The Rational Optimist (P.S.)

by Matt Ridley

Worse still, as Friedrich Engels was the first to argue, agriculture may have worsened sexual inequality. It is certainly painfully obvious that in many peasant farming communities, men make women do much of the hard work. In hunter-gathering, men have many tiresome sexist habits, but they do at least contribute. When the plough was invented around 6,000 years ago, men took over the work of driving the oxen that cultivated fields, because it required greater strength, but this only exacerbated inequality. Now women were treated increasingly as the chattels of men, loaded with bracelets and ankle rings to indicate their husband’s wealth. Now art became dominated by the symbols of male power and competition – arrows, axes and daggers. Now polygamy probably increased and the wealthiest men acquired harems and patriarchal status: at Branc in Slovakia, more women than men were buried with elaborate grave goods, indicating not that they were wealthy, so much as that their polygamous husbands were wealthy while other men languished in celibate poverty. In this way, polygamy enables poor women to share in prosperity more than poor men. It was an age of patriarchy.