One of the things I have been wanting to write about for a long time is feminism from the perspective of the hunter-gatherer hypothesis. When I first had the idea that Jungian intuitives are very similar psychologically to ancient hunter-gatherers it occurred to me that most feminists must be hunter-gatherer types. Not only did I find out that this is indeed the case but also that most intuitive men have a highly egalitarian attitude towards women, i.e. are more likely to support women when they want to have a career and are more willing to do jobs considered typically female, like babysitting. One of my male university professors was a committed feminist. So, it’s not only conforming to changing social expectations but actively taking part in bringing about social change.
Feminists usually claim that women have been suppressed in all historic societies. However, this is not true for the majority of hunter-gatherer societies:
Various anthropologists who have done fieldwork with hunter-gatherers have described gender relations in at least some foraging societies as symmetrical, complementary, nonhierarchical, or egalitarian. Turnbull writes of the Mbuti: “A woman is in no way the social inferior of a man” (1965:271). Draper notes that “the !Kung society may be the least sexist of any we have experienced” (1975:77), and Lee describes the !Kung (now known as Ju/’hoansi) as “fiercely egalitarian” (1979:244). Estioko-Griffin and Griffin report: “Agta women are equal to men” (1981:140). Batek men and women are free to decide their own movements, activities, and relationships, and neither gender holds an economic, religious, or social advantage over the other. (The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers)
Of course, hunter-gatherers have institutions we modern people are shocked about. Arranged marriages are also common among hunter-gatherers, albeit less so than in agrarian societies. What’s more, hunter-gatherer women are free to leave a marriage if they should not be happy.
Not all hunter-gatherers have arranged marriages, and in those that do, generally both parents have a say in arrangements for their sons and daughters. Defining marriage as wife-exchange is one way anthropologists inadvertently overlook women’s influence over their own marriages and those of their children. Like many foragers, Batek men and women choose their own spouses. Ju/’hoansi parents arrange first and sometimes second marriages for their young sons and daughters (Marshall 1976:266). But unhappily married young daughters may move back home or divorce (Shostak 1981:127–30, 158). Adult Ju/’hoansi women and men select subsequent marriage partners for themselves (Marshall 1976:266).
Here is my model of evolutionary types according to subsistence:
According to my model male competition increased among food-producing farmers and herders which reduced egalitarianism, in particular in regard to women. So, it follows that hunter-gatherer type women are most unhappy with traditional women’s roles. All the more so as child-rearing is a collaborative effort (alloparenting) in hunter-gatherer bands with men taking an active part. Almost all of the famous feminists in history were hunter (NT) or gatherer (NF) types:
A poll on the website www.personality-database.com yields the following result
All intuitive types are ahead of the sensing types in considering themselves feminists. The lowest score is among the extraverted sensing types (ESXX).
Apart from hunter-gatherer type women, pastoralist type women (but rarely men) are also frequently feminists. This often leads to a rift between feminists when it comes to feminist values. Freedom for pastoralist type women often goes hand in hand with fun, sexual liberalism (adventure), self-display and self-enhancement.
Even though the situation for women is much better in so-called WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) societies which have been extensively “foragerized” in values than in traditional farming or herding societies, modern hunter-gatherer type women should still be somewhat disadvantaged which manifests itself in them getting married later in life or not at all and having fewer than average or no children at all. In fact, the WEIRD trait of low fertility is another hunter-gatherer characteristic as hunter-gathers typically only have half the fertility rates of agriculturalists.
Also, we should expect that hunter-gatherer type women in history didn’t always conform to the role of women that agricultural societies wanted to assign to them. A lot of HG women, therefore, may have refused to get married and lived at the edge of society. Witches were most likely HG type women. Sadly enough, prostitution may have been another option they may have deemed better than a “lifetime imprisonment sentence”. It’s not an uncommon phenomenon even nowadays among hunter-gatherer women:
Elsewhere contact increased options for women. Tonkinson (1990) reports that Mardu women in Western Australia acted as liaisons between Aborigines and missions and cattle stations. The women learned more English than the men and earned money through employment opportunities, including prostitution, which they did not view pejoratively. (The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers)
Modern hunter-gatherer women are very likely overrepresented among single mothers. There is also a high percentage of single mothers among the Evenki:
A high rate of adoption (due to the death of parents) further tangles the kinship net. The labor division of Evenkis into intensely sedentary “villagers” and highly mobile units of bachelor men is another hindrance to contracting and maintaining marriages. Since the 1970s, many female single-parent households have appeared. They are considered stable and desirable owing to generous support payments from the state and the relatively high income of some salaried female office employees. In general, Evenki women predominate in professions demanding higher formal education.
Also, like Evenki women, HG types are overrepresented in women with higher formal education. In fact, most female academics are hunter type women. Women in academia are likely to have the lowest fertility rate of all demographics.
This phenomenon has likely been present throughout history. The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (2020) by Harvard professor Joseph Henrich provides a glimpse into the lives of women in the Middle Ages:
Many women never marry: By age 30, some 15–25 percent of northwestern European women remained unmarried. The Church provided a respectable alternative institutional mechanism to evade marriage: women could enter the convent. By contrast, in most societies close to 100 percent of females married, and usually at young ages. In traditional China, for example, only 1–2 percent of women remained unmarried at age 30.62 Smaller families and lower fertility: Smaller families were likely influenced by many factors, including fewer kin ties (less childcare), neolocal residence (less pressure from in-laws), a later age of marriage, and a lack of polygyny.
Again, among those 15-25 percent of women who remained unmarried HG type women were certainly vastly overrepresented. Nowadays joining a convent does not really seem like an option to getting married. However, from the point of view of a HG woman who lived in mediaeval times it did have some serious benefits:
- Avoiding societal shame and gossip
- Avoiding a much higher risk of rape for single women
- Providing companionship of like-minded people rather than choosing loneliness
From the point of view of evolutionary psychology, such high rates of unmarried women require an explanation. In traditional societies, the rates of unmarried women (in stark contrast to unmarried men) has always been close to zero. This is, of course, also true for traditional hunter-gatherer societies. In traditional China, which is very farmer-type dominated, the rates of unmarried women were ten times lower than in Europe.
Feminism has done a lot to improve the situation of women in society. However, it’s not feminism itself that has led to lower fertility rates. Asian countries with high percentages of farmer types (South Korea, China, Japan) have some of the lowest fertility rates in the world. Economic growth seems to have had a much higher impact on fertility rates than feminism. Paradoxically, equal opportunities in education have also brought about a further rift in inequality and even lower fertility rates among HG type women. From the point of view of evolutionary psychology there is one glaring injustice in this story: while a college degree for men increases the chances of offspring for a woman the opposite seems to be the case.
Check out my book for more background information on mapping human nature:
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