The institution of marriage, as we know it today, is a formalized bond between two people sanctioned by the church, the state, or both. While love and marriage are synonymous today in Westernized societies, this was not the case for most of human civilization.

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Based on hunter-gatherer societies around the globe today, anthropologists theorize that pair bonds throughout most of human history were more casual than the formalized bonds of matrimony that we know today. Pairing up was as simple as moving one’s hammock next to another’s. Since many hunter-gatherer societies were egalitarian, communal child-rearing made the paternity question insignificant. A child could have as many uncles as men in a tribe. People expressed sexuality more freely, and some cultures lacked a word for virginity, as it wasn’t something they guarded or valued. The Mosuo, a small agrarian ethnic group in southeastern China, is one of the world’s few remaining matrilineal cultures where inheritance follows the female line, as was the practice in ancient Egypt. Instead of marriage, Mosuo women consort with whomever they desire, and the uncles, not the fathers, rear children in the family home.

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When humans transitioned from the vagaries of a nomadic hunter-gatherer existence to an agriculturalist’s more structured and food-secure lifestyle, one significant impact of land ownership on social structure was the value placed on gender roles. While hunter-gatherer roles were seen as equally important, land ownership caused a shift, and society began to value the roles of defender and homemaker differently. Due to their physical strength, men assumed the responsibility of defending their land and livestock against both animal and human predators, safeguarding their property rights. Women, once gatherers and even hunters, began tending fields and, over time, became restricted to the home, grinding grains into flour and baking bread.

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Another impact of land ownership was that there was now something to be passed along the family line, as “what’s yours is mine” became “what’s mine is mine” to be handed down to one’s offspring. As such, the patrimony of a child became important, as it was now imperative that the toil dispensed to safeguard land and livestock was reaped by one’s offspring and not that of another.

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Thus, society devised marriage, binding a woman to one man, not for love nor to establish bonds between families, but to ensure her offspring were the children of one man and one man only. The sexual freedom once enjoyed by both men and women gave way to a practice of obtaining exclusive sexual access to a girl as soon as she reached puberty, ensuring she did not stray from the marital home. Consideration of a woman’s natural sexual desire and need for variety was sacrificed to secure the line of succession. As a result, women were severely chastised for displaying any signs of sexuality, a practice that reached new heights in ancient Greece and later Islamic cultures. In addition to restricting women’s freedoms, societies often portrayed them as legendary monsters, such as the harpies, sirens, gorgons, and the Hydra, who were forever tempting or destroying men, as illustrated in Greek mythology.

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An increased, stable food supply and decreased mobility led to higher birth rates, expanding a family’s workforce but increasingly putting women’s lives at risk. In hunter-gatherer societies, a nomadic lifestyle, uncertain food supply, and birth control practices, including the use of local herbs to facilitate contraception and abortion, placed restrictions on the number of children born. In ancient cultures, such as Egypt, birth control continued to be practiced, and prescriptions for birth control and abortions were available to both married and unmarried women. With the rise, spread, and evolution of Christianity, the Medieval Christian doctrine that sex had no value except for reproduction and that hindering reproduction encouraged sinful uses of sex drove the use of herbal contraceptives and abortives underground, leading to larger families and higher maternal mortality.

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As prosperity from farming grew, women and even children came to be more and more regarded as property, something to be guarded and controlled by patriarchal societies. Marriages became more contractual, used to form political alliances and increase wealth within families. Increased affluence meant that families could attract wealthier brides by being able to pay a family’s “bride price.” As males were the ones who needed that wealth to vie for marriage partners, it made sense for families to give their wealth to their sons rather than their daughters. Hence, the shift away from a matrilineal line of succession, where the assurance of maternity allowed everyone to continue to enjoy their sexual freedom, to a patrilineal line, which saw polyamory giving way to monogamy, then polygamy. With the decline of the egalitarian Sumerian and Ancient Egyptian civilizations, patriarchy became the dominant social structure in most Old World civilizations and religions, and was subsequently transported to the Americas by European settlers.   

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All You Need Is Love

For millennia, marriage was a means to forge alliances and provide cheap labour. Marrying for love seemed absurd, almost against social norms. The Greeks considered love a type of insanity, and the Medieval French defined love as a “derangement of the mind,” concluding that it could only be cured by sexual intercourse, either with a loved one or another. The idea of love as a primary reason for marriage gained traction in Western societies around the time of the French and American Revolutions in the late 1700s, when Enlightenment thinkers began promoting the “right to freedom of choice and personal happiness.” During the nineteenth century, the development of a wage-based economy in the wake of the Industrial Revolution meant that a woman didn’t have to depend on her parents’ ability to put up a dowry, and a man didn’t have to wait for an inheritance to marry, encouraging the radical idea of marrying for romantic love. The Romantic poets promoted the ideals of “individual thought and personal feeling”, inspiring an increasingly literate society to choose their partners and openly express their feelings, blazing a trail for courtship rituals.

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But personal choice, born of wealth, came at a cost. Despite being subservient to men for millennia, women were still essential to generating economic income for their families and businesses. The Industrial Revolution increased affluence, and a wealthier middle class emerged in the nineteenth century. This enabled more women to adopt the lifestyle of affluent women of the gentry, who were once the only ones privileged to focus on being mothers and wives. Many failed to recognize that, by adopting this lifestyle, women confined themselves to the domestic sphere, restricting their roles within the household to creating a congenial home for their husbands and raising their children to be model citizens. Control of the household finances was now left in their husbands’ hands, and if wealthy enough, they even left the running of the household to servants. The Victorian Era shaped the role of the subservient woman, whose sole purpose was to serve others. This created the “ideal feminine,” a persona that women of the twentieth and even twenty-first centuries have struggled to shed.

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And how did one achieve the “ideal feminine”? Through Good Girl conditioning. Starting as a virginal bride, a Good Girl is accommodating and resourceful and creates harmony within the household, ensuring everyone within their sphere of influence thrives, always putting themselves last. The Good Girl ensures she never falls behind, but neither does she outpace anyone. She doesn’t ruffle feathers and responds instead of initiating; she has no desires of her own and is modest in temperament and sexuality, only allowed to be woken by one chosen partner, such that her erotic life is external and not part of who she is.

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This Good Girl conditioning has, of course, existed for millennia, with patriarchal societies conditioned to believe that “this is the way.” By acquiescing to the Good Girl role, civilized women allowed their voices to be silenced, their ambitions to go unheeded, and their sexuality to be stifled. As men were physically stronger, this gave them the right to assume that they were also mentally superior, creating the “ideal masculine” based on the dominant hyper-masculine alpha male. As few men embody the “ideal masculine,” the use of fists and language has forced men to suppress the feminine, preying on the anxieties of young men to “man” up. In many cultures, the biggest insult a boy can level against another is to say that he throws, runs, or cries like a girl. As such, civilized societies have allowed the strengths of the feminine approach to problem-solving, such as receptiveness and consensual problem-solving, which are present in both men and women, to be overshadowed by the assertive, authoritarian masculine approach, also present in both.

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We Are Women, Hear Us Roar

The rise of the feminist movement in Western societies was the first organized shift in women’s rights. Demands for gender equality started with the vote, followed by the right to higher education, the legalization of birth control and abortion, access to all professions, and the elusive goal of equal pay, most of which Egyptian women had access to in pre-Christian times.

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But something went wrong with this grand experiment. Despite being labelled the feminist movement, pushback from various sources led women to believe they had to suppress their feminine side (the nurturing yin) and emphasize their masculine side (the assertive yang) to infiltrate traditional male domains. In the earlier years, before women began delaying childbirth, some denied the existence of their children by having no family pictures on their desks or by failing to acknowledge that they even had children. This undermined any potential benefits from including women in decision-making, prioritizing the still-dominant masculine yang.

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The fallout for women was that adopting the masculine approach led to the corrupted ideal of the independent superwoman who could do it all. As women infiltrated the domain of men, men were slower to step up and lend a hand on the home front. While more women entered the workforce and worked 8- to 12-hour days like their male counterparts, they were often still expected to prepare the family meals, do their traditional household chores, and carry the entire burden of childcare, such as taking children to and from school/childcare centres, or staying at home with a sick child. Even those with the luxury of hiring a nanny often found themselves the sole point of contact when communicating their children’s schedules to the childcare professional. Women who wanted the flexibility to pursue their careers as high as possible often chose career over family.

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By mastering the masculine, becoming hyper-competent, and refraining from complaint, a woman often had no one to support her. For millennia, success had been geared towards men, and while some acknowledged that behind every self-made man was a woman, it seemed that for a time, behind every successful woman was no one.

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The challenges facing Westernized women transitioning back into the workforce impacted the Baby Boomer generation, the bearers of this social experiment, a generation that has dominated the workforce far longer than any previous one due to extended life expectancies. With child-rearing and household duties being increasingly shared between the genders in successive generations, one wonders whether men are embracing the feminine or if it’s the economic reality that a rising cost-of-living means that the average family needs a double income to meet the basic requirements of a roof over their heads and food on the table.

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An interesting side note is that when women first entered male-dominated roles and delegated their former responsibilities, the nannies and cleaners were recognized as significant contributors to the economy because of the income they earned from caring for someone else’s child and home. On the other hand, the women who stayed at home, doing the same job for no remuneration, were silently criticized by society. Perhaps women who stepped into the workforce felt they had sacrificed so much to gain these rights that all women should embrace the opportunity. Or perhaps it was a case of being careful about what you wished for as the working woman juggled dual roles, envying those who made the less complicated choice.

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Ironically, in emphasizing the masculine, men created their own burdens. Even as women have struggled to have their voices heard, men have shouldered the lion’s share of providing for a household, a societal burden that has overwhelmed many men throughout history, borne at best in silence, and at worst, through a cycle of substance and domestic abuse. As a woman’s devotion to home and family became a symbol of prosperity from the latter half of the 1800s, society forced women out of the workforce, leaving the middle-class man solely responsible for providing for his family. The rise of alcoholism in some Western societies during this time led to a societal crisis that sowed the seeds of the temperance movement and, finally, the passing of laws of prohibition, spearheaded in large part by women, who, along with their children, bore the brunt of abuse from alcoholism. Women, empowered by laws against physical and then verbal abuse, demanded change, culminating in the first and second waves of the feminist movement throughout the 20th century.

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The recent shift in Westernized countries for men to be more actively involved in caring for their children has made it easier for men to express their feminine, nurturing side with less fear of reprisals. With a sharing of responsibilities, both men and women are freer to realize their dreams and ambitions as societal expectations and norms favour a more egalitarian society.  

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This cultural shift is nudging us away from a toxic environment where people acknowledge men for their actions but recognize women for their appearance. Away from a culture that rewards an abusive, hyper-masculine man for his business achievements, ignoring his transgressions. Away from a culture where women are judged on their attractiveness, what they wear, and whether they can win the Miss Congeniality award, but never for their accomplishments. We need to nurture this shift toward the realization that gender may not be a hard and fast binary of female and male, but rather consider the possibility that gender may be a continuum, where what it means to be male or female can blur if we acknowledge we possess both feminine and masculine elements. We need to understand that having a womb doesn’t make you a nurturer by default; that having a womb doesn’t mean you cannot be a warrior, any more than not having one means you cannot show emotion. We need a society where you are free to express your inner self and not have to spend a lifetime in angst, worrying about why you can never match up to the ideal of the alpha male. A society where a woman can be seen, heard, and supported as she realizes her dreams and ambitions, whatever they may be—a world of Liberté, Égalité, and Fraternité for all.  

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In my next post, I will look at the evolution of sexuality from polyamory to monogamy to polygamy, followed by Christianity’s reversion back to monogamy.