"In The Concise Encyclopedia of Sociology, women’s and gender studies professor Michelle Meagher writes that, “Patriarchy is a theory that attempts to explain this widespread gender stratification as an effect of social organization than the result of some natural or biological fact.” While discussions of patriarchy today do tend to emphasize social organization—and socialization practices in particular—as the primary explanation for its existence, this was not always the case. Some of the earliest, and indeed most informative, work on the nature of patriarchy was done in the 1980s and 1990s by feminist social scientists well versed in evolutionary theory, who integrated primatology and ethnographic data to aid in their understanding of the degree of male dominance across human societies.
Anthropologist Sarah Hrdy, a feminist and self-described sociobiologist, wrote one of the earliest evolutionarily informed analyses of the idea of patriarchy in her 1981 book The Woman That Never Evolved. Much as I do here, Hrdy traced the initial foundation of male dominance to the fact of anisogamy, but also noted the important role of socioecology in expanding or diminishing its extent. Hrdy criticized existing explanations for male dominance that focus exclusively socialization, arguing that:
They cannot explain sexual asymmetry in even one other species. Yet male dominance characterizes the majority of several hundred other species that, like our own, belong to the order Primates. Save for a handful of highly informative exceptions, sexual asymmetries are nearly universal among primates. Logic alone should warn us against explaining such a widespread phenomenon with reference only to a specialized subset of human examples.
The “highly informative exceptions” Hrdy mentions are in reference to three social contexts among some primate species that are most favorable to high female status: where there is a monogamous mating system, where females have a short breeding season, which relaxes male competition for most of the year, and/or where females live in matrilineal (rank inherited through the female line) “sisterhood” groups of relatives. Hrdy emphasizes the role of monogamy in particular, writing that, “Only under one particular type of breeding system, monogamy, do we routinely find anything approaching equality between the sexes in either size or rights of access to preferred resources.”
Because some elements of patriarchal social systems are tied to evolved sex differences, we would expect certain aspects of ‘patriarchal behavior’ to be found in every society, even those that are relatively egalitarian. Perhaps the clearest example of this is the extreme violence some males sometimes employ in the pursuit of women, or in attempts to control their sexuality. As anthropologist Richard Wrangham and psychologist Joyce Benenson note in their book chapter titled “Cooperative and Competitive Relationships within Sexes,” across cultures, “The primary causes of within-community aggression between men are competition for status and access to women.”...
For Hrdy, it is largely the problem of paternal uncertainty, and cultural endeavors to mitigate it, that underlie patriarchal social practices: “To keep women (and their sexuality) in check, husbands and their relations (and perhaps especially property-owning families) devised cultural practices which emphasized the subordination of women and which permitted males authority over them.” One important insight here is the recognition that women may themselves sometimes support social norms that control female sexuality, to the extent that it benefits their lineage...
Many women can also reap fitness benefits through inclusive fitness by increasing the paternal certainty of her brothers and sons. If she is part of a particularly wealthy, powerful family, in a patrilineal descent system, she has even more of an evolutionary incentive to support norms that restrict female sexuality and increase paternal certainty, to prevent her family’s resources from being passed down to the illegitimate children of her brothers and sons. Hrdy writes that, where large dowries are offered, “The bride’s family, then, as well as the groom’s, has an interest in ensuring her virginity and future fidelity. Access through marriage or concubinage to a wealthy family is competitive, and the bride’s family has a direct stake in her reputation and eligibility.” Intrasexual competition can also play a role; women sometimes have an incentive to obstruct the sexual behavior of other women, which may reduce the likelihood of her own partner cheating or investing resources in another woman.
In her 1995 paper ‘The Evolutionary Origins of Patriarchy’, published in the journal Human Nature, feminist anthropologist Barba Smuts identifies six factors that she hypothesizes contribute to the existence of patriarchal social systems in humans:
- The relatively limited power of female coalitions across human societies, due in part to patrilocal residency (living close to the husband’s family after marriage) being more common than matrilocal residency.
- The strength of male-male alliances across cultures, due in part to the demands of warfare.
- Male control of resources.
- Large variance in male wealth and power, leaving women more vulnerable to the authority of powerful men and reducing women’s control over their sexuality.
- Female behaviors that promote male resource control and control over female sexuality.
- The human capacity for language (unlike other primates) which allows males to propagate ideologies that promote male dominance.
Smuts argues that these characteristics lead to humans having a unique and more extensive elaboration of male dominated social systems than many other primates...
We might consider an alternative explanation for male-dominance across human societies. Evolutionary psychologist David Buss, for example, attributes patriarchal social systems largely (but not entirely) to female choice:
My view is that women’s preferences for a successful, ambitious, and resource-capable mate coevolved with men’s competitive mating strategies, which include risk taking, status striving, derogation of competitors, coalition formation, and an array of individual efforts aimed at surpassing other men on the dimensions that women desire. The intertwining of these coevolved mechanisms in men and women created the conditions for men to dominate in the domain of resources."
