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.
