less starvation.  It lead to different food for some of us and more starvation - the giant asterisk here being that this happened at a time of population explosion and mass displacement due to the conflict.   

If farming was mens work, when the plow comes on to the scene it quickly becomes womens work as conscripted farmers wives are absolutely expected to work the fields.  To be clear, I do think that the adoption of the plow and specific ideas about gender and the place of women are related - but I don't think it's directly causal, more that both are the effects of the victorious feudal patriarchies that organized and facilitated plow adoption at that time.  People and systems, without which, the plow could not have been created and if it were, would have been useless (you also need developed iron industries, mass irrigation, etc).  I'd lay the emergence of particular ideas about gender and the place of men and women in post adoption china through the warring states at the feet of the victorious neo-confucianists, not the plow..though the plow was one of the tools they used to secure said victory.

Ironically - as a post note, chinas long history with the plow never solved their food insecurity issues - it greatly exacerbates them in the here and now.  They have some of the poorest soils in the world. Worked hard for ages, and recently poisoned. They've adopted aggressive conservation practices to address this - soil remediation, and no-till.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Pre and post plow, not pre and post agriculture. 

The plow allows more efficient agriculture, therefore they could reasonably allocate resources that would have been spent on agriculture to military purpose to gain advantage over plow-less neighbors, sure.  But would not any innovation or improvement in societal organization not have that effect?  Nothing purposeful to it.  Military advantage would be an unintended side-effect, the main effect being "more food for more of us, less chance of famine and starvation."

I think some advances would have military advantages obvious even then, such as a better way to bind a spearhead to a shaft, for instance. Maybe useful in civilian life, but its military application would be probably the first noticed. Others would be peaceful applications which would find quick military use -- say snares for trapping prey could be made larger to trap your enemy.

You're right, most military advances are by-products of civil development. But there's not much civil use for things like a club or sling. The plough gave a strategic advantage in that one could support a larger population and therefore more fighters, but that was an ancillary effect and not its direct purpose. No one sat down to invent the plough thinking that they could thereby expand the number of fighters available.

[Rhythmcs]

No one person sat down and invented their plow (or any early plow) at all - it's early emergence was in hunan under chu - but qin, having conquered chu, rolled it out in a systematic way centuries after the emergence of the earliest types. The trouble, for the hypothesis at least, is that qin (and chu) came with ideas about gender and the roles of men and women pre-adoption as a direct and explicit consequence of militarism.

I don't have access to the full text - but I would suspect that they're playing loose with the timing of the adoption of the plow across their examples. For example, if what they mean is the adoption of a moldboard wheel hoe in chinas case - to account for both qin and chu already having these notions at emergence and adoption - then they would have to allow that the handful of cultures that "never adopted the plow" all adopted hoes - and yet the same effect did not present itself in their estimation - and despite actual practical questions about why that wouldn't also have been "mens work" by the explanation of physicality - as it appears to have been in qin and chus case precisely -until- they adopt a legit plow from the top down...at which point it was anyone with a pulse's work.

[Cavebear]

From an NPR article this morning:

For instance, one of the most surprising findings in this field came from a study which found that modern gender norms might have been influenced by the adoption of the plow. Plows are heavy and require much more strength to use than other early farming instruments like hoes and digging sticks. So, in societies that used the plow, men had a natural advantage in farmwork. This contributed to a gendered division of labor – men started disproportionately working in the fields while women worked in the home. And this division of labor in turn influenced beliefs about the appropriate roles of men and women in society.


By contrast, this didn’t happen as much in societies which didn’t adopt the plow. Men had no natural advantage in using other farming tools, so everyone there was involved in farmwork. There was no reason to think of work outside the home as “men’s work”, so gender norms regarding work developed differently too. Amazingly, economists found that these historical differences affect gender norms to this day. It turns out that societies that did not adopt the plow still have higher gender equality and higher female labor force participation!

But I'm not sure why male strength should be important only after the plow. Before that, throwing a spear at a mammoth or pushing one in, in tight situations, takes gross strength too. And so does hauling back the meat to the family. So does defending a village with heavy swords and charging attackers crazily when fueled by testosterone.

[Rhythmcs]

The more I consider it the weirder it seems. Does anyone with access have any idea what nations or cultures they isolate as having greater gender equality and female labor force participation? Denmark sweden norway switzerland and netherlands top the charts for gender equality but they all adopted the plow. The highest rates of female participation in the workplace don't correlate to high rates of gender equality and the list is largely populated by african nations like ethiopia...but ethiopia and the region in general very much adopted the plow.

I feel like they'd have to look for island lithoculture to first, find some group of people that hadn't adopted the plow loooong ago, and..b, to find some society (presumably now subsumed by another) that they can say had more gender equality or a higher rate of female participation in the workforce than norway or ethiopia.

[Rhythmcs]

 So does defending a village with heavy swords and charging attackers crazily when fueled by testosterone.

That last one is super instructive, imo, because blades and plows are deeply related.  We learned to make the blades first..the earliest plows were blades folded over a wooden hoe set vertically...and the most common non-plow non-metal farm implement was a stone wedge seated from the rear into a curved handle.

(as a sideline, these basic forms of the implements are no longer believed to be direct transfer to every culture from a single super smert inventor (or culture of inventors). Multiple independent lines of innovation all converge on a recognizable type because it's very well suited for the problem the implement solves. Just like an aschulean hand axe made by homo erectus and a modern day computer mouse made by hss are roughly the same size and dimensions for identical reasons.)

[SYZ]

The more I consider it the weirder it seems.  Does anyone with access have any idea what nations or cultures they isolate as having greater gender equality and female labor force participation?  Denmark sweden norway switzerland and netherlands top the charts for gender equality but they all adopted the plow.  The highest rates of female participation in the workplace don't correlate to high rates of gender equality and the list is largely populated by african nations like ethiopia...but ethiopia and the region in general very much adopted the plow.  

I feel like they'd have to look for island lithoculture to first, find some group of people that hadn't adopted the plow loooong ago, and..b, to find some society (presumably now subsumed by another) that they can say had more gender equality or a higher rate of female participation in the workforce than norway or ethiopia.

Here in Australia, our 65,000-year-old Aboriginal
inhabitants, were, and never have been "traditional"
crop farmers, or animal herders in all that time.

And of course never developed anything resembling
a plow—largely because there were no domesticated
animals available to pull it.

The males were the hunters of the mob, whilst the
women were the foragers—gathering food from local
naturally occurring sources, especially wild edible
plants and seeds, but also insects, fungi, honey, bird
eggs etc.

The males hunted/butchered kangaroos, wild turkeys,
crocodiles, emus, anteaters, goannas and snakes.

[Rhythmcs]

What's the status on gender equality and female participation in the workforce in that group?

Anecdotally, as a manager, I preferred female laborers for harvest and post harvest process. IDK if I would have noticed the same in the early iron age (or ages, different cultures different timeframes)...but the plows and traction to move them have certainly leveled the playing field as a matter of practical reality in the present. High participation of females in the workforce..outside of developed countries with a long history of the plow..is made up in large part by agricultural labor. I suppose that peoples ideas about the roles of men and women have always been aspirational - which is to say how a culture says things ought to be but not necessarrily how they were or are...so there's that.

[Rhythmcs]

-I'm of the opinion that anytime some historical source sets pen to paper to say that women ought to be in the home doing womanly shit that's not an exortation that arises from nowhere unbidden and unprompted. That person must see a whole lot of women doing unwomanly shit to even get the bug up their ass to make the claim, and they must believe that they're talking to people who could put that back in it's proper place.

[Cavebear]

 So does defending a village with heavy swords and charging attackers crazily when fueled by testosterone.

That last one is super instructive, imo, because blades and plows are deeply related.  We learned to make the blades first..the earliest plows were blades folded over a wooden hoe set vertically...and the most common non-plow non-metal farm implement was a stone wedge seated from the rear into a curved handle.

(as a sideline, these basic forms of the implements are no longer believed to be direct transfer to every culture from a single super smert inventor (or culture of inventors).  Multiple independent lines of innovation all converge on a recognizable type because it's very well suited for the problem the implement solves.  Just like an aschulean hand axe made by homo erectus and a modern day computer mouse made by hss are roughly the same size and dimensions for identical reasons.)

Yeah, if you have iron and a blacksmith, they are pretty much interchangeable.

The Anvil Chorus... LOL!

But more to the point... Swords came first. Weapons almost always do. As men are valuable as defenders, it really is only because other men attack the homes. As a male, I'm not exactly proud of that. But in times of scarce resources, a guy is expected get them "somewhere" for family and hearth and equally "defend" them. It's a bad loop that we guys are sometimes trapped in.

Fortunately, most times, we all negotiate.

I liked the "(as a sideline, these basic forms of the implements are no longer believed to be direct transfer to every culture from a single super smert inventor (or culture of inventors).  Multiple independent lines of innovation all converge on a recognizable type because it's very well suited for the problem the implement solves.  Just like an aschulean hand axe made by homo erectus and a modern day computer mouse made by hss are roughly the same size and dimensions for identical reasons.)"

People everywhere tend to make the same discoveries eventually. And they are similar because we are similar. Things have to fit our hands. An apex intelligent octopus would have different tools. I was able to hold a replica of an Acheulean hand axe once and the connection to my basic tools and my computer mouse occurred to me. We function very much by our form.

[Rhythmcs]

I'd say people in similar situations come up with similar solutions - plows being a profound example of what is essentially a deepity. Early plows were limited in function and distribution. Most of them, today, would be categorized as cultivators and bed shapers. The types of instruments that are unambiguosly plows, that is to say things that can reach more than four inches rip and turn in one pass, are associated in chinas and in europes case with the onset of iron age conflict and it's resolution into a feudal patriarchy. To their credit, china was an early innovator and adopter here. By the end of the warring states period they would have plows that an enterprising redneck could and would weld onto a frame in a pinch. They invented a very early all metal three bottom, also one version of a heavy moldboard that would make it's way to europe through holland and replace native and previously adopted designs prevalent at that time. IE roman..which itself was adopted replacing native roman designs by an iron version of the the typically north african adz.

All of these tools were created to satisfy the same task. Opening new land. How do we get all this new land....? Kindof of a chicken and an egg thing, because say you started with the swords (more likely spears) and now you have a bunch of new land. What do you do with it, and what do you do that with? For that matter, where do you get the raw materials for either thing. Soooo many babies.