Like widespread literacy, gender roles too were relatively stable historically until a few hundred years ago. Changes in gender roles that began in the nineteenth century only accelerated during the post-World War II era.
The contemporary transgender debate has embroiled women in a remarkable and unenviable predicament. One watches in astonishment as a succession of prominent women thinkers and writers become victims of transgender ire and boycotts for reiterating the essentially biological basis of gender. There is a tragic irony in their plaintive cries asserting the inviolability of biology in determining gender because many feminist writers have insisted that female roles were socially constructed. The extraordinary situation justifies no celebratory macho self-satisfaction because the travails of the other gender are an inseparably integral part of the very humanity of their gender.
More to the point, the argument that femininity was constructed was never consciously extended by feminist writers and ideologues to the core notion of biological identity. Yet, one might wish to pause to consider some of the wider implications for women of current debates. A man might dare discuss them though from an implicit androgynous intellectual perspective and also because the fate of women and men are inseparably conjoined. In addition, the historical traditions of India have always quite taken for granted the pre-eminent role of the female sex. In India that is Bharat, the goddess Durga pronounced in the most ancient of times: “I am supreme and I am the one to whom all answer”.
American YouTube videos are full of lament of women beyond their late 30s, who allegedly find themselves alone and fear for the future, although many of these are produced by men with an unattractive sense of schadenfreude. However, there is indeed growing evidence of a breakdown in gender relations, especially in the US, with men anxious about the potential legal and financial implications of marriage and the inevitability of its breakdown. There is also significant statistical evidence that marriage will cease to be the norm and a disproportionate number of American women will remain unmarried and childless. Even if this outcome is by choice it will result in major socio-economic changes with significant wider consequences that deserve to be examined and understood.
At the same time, the ‘Me Too’ movement highlights the exploitation of women, especially by men in positions of power, which comes as no surprise. However, an ensuing ideological politicization of the issue threatens a wider breach in gender relations because of a spillover impact that implicates all gender interaction. Some women have also reacted to the increasingly conditional fate of marriage by suggesting a reversion to traditional gender roles as the appropriate response to growing evidence of societal breakdown. However, that seems to consign the issue to the influence of attitudes rather than objective socio-economic imperatives and constraints that have dictated gender role outcomes. It is clear that the fear among men that they will lose a significant portion of their assets, to which a partner’s legal entitlement might not be commensurate with their contribution during the married relationship, is of relevance to the reluctance to commit to marriage.
There is also an intensification of short-term calculation in gender alliances and prioritization of personal gratifications on multiple axes by both men and women that curtail the scope for postponement of personal satisfaction and evaluation of long-term fallouts. One noteworthy aspect of the developing norm is the increasingly transactional nature of relationships and the high priority attached to the sexual encounter, as contrasted with the possibility of prolonged intimate emotional engagement. Unfortunately, it also seems that the welfare of children during the breakup of marriage is now less significant and mostly consigned to the realm of negotiating practicalities and legal sanctions for arrangements following the estrangement. A largely unnoticed negative aspect of the degradation of committed long-term relationships is truncated steadfast exposure to offspring. Waning of this deeply rooted humanizing form of domesticating socialization is especially unfortunate in the case of men.
It may be surmised that a turning point has been reached for society in the roles of both genders. The situation is avowedly not a women’s issue alone since gender roles are always inseparably interlocked. It might be useful to pause and attempt a much broader and deeper historical contextualisation of gender roles that has led to the contemporary impasse. It might be noted in passing that although some economically advanced countries, especially the US, are most affected by the resulting deepening societal crisis in gender roles, the phenomenon is becoming visible elsewhere. The reasons for its evident globalization are not far to seek and it will be appropriate to acknowledge a debt to the materialist conception of history in analyzing it. Although Marxism has lost appeal and is now derided, and most are unfamiliar with its analytical framework, it does provide a conceptual apparatus for making sense of the development of contemporary gender roles.
The long historical development of human society is the bedrock on which contemporary gender roles originate, however great the distance in time. Indeed, like widespread literacy, gender roles too were relatively stable historically until a few hundred years ago. Changes in gender roles that began in the nineteenth century only accelerated during the post-WWII era. For much of history, human societies constantly engaged in warfare, men met early death, and women abduction and effectively enslavement. This long history of enduring horrors is frequently forgotten though it has not ceased, as WWII illustrated, and the very recent tragic fate of the Yezidi people has been highlighted once again. There is continuing ideological justification for the abduction and enslavement of women in the contemporary world. And governments of societies claiming a lien on the very idea of civilization, to the exclusion of others, have quietly acquiesced in it.
Human society discovered the use of fire forty thousand years ago (though there is some unconfirmed evidence of use dating back 300,000-400,000 years) and it understood the degradation of progeny through inbreeding about thirty-four thousand years ago to evolve sophisticated mating systems to overcome it. The onset of agriculture and the establishment of less nomadic settled groups occurred four thousand years ago. Knowledge of the consequences of inbreeding and the onset of more stable agricultural settlements was a crucial turning point for the origin of gender roles. One may immediately surmise a decisive separation of gender roles at this crucial moment when the importance of inbreeding between immediate relatives was understood. However, the issue of consanguineous mating is somewhat distinctive and the antecedents of gender roles probably lie even earlier.
A critical historical context for gender roles is a biological reality since women always lacked the freedom of time and space compared to men. This material condition of life pre-determined their role in the earliest human society. Women always lacked time because of the nurture of offspring and space because of their relative immobility during the period when their care was necessary. But knowledge of inbreeding also impelled the exchange of women between groups and the impossibility for men to know who was their progeny prompted the creation of social norms and sanctions to discipline women. Thus, women became the single most valuable community for groups to keep under control since their exchange was imperative to avoid inbreeding and they were also a primordial necessity for self-perpetuation of the individual and tribe.
Throughout much of history, the lives of the overwhelming majority of women were shaped and dictated by this basic condition of life, constraints on their time and space. During all the prolonged history of warring and carnage for conquest and dominance this predicament was institutionalized further because it was men who did most of the actual fighting. That it reduced women to chattel under the control of men, anxious about the integrity of their sole right to the progeny of women under their control is not open to debate. Other kinds of religious superstitions accompanied the perception of women, from anxieties about menstruation to the attribution of suspect powers that led to various forms of torture for infractions, from stoning to death to burning at the stake and much else.
(This is part 1 of the two-part series)