Many of the more ridiculous and outlandish claims made by feminists involve events in the distant past, conveniently before there is any decent documentation. For example, it has been hypothesized that prior to civilization, we all lived in a gender equal utopia, or, as some have suggested, an outright matriarchy. Fortunately, we have rather recent examples to debunk the idea, as there are still people living in hunter-gatherer societies in some parts of the world. It seems that, rather than a matriarchy or a gender equal society, there is a very clear division of labor. The men hunt and protect, while the women gather and process “safer” but lower-quality food.
In a 2006 article, John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin Madison, addresses the notion that neanderthals were gender equalists in which women and men hunted together. Hawks is skeptical, mainly because he thinks that hunting was even more risky for neanderthals than for recent humans, yet we still don’t find recent human females engaging in hunting on a significant scale.
However, the study he is holding to the light is interesting in that it proposes that neanderthals died out because there was no significant sexual division of labor. Whether this is true or not as far as neanderthals are concerned, the fact that division of labor has played a significant part in modern human development is undeniable.
Science has accepted that gender is far from a mere “psychological construct.” Long before humans even imagined the concept of patriarchy – back when people had only a vague notion of fatherhood – sex roles were well-defined. This doesn’t mean that women should never work or take the lead in any endeavor (quite the opposite, in fact), but rather that the sexes are distinct, and not “equal” in the feminist sense of the word.
The “patriarchy” theory that holds that women were prevented from being warriors and such and forced to be nurturing by some shadowy cabal of men has always been tenuous, and now we can say with some conviction that science has thoroughly debunked it.
