3000 BCE to 300 CE · Africanspan
Stratification produced patriarchy in Eurasia and not everywhere
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If steeply unequal societies were emerging in several regions at once, a question follows. Did the subordination of women arrive with them everywhere? Comparative ethnographic evidence from Africa south of the Sahara, from Native American societies and from Oceania says it did not. In many of those societies each sex held authority over its own sphere of social and economic activity, and the views of women, senior women in particular, had to be weighed in community decisions. Across the long middle belt of Eurasia the record reads differently. There female subordination does seem to arrive early in nearly every society that developed strong stratification. That correlation has been treated as a law of social development. It is the behaviour of one region. The places where the correlation breaks down are exactly the places Western scholarship left out when it built its theory of what complexity does to women, which is how a regional habit came to be reported as a human universal.
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