An Intellectual History of Pink-Washing Patriarchy

Feminist scholars of the 1970s and ‘80s often wanted to show that patriarchy was not inevitable, but rather another world was possible. They scoured the ethnographic records for small-scale egalitarian societies, celebrated ancient ‘matriarchies’, and pointed to ancient goddess-worship.

Looking back at the European past, gender historians sought to highlight women’s historic agency, importance, wealth, and labour. This scholarship was often motivated by a feminist desire to counter past erasure and show that women mattered. But as Judith Bennett (2006) brilliantly argued, while it may feel empowering to document female agency and rebellion, this minimizes historic patriarchy.

Thankfully, patriarchy has largely been emasculated in most advanced countries. Challenges persist (such as women predominating in firms with greater flexibility and lower productivity), but pale in comparison to the moral gravity of femicides and arranged marriages. Yet the same violence, abuse and male-dominance that would provoke virulent critique in the West are sometimes ignored, or even defended elsewhere. Captured concubines in Persia are celebrated as strategic, modern Cairene women who embrace obedience and seclusion are heralded as ‘agentic’, while laws banning female genital mutilation are condemned as ‘stigmatizing’.

What on earth went wrong? Western feminists gain moral prestige by ‘punching up’ and criticising male hierarchies at home, but are often reluctant to scrutinize gender norms in other societies for fear of being branded neocolonial or racist. Elites in the Global South may downplay patriarchal oppression in their own countries, wary of being cast as ‘backward’. Globally-comparative analysis of gender is thus taboo.

Yet if we actually want to advance gender equality, we need to get real. We need to stop pink-washing patriarchy, and embrace an open, empirical enquiry.

Medieval Europe

The British Library’s exhibition on Medieval Women showcased a tremendous collection of manuscripts and artefacts, demonstrating women’s prominence, but almost to the point of sugarcoating 15th century misogyny.

Yes, Christine de Pizan wrote the Book of the City of Ladies, asserting women’s equal competence. But she faced an uphill struggle. Before mass printing, each manuscript had to be transcribed by hand, and every major institution was dominated by men.

Head into any Western bookshop and you’ll find celebrations of “bad ass” women from the past, but these are slim pickings. In a database of almost 59,000 European university teachers and academy members active before 1800, there were just 108 women.

Misogyny was rife. As Protestant and Catholic churches sparred for souls in 16th century West-Central Europe, they aggressively demonstrated their power to vanquish the devil (Leeson and Russ 2018). Thousands of ‘witches’ (mostly women) were accused, tried and murdered. Paintings cast women as potentially deceitful and dangerous, circulating via printing. Frans Francken the Younger’s paintings show women in ordinary, respectable clothing undressing to join demonic rituals - hinting that satan’s agents live amongst us.

Small-Scale Societies

Analyses of small-scale societies must also be viewed with caution. The Standard Cross Cultural Sample (SCCS) gives the Ashanti its highest possible score for ‘female power’, recognising Queen Mothers, but this same society was rife with pawning - as girls were given off as collateral. Moreover, focusing on a single, royal actor like the Queen Mother ignores whether women could organize powerful coalitions to defend their collective interests.

Violence is another major omission. Accounts centred on female prominence, labor, property ownership, matrilocality, and permissive sexual norms are misleading if they do not also recognise violence and coercion. That includes risks of rape, capture, enslavement and head-hunting. If men can get what they want through brute force, or arranged marriage, they need not demonstrate care, companionship or devotion. In my analysis of the SCCS, wife-beating was reported as common in 80% of coded societies.

The Siraya of Taiwan were matrilocal and women did the lion’s share of agriculture. But men still engaged in out-bounding raiding and exclusively dominated governing councils. Analyses that focus on gender divisions of labour may well be tabulating drudgery, while omitting child marriage, impoverishment and routine coercion.

Get over the Hoe!

If you attend any Economics course on gender, you’ll probably learn ploughs favoured male brawn and naturalised men’s participation in the public sphere, whereas hoes maintained women’s centrality.

This is possibly one of the most misleading ideas in economics (save all the other ones).

Women’s participation in agriculture doesn’t tell us whether women controlled any of the surplus, let alone whether they could build powerful coalitions. Hoe agriculture produces larger surpluses compared with slash and burn, and anything which generated a storable surplus made a village more vulnerable to external predation. This generated stronger incentives for raiding, defence and warfare. Male military coalitions grabbed power and enshrined themselves as leaders.

The real puzzle is why women worked so hard, but struggled to capture the rewards. What prevented women from organizing powerful networks, capable of challenging patriarchal authority and impunity?

Aztec Patriarchy

Feminist histories of the Aztecs often highlight ‘gender complementarity’, noting that women ground maize and sold at markets.

But why are we elevating a hard slog? The overwhelming majority of Aztec mothers woke early, spent five hours a day grinding maize for tortillas, scrubbing their children’s clothes. Women’s work is often thankless. As a young woman told me in an Oaxacan market, “men think of us as servants”.

Dodds Pennock also seems to pink-wash human sacrifices. She notes that victims of human sacrifices were sometimes ixiptla (impersonators) of the gods, embodying the deity the ceremony was supposed to honor. Since female victims often embodied deities associated with earth, fertility, water, maize, salt, childbirth, disease and natural forces: “Women were bound up with the earth – and this connection gave both their lives and their deaths significance”.

Pardon?

Islamic Empires

Within Islamic history, postcolonial scholars have often emphasised women’s property ownership, donations to mosques, litigation in courts, and strategic ploys in the harems (Peirce 1993; Tucker 1985).

But this minimizes wider patriarchal oppression: teenage girls were betrothed to men they had not met, and thereafter kept cloistered, while men dominated every single institution. Late 19th century Egyptian reformist, Qasim Amin, was refreshingly honest, highlighting that women applied their seals to accounts and contracts, without understanding their contents, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation by husbands, relatives or trustees.

Today, female employment remains especially low across Central Asia, South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa (CASAMENA), and these same patterns persist when communities move abroad to Europe. Yet too often scholars attribute this to the challenges of balancing work and motherhood, thereby extending analyses derived from the West. But clearly there is something culturally specific about CASAMENA, since even when compared to economically-similar countries, female employment remains ultra low.

Patriarchy, therefore, gets a free pass.

Hauling water isn’t Emancipating!

Sub-Saharan Africa scores well on standard metrics of gender equality, on account of high female labor force participation, but this is grossly misleading, because work is not inherently liberating.

In low-income Africa, women may move independently, but their lives are still marked by relentless drudgery and insecurity. Too often, poor women wake before dawn and labour long after dusk, only to be stuck in the same place.

LLMs also sugar-coat the patriarchy!

Since LLMs are trained on this same data, they reproduce the same selectivity. When I uploaded Upinder Singh’s (2008) tremendous book on India, which states that ‘the number of hymns attributed to women sages in the Rig Veda is small”, Claude then told me: “The Rig Veda includes hymns composed by women - a testament to their participation in the intellectual and spiritual life of the time”. Dropping the qualification, Claude refashioned male dominance into female prominence!

Such narratives blind us to the fact that the entire world was run by fraternal coalitions, often extremely violent, and that over the 20th century we have made phenomenal progress!

When I asked ChatGPT, “Why do so few women in the Middle East and North Africa work for pay, when so many are university educated?”, it summarized a range of economics papers, emphasizing domestic labor and job scarcity. But this hypothesis seems unconvincing, given that MENA’s female employment is so much lower than other countries with similar economic development. ChatGPT seems reluctant to recognize region-specific cultural constraints, namely seclusion.

Even when LLMs do note patriarchy, they tend to excessively ‘hedge’ - such as by saying that in the Ottoman Empire, royal women might exercise influence. I suspect their training data includes academic papers that stress ‘exceptional women’.

Studying the Great Gender Divergence!

Over the 20th century, the entire world made colossal progress towards gender equality, more rapidly in some regions than others. Pink-washing past and present patriarchy may feel nice, but is ultimately misleading because it blinds us to both progress and persistent oppression.

To understand how our world came to be, we need to study how male fraternities consolidated power, and why this persisted for so long. That means studying long historical processes, tracing the interplay of political, economic and cultural shifts, and comparing societies to understand what sustained (or weakened) patriarchal authority.

Digitization can help us track the longue durée. For example, we still don’t really know why ideals of female seclusion spread across Mesopotamia. I am hopeful that digitisation of hundreds of thousands of cuneiform tablets might help us track the adoption of veiling.

Social network analysis is now more possible at scale. I’m curious to learn how caste changes in the diaspora. What role do parents play in Indian American marriages? Can LinkedIn or Meta data help us understand jaati networks?

Visual media is the frontier! We could analyse, compare and track shifting representations of gender in paintings, photos film and television by harnessing vision-language models (as I suggested here). Which forms of masculinity become admirable, how does this vary over time and between countries?

Big data can be tremendously valuable, though it’s crucial to ask the right questions, grounded in social realities. For example, Baumard and colleagues generated an ‘Ancient Literary Fictions Database’ (a corpus of 2995 literary works on Wikipedia, spanning Ancient Egypt and the Norse World), then analysed depictions of falling in love. But their finding that the 16th century saw a global rise in love literature is a little misleading, since there’s a vast difference between writing about one’s passions and societies actually upholding marriages based on love.

Gender benchmarks could be developed to assess Large Language Models, evaluating whether they provide accurate descriptions of each society, alongside empirically-supported hypotheses. Given growing use of LLMS, correcting their biases seems extremely important.

Celebrate truth-seeking! Patriarchy thrives when it is widely regarded as legitimate, and actual oppression goes unquestioned because people are too scared to speak out, fearing aggressive backlash. To tackle actually-existing patriarchy, we need to support and encourage students to turn over every stone, scrutinize every hypothesis.

We live in an era of rapid technological advances, and yet women’s lives, safety and status still vary enormously across world regions. To tackle actually-existing patriarchy, we need to recognize this heterogeneity, and develop tools which help us understand its persistence. Going forwards, I suggest that qualitative insights into different societies can help ground our inquiries, so we can build innovative datasets that capture what really matters. Further, we could scrutinize LLMs to ensure that they do not pink-wash the patriarchy.

Related Essays

• Rose-Tinted Patriarchy

• Against Rose-Tinted Patriarchy

• Getting Real about Aztec Patriarchy

• Female Power for Whom?

• Are Queen Mothers Over-Rated?

• Is Matrilocality Over-Rated?

• What Explains Matrilocality?

• Male Violence and the Myth of Female Freedom

• Did Female Seclusion Help Build Islamic Empires?

• “Behind Bolted Doors”: Arab Debates on Seclusion

• Battling Medieval Misogyny: a 15th Century Barbie?

• Why Are We Sugarcoating Medieval Misogyny?

• How Courtship Transformed Masculinity

• What people get wrong about women’s rights (in the Economist)

Additional: Paintings of Witchcraft

For most of the past 300,000 years, humans struggled to coalesce, so instead lived in very small-scale bands of hunter-gatherers. It’s only in the last several thousand that they amassed into vast empires.

A wealth of literature has recognized this challenge and explored different strategies that enabled societies to scale up: religious rituals, moralising supernatural punishment. But much downplays one central friction: men’s sexual rivalries over women.

Tribal societies made this problem especially acute. Where men’s primary loyalty was to kin, a slight against one man’s sister could offend his entire lineage, prompting blood feuds. The same men who might prosper through trade or fight together as allies could also see each other as threats to their wives and sisters.

Islamic empires achieved something remarkable: they ruled much of Central Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa for centuries, governing societies where many remained loyal to kin. In Baghdad, Cairo, Aleppo and Delhi, men of different tribes, languages and origins traded in the same markets, worshipped together in the mosques, and lived side by side. How on earth did Islam achieve this phenomenal feat?

I suggest that Islamic empires built a brotherhood, without dissolving the clan. Islam brought diverse men together in shared devotion, binding them in obligations of mutual assistance, hospitality and restraint. Sharia courts and jurisprudence provided a common legal framework to resolve grievances. Preachers motivated compliance by emphasising God’s omniscience and the Day of Judgement: promising paradise and threatening hellfire.

Islamic empires also developed extensive restraints on encounters that might provoke men’s sexual jealousy and rivalry. By praising female seclusion as a mark of piety and raising concerns about fitna (sexual temptation/ disorder), preachers curbed men and women’s intermixing. Fraternities could meet in mosques, markets and Sufi lodges without trespassing on one another’s women.

Female seclusion, I suggest, helped reconcile patriarchal kinship with fraternal cooperation by restricting encounters that might provoke men’s sexual suspicions and rivalry.

State-building through Military Slavery

The early caliphs confronted a major challenge of tribalism, explains Francis Fukuyama. Men might rally behind their chiefs, yet those chiefs could withdraw their followers after a quarrel (Fukuyama 2011, 192).

Abbasid rulers developed another strategy: foreign slave soldiers. Recruited individually, slaves were detached from the kin networks through which tribal leaders commanded loyalty. Their training and advancement was organised as service to the ruler. Under al-Mu’tasim, Turkic soldiers were trained in separate academies, supplied with enslaved women as wives, and forbidden from mixing with the local population (Fukuyama 2011, 198-200).

The Ottomans later recruited through the devşirme, requiring Christian populations to surrender boys, who were raised as Muslims, trained for military or administrative service. Janissaries were barred from marrying while in service.

Fukuyama thus argues, “The system of military slavery emerged as a brilliant adaptation designed to create a strong state-level institution against the backdrop of one of the most powerfully tribal societies on earth” (2011, 192).

Of course, dynasties remained vulnerable. Slave soldiers often developed their own solidarities and seized power for themselves. Ottoman Janissaries deposed and installed sultans, while Mamluks in Egypt seized the state itself, then presented themselves as defenders of Islam and celebrated military victories over the Mongols as jihad.

Over in Mughal India, nobles were assigned numerical ranks (mansabs) that determined their status and pay, alongside military obligations. Officers were expected to maintain specified numbers of cavalry. By regularizing rank and remuneration, this system may have strengthened imperial stability (Moosvi 1981).

The crucial point is that Islamic rulers repeatedly developed institutions to overcome the challenge of tribalism. Military slavery did this by supplying soldiers detached from kin networks; mansabdari provided a common hierarchy of rank and military service. But these were not the only innovations…

Protecting the Brotherhood

Unrelated men can become valuable allies, but not if they spar in sexual rivalry. Societies that successfully scaled-up tended to develop cultural, religious and institutional restraints on men’s sexual rivalry - from punishing adultery, to enforcing monogamy, to restricting encounters that might generate sexual temptation.

Islamic scripture strictly proscribes a wide range of encounters that might generate sexual temptation. In the Quran, men are instructed to lower their gaze (24:30), while women are instructed not to stamp their feet so as not to draw attention to hidden adornments (24:31); believers were asked to address the Prophet’s wives through a barrier (33:53). Muhammad also said that a woman should not be alone with a man unless chaperoned by a close relative (Sahih al-Bukhari 5233).

Curiously, the Quranic prescriptions concerning gaze, adornment and separation all appear after Muhammad went to Medina, where he became a political leader of a rapidly expanding political-religious community. His followers now faced a much greater challenge of cooperation across tribes. Indeed, in 627, Aisha was left behind on an expedition, later accused of adultery, and this scandal nearly ignited a physical fight between two tribes.

In many well-known hadiths, the Prophet warns about sexual temptation,

Fitna literally means a trial. This term is repeatedly used by Islamic scholars and preachers to refer to both sexual temptation and also disorder within the Muslim community. Major civil wars in early Islamic history are known as the First, Second, Third and Fourth Fitna, followed by the Fitna of al-Andalus (a civil war in Islamic Spain). The word thus evokes the danger of communal discord.

As warriors went out to wage holy war, Muhammad also assured them that their wives would be safe, stating that anyone who violated their wives “will be made to stand on the Day of judgment” (Sahih Muslim). Men’s obligations to absent comrades were reinforced by threats of Allah’s wrath.

Women attended public prayers in the mosque during the Prophet’s lifetime, but with one proviso: Muhammad told them not to wear perfume. By the 11th century, jurists discouraged women from attending congregational worship, by citing concerns about fitna. Ibn Rushd, a Maliki scholar in Cordoba, permitted ‘an old woman for whom men no longer have any desire’ (Katz 2014, 24-25). Andalusian mystic Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240) disagreed, saying that such men were just succumbing to base sentiments of sexual possessiveness (ibid, 41). Such resistance was generally over-ruled, and concerns about sexual temptation became the central rationale for pushing women to pray at home.

Islamic ethicists like Ghazali praised men’s sexual jealousy, and urged men to prevent their wives going into the marketplace. A wife should avoid approaching her husband’s friends, and refrain from conversation if one called while he was absent.

Seclusion thus created an asymmetry: by confining women, men could preserve the clan while building wider networks.

Restricting Love Marriages

The means by which Islam scaled up men’s cooperation had major consequences for women. Early conquests may have preserved cousin marriage and clan loyalties, then prescriptions of female seclusion may have increased men’s control over sisters and daughters, inhibiting love marriages.

Reinforcing a Husband’s Bargaining Power

Scholars maintained a system of jurisprudence that preserved patriarchal prerogatives and wifely obedience. This includes men’s easy exit.

A Muslim husband’s bargaining power was strengthened by his unilateral right to divorce and permission to take additional wives. Since divorce was regarded as a disaster for women (depriving them of support, protection, while remarriage jeopardized child custody), men could thus use threats of divorce to enforce obedience (Rapoport 2005, 69). Reviewing evidence from medieval Mamluk Cairo, Damascus and Jerusalem (1250–1517), Rapoport surmises:

A wife might not even claim some of her legal rights, or refuse sex, because she feared divorce. In the early 14th century, a question was submitted to Ibn Taymiyya, “For many years, a wife is incapable of demanding the marriage gift owed to her by her husband, in order not to cause a divorce” (Rapoport 2005, 55; see also Ali 2010, 126, 195).

Islamic jurists often likened wives to slaves and marriages to commercial transactions. They conceived of marriage as a transaction in which a husband paid a dower and gained a form of dominion (milk) over the wife’s sexual and reproductive capacity (Ali 2010, 6). Marriage established his exclusive sexual claims, which others were bound to respect. In 14th century Damascus, Ibn Taymiyya suggested that a wife should serve her husband because he was her master and she was a “captive in his care” (Katz 2022, 173).

Wifely obedience was repeatedly sanctified by religious scholars, promising salvation if women pleased their husbands. “A woman cannot be righteous … without being obedient … to her husband”, declared al-Razi. Reviewing pre-colonial Sunni commentaries, Ayesha Chaudhry notes that a husband’s sexual disinterest was often explained by his wife’s age, appearance or behaviour, while her sexual refusal was condemned as disobedience deserving punishment (Chaudhry 63-66). Some jurists advised husbands to beat wives for refusing sex or swearing (Rapoport 2005, 76).

Our knowledge of the medieval period overwhelmingly comes from men: their chronicles, biographies, legal opinions and written records. Even where girls were educated, their literary expression was strictly restricted (Rapoport 2005, 8-11).

Glorifying Brotherhood

Islamic ethicists repeatedly elevated brotherhood. Men were called upon to pray together in Friday jummah, regularly assembling in shared devotion

Ghazali extolled the primacy of male friendships: men should seek virtuous companions to cultivate spiritual refinement. He urged men to cooperate as comrades, provide material aid, keep each other’s secrets, and remain loyal. Ghazali quotes Al-Hasan as saying

Women, meanwhile, were often belittled. Reviewing Ghazali, Tusi and Davani, Zahra Ayubi shows how these ethicists treated women as intellectually deficient, assigned care of the home, so that men could focus on spiritual refinement. Rūmī asserted that women should not be consulted or trusted, due to their lack of reason.

Futuwwa Brotherhoods and Ottoman Guilds

Futuwwa brotherhoods emerged across the Islamic world, comprising young men. Members were to emulate prophets, saints, and Sufi sages.

In the 14th century, the Anatolian brotherhood of the Akhis brought together craftsmen, merchants and other townsmen who shared their earnings, food and possessions, while building zawiyas (lodges) for social gatherings, shared meals and spiritual Sufi devotion.

Ibn Battuta (1304-1377) visited several Akhi hospices in Anatolia, always greeted with great hospitality and compassion. At one, two hundred young akhis from different trades had elected their leader, the shaykh.

The 16th century saw the emergence of more centralized guilds. Members pooled money into common funds, bought raw materials collectively, shared tax liabilities, selected representatives, enforced production standards and agreed not to poach one another’s apprentices.

In the 1640s, Istanbul’s cauldron-makers created a cash waqf, then used the returns to pay collective taxes and military requisitions. Saddle-makers pooled funds to pay for communal meals (Yi 2004, 61–62, 85). The oil-makers bought sesame and linseed collectively, paid the tax, then divided the supplies between themselves under guild supervision. One tanner who secretly purchased 448 goatskins outside the collective arrangement was hauled before the court and accused of creating disorder. He was warned that another violation could mean expulsion (ibid, 81–82).

Guilds also cultivated solidarity through feasts and religious rituals. In Istanbul, artisan organizations usually regarded holy men from early Islamic history as saintly patrons, while members visited dervish lodge or saint’s mausoleum, for devotion and a communal picnic. Evliya Çelebi reports that the barbers held annual assemblies in honor of their patron saint, Selmân-ı Pâk, while goldsmiths organised festivals at Kâğıdhane. Some guilds also financed pious activities, such as reciting poems in praise of the Prophet Muhammad. By the 18th century, Sarajevo saddlers admitted new masters at a Mevlevi dervish lodge (Faroqhi 2009, 73–74, 124, 173). Craftsmen might also meet in a member’s shop, a mosque courtyard, or guildhalls (ibid, 125). If men travelled to Istanbul, they might stay in ‘hans’ - commercial inns, often with male dormitories for artists, traders, and porters.

Women’s labor was certainly vital to home-based production, but it was men who built wider connections. Together, they built up trust, loyalty and fraternity.

Brewing Fraternity

In the 1840s, Istanbul had around 2,500 coffeehouses. These establishments attracted a diverse clientele - men from different classes, trades, professions, sects and countries - but were exclusively reserved for men.

Coffeehouses were thriving centres of commerce, places to exchange news, information and ideas. Men also listened to stories and histories, including tales of great Islamic battles. Cheering heroes and cursing villains, they imagined themselves as heirs to a shared martial past (Kirli 2015; Wishnitzer 2026).

Commanding Right & Forbidding Wrong

As the Ottomans warred with their imperial rivals, the Habsburgs and Safavids, they cultivated a Sunni group identity - establishing mosques and sharia courts across each district, staffed with centrally-appointed kadis (judges) (Akiba 2024). Moralists condemned women leaving the house, such as to go meet non-relatives. Men scaled up their connections through collective worship in mosques and Sufi brotherhoods (Zilfi 2012, 19, 56).

One kadi (Islamic judge) in 16th century Eyüp, a suburb of Istanbul, declared:

The police were charged with strict enforcement, patrolling the streets with sticks, staffs, paddles and canes. In 1757, Osman III commanded that “women remain in their own houses except of needs sanctioned by holy law” (Zilfi 2012, 57, 73). Grabbing this righteous mantle, male thugs were equally zealous in commanding right and forbidding wrong (Zilfi 2012, 74). Over in the Syrian city of Aleppo in 1762, several residents entered a house, discovered several unveiled women sitting among men, and successfully petitioned the court for them to be expelled from the neighborhood. In 1754, a qadi ordered a shop to close because it had permitted their male and female customers to mix freely (Marcus 1986, 165, 169).

Islamic jurists maintained that anyone who sees a wrong should try to correct it by hand, tongue or heart. To maintain the righteous path, believers should either intervene physically or verbally. Failure to prevent widespread wrong-doing will surely lead to punishment in the afterlife. This religious obligation falls upon all legally competent Muslims - explains Michael Cook. State capacity therefore was not a pre-condition for strict moral policing.

While some women clearly transgressed, prompting further campaigns against moral laxity, and poor female labourers and slaves traversed the city for piece-work, the prestigious ideal was still female seclusion. That did not prohibit royal and wealthy women in medieval Cairo from using their inheritance to own property or endow madrasas, but there is little evidence of them acting professors or students in formal education (Berkey 1992, 163). When families prospered, it was men who established networks across religious education, commerce, salons, armies, and governance. Men befriended other men.

In Ottoman cities, it was even considered improper to inquire after the female members of a man’s household - even government authorities were expected to abstain. Aleppo’s census only included women in the 1880s, with men being allowed to present information on behalf of secluded relatives (Marcus 1986, 170, 175).

What about Iran?

Gender segregation was enforced so strictly in Safavid Iran that muezzins rarely made the call to prayer from the top of a minaret, as otherwise they might see women in their enclosed gardens! Yet elite men nevertheless hosted lavish feasts with copious drinking, female dancers and young male singers (Matthee 2005, 9, 55, 67). Men could bond over shared pleasures, as long as their own women were secluded.

In 19th century Qajar Iran, Shi‘i fiqh proscribed men and women’s intermingling. These restrictions extended to speech and song - since her voice could arouse sexual desire. Muhammad Hasan Najafi, a prominent cleric, argued that men should not listen to an unrelated woman’s voice, even in devotional settings (Vejdani 2024, 25-26).

The Islamic duty of commanding right and forbidding wrong was repeatedly invoked to justify moral policing - by sovereign, governors, ulama and ordinary people. In Shiraz, ‘ulama sometimes took matters into their own hands. In 1894, Sayyid ‘Ali Akbar Falasiri mobilised two to three hundred seminarians and mob ruffians to raid a house hosting prostitutes. Both the women and the neighbourhood headman fled. The government despatched attendants to expel the raiders, but they were beaten up instead (Vejdani 2024, 189). Thus even on the verge of the 20th century, religious followings could overpower the state and forbid wrong.

Reverend Wilson, a missionary, was based in Tabriz for 15 years. He writes, “The most striking fact in the condition of woman in Persia is her seclusion. Her dwelling is shut in from the street and the view of the neighbors by high mud-walls” (Wilson 1895, 255). Further, “the social intercourse of men and women is not permitted, and the idea of it shocks their sense of propriety” (Wilson 1895, 243).

Wilson details that women left their houses wearing a chaddor, concealing their bodies and faces. One time, the wife of a Persian official from Istanbul went out in Tabriz wearing her foreign costume: “The mujtehid sent his servants to warn her to cease to do so or she would be beaten” (Wilson 1895, 256).

Noruz (new year) was the most important social celebration. The finale was a children’s festival, in which “boys crowd the streets, and women gather on housetops”. A chief activity during Noruz was to visit acquaintances, but such social gatherings were primarily reserved for men. Women, therefore, performed a huge volume of labour cooking and cleaning, making kulva and peshmak confectionary, as gifts and generosity for men’s social connections (Wilson 1895, 245-247). I call these ‘patriarchal rents’.

Misogyny

Islamic jurists and preachers repeatedly warn men against listening to women, belittling them as intellectually inferior and ignorant.

From the late 19th century, reformists challenged these narratives. In the 1886 preface of the women’s magazine Şükûfezar, Arife Hanım, noted that ‘We are people who have been subjected to the mockery of men who say, “Women are long-haired, short-witted” (see also Zilfi 2012, 16). Abdülgani Seni wrote a newspaper article in Salonica, arguing that women’s capacity to engage with the wider world had been restricted by seclusion: they ‘lived their lives like caged chickens’. In Egypt and Tunisia, reformists likewise argued that confinement kept women ignorant, reinforcing misogyny.

In Tabriz, Reverend Wilson recorded a popular saying, “a man’s worst enemy is his wife” (Wilson 1895, 259, 266). He further details:

Wilson observed men maligning women as ignorant, and justifying violence as necessary for patriarchy:

Jewish Communities and Fraternal Networks

These dynamics were not unique to Islam. Other communities living within Islamic empires also organised commerce and kinship through patriarchal households and male networks.

Our evidence on the Jewish community in 10-13th century Egypt primarily comes from the Geniza documents: personal and administrative letters, court records, and legal documents. Most were written by men - suggesting they were the ones cooperating at scale. Krakowski (2018, 15) notes that with the exception of slavery, marriage and informal adoption, “women seem not to have created recognized social relationships with non-relatives”. Women were thus far more dependent on kin.

Marriages strengthened male networks: prospective grooms courted a woman’s male relatives, seeking relationships that could cement commercial partnerships, while her own preferences remained peripheral (Krakowski 2018, 227, 232). Court documents also suggest that women often appointed a man to speak on their behalf.

In 19th century Istanbul, Jewish first marriages were usually arranged by parents, motivated by business considerations. Reviewing two registries of the rabbinic court of Istanbul for 1833 to 1847, Rozen notes that betrothals could be arranged for infants, and consummated once a girl turned 12 - so long as women testified to the presence of two pubic hairs.

Muslim Travellers to Europe

Arab travellers often remarked that European men were not jealous when their wives joined social gatherings and spoke to other men. Edward Lane, based in Egypt from 1833 to 1835, reports that an Egyptian friend asked another Egyptian, who had been to Paris, what was most remarkable in the land of the infidels. The traveller is quoted as saying,

The Egyptian traveller’s astonishment reveals something crucial: he expected a husband to be angry when his wife spoke to another man. I suggest that Islamic-Egyptian prescriptions of female seclusion had reduced occasions for such antagonism.

Why Restrict Women’s Writing?

In the pre-modern era, Muslim scholars rarely considered women’s writing. Exceptions include 10th century al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī, who wrote that if women learnt to write they would write to those they actually desired, which would only cause discord (fitna). 12th century al-Shayzari’s manual on Hisba states, “The educator must not teach a woman or a female slave how to write, because this makes a woman worse, and it is said that a woman learning to write is like a snake made more venomous by being given poison to drink”.

14th century scholar Badr al-Din Ibn Jam’a said that women should not even inhabit buildings with windows overlooking madrasas, so that males would not be distracted by their allures (Berkey 1991, 167). In the 16th century, Shāfiʿī jurist Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī concurred that women’s writing poses a risk of corruption, for “if a woman learns to write”,

In 19th century north India, elite Muslim families sometimes taught their daughters to read the Quran, but rarely to write. Why? Because many feared that a girl might send letters to a marriageable man, violate purdah and impugn her family’s izzat (honor) (Minault 1998, 24).

Debates became much more animated in the late 19th century, when colonial governments and missionaries established schools. In British India, Ahmad Reza Khan (founder of the Barelvi revivalist movement) issued a fatwa in 1898, “teaching women to write is religiously prohibited”. In Egypt, Mukhtār al-ʿAẓmī warned that primary schools would break Sharia and mean free-mixing with men. Both cited a (widely-rejected) Hadith that the Prophet forbade teaching women to write.

Reformists, by contrast, encouraged female education for national development. Breaking the deadlock, the Deobandi scholar Ashraf ʿAlī Thānawī proposed that women could be taught to write, but within Islamic constraints (Wright 2022). Mumtaz Ali (Sunni scholar) argued that some men lock their women away partly because they believe that all other men, including their close friends and relations are untrustworthy. Instead of saying ‘wife’, a man might even say ‘the person in my house’ (Minault 1998, 86-87). Aligarh girls’ school maintained strict purdah: only close relatives could visit the students; and Begum Abdullah checked incoming letters against handwritings of each pupil’s relatives (ibid, 246).

These debates reflect serious concerns about young women intermixing with men and writing love letters. Even in the 1970s, Muslim-majority countries had much larger gender gaps in secondary schooling: for every 100 boys, there were about 54 girls.

Islamic Empires and Brotherhood

Islamic empires achieved large-scale cooperation in societies with powerful loyalties to kin. Shared worship, duties of mutual assistance, a common legal framework, and threats of eternal hellfire may have encouraged men from diverse families, languages and origins to cooperate as brothers.

Female seclusion, I suggest, helped reconcile this wider brotherhood with patriarchal kinship. By sanctifying female seclusion and proscribing free-mixing, Islam reduced occasions for men’s sexual rivalry and suspicion.

Men gained allies across guilds, salons, Sufi lodges, coffeehouses, and the state - often consolidating these fraternal connections by arranging their daughters’ marriages. In such cases, husbands could gain a wife without first securing her affection. Threats of divorce or polygamy could further enforce wifely obedience.

Women’s cooking, cleaning and childbearing sustained households, while also enabling men to host guests and cultivate wider social connections. These alliances weren’t just built on women’s domestic labor, but from their exclusion.

A few years ago in Fes, my friend and I passed two men in the street; afterwards she told me that they were her neighbours. Curious, I asked why she did not greet them: “it would disrespect my brothers”.

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Here lies a crucial challenge for cooperation at scale. Societies gained strength by expanding alliances, increasing agrarian production, building ever larger armies and cities. But the more they expanded, the more that strangers intermingled, including with each other’s women. Sexual rivalries over women are especially prone to violence, because (unlike gold and land) a woman cannot be partitioned or divided. The effectiveness of any alliance therefore depended on how well men managed their competing sexual interests.

Looking back at history, we can see many examples where military alliances crumbled because - to be blunt - men could not keep it in their pants.

The Rape of Dinah

Early in the Torah and Bible, we read a tale of rape and revenge. Genesis 34 details that Dinah (daughter of Jacob) once went out to visit women. Shechem (son of chief Hamor) “saw her, took her, lay with her and disgraced her”. Shechem, in love with the maiden, asked his father to get Dinah as a wife.

“The sons of Jacob.. were distressed and very angry, because he had committed an outrage in Israel by lying with Jacob’s daughter”. Hamor asked for marriage, promising more inter-marriage, land and trade, ultimately becoming “one people”. Shechem offered any bride price they wished.

Deceitfully, Dinah’s brothers said they would permit the marriage on one condition: every man under chief Hamor must be circumcised. At the gate of their city, Hamor and Shechem persuaded their townsmen that they could make an alliance on the condition of mass circumcision. All men complied.

On the third day, “when they were in pain”, Dinah’s brothers attacked the city:

Hamor had offered land, trade, wives and any bride price. So why had the brothers refused? Perhaps one important factor was that Canaan lacked a state to enforce the rule of law, meaning that a tribe’s only protection was their reputation for retaliation. To accept a payment would be to tell every neighbour that Jacob’s women could be taken for a price.

Jacob, their father, was nevertheless angry. These testosterone-fuelled young men (Simeon and Levi) had waged battle, potentially aggravating other tribes, and jeopardising wider political security. He chastised them:

On his deathbed, Jacob still condemned Simeon and Levi: “their weapons are tools of lawlessness.. cursed be their anger, for it is fierce” (Genesis 49: 5-7).

Genesis, the first book of the Torah and Bible, thus dramatises a major challenge for trade and peaceful cooperation at scale: a young man takes a fancy to another group’s woman, her kinsmen retaliate, and a single assault triggers wider discord, which threatens state-building.

The Mahabharata

In the Mahabharata (c. 400 BCE - 400 CE), the divine sage Narada tells a tale of two brothers, Sunda and Upasunda, who lived together and ruled the same kingdom. Together, they were invincible, except if they killed each other. But… both fell in love with Tilottama (an apsara created to sow discord), and beat each other to death.

As this 10th century Khmer temple wall conveys, this story was retold across cultures, warning that a powerful martial alliance could be destroyed by sexual rivalry. Emphasizing these risks, the divine sage warns the men, “they must establish a rule”.

The Hittite Treaty of Non-Compete

For almost five centuries, the Hittites were an Anatolian superpower. In the mid-14th century BC, Hittite Great King Suppiluliuma I made a treaty with Hukkana, king of Hayasa, sealing the military alliance by giving his sister in marriage. In the treaty, the Hittite king states,

Avoiding the king’s women was a sworn condition of their military alliance.

The Rape of Lucretia, 509 BC

The rape of Lucretia is the foundational legend of the Roman Republic, where assault triggered armed revolution, overthrowing the Roman monarchy. Unfortunately, we have no contemporaneous sources, so must rely on much later accounts from Dionysius, Livy and Ovid. While the exact particulars are uncertain, what really matters is that men repeatedly told stories that sexual assaults could destroy a dynasty.

During the siege of Ardea, several princes were drinking together, debating whose wife was most virtuous. Collatinus declared that actions speak louder than words, so they should see for themselves. Galloping to Rome then Collatia, they found his wife, Lucretia, weaving wool with her maids, and deemed her the most virtuous.

Sextus Tarquinius (son of the tyrannical Etruscan king of Rome) was then “burning with passion”, and secretly returned to rape Lucretia, threatening to kill her, and portray her as adulterous. Distressed, Lucretia summoned her father and relatives, asking them to exact revenge. Plunging a knife into her heart, she committed suicide.

Her relatives then carried Lucretia’s body into a public square, mobilizing armed supporters, who condemned “royal villainy”. Incensed, they expelled the Tarquins, and the monarchy fell (Livy, History of Rome 1.57-60).

This legend captures a crucial challenge for any empire: men are prone to revolt if the ruler seizes their women. It was most famously retold by Botticelli and Shakespeare.

The Heiress of Ardea, 5th century BC

Ardea appears again in Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, under the chapter: How Women are a cause of the ruin of States.

A plebeian and a noble suitor both wanted to marry the same heiress. This dispute became so heated that the men of the city split into two armed camps: nobles with their fellow noble, plebeians with the plebeian.

The conflict then escalated into a factional war, involving neighbouring states. The plebeians sought help from the Volscians, while the nobles sought help from Rome. The Romans arrived, surrounded the Volscians, and cut off their supplies, forcing their surrender. Entering Ardea, they put the ringleaders to the sword.

Machiavelli then warns his reader,

Syracuse

“In revolutions the occasions may be trifling, but great interests are at stake”, explained Aristotle in 4th century BC. He recounted an old episode in Syracuse, where a sexual rivalry between two young men in government divided the city.

Mongol Īlkhānate, 14th century

At age 12, Abū Sa‘īd inherited the throne of the Mongol Īlkhānate, which ruled over Iran, Iraq, the Caucasus and much of Anatolia. In these early years, he heavily depended on his chief amīr, Chūpān, who appointed his own sons to the top military and administrative posts. Then they fell out - over women…

Abū Sa‘īd wanted Chupan’s daughter, Baghdad Khatun. She was already married: Chupan had given her to Ḥasan Buzurg, a powerful amīr, and would not break that alliance. When Chupan rejected his advances, Abū Sa‘īd became sad and resentful, withdrawing from the ordu (royal camp). Humiliated, the young Īlkhān vented at Chupan,

Chupan then left with an army to defend the eastern border. In his absence, two amīrs informed the Īlkhān that Chupan’s son, Dimashq Khwājah, had entered the royal harem, and pursued a secret love affair with one of the Īlkhān’s late father’s concubines. Ibn Battuta reports one of the late sultan’s widows saying “Last night he passed the night with Tugha Khatun, and he has sent to me saying “Tonight, I shall pass the night with you”.

“The affront to his honour roused Abu Sa’id to anger”, reports Ibn Battuta. Abū Sa‘īd ordered his amīrs to murder the young Chupanid. Ibn Battuta adds, “The sultan gave orders to pillage his house and to kill all those of his attendants and mamluks who put up a fight”. Dimashq was caught and executed.

Hearing the news, Chupan assembled his own amīrs and commanded them to swear an oath of allegiance to him personally, and marched against the Īlkhān. Ultimately, Chupan was killed, and Abū Sa‘īd married Baghdad Khatun. After his death in 1335, the Īlkhānate broke up among rival amīrs (Hope 2022, 189-196).

Women may not have been the sole cause of their downfall, but failure to resolve these tensions had certainly undermined lasting cooperation.

Mughal-Timurid, 16th century

Gulbadan Begum (born in 1522) was a Mughal princess, daughter of Emperor Babur. She wrote the Humayun-nama. In this chronicle, Gulbadan Begam recalls that Humayun and his fellow princes, including Kamran and Mirza Sulaiman, promised to preserve a military concord. However, Kamran then sent a love letter and handkerchief to Haram Begam, Sulaiman’s wife. Outraged, she summoned her husband and son, declaring this a breach of trust between political ‘brothers’.

Gulbadan blames this affair for the men’s subsequent antagonism: Sulaiman and his son became Kamran’s enemies, and wrote to Humayun against him (Beveridge 1902, 191-201). Attempted seduction broke the alliance.

Small-Scale Societies also Raided Women

Ethnographies from the 19th and early 20th centuries suggest that many small-scale societies raided neighbouring communities for women. In what is now Guinea-Conakry, Layes Kunda recalled that Samori’s men returned with women captives and were asked,

“Where did you get these beautiful women? … The men said, “A new war has just started, if you go and capture some people, they are yours.” This is how Samori’s war became popular. They captured people then took them to Sierra Leone to exchange them for guns”.

Men’s Sexual Jealousy was one of the Biggest Challenges for Social Co-operation

These cases span three thousand years, but repeat the same sequence: a man makes an advance on another man’s wife or daughter, her kinsmen retaliate, their followers take sides and a private grievance escalates into a wider conflict. At Shechem, it ended the promise of becoming “one people”. At Ardea and Syracuse, it split the cities; in Rome, it brought down a monarchy; and in Iran, it turned the Īlkhān against his chief amīr.

Offenders clearly took different forms: Sunda and Upasunda, Kamran and Sulaiman, as well as the young men of Syracuse were allies of equal rank. Shechem, meanwhile, was an outsider. And Tarquin was the son of a despotic tyrant, taking from his own subjects. But all created discord.

These dangers were widely recognized: the Hittite king demanded that the avoidance of palace women should be part of a military treaty, Aristotle saw a love quarrel as kindling for revolution, while Machiavelli warned rulers to prevent such disorders.

To scale up, preserve military alliances, and secure peaceful cooperation in cities, states often sought to punish extra-marital affairs, so as to create credible deterrence. Hammurabi’s laws decreed that adulterers should be bound and thrown into the river. But private acts are often difficult to spot.

I suggest that the empires that came to conquer and dominate much of our world were those that effectively regulated men’s sexual rivalries and secured the peace. Religions played a crucial role in threatening moralizing supernatural punishment, instilling fears that an omniscient being was always watching, condemning sins with hellfire.

Some religions went even further still, and radically reduced the opportunity for sexual rivalry. They proscribed women from leaving the house at all. As I shall explore in my next essay, the price of men’s scaled-up cooperation sometimes became women’s confinement.

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Robert Boyd, Peter Richerson and Joseph Henrich all emphasise cultural group selection: competition between groups can favour cultural traits that strengthen cooperation. Communities that reward loyalty, punish selfishness and suppress internal frictions may be better able to rally together and outcompete rivals, spreading the institutions that helped them succeed. External threats can thus encourage within-group cooperation.

Historians will also recall Charles Tilly’s account of how war made European states. Peter Turchin makes a broader case that war encouraged societies to coalesce, cooperate and scale up - enabling imperial expansion. Turchin further emphasises egalitarian ideologies, which constrain rulers and oblige them to govern for the common good. A wider literature on Axial religions debates their role in sustaining state expansion.

But who cooperated at scale, and thereafter gained power?

Male-male alliances were paramount to human evolution, and laid the foundations for patriarchy - argue Barbara Smuts and Richard Wrangham. Smuts suggests that by restraining within-group rivalries and competition, male groups were better able to confront external rivals, while also increasing their collective control over women. Wrangham hypothesizes that around 300,000 years ago humans became increasingly smart, savvy, communicative and coordinated. By developing more sophisticated language, men could conspire against despotic tyrants and defend themselves against rival groups. By forming fraternal alliances, men could then enforce patriarchy.

Building on these insights, I suggest that as communities produced an agricultural surplus, they became vulnerable to predation, which motivated military coalitions. These thrived by reinforcing fraternal solidarity and ultimately built patriarchy:

Today, let’s explore these mechanisms among small-scale societies.

Warriors Enforced Fraternal Solidarity

Warrior fraternities depended on cohesion, solidarity and willingness to sacrifice. Yet a man besotted with his wife might devote his time and resources to her, defend her interests, and even resist demands to prioritize his comrades. Worst-case scenario: he might abscond.

Reviewing the anthropological literature on small-scale societies, Lars Rodseth notes that concern for collective defence could motivate men to set aside their feuds and rivalries to build alliances. Rather than see bachelors as competitors, older husbands might forge fraternal solidarity. This “fraternal security” could even take precedence over conjugal bonds, leading to institutions that kept husbands and wives apart.

Bena Bena in New Guinea

Langness (1967) describes how the patrilineal Bena Bena in the New Guinea Highlands reinforced male solidarity, while suppressing conjugal intimacy:

Young brides were often forced into marriage, despite their resistance and tantrums. A bride sent to her husband’s village (or seized by capture), she might then be ignored by him, and the two might harbour considerable dislike. Even if they developed affection, this might be suppressed by male peers and elders:

He tells of a Bena Bena man who had worked for Europeans and wanted to emulate their conjugal ideal, openly expressing a desire to sleep in the same house as his wife, treating her with respect and kindness. “Within the space of a few days he was virtually a social outcast and could expect no help from other men, who went out of their way to make him miserable” (Langness 1967, 172).

Bena Bena boys were initiated into this fraternity through painful rituals. During adolescence, they underwent a “violent month-long event, during which the boys are kept in seclusion by the adult males. At various stages sharp leaves are rolled pencil thin and thrust repeatedly into the nostrils to cause bleeding. The urethra is pierced with a miniature bow and arrow until blood is drawn”.

This ceremony was, in Langness’s account, “clearly designed to impress upon the youths the importance of male solidarity and the evils of associating too much with women”:

The Sambia of New Guinea

Sambia were also characterised by endemic warfare and intense misogyny that cast women as “polluting, depleting inferiors a man should distrust and keep distant”. In one of the boys’ many initiation rituals, they were warned about three things:

Sambia elders threatened youths with severe punishments for adultery - perhaps because it would sow discord between men. If a youth committed adultery, he “will be killed by the cuckold and his age-mates, elders warn: obey us or suffer that fate. In other words, nosebleeding is here explicitly used as a powerful social sanction to constrain the youths’ sexuality” (206).

Upon marriage, men were cautioned to be ‘aloof’. While some marriages exhibited care and respect, fraternities repeatedly cautioned men against becoming too close:

Sambia youths were thus inducted into warrior fraternities and taught to keep their wives at a distance.

Why Sleep Apart from Your Wife?

Reviewing a cross-cultural sample of societies, Whiting and Whiting (1975) hypothesise that in societies with valuable resources requiring collective defence (that is, where capital investments are high), couples are more likely to sleep apart.

Separately, de Munck and Korotayev find that husbands and wives were less likely to spend leisure time together where boys were trained to be aggressive.

Why Did Some Societies Impose Painful Rituals?

Several explanations have been offered for male initiation ceremonies, such as to prevent defection, and unify men through trauma.

Sosis and colleagues (2007) analyse observations of 60 small-scale societies worldwide. They find that warfare frequency is the most significant predictor of costly, painful rituals. Warfare against culturally different groups is also associated with more permanent bodily marks, like scarification and piercings.

Sosis and colleagues suggest that marks may demonstrate group commitment and make it harder for men to switch sides - abandoning their community to join rivals. Under this interpretation, rituals could demonstrate loyalty and make it harder to escape, establishing commitment before men entrusted each other with their lives.

Harvey Whitehouse (2023) likewise recognizes that warlike societies tend to have painful initiations, leaving permanent scars. Drawing on research among the Mambila of Cameroon, he suggests that emotionally intense rituals leave lasting memories and strengthen men’s sense of brotherhood. Men who had undergone initiation reported stronger identification with the Mambila, and willingness to sacrifice for their ethnic group.

Webster (1908) detailed how initiation rituals mark a boy’s passage from association with women to the male fraternity. Where elders controlled admission and instruction, they could gain authority over younger warriors.

All hypotheses may be true: painful rituals could create a sense of fraternity, while scarification could increase the costs of defection. (US readers may have seen reports of dangerous hazing rituals in college fraternities).

Male Secret Societies

In Amazonia and Melanesia, anthropologists have observed how men in small-scale, horticultural societies built camaraderie through painful initiation rituals, secret societies, shared men’s houses and feasts.

Gregor and Tuzin argue that inconsequential secrets could have a powerful social purpose, uniting cult insiders (men), distancing them from outsiders (women and children). Fraternities could fiercely guard this secrecy, threatening women who saw ritual objects with rape or death. Among the Sambia and Yahgan, an individual could also be killed for revealing the secrets.

In the Mehinaku origin myth, the men rape the women and bar them from the men’s house, shouting:

In another Mehinaku myth, Pahikyawalu entered the men’s house and played their sacred flutes. Her husband denounced her, and the men buried her alive. Her lover joined them, fearing the men’s anger if he refused, but later return to dig her out, carried her to a stream, washed her and took her to another community. In sharing this story, the Mehinaku chief recognised the conflict between romantic love and fraternal loyalty.

I suggest that these bonds could reinforce men’s collective authority. This would help explain why even matrilocal societies were so often governed by men.

Misogyny

Misogyny is a manifestation of patriarchy. Worldwide, male dominance was sustained by an ideology that cast women as evil, dangerous, untrustworthy or polluting. The Christian Bible, Muslim Quran, Hebrew Torah, as well as Buddhist and Hindu scriptures all blame women for tempting and manipulating men. Western folklore also features nagging wives, abusive step-mothers, and wicked witches.

Ethnographic records of Papua New Guinea’s small-scale societies likewise describe women being seen as polluting to men, dangerous to men’s strength and vitality. Globally, menstruation was often regarded as polluting, with women being banished to a hut. Myths frequently portrayed powerful women as sources of danger and disorder, making male dominance seem necessary for collective safety.

Synthesising this literature, Marilyn Gerber records that New Guinea’s Eastern Highlands may be ethno-linguistically diverse, but nevertheless share many customs of gender antagonism. She adds,

In Southern Africa, the matrilineal Bemba have several proverbs on fraternal loyalty: if a woman is permitted to lead, “kuti atoba umushi” - she might destroy the village! Also, “Bepo mwanakashi: umwaume mubiyo, mwenda nankwe” - lie to a woman; your male companion, you travel with him.

This historical and geographical comparison of misogyny helps us recognize:

1. Irrespective of women’s economic contributions, kinship, political complexity or external threats, they have been repeatedly cast as deceitful, dangerous liars.

2. Fraternal organizations distrusted, denigrated and excluded women so as to consolidate their stronghold. This is a fundamental aspect of patriarchy.

3. The evolution of complex societies was inherently misogynistic. Men scaled up co-operation and outcompeted rival groups by Othering women: reinforcing “us and them” gender antagonism.

Does Peace make Conjugal Intimacy less Costly?

If external threats increased men’s dependence on warrior fraternities, might peace and security weaken some of their demands? Langness described instances where the suppression of warfare allowed more conjugal intimacy:

Among the Sambia of New Guinea, Herdt observed:

Clearly, these changes were part of wider colonial transformations, so they do not isolate the effects of peace. That might require a more complex natural experiment... Nevertheless, they are consistent with the proposed mechanism that, as the military demands sustaining male fraternities weakened, that particular constraint on conjugal intimacy also loosened, and couples could spend more time together.

That said, men’s reliance on fraternal networks can certainly persist during peacetime.

Male Segregation

Peggy Sanday’s team of graduate students coded societies in the Standard Cross Cultural Sample for “male segregation” - whether males congregated alone, occupied a separate part of the household, or sharply segregated in ceremonies. Male segregation, as you can see from the map below, existed across all world regions.

Which Societies Lacked Male Segregation??

The Semang of Malaya were an exception. In the 1920s, men did not band together collectively for warfare, father often cared for children, men and women undertook many activities together. “A married pair are bound together by genuine affection”, wrote Paul Schebesta, who spent months among the Semang (199, 280).

But it would be wrong to characterise the Semang as evidence of ancient matriarchy. Their way of life was not necessarily timeless. Schebesta repeatedly suggested that Malay population expansion and exploitation had led the Semang groups to retreat into the forest, where they lived as small, mobile and dispersed communities.

Furthermore, this was not a matriarchy in the sense of women ruling over men. There was hardly anyone to rule! Semang camps were tiny: one comprised just 15 inhabitants, while another had 54. Political organization was also weak. Schebesta added that “there are no commands emanating from the seniors” and that “the individual camps have no recognised rulers”. Within each family, however, “the father alone is a respected person” (Schebesta 1929, 279).

The Semang provide suggestive evidence that where communities are tiny, dispersed and non-militarised, there may be little cooperation at scale - including very little among men.

Curious to see if my hypothesis holds more widely, I reviewed the 23 other societies where “male segregation” is coded as absent.

Generally, they confirm my hypothesis, but with several exceptions: the Aleut, Omaha and Haidi. Reviewing the original ethnographies, they are described as warrior societies. Alice Fletcher (1896), one of the earliest female anthropologists, who spent decades with the Omaha, describes the Omaha Hae-thu-ska as a society composed of warriors, governed by male military leaders. Military victories were scrutinised and celebrated in “The Tent of War”. So the Omaha case looks like a coding anomaly, and nice reminder to always check the underlying ethnography!!

Male Co-operation, Misogyny & the Suppression of Romantic Love

Humans uniquely evolved to cooperate in enormous, complex societies. As farming communities stored a surplus, they became vulnerable to predation and so men invariably allied together for defence. Societies may have gained a military advantage over rivals if men cooperated at scale, that is if they reinforced fraternal solidarity. While we lack direct evidence about our prehistoric ancestors, ethnographic records of small-scale societies that organise collectively show how men can punish others for becoming too close to their wives.

Scaling up cooperation is often regarded as human “success”, but these military feats were invariably fraternal victories. Thus even where women produced much of the food, moved independently, or lived near their kin, they could remain subject to male collective authority. Fraternal age-mates, clans or tribes maintained collective strength by bullying any man showing too much loyalty to his wife.

This tension is best illustrated by the Sopranos - a television show about an Italian-American crime family. Corrado (a gangster) enjoys performing cunnilingus on his lover, and she brags about this to her friends. When the gossip spreads, he is mocked by his gangster brethren. Embarrassed, Corrado breaks up with his beloved, shouting “you stupid, fucking blabbermouth cunt”.

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Crop systems are one possible explanation. Many scholars have observed that matrilocality is rare among communities that depend on plough agriculture or pastoralism. After matrilineal societies adopted cattle herding, many later shifted to patriliny. Women’s contribution to subsistence is also associated with matrilocality once researchers account for polygyny, involving unrelated wives. Yet this still leaves a puzzle: why do societies with similar farming systems differ in terms of kinship?

Hardcore readers will recall my observation that matrilocal societies have tended to survive conflict with larger empires only by escaping to marginal or rugged terrain - Taiwan’s Siraya were displaced by the Qing, Meiji and Kuomintang, whereas India’s Khasi outlived the Mughals by keeping to Meghalaya’s monsoon-drenched hills. I suspected that matrilocality was historic, then got crushed or pushed aside.

Doug Jones presents a complementary hypothesis: matrilocality may be a response to violent conflict. By dispersing brothers across villages, it knits settlements into wider defensive coalitions.

Crucial caveat: this debate is highly speculative. We are trying to explain historic cultural shifts, which long predate written records - no one was scribbling “Dear Diary, today we sent out our sons to live elsewhere because of XYZ”. Caveats aside, we can at least use available data to test alternative explanations and see what stacks up.

Is matrilocality a response to conflict?

Jones extends Peter Turchin’s argument that conflict across sharp cultural divides can strengthen internal cooperation, enabling smaller communities to coalesce into larger political formations. Further, if neighboring groups are culturally similar, people may shift between competing coalitions - moving to be protected by the winners. Cultural distinctiveness may deter defection: members with a strong shared identity may be reluctant to switch sides, making alliances more durable. Thus we might anticipate that neighboring empires will be culturally antagonistic - as in Figure b.

Medieval Iberia, for example, was divided between Muslim states in the south and Christian kingdoms in the north. This frontier may have encouraged within-group cooperation, enabling communities to scale up.

By strengthening within-group cohesiveness, groups were able to scale-up and gain military dominance. These successful populations spread over larger territories, bringing their genes, languages, kinship and technology - such as farming. This process - i.e. farmers moving into foragers’ territory - was often violent. And as external threats increased, groups may have survived by strengthening their military prowess and buttressing within-group cooperation. Or else, they were at greater risk of rape, pillage and enslavement.

While external warfare could encourage societies to coalesce into larger, more centralized states, Jones suggests there was also a small-scale alternative: matrilocality.

If men are dispersed across villages through matrilocal residence, they may be more likely to rally together, unite villages for shared defense, and cooperate as a larger tribe. Thus if a man lives with his wife’s family in one settlement, while his brothers marry into two neighbouring communities, they may be inclined to rally together against shared foes. Families might adopt this arrangement to strengthen their own security.

The Mundurucú of the Brazilian Amazon

Jones gives the example of the matrilocal Mundurucú, who cooperated across 20 villages, not engaging in violence or revenge raiding within this network. Beyond this dispersed community, they nevertheless engaged in external warfare. Some reports suggest they actually switched to matrilocality for this bellicose advantage.

Anthropologist Murphy noted that men united in cooperation, especially for defense:

Thus while matrilocal marriage could connect brothers across villages, men’s houses likely strengthened solidarity among men from different communities, generating a cohesive fighting force.

The Bantu expansion and matrilineal belt

From around 3000 BC, Bantu-speaking farmers migrated out from West-Central Africa, spreading out across much of Africa south of the equator. As farming villages expanded, some earlier inhabitants fought, were driven out, co-existed or intermarried with newcomers.

Matrilocality may have been ancestral. But where groups adopted cattle herding, they may have shifted into patriliny - especially around the Great Lakes and southern Africa. However, across Africa’s matrilineal belt (where I used to live, and spoke a Bantu language fluently), communities practised hoe agriculture.

Yet as Jones notes, hoe agriculture is not a sufficient explanation for this variation in kinship; elsewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa, communities also practise hoe agriculture yet remain patrilineal and polygamous.

Jones hypothesises that matrilocal residence could have been an evolved response to warfare, enabling cooperation across villages in contested frontiers. Personally, I’m not sure that that the available evidence is conclusive on whether warfare encouraged communities to switch to matrilocality, or whether it rewarded arrangements that already existed.

By the 19th century, matrilocality certainly co-existed with expansionary warfare: Bemba chiefs gainwd territory by raiding neighbouring groups and taking captives. In 1832, Gamitto reported that ‘the Bemba.. are today powerful and feared by all for their fierceness’. In 1895, [Chief] ‘Ponde’s men captured Chitimbwa’s village, killed the chief and carried away rich spoils of cloth, salt and women’.

Matricentric Austronesians

Austronesians originally hail from Taiwan. Around 3000 BC, Austronesian speakers moved out to the Philippines, then around 2000 BC, some headed to western Indonesia. Their descendants colonized Polynesia and eastern Micronesia.

Matrilocality may have been ancestral, with some Austronesians later shifting into patrilocality. This frontier may well have been violent, with many groups practising headhunting. Again, matrilocality could have persisted as response to this conflict.

Let me add, the Austronesian institution of “men’s houses” (discussed in my essay on the Siraya) could have strengthened solidarity among men who arrived from different communities (just like 19th century English elite schools and universities).

Did violent conflict drive matrilocality?

Human communities are tremendously inventive, constantly innovating new ways to survive, expand and out-compete external threats.

Doug Jones’s hypothesis certainly makes me think that kinship is not necessarily determined by crop systems or women’s contribution to agriculture. He makes a valid point that many African societies practise hoe agriculture, but only some practise matriliny.

Jones also makes a convincing case that while warfare could increase the returns to Turchin-style state expansion and cooperation, that’s certainly not the only solution. When confronted with similar challenges, human societies have innovated culturally different solutions: some cross rivers with boats, others build bridges.

By the same token, I don’t believe we have sufficient historical data to identify the timing of matrilocality. It’s not clear from the available evidence whether warfare: (i) encouraged communities to adopt matrilocality, (ii) helped preserve established arrangements; or (iii) interacted with changes in subsistence. Matrilocality could have been deeply ancestral, and then gained advantages amid frontier warfare.

To test each hypothesis, I await delivery of my time-travelling gizmo…

External threats encouraged male military cooperation

My reading is that communities facing attacks had strong incentives to strengthen cooperation, yet they could creatively do so through many different institutional innovations. For this reason, there is no correlation between kinship and violence (recall my data visuals below).

Matrilocality could connect brothers across villages, rallying them together against shared enemies. Jones acknowledges, however, that this arrangement struggled to scale, as any particular pair of settlements might lack a personal affinity. I would add that when rivals did become militarily powerful, matrilocal societies have tended to get crushed. The Siraya, for example, got battered by larger empires, like the Qing and Meiji.

But who gained power through this cooperation?

These accounts of social cooperation omit something fundamental: militarism compounded patriarchy. As warriors banded together, outcompeted rivals, and became dominant, they gained power, which in turn forced competitors to consolidate their own reliance on warriors. Whether warriors banded together in gotras, clans, tribes or dispersed matrilocal villages, violent competition increased the returns to military cooperation.

And where communities depended on these coalitions for protection, warriors gained power and prestige - whether or not men lived with their wives families. Militarism could thus compound patriarchy even if women reside with natal kin. Matrilocality, therefore, could restrain internal feuding, while enabling outbound warfare, without necessarily giving women political authority. The matrilocal Siraya were governed by all male-councils.

Thus while other scholars, like Turchin and Jones, have argued that within-group cooperation encourages military survival and expansion, I would add that this has overwhelmingly been male.

The empires that ultimately came to dominate and carve up our world were those with the largest, most powerful armies. From Romans to the Qing, states grabbed and consolidated territory through outbound conquest, then used the state’s coercive powers to extract revenue to feed ever larger forces. Rulers then empowered religions that sanctified their righteous dominance. And, they were all patriarchal.

The brutal truth is that the modern world was created by patriarchy, and could not have emerged without it.

Related Essays

• Male Violence and the Myth of Female Freedom

• Are Queen Mothers Over-Rated?

• Female Power for Whom?

• Is Matrilocality Over-Rated?

• What’s Northeast India’s Feminist Secret?

• Did Iron Age Britain have pockets of Matriliny?

• Rituals, Raids, and Masculinity: The Cultural Evolution of Warfare

Perhaps the best example of these tensions is Taiwan, before it became Chinese.

In the early 1600s, Taiwan’s coastal plains and forested mountains were inhabited by Austronesian villages. Among the Siraya of the southwestern plains a married woman continued living with her parents, inherited their lands, and moved independently in her community. Qing travellers remarked, “The savages value woman and undervalue man” (zhongnu qingnan) (Teng 2004, 177, 173).

Given matrilocal kinship, some might infer that Austronesian Taiwan had precocious gender equality, which was bashed and broken by subsequent imperialism. But this would be too swift. Learning from an early 17th century Dutch ethnography, it seems that while villages were autonomous and led by deliberative councils, these small-scale societies were run by men, often at war, young warriors lived separately, and their readiness for battle may have even been spurred by mandatory abortions.

Confused? As was I!

Austronesian Small-Scale Societies

In 1624, the Dutch grabbed territory in Taiwan and sought to develop its agriculture, recruiting tens of thousands of Han from Fujian. They observed scattered villages, each with a few hundred inhabitants. When wars arose, villages might temporarily ally against a common enemy but otherwise these were small-scale societies, marked by cultural and ethnic heterogeneity.

In 1662, a defeated Ming warlord - Koxinga - kicked the Dutch out and settled his own soldiers. Two decades later, in 1683, this regime was overpowered by the Qing. Han settlers continued to arrive, often defying imperial prohibitions, banding together to seize, cultivate and defend land.

Matrilocality

Over the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, Chinese travellers and administrators increasingly journeyed to Taiwan and wrote on native customs. Importantly, none actually lived with indigenous communities, at most they stayed at a village for a couple of nights. These accounts often referred to people as “backward” and “savages”, detailing their proclivity for head-hunting. Proceeding cautiously, these accounts provide useful clues into indigenous gender relations.

After staying several weeks on the island as part of a naval expedition, Chen Di wrote “Record of the Eastern Savages” (1603). He emphasised young women’s sexual assertiveness, matrilocality, daughter preference and ease of divorce on the southwestern plains:

In 1697, after the Qing annexation, the sulphur prospector Yu Yonghe travelled in Taiwan, sometimes staying for a few days at indigenous villages. He likewise depicted women’s sexual agency and matrilocality.

In this Qing depiction of a wedding on the plains, the newly wed couple sit on a palanquin held up by four people. The bride sits at the front, wearing a headdress made of feathers while her stomach is on display; the groom sits at the rear. They are being led to her parents’ home.

“No Taboos against Contact between Male and Female”

Chinese travellers observed women openly bathing, and further observed that indigenous men and women would sit together “mixed”. Qing-era illustrations also show men and women working together in the fields, also socializing together in village festivals and drinking parties.

Censor Liu-shi-qi (a Manchu official who served in Taiwan from 1744-1747, and resided in the Chinese administrative area) noted,

Qing travellers often interpretted this inter-mixing as evidence of indigenous people’s backwardness and lack of propriety. One Qing official also noted that natives would stack up skulls by their huts to showcase their martial prowess (Teng 2004, 218).

Egalitarianism

For a more detailed ethnography, we turn to Reverend Candidius, a Dutch Reformed Church missionary. Upon arriving in Formosa (Taiwan) in 1627, he refused to live in the Dutch castle and instead stayed in the native village of Sinkan. He learnt their language and after living there for 16 months, he wrote an account of the inhabitants. Three centuries later, Campbell (an English Presbyterian missionary) went to Taiwan and translated the records of his Dutch predecessors.

Like the Chinese travellers, he emphasized that in the summer, indigenous people would spend several months of the year “perfectly nude, without any feeling of shame. If a man passes by and sees [women washing while nude], they do not mind it very much, if at all” (Campbell 9).

He describes the communities as remarkably egalitarian - not run by a chief but a deliberative council with two year term limits:

Communities are described as extremely egalitarian, while respecting older people:

Even spirituality was run by women. The Siraya only had priestesses, the Inibs, who led sacrifices and went into public trances. According to Candidius, there was no religious hierarchy or holy book,

Frankly, I’m surprised that Graeber and Wengrow did not use these examples in their book “The Dawn of Everything”, which is all about how pre-state societies could be remarkably egalitarian, while women moved independently.

However, any such extrapolation would omit a defining feature of social life.

Head-hunting

From early childhood, boys slept in male dormitories rather than in their mothers’ houses; at around 17, they appear to have entered age-set ranks. Together, they undertook military training, hunted deer and raided neighboring villages, gaining glory through headhunting:

When war was declared on another village, young men would move in at night, with the goal of getting heads (or ideally whole bodies):

When warriors returned with enemy heads, they were welcomed as heroes, with several days of feasting and celebration.

Prime age males therefore concentrated their attention on inter-village headhunting, hunting and martial prowess.

Marriage?

When a man was 20 or so, he sent a female relative to the prospective bride’s parents, and if they accepted his gifts, the couple would be married. Girls could marry as soon as they were considered physically ready, namely puberty.

Candidius details that the groom then gained exclusive sexual rights but not control over the wife’s labor nor right to remove her from her natal home. Adultery was taboo, but nonetheless occurred; the aggrieved husband simply seized two or three pigs from the offender (Campbell 1903, 17).

Until the age of about 50, a husband divided his time between his natal family (where his mother and sisters did the cooking) and the men’s houses (where he conducted his business and slept). The young couple lived apart

A man meeting his wife was apparently taboo, and could only be done in secret:

Mandatory Abortions

If a wife became pregnant before the age of 35, the priestesses enforced mandatory abortion:

Women told Candidius that they had aborted 15 or 16 times before being permitted a live birth. I have not heard of such practices elsewhere - if true, it would be a good example of the global heterogeneity in culture…

John Shepherd (an anthropologist) offers a plausible explanation. He suggests that mandatory abortions may have been enforced so that young men would be reckless in battle: “they radically postponed conjugal family life (but not sex) in favor of the warrior ideal and exclusive male age grade service”. On this theory, young men thus lived with their age-mates, so as to strengthen fraternal solidarity and martial prowess.

One may wonder whether delayed reproduction would really be sustainable, given women’s limited reproductive years and pre-industrial rates of infant mortality. Unfortunately, we lack any means to triangulate these claims: perhaps the women understood “age” slightly differently, and pregnancies were only aborted till women reached their early 30s?

Headhunting & Warfare

Curious to understand why societies might practise headhunting, Boris Gershman and Tinatin Mumladze analyze Pulotu, an ethnographic database of 137 Austronesian societies, mostly observed before 1935.

Headhunting was observed in 31% of the 129 societies where its presence or absence was recorded. It is strongly correlated with warfare: 50% of the societies with frequent warfare also practise headhunting.

They suggest that headhunting may provided a means by which warrior develop skills and participate in risky raids, while demonstrating their performance. Training and rewarding men for such daring feats could have been useful in societies exposed to frequent warfare.

Of course, this is only a cross-sectional analysis, and does not rule out reverse causation. For our purposes, it seems sufficient to note that some societies were extremely violent…

Is Matrilocality Over-Rated?

If one just clutched at a couple of conventional indicators - matriliny, matrilocality, women’s labor force participation and control over the distribution, women’s spiritual authority, and ease of divorce - and rammed them into a cross-sectional regression, the Siraya might top the charts in terms of gender equality. They would also score exceptionally well in terms of democracy and egalitarianism - with strict two year term limits.

But the Siraya were nevertheless impoverished and violent. Women spent all day toiling in the hot sun with pickaxes, while men lived together and embarked on hunting and raiding. Priestesses were no allies - they pummelled young women till they aborted. And given the prestige of head-hunting, villages were constantly at risk of raids. Moreover, the deliberative councils were entirely run by men.

Related Essays

• Are Queen Mothers Over-Rated?

• Female Power for Whom?

• Male Violence and the Myth of Female Freedom

References

Campbell, William. 1903. Formosa under the Dutch: Described from Contemporary Records, with Explanatory Notes and a Bibliography of the Island. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. (Includes Rev. George Candidius, “A Short Account of the Island of Formosa” (1628).)

Chen Di. 1603. “Record of the Eastern Savages” (Dongfan ji). Quoted in Teng 2004.

Gershman, Boris, and Tinatin Mumladze. 2024. "Headhunting and Warfare in Austronesia: A Phylogenetic Comparative Analysis." Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 220: 768-791.

Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. London: Allen Lane.

Shepherd, John Robert. 1995. Marriage and Mandatory Abortion among the 17th-Century Siraya. American Ethnological Society Monograph Series, No. 6. Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association.

Teng, Emma Jinhua. 2004. Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683 - 1895. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center.

Yu Yonghe. 1697. Pihai jiyou (Small Sea Travel Diaries). Quoted in Teng 2004.

To answer this question, I strongly recommend Divya Cherian’s Merchants of Virtue. Drawing on the Jodhpur Sanad Parwāna Bahīs (administrative records from the Rathor state in pre-colonial Marwar), she argues that an aspirational mercantile elite petitioned the state to enforce bans on eating meat, abortion, gambling, drinking, and female infidelity so as to differentiate themselves from lower castes. Such reputations may have strengthened their creditworthiness and paid financially.

Thus while some debate whether caste hierarchy is deeply rooted, colonial invention or imposed by Brahmins, we see that modernity itself (i.e. literacy, trade, state development, and petitioning) enabled merchants to secure state-backed exclusion of lower castes. Modernization is therefore not like a current pushing all societies towards the same liberal democratic values; it really depends on which ideologies gain power!

Marwar was largely administered by merchants

The Rathor family ruled Marwar for centuries: allying first with the Delhi Sultanate, later serving as vassals of the Mughal Empire. After Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, Mughal authority weakened, and the Rathors became autonomous, but paying heavy tribute to the ascendant Marathas.

Simultaneously, Jain and Vaishnav merchants grew prosperous from foreign trade and moneylending. They sought to convert this wealth into caste rank, thus lobbied the state to differentiate them from lower castes. By gaining reputations for piety (through strict vegetarianism, religious donations), they may have gained creditworthiness.

These wealthy and literate merchants also staffed the Marwar state: overseeing state finances, the military, district governorships, treasuries and mints. As Cherian notes, Rathor kings may have been reluctant to appoint their own rajput kinsmen (who might claim the throne).

This case study of 18th century Marwar thus provides useful insights into how caste played out in the absence of British colonialism.

Purity

King Vijai Singh presented himself as a devotee of Krishna, as part of the Vaishnav sect, which elevated non-harm and vegetarianism. From 1785, the state defined Hindus as all those who were neither leatherworkers, sweepers, vagrants or Muslims.

According to Hindu jurisprudence (smrti commentaries), the king’s overarching duty is to preserve dharma (moral order), but the specifics varied tremendously, with heterogeneity by caste, life stage, and local custom.

Invoking that ideology of varna, merchants repeatedly pressed the state to uphold dharma - such as by enforcing spatial segregation between themselves and lower castes. This was not an ‘invention’ of caste hierarchy; rather they were using their growing wealth and power within the state to over-ride historic custom and intervene to affirm their rank.

To this end, merchants repeatedly organized across diverse jatis and faiths (Jain, Vaishnav, Shaiva), allying with high caste Brahmins. For example:

In 1784, the mahajans (merchants) of Sojhat urged the crown to prohibit district officers from bringing their low caste washermen and barbers to their wedding feasts. The crown agreed, ordering its district officers to stop this custom.

Caveats

Let me add two crucial caveats. First, the available records attest more to orders than outcomes. Even where outcomes are mentioned, we see that segregation and expulsion orders were repeatedly defied, and the crown to re-issue its demands. This can be seen as a reflection of state weakness. Second, the book does not state what share of petitions came from merchants.

Pollution

Leatherwork - skinning dead carcasses and treating hides - was seen as ritually defiling. Many of these workers were trapped in debt and bonded labor to rural landlords and moneylenders. Proximity to these workers was itself polluting, mixing was undesirable.

In 1775, brahmin and merchants successfully petitioned the state to forcibly resettle the leather-working jatiyas of Merta, who had previously been their neighbors (Cherian 2023, 50).

In 1785, the mahajans of Pali asked the state to end the existing practice of all townspeople drawing water from the same tanks and stepwells; they requested segregated access. The Rathor crown ordered the local governor to ensure that “superior castes” (brahmins, mahajans, and others) filled water from one bank, and Untouchable castes from another (Cherian 2023, 56).

Untouchable

In 1785, the state referred to leatherworker castes, sweepers and Muslims as achhep. This same label was consistently used to refer to castes with whom contact was deemed spiritually polluting (Cherian 2023, 57).

In Jalor, the magistrate complained to the crown that the governor was housing untouchable and elite castes in the same prison cells. The brahmin representative of the crown affirmed that they would henceforth uphold spatial segregation in prison.

Thus while others have highlighted untouchability in early modern poetry and religious texts, Cherian shows how it was invoked by aspirational elites and enforced by the state.

Muslims were also Untouchables

Administrative documents also reveal how Muslims were often lumped with other low castes, classed as Untouchable and lowly. A number of castes sought the state to intervene to enforce spatial segregation against Muslims, while targeted Muslims usually replied that they had previously lived together peacefully for generations.

In 1788, a mahajan (merchant) in state office decreed that the custom of Hindus and Muslims drawing water from the same wells in Didwana town was to end. Henceforth, they should use separate wells (Cherian 2023, 63).

Thus while some argue that religious differences arrived with the British, these two categories were already in use in pre-colonial Marwar. Cherian further notes that the 17th century Sisodiya rajput rulers of Udaipur had previously propagated stories of resistance against Muslim aggressors, who were enemies of a Hindu dharma.

Chastity

For 18th century rajput, brahmin and mahajan groups, a woman should only have sex within one marriage. If her husband died, she should remain chaste. And that chastity was intricately linked to the honor of her male kin, husband and caste.

The state punished lagvāḍ and chāmchorī - illicit sexual relations that violated norms of caste and religion. In Didwana, it imposed a fine of 145 rupees against the family of a young man from a weaver caste who had impregnated a mahajan widow (Cherian 2023, 145).

Reading these cases, we realize that jatis were not only self-policing, but actively reported on others and petitioned the state to punish any man who trespassed against caste purity.

Bravo Divya Cherian!

In Merchants of Virtue, Cherian suggests that upwardly mobile elites sought to leverage their wealth and state power so as to gain status, petitioning the state to enforce spatial segregation and differentiate them from lower castes and Muslims.

This is a good example of how economic and state development is always mediated by culture. Since jatis relied on fellow members for credit, commerce and marriage, and reputations for piety may have strengthened their creditworthiness, it may have paid to lobby for the mercantile group, jockeying for status within the caste hierarchy.

While British colonialism may have exacerbated aspects of the caste system (such as by allying with dominant groups, appointing Brahmin pandits to codify diverse smrti, or by categorizing groups in the census), it is notable the pre-colonial Rathor state was upholding caste hierarchy and religious divisions.

Going forwards, it would be valuable to learn if similar dynamics played out elsewhere: were upwardly mobile jatis key enforcers of caste hierarchy, and had spatial segregation been weaker under the Mughals?

Qasim Amin was a Muslim Egyptian judge, trained in law at Montpellier, who later co-founded Cairo University. His two books - The Liberation of Women (1899) and the New Woman (1900) - argue that Islam upheld women’s equal rights, and he strongly opposed female seclusion as this reinforced misogyny and ignorance.

Malak Hifni Nasif was also a reformer, but opposed unveiling. Her essays, published in 1910, describe city women’s seclusion, ignorance, and syncretism, as well as men’s tyranny and street harassment. Meanwhile, Muhammad Tal'at Harb, who would become a pioneering national industrialist, lambasted the sexes’ “free-mixing”.

Tunisia saw parallel debates. Ibn Abi ‘l-Diyaf, private secretary to Ahmad Bey, wrote a treatise on the position of women in Muslim society, championing patriarchy. Whereas Abdelaziz Thâalbi co-authored a book in 1904 on the liberal spirit of the Quran, while jailed for blasphemy. Later in 1930, Tahar Haddad pressed for women’s freedoms, but leading sheikhs declared him a heretic, his book was outlawed and he died in isolation.

Even the reformists upheld the Quran as arbiter of women’s rights and freedoms, none denied its veracity or applicability. They merely differed over interpretation. Qasim Amin leaned on ‘aql (reason): seclusion thwarts learning and progress. Tal’at Harb’s rebuttal relied on naql and ijma - the Quran, Hadith, and consensus of esteemed theologians. Thâalbi and Haddad argued that scripture never commanded veiling or seclusion. Nasif conceded that scripture does command veiling, yet insisted that customs of total seclusion were harmful.

Over the 20th century, these same questions dominated moral debates across Arab lands. Which ideal would ultimately prevail: economic progress or religious orthodoxy?

European Progress

Amin argues that as the West came to shed delusion, suspicion and superstition, it ultimately became more scientific, liberal and gender equal.

While European men previously regarded women as mentally inferior, temptresses and agents of the Devil, they had since lifted this “veil of ignorance” and come to recognize that women’s capacities can be developed through education. Thus women came to participate in social and scientific life as a “refined individual”. Noting that women had already achieved suffrage and become judges in Wyoming, he anticipated wider reform across the United States (Amin 1900, 115-125).

Amin, who studied in France for four years, adds that if an Eastern man travels to Europe or America, he will “discover that the division between the sexes, which he accepts as natural, is almost nonexistent. He will observe women working at men’s jobs” (1900, 147).

Tahar Haddad, writing in 1930, likewise remarked about Europe’s progress towards gender equality - emphasising female education and representatives in public office.

In Egypt too, Change was Afoot

Amin observed that while past generations of Egyptians observed strict seclusion, elite women were increasingly stepping out, such as to go to the park.

Why Seclude Women?

Amin states that men seclude their womenfolk in order to preserve their purity and prevent immorality. They “shove their wives behind bolted doors, thinking that this will alleviate their concerns and suspicions”. Amin does not question the imperative of chastity, but rather argues that strict restrictions reflect men’s distrust and misogyny:

In Tunisia too, Haddad argues that female seclusion is enforced by men to secure female chastity:

Harassment

Malak Hifni Nasif highlights another driver of female seclusion: Egyptian men are so lecherous, an unveiled woman would be pelted with harassment, creating a sea of moral corruption:

Muhammad Tal’at Harb similarly details rampant street harassment, with men shouting obscenities, buying indecent pictures and flaunting them at veiled women, then bursting out in laughter. Apparently, some even rode their bicycles, trying to degrade women in carriages and cause their loss of honor. “And to Egypt’s ill fortune, [these young men] are not few!” (1899, 41).

Where men harass with impunity, women may try to guard themselves by veiling:

If I may lodge one criticism of Amin it is that he over-states the extent to which female seclusion persists through force. In “the New Woman”, he emphasizes how men oppress women, forbid them from leaving the house, and treat them as “prisoners” and “slaves”.

This downplays the importance of ideological persuasion, women’s own belief in eternal rewards, and also their fears of social ostracism. Even if a woman is not forcibly restricted, she may nevertheless choose to remain secluded in the belief that this will raise her marriage prospects and respectability (or else be hounded as a harlot), and further secure passage to paradise.

Seclusion reinforces Patriarchy

By keeping women in seclusion, Amin suggests that men can both monopolize opportunities in the public sphere and also ensure that women will be motivated to pleasure and obey:

Seclusion can be considered as anti-competitive in two ways. First, it ensures that men monopolize all opportunities in the public sphere and routes to prestige; second, it eliminates competition over a wife’s affection. By extracting these benefits, men can thus capture what I call “patriarchal rents”.

Over in Tunisia, Abdelaziz Thâalbi likewise pushed for women to go out into the world:

Women’s Ignorance

Amin notes that even though the Quran gave women rights of property ownership, because men keep their wives in seclusion, this keeps women ignorant. Lacking direct experience of the world, she relies on hearsay and cannot adjudicate fact from fiction.

Some may hand over the administration of their assets to a relative or stranger, creating risks of exploitation:

Talent is then lost. A 15 year old boy might even be more intelligent and experienced than his mother (Amin 1900, 132).

Even if a girl were to go to school, seclusion means that she cannot experiment or gains first-hand knowledge of different people (Amin 1900, 183).

Nasif wholeheartedly concurs, adding that foreigners tell women about their own pyramids:

In Tunisia, Thâalbi (1904: 21) likewise argued that prohibitions on women’s intermixing mean that when she receives an inheritance or owns property, she cannot administer it herself. Ignorant of the external world, she must rely on an agent, “who is always unfaithful and appropriates the fortunes entrusted to his honesty”.

Haddad concurs that “the women are lost in a world that is filled with darkness, pain and incomprehensible events” (1930, 145). Seclusion further enables exploitation: “surrender[ing] their rights to male guardians” (ibid, 150). She struggles to gain confidence and capacities:

This isolation also makes women “ignorant”. And asks whether any society can really achieve glory if “half of society is living in darkness” (Haddad 1930, 150).

Ignorance and Syncretism

Since Egypt had been under religious authoritarianism for centuries, one might assume strong support for sharia. Today, social scientists often refer to religious orthodoxy as ‘tradition’, as if ordinary people have always understood “correct practice”. Both views are incorrect.

Amin notes that when women were kept at home and did not receive any formal religious education, they were actually deeply syncretic. Nasif likewise describes ‘ignorant’ women, relying on “magic, spirit possession and amulets”. She suggests that zar (spirit possession) is especially common among brides married as children - a weapon of the weak (1910, 19, 57).

Salafists would consider such syncretism as “shirk”. But it was nonetheless widespread, even in the Islamic heartland. In 1900, before mass schooling, the average Egyptian child received very little religious education:

Misogyny

In 1792, Wollstonecraft damned men for denying women education then condemning their frivolity and justifying their exclusion. Echoing this same critique, Amin argued that keeping women in seclusion reinforced Egyptian men’s misogyny:

As Amin himself highlights, much Arab writing, poetry and folklore was often extremely misogynistic (1900, 152). Celebrated philosophers like Rumi, Tusi and Davani all derided women as untrustworthy, and reinforcing proper allegiances to men.

Class variation

The French consul-general in Tunis, Léon Roches (fluent in Arabic), asked Ibn Abi ‘l-Diyaf:

Ibn Abi ‘l-Diyaf replied that it was only disadvantaged communities that used women for heavy tasks. This is a useful acknowledgement that even if peasant women were not so severely secluded, they were nonetheless low status.

The Financial Cost of Female Seclusion

Women’s absence from the workforce also has important economic implications, since it means that multiple dependents rely on a few earners:

Arranged Marriages

Patriarchy and female seclusion also meant that women did not choose their own husbands, let alone meet before marriage. Nasif suggests that such arrangements create incompatibility and “discord between the spouses”.

If the man is displeased, he may be “light and loose” - pursuing divorce or multiple wives (Nasif 1910, 25). To ameliorate these risks, she proposed that couples should not marry until they have met in person, in the presence of a mahram (relative).

Deference to Husbands

Even as elite Egyptian men returned from Europe, trumpeting ideas of reform, Nasif notes that they did not necessarily treat their wives with respect:

Nasif states that while bedouins, peasants and European spouses address each other by their first name and fairly share food, Egyptian city marriages are much more hierarchical, with some even addressing their husbands as “Your Honour”, “Your Excellency” [hadritak, sa’adtak]: “how many a woman accepts her husband’s insult in meek submission”. Economic dependency and fear of divorce, she argues, compel wives to submit (1910, 61-62).

Religious Backlash

Arab reformists’ capacity for ideological persuasion depended on the countervailing power of respected religious authorities.

Where the ulama commanded popular or state-backed authority, reformists were punished. Ali Abdel Raziq questioned the religious justification of the caliphate and Al-Azhar stripped him of his credentials. Thâalbi, returned from Cairo with reformist ideas, but was jailed for “insulting religion” - accused of calling the Quran outdated, labelling one of the Prophet’s companions despotic, and cursing Sufi figures. A sharia tribunal sentenced him to death, French authorities intervened and re-routed him to a civil court which convicted him of offending public order. Haddad criticized polygamy, unequal divorce rights, and unequal inheritance, then was ostracized and insulted. Several fatwas declared him a heretic, one deemed him an apostate.

By 1914, 70% of Muslims were under Christian rule. Even though Egypt’s colonizers did not revise sharia rulings on marriage, divorce, polygamy or inheritance, women’s bodies became a symbolic battleground between the West and Islam. This in turn triggered defensive backlash.

Tal'at Harb denounced men and women’s intermixing as a foreign imposition:

Where the state subordinated the ulama, reform could still be imposed from above - Kemalist Turkey, Bourguiba’s Tunisia. But leaders’ capacity to spearhead secular modernization was still contingent on their capacity to maintain popular legitimacy, and, as loyal readers know, that soon came under attack.

Translation Notes

Malak Hifni Nasif, Muhammad Tal’at Harb and Thâalbi’s texts are not available in English translations, so I gave the Arab and French originals to Claude for translation, requesting page by page. I double checked these translations with other reports in the secondary literature. Correctives are welcome.

I also sourced translations of Ali Abdel Razek’s “Islam and the Foundations of Political Power”, as well as al-Tahir al-Haddad’s “Imra ‘tuna fi ‘l-sharia wa ‘l-mujtama”.

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So here’s our line-up:

• Evliya Çelebi, Ottoman Turkish explorer, born in 1611.

• Aḥmad ibn al-Mahdī al-Ghazzāl, Moroccan ambassador to Spain in 1766.

• Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, Iranian-Indian tax collector, toured Europe in 1799.

• Rifa’a Rafi’ al-Tahtawi, young Egyptian cleric, sent to Paris from 1826 to 31.

• Al-Saffar, a Moroccan jurist, accompanied an embassy to France in 1845-46.

• Bin Chun and Zeng Jize, Chinese diplomats to Europe in 1866 and 1878.

• Li Gui, a Chinese official who toured the US in 1876.

• Nasir al-Din Shah Qajar, the Shah of Iran, toured Europe in 1873, 1878 and 1889.

• Zeyneb Hanoum, Ottoman elite of French and Circassian descent, left in 1906.

Europe was Patriarchal

Mirza Abu Taleb Khan provides a superb synopsis of English patriarchy in 1800.

English women walked with “apparent liberty” and were treated with “politeness”, but were still subject to ‘salutary restraints’. Principally, “no woman of respectability ever walks out (in London), unless attended by her husband, a relation, or a confidential servant”. These safeguards prevented her from “acting improperly” (173).

English marriage law, as Mirza understood it, gave husbands sweeping powers:

Here, I agree with Mirza Abu Taleb Khan: both societies were patriarchal, but differed in one crucial respect:

China Upside-Down

In the late 19th century, Chinese diplomats visited Europe and America. In reporting on this strange and distant realm, they often stressed the weirdness of Western women. Some viewed it positively, others played on male sexual fantasies, while others recoiled in absolute horror.

Bin Chun, a diplomat, relished gender mixing at banquet - likening the surreal experience of London’s Grand Ball to the underwater palace of the Dragon King.

Li Gui reported of America,

Others, however, viewed Western egalitarianism with disdain, as if the cosmic order was out of whack. Everything was upside-down, perhaps due to England being on the opposite side of the world. Liu Xihong wrote in his private diary,

Zeng Jize absolutely refused and wrote a letter to the French diplomat with a very important request:

Ladies First!

Ottomans were shocked by public deference to women and repeatedly reported on this with bemusement. In 1665, Evliya Çelebi joined the Ottoman peace embassy to Vienna and detailed,

In 1721, Mehmed Efendi, the Ottoman ambassador to Paris, noted that the city seemed more crowded than Constantinople because women came out onto the streets, where they were treated with respect:

In the 19th century, al-Tahtawi likewise noted that women received “greater regard”:

He thought this absurd. Parisian men were too deferential to unrelated women, even those who were plain:

Why was al-Tahtawi so disgruntled?

In honour cultures, a man cloisters his own women and owes little to anyone else’s. But in Europe, courtesy crossed the boundary of kin: unrelated women were owed respect. This had deep roots: in the absence of clans, Europeans cooperated with non-kin in guilds and markets. Unmarried women routinely left home to work as servants in strangers’ households. Commerce then redoubled the incentive to please strangers. By the 18th century, English essayists explicitly championed mixed-gender conversation as a mark of good manners.

Mixed Gender Socialising

Near Vienna, Evliya Çelebi observed, “the men and women do not flee from one another”:

In 1766, al-Ghazzāl crossed the border to the Spanish port of Ceuta, observing:

In France, Al-Saffar was bewildered. Staying on the Champs-Élysées in 1845, he was delighted by the sight of women - running shops, operating machinery (157, 203). Meeting King Louis Philippe and his family, he noted that

Al-Tahtawi, an imam who travelled to France in 1826-31, noted French men’s lack of jealousy and women’s far greater freedom of movement:

He also described French balls - open to both sexes, with guests greeted by the mistress of the house. With some disapproval, he remarked that a woman could dance with multiple men. A man’s capacity to talk to women was even seen as a mark of refinement!

The Shah of Iran’s Displeasure

Nasir al-Din Shah toured Europe three times between 1873 and 1889 and repeatedly wrote diary entries about women’s visibility - at theatres, dinner tables, and even on his own arm at court banquets. In these entries, he sometimes expresses disgust and repulsion. According to a British diplomat, the Shah even pointed a finger at the Tsar’s Grande Maîtresse’s cleavage, saying:

Gender Segregation in Parliament

When the Palace of Westminster was built after a fire in 1834, a Ladies’ Gallery was installed - but with a poor view and grille panels to obscure women from the debating chamber. Suffragist Millicent Fawcett described it as a “grand place for getting headaches”.

Zeyneb Hanoum, who fled Istanbul with her sister in 1906, described the Ladies’ Gallery as another form of harem:

Europe’s Latent Assets

Together, these accounts capture what made pre-20th century European gender relations distinctive, yet still patriarchal. Mirza noted husbands’ legal authority, while Zeyneb saw women watch parliament through a grille.

Yet Europe had several latent assets.

• Weak ideals of female seclusion. Chinese, Arab, Turkish, Indian and Persian travelers were repeatedly startled by men’s lack of sexual jealousy, alongside women’s public presence at shops, parks and banquets.

• Courtesy to strangers. Unrelated women were owed respect, a habit forged over centuries of weak kinship and commerce.

• Economic growth - the industrial revolution was creating jobs, ramping up demand for workers and generating revenue for public goods.

• Liberal democracy, which could be leveraged to include women.

• State capacity, to constrain and punish male violence.

Europe was becoming richer, stronger, and more democratic. Over the 20th century, feminists would seize the levers of state power and media persuasion to secure greater gender equality.

Watch out for my next essay on how Japanese, Korean, Turkish and Indian female travelers got inspired and pioneered reforms worldwide!!

Related Essays:

• What did Indian Women make of Victorian England?

During 8 years in England, Krishnabhabini amassed a litany of complaints - condemning English individualism, greedy materialism, haughty pride, anti-social reserve, terrible weather, lack of decent fish, and women’s dearth of feminine grace. Horrified, she reports that the poor working-class got raucously drunk, collapsing in the street.

But here is the puzzle. In the 1880s, India and England were both patriarchal, hierarchical, and religious. Yet, one became far more gender equal. Can their first-hand observations provide clues?

Yes! Although Victorian England was extremely patriarchal, these accounts reveal that women already enjoyed freedoms that could be tugged and stretched: they moved independently through public spaces, chose their own husbands, and could even escape terrible marriages. Together, these accounts provide unusually revealing insights into The Great Gender Divergence, and thoroughly recommend them both:

• “Pictures of England” by Janakummah Ragaviah, 1876. (translated)

• “A Bengali Lady in England” by Krishnabhabini Das, 1885. (translated)

As handy visuals, I have added English paintings of the scenes they encountered. Enjoy!

Female Seclusion in India

“My female readers! I was also cloistered in a house like you”, begins Krishnabhabini. Married at nine, she was home-schooled by her in-laws, then later accompanied her husband to England, where they lived for 8 years. Left behind, their daughter was married off at age 10.

In poetry, Krishnabhabini describes her Bengali sisters as “blind in cages” (Das 1885, 11, 167).

She further describes Bengali women as often cloistered, neglected and fearful - “scared of the babu” (Das 1885, 99).

Arriving in Bombay, Krishnabhabini notes that “Parsi women are not confined in cages like us. I have seen them always moving around in the streets, stations, and shops. They are very beautiful and they dress in very elegant clothes” (Das 1885, 8).

The 1911 Census of India provides a rough proxy for female work - that is, if she followed an occupation that added to family income, including regular unpaid assistance in a household enterprise. Visualising that data, you can see it was especially low in Bengal, but higher in Madras and Bombay.

Courtship and Romantic Love

In England, Krishnabhabini was struck that marriage was not enforced by parents, but that young men and women pursued their own partners, quite independently:

Courtship involves love letters, meetings, mutual attraction, and emotional connection:

Emotional Companionship in Marriage

“Married life is totally different here from that in our country”, writes Krishnabhabini. She was struck that “[b]oth husband and wife stay together, eat, go out, study, pray, do family chores, and even discuss different things about the world together”.

Writing to the Madras Athenaeum and Daily News, Janakummah likewise emphasised the English people’s romantic love:

Divorce

In 1857, England created a civil divorce court, making this more accessible. This was still difficult, especially for wives, who had to prove adultery together with cruelty, desertion or some other offence. Krishnabhabini was nevertheless struck by the possibility of exit:

Whereas in India’s caste systems, jatis are cemented by endogamous marriage and divorce is widely discouraged. She observes,

Female education

For centuries, European universities had trained only men, preserving their monopoly of the professions and esteem as knowledgeable authorities. But in 1878, the University of London (finally) admitted women to full degrees. Krishnabhabini was amazed!

In 1880s India, female education could trigger ostracism:

Working women

Upper caste Hindus maintained their jati networks by socialising girls to marry, please their in-laws and stay put. English women, by contrast, could achieve status and accolades by their own skills and independent contributions, such as in the case of Miss Florence Nightingale:

Krishnabhabini suggests that by running shops, working as clerks, teachers, novelists, and journalists, English women were “leading the country to prosperity” (Das 1885, 75-76).

At Southampton, Janakummah was likewise struck that women issued tickets and conducted much of the station’s official business. At her hotel, almost all the servants were female (Ragaviah 1876, 44–45).

Relaxation and leisure

Venturing to Hyde Park, Krishnabhabini observed women rowing boats with men and exercising on horses:

Such intermingling extended to people’s homes:

In London, Janakummah marveled at the brilliant gas lights and “the countless people of both sexes walking up and down”. Visiting Westminster Abbey, she very much enjoyed “the Psalms sung by both sexes, which was thrilling to the heart, and a chillness crept over my whole frame” (Ragaviah 1876, 45, 75).

Restraining Englishmen

Krishnabhabini found Englishmen to be most peculiar: “I had never seen such calm-natured men before” (Das 1885, 48). Bystanders, she observed, would intervene when a man mistreated a woman.

Money & Ideals of Social Mobility

“I have read in many books that hundreds of English people who had been born in very low and poor families have become rich and famous just through their hard work”, reports Krishnabhabini. This may exaggerate actual mobility, but it reveals a national story of advancement through effort - which is at odds with a caste hierarchy.

She adds, “Money is the main worshipped god of the Englishman” (Das 1885, 48)

This is central to what I call “the honour-income trade-off”. Men may gain honour by guarding women’s chastity and modesty, but they also gain status through wealth. If income is a stronger source of prestige, they may be more supportive of wives and daughters going out to earn.

Encouraging Independent Thought

In comparison with Bengal, Krishnabhabini thought that English parents raised their sons and daughters as equals, encouraging free-mixing, exploration and open dialogue. By urging girls to converse men, without presuming them to be high status, Krishnabhabini suggests that the English encourage more independent reflection:

Apparently, children were not scared of parents but raised for independence (Das 1885, 100).

“By travelling in different countries, they get rid of superstitions, get to see and know new things and, in the process, increase their knowledge. The mind is enlarged and living among new people, feelings of the heart are expanded… Not only men but women also travel” (Das 1885, 127, 57).

This liberal tolerance is contrasted with India’s “superstition and illiteracy”. One of her relatives did not do the “Shashti-puja” ritual, and then no one went to their house for another ceremony. “Just imagine how, about two thousand people became angry and criticised him for this little deviation!” (Das 1885, 34.

The Great Gender Divergence

Armed with only these two books, I wager that one could have rightly predicted that England would make far greater progress towards gender equality over the subsequent century.

English society was industrialising, animated by ideals of material and scientific progress. Since women were not cloistered, they increasingly seized opportunities in education, work, arts, and social reform. They could also choose their own husbands, rejecting men who seemed rude, unkind or aggressive. Over the next century, activists would further mobilise for an expansion of these liberal freedoms.

Upper caste Hindus, by contrast, secured their jati networks by raising their daughters to marry within the community, stay put, please their in-laws and endure abuse. Since female seclusion was prestigious, women barely ventured out, unless for bare-bones survival. Returning home to Bengal, Krishnabhabini supported women’s education and published in several newspapers. After her husband’s death she retreated to become a dutiful widow and was praised in local newspapers. Over in Madras, Janakummah asked,

Her question remains prescient. Only 25% of urban Indian women work, while only 11% of Indian women who have been beaten by their husbands have sought help.

Both patterns are sustained by the caste system and will likely unravel when caste weakens. That could occur through rapid economic growth or migration overseas.

In my own qualitative research with the Indian diaspora across the US, Europe, Africa and Southeast Asia, I find that migration tends to weaken caste policing. Abroad, Indians can seize a plethora of economic opportunities and are thus far less dependent on their jatis, so threats of ostracism lose their teeth.

As parental supervision wanes, young men and women can mix and mingle, befriending others who do not chastise such fraternisation. Free from censure, they are far more able to explore and pursue romantic relationships as well as economic opportunities. And that’s precisely what we see in Britain today, Indian Hindu and Sikh female employment converges with natives!

Once caste punishment wanes, Hindu and Sikh families cheer their daughters’ economic success.

Methodological Notes for My Graphs

Historical estimates are drawn from the 1911 Census of India, which reports female workers per 1,000 women (Tables I and XV) and the religious composition of each geographic unit (Table VI). The census recorded a woman as a “worker” if she followed an occupation that added to family income, including regular unpaid assistance in a household enterprise. Women who primarily managed the house, or gave only occasional help, were recorded as “dependants”. These historical estimates aggregate across all ages, and do not provide a rural-urban split.

Crucially, the 1911 census did not cross-tabulate sex and religion jointly, so no female work rate by religion exists for that year. I therefore examine the relationship between aggregate female employment and the religious composition of each area. The North-West Frontier agencies are excluded because their occupation tables cover under 1 per cent of the enumerated population.

Present-day estimates are taken from India’s Periodic Labour Force Survey (July 2023 - June 2024), Pakistan’s 2024-25 Labour Force Survey microdata, Bangladesh’s published 2023 labour force report, and custom tabulations of ethnicity by religion from the 2021 Census for England. Rates are restricted to women aged 16-64 in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. I use urban labour force participation since this is where women mix with unrelated men, so low figures will reflect strong ideals of seclusion. The England figures are reported for ages 15-64.

Historical regions are matched to present-day states directly rather than by area weighting. Five regions - undivided Bengal, Kashmir, Assam including Sylhet, and Bombay including Sind - span the present international borders of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

Last week, I suggested that the world of the Homeric epics was really about men seeking glory and heroism through violence. Football is an offshoot of that same martial past. Rival coalitions of young, testosterone-fuelled, muscular men jostle for status and symbolically battle for glory. Despite all the rules intended to discipline behavior, sometimes blood rises, opportunity strikes and foes get maimed. In male competition, there is always a danger that violence will break out.

In the most recent World Cup final, Argentina committed 25 fouls and collected six yellow cards and one red card - for grabbing, wrestling, elbowing, and a lunge that sent a defender cartwheeling into the air, smacking down with a thud. Spain committed 21 fouls. After the final whistle, Argentina’s players then threw some punches, punished with a further red card.

Every single society faces this same risk of male coalitional violence; progress towards gender equality depends on building institutions that punish thuggery and cronyism.

Hacking and Thwacking

Older fans may rightly insist that football was once even more violent. Until 1863, it was perfectly permissible to kick one’s opponents in the shins - aka ‘hacking’.

The Battle of Santiago - Chile vs. Italy in 1962 - was dubbed “the ugliest, most vicious and disgraceful in soccer history”, deserving a “horror certificate”. Refereeing was highly discretionary and unpredictable: some even tolerated tackles from behind as ‘manly’. The opening days of that tournament saw three broken legs, a fractured ankle and some cracked ribs. The Express called out FIFA for its failure to intervene, “With no action against the few out-and-out villains the ugly situation has been encouraged to spread.” Watching on their small screens, viewers were outraged.

Top talent was also frustrated. In 1966, Pelé wowed the crowds with lightning moves, chipping passes, but was tackled aggressively and severely injured. Pelé declared he would never again play in a World Cup. “Football stopped being an art, stopped drawing the crowds by its skills, instead it became an actual war”.

In 1970, the World Cup formalized Ken Aston’s system of yellow and red cards - stepping up deterrence. Over the years, punishments for violence have been progressively institutionalized, with mandatory red cards for ‘professional fouls’ (1990), outlawing tackling from behind (1998).

Some players still thwacked their opponents, and Fifa imposed punishment. The ‘Battle of Nuremberg’ (the 2006 World Cup) saw four red cards and 16 yellow cards. Visibly enforcing the rules, providing credible threats, appeared to provide a powerful deterrent - as you can see in the graph below.

Muscling Ahead

None of this is new. The grand arc of human history is fundamentally shaped by violence between men. Coalitions of violent men fought against other coalitions of violent men. When one coalition scaled up, they called themselves a state. But even then, it’s just a big coalition of violent men, invariably fighting with other big coalitions of violent men.

When ambitious kings set their sights on Troy or empires in the New World, they also played dirty. Victory came to the leaders most successful in organising coalitions of armed men. Conquerors then reveled in military might, commissioned statues, paintings and epic poems about their triumphs, and rejoiced in their rivals’ humiliation. Outsiders’ welfare counted for little.

“I sacked the town and killed the men. We took their wives and shared their riches equally among us” - boasts Odysseus. Throughout history, aggression has yielded high returns. By cultivating reputations for violence, such men intimidated their opponents, so that others wouldn’t dare. Violence persisted wherever the rule of law was weak. As Adam Smith observed, where courts offered no redress, gentlemen avenged conflicts in duels.

Today this same pattern persists in many parts of the world. As a gay black man from a Brazilian favela shared, “I had to be strong to show I was stronger. I wasn’t violent, but I had to be violent… The man needs to show their strength, their power, they’re reckless, otherwise they’ll treat him as weaker. That’s how things work, you need to learn how to use violence… Everything is about honour”.

In such dangerous and insecure environments, men and women may quite rationally rally behind whoever commands the most muscle, seeking protection from rivals. This breeds an escalating cycle of violence as guys smash their opponents and boys learn to solve problems with their fists. When I visited a school in a favela, the first thing I heard was one teen say to another in Portuguese: “I’m going to punch you in the face”.

Such environments are not conducive to gender equality. Wherever there is a premium for brutality, men tend to gang together, consolidate alliances, and intimidate foes. Societies that support army rule also believe that men are better political leaders.

Pacification

Claudia Goldin won the Nobel for her path-breaking work on gender equality, showing the importance of women controlling their fertility, pursuing higher education, and then capitalising on growing demand for skilled jobs. This is entirely valid.

But if we take a step back to compare internationally, we realize that societies that have made the greatest progress towards gender equality are no longer organised to wage war and have quelled internal violence.

Beyond Military Pathways to Prestige

Traditional agrarian societies were organized to expand the ruler’s territory at the expense of other rulers, the ruling class were thus warriors. Some societies (such as China, early Russia or any society exposed to the steppe) were organized around defending against constant external threats. In either case, the ruling class is primarily militaristic, not commercially orientated.

Since power is gained by whichever group is most effective in waging war and consolidating military dominance, warriors exercise competitive advantage and consolidate their patriarchal dominance. War-making structured entire societies. Feudalism was permanent mobilization in the sense that the nobility retained their own private armies which the king could call upon. In Roman times, there was a strong connection between land holding and military rolls. Aztec “houses of youth” were intended to turn boys into killers; German roads were designed to move millions of troops.

As militarism loses its stranglehold over economic and political life, men can gain status through alternative pursuits. During the Enlightenment, for example, men established clubs and societies that celebrated scientific innovations and commercial prowess. Savant-fabricants (knowers and tinkerers) eagerly networked, exchanged useful knowledge, and collaborated to get ahead. Instead of sneering at trade, shopkeepers could now gain status.

Certainly, some states were militaristic, commercial, scientific and literary. British imperialism coincided with a vast range of innovations, discoveries, novels and social reforms. Jane Austen penned her classics while Beatrice Webb later pushed for women’s and workers’ rights. Crucially, society was not entirely dedicated to waging war; there were alternative routes to power and prestige. Status was not monopolized by brutes; mild-mannered nerds could also advance!

This is the thesis of ‘doux commerce’ - usually applied to trade, but also applicable to peaceful men and women gaining prestige!

Punishing Thuggery

Crucially also, states must pacify their own societies - ending common thuggery and removing violent coercion from everyday affairs, like commerce.

State penetration were always extremely weak in herding societies. Nomads on horseback could raid nearby villages, plunder the loot, then escape into the steppe, evading taxation and regulation. Without effective rule of law, men’s only source of protection lay in their own collective strength and reputations for violent revenge. These herding societies tended to glorify aggression.

So too in the 20th century, wherever state enforcement is weak or breaks down, violent entrepreneurs may try to extort rents through intimidation and coercion - threatening others with dead fish or a severed horse’s head. When the USSR collapsed in the early 1990s, streets became over-run by organized criminal gangs who sold protection, guarded shipments, and butchered rivals. Russian women worked at high rates, but skills still earned far less than bratva - criminal brotherhood.

And where women fear attacks (as in some parts of Delhi), they may even back out, choosing lower-ranked colleges to avoid dangerous neighborhoods.

Rules of the Game!

“Institutions”, explained Douglas North, “are the rules of the game in a society or, more formally, are the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction”. This is extremely apt of football and also highly applicable to gender.

While football may be the (rare) topic that Daron has not (yet) published on, it is in fact a fantastic example of the rise of impartial institutions - with striking parallels for progress towards gender equality.

Coaxing the Ref

Favouritism has been a major problem in football. Luis Garicano and colleagues found that referees repeatedly favor home teams, ceding to pressure. When the stadiums emptied (due to Covid19) that bias shrank and home teams were treated less favourably!

After Italian club executives were caught arranging favourable referees, leagues moved to randomise appointments and remove discretion with surveillance technology - permitting video assisted referees (VAR) in 2018. Recognising potential for bias, FIFA also cracked down on racism.

This constant tendency for in-group favouritism and personalistic relations calls to mind one of the big themes of political science and state-formation, the transition from patrimonial rule to impersonal rules-based governance…

Smashing the Patriarchy with the Rule of Law

Just as football referees bent to the home crowd, company managers and state officials can rig the game for male insiders. In South Korea and China, the police and courts have repeatedly dismissed violence against women. In Japan, companies escaped laws against discrimination by simply outsourcing women’s work. With scant activism and toothless sanctions, Japan registers one of the largest gender pay gaps in the OECD.

North America and Western Europe’s progress towards gender equality is only possible due to effective rule of law and activism to prevent fraternal cronyism. During the counter-cultural revolution, US activists tackled sex discrimination. They mobilized for equal pay and workplace equality (1963-64), and repeated court cases made companies ensure compliance. Over the 1980s, the Supreme Court repeatedly ruled that all-male civic and business clubs could be compelled to admit women. Old boys’ clubs came under attack - for monopolising access to spaces where “business deals are often made”, and thereby creating an uneven playing field. Thanks to feminist organising and litigation, courts increasingly punished fraternal favouritism.

In 1976, a Tribunal of Crimes Against Women met in Brussels. This was a people’s tribunal - much inspired by Bertrand Russell’s people’s tribunal on crimes in Vietnam. Over 2000 women from 40 countries came to share tales of abuse and demand public safety. London’s Fleet Street was a total boys’ club: women were treated as servile secretaries and sex objects. Men patted their bottoms, complimented their shapely legs, treating it all as ‘a bit of fun’. But feminist activists were defiant, they marched ‘take back the night’ and demanded state protection.

Levelling the playing field - preventing cronyism and thuggery - isn’t just important for fairness, but also better allocation of talent. So we don’t miss out on the future Pele and Goldin! Feminists and football fans thus have more in common than they might otherwise recognize. Both have mobilized to punish partiality so that games can be won on talent!

Congratulations to Spain - who now hold both the men’s and women’s FIFA World Cup trophies!

Related Essays

• Taking Back the Night

• Confining Insiders, Raping Outsiders

• “Violent Intimacy” by Tiantian Zhen

• “Flowers of Fire” by Hawon Jung (review)

• Fight Club, USA

• How Male-Dominated Networks Lock Women Out

I speak of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, composed around the 8th century BCE, narrating the Trojan War and Odysseus’s long journey home.

These epic poems offer hugely valuable insights into ancient patriarchy as they teach us what was glorified. Men gained power and prestige by uniting in fraternal solidarity, conquering rival cities, seizing female captives, keeping their own wives close to the home. The Iliad and the Odyssey are thus prime illustrations of my last essay: “Confining Insiders, Raping Outsiders”.

Martial Glory!

A crucial part of the Greco-Roman fraternal bargain was that even the elites fought, and their martial valor was celebrated, so as to encourage other men to fight.

Sarpedon, a Lycian commander and son of Zeus, encapsulates this by turning to his comrade and asking,

Hector also relishes martial glory (kleos) - leaving his wife alone and vulnerable, so that he can pursue battle, since he would otherwise feel shame (aidōs) before the Trojan men.

This is a fundamental part of how Europe became so patriarchal: the most successful armies scaled up, subjugated others, and entrenched that masculine dominance, while poets, storytellers and artists celebrating military might by encouraging yet more foot soldiers to join their wars.

Fraternal Bonds

Homer celebrated male bonds of friendship, embodied in Achilles’s grief over Patroclus’s death. He laments, “My friend Patroclus, whom I loved, is dead. I loved him more than any other comrade. I loved him like my head, my life, myself”. He then cries: “I want to die right here and now, because I could not save my slaughtered friend” (Iliad, Book 18).

When Patroclus’s spirit subsequently visits Achilles in his sleep, he reminisces about their upbringing and requests, “let a single urn hold both our bones” (Book 23).

Later, Achilles avenges Patroclus’s death by seeking out Hector (who killed him), tying Hector’s ankles to his chariot and dragging him around in torment.

Patriarchal Rents

In Book 9, with the Greeks facing disaster, Agamemnon tries to win Achilles back with “lavish gifts of friendship”. He offers seven tripods, ten bars of gold, twenty cauldrons, twelve racehorses, and seven skilled slave women from Lesbos (Iliad Book 9). This is a good example of what I call “patriarchal rents”: men redistribute female captives to strengthen their own alliances.

Warriors sacked cities and seized women

When warriors sacked cities, they invariably raped the women, hauled them away as laborers, forcing them to weave textiles, satisfy men’s sexual desires, and bear children.

In her introduction, Wilson emphasises, “The most important warriors in the Greek encampment are all waited on and cared for by multiple female captives, of whom the most valuable are subject to repeated rapes in the beds of their enslavers. Their subjugation demonstrates the status of the enslaver to his peers. The silencing, rape, subjugation, kidnapping, and enslavement of women in war are essential instruments for the construction of male honor.” That is, warriors gain rents by capture and coercion.

In the Iliad, Andromache pleads with her husband Hector to stay and protect the city from within the ramparts. But he feels bound by martial glory (kleos) and insists on leaving, though he recognises the inevitability of her capture and enslavement.

Eager to defy that inevitability, Hector kills Patroclus and boasts, “I suppose you thought you would destroy my city and enslave the women of Troy and rob them of their day of freedom, and take them in your ships to your own homeland. Fool!… I am the finest of the valiant fighters of Troy, and I defend the Trojan women from slavery, the day they lose their freedom” (Iliad, Book 16).

When Odysseus presents himself to King Alcinous and the Phaeacians, he describes the seizure of other men’s wives as a matter of fact, an ordinary part of warfare:

Note, the scrupulous insistence on fairness! Each man got an ‘equal share’, so as to maintain fraternal bonds.

Hanging the Slaves (not ‘maids’)

While previous writers usually translated dmoai as ‘maids’, Wilson writes ‘slaves’. After Odysseus slaughters Penelope’s suitors, he instructs his son to kill the 12 female ‘slaves’ who have slept with the suitors. Telemachus takes the initiative to add torture:

Mute Women

While enslaved women’s labour was vital to Greek encampments, the poem rarely shares their names, let alone their voices and feelings.

When Achilles sacks Lyrnessus, he destroys the city, kills its defenders and seizes Briseis as a captive. When he hands her over to Agamemnon’s heralds, all we hear is that “The woman walked unwillingly beside them” (Iliad, Book 1). She has no speech, or even thoughts.

Men also gain honour from guarding their wives’ sexual virtue

“The rape and abduction of an elite woman in peacetime, like the removal of Helen from her husband’s house in Sparta, is a terrible violation of social norms, because it threatens the male homeowner’s control over his own household, including its wealth, its social power, and the subordinate household members” explains Wilson.

Her Odyssey introduction likewise notes, “women were often treated by elite warrior men as if they were objects, prizes traded in war for men’s honor, along with other possessions, like bronze tripods and piles of treasure”.

Does Penelope have agency?

Some gender historians have presented Penelope as cunning and ‘agentic’. While Odysseus is away, his wife is hassled by suitors seeking her hand and his estate.

Rather than risk confrontation and refuse the suitors outright, she promises to marry once she has finished weaving Laertes’s shroud. Covertly, she delays that eventuality by unpicking the cloth each night.

Odysseus is then congratulated for having such a devout wife, who preserves her sexual virtue and his honor. Odysseus wins, twice over. To quote Agamemnon’s ghost:

Agamemnon’s ghost continues to scorn his own wife, “deceitful Clytemnestra”, who took a lover while he was away for ten years at Troy. Aegisthus then seizes the kingdom and murders Agamemnon on his return, with Clytemnestra as accomplice. Agamemnon also brought home a captured Trojan princess, Cassandra, whom Clymnestra then murders.

Learning from this deceit, Agamemnon’s ghost warns Odysseus: “never treat your wife too well. Do not let her know everything you know. Tell her some things, hide others”. This is a classic example of men teaching each other never to bring women into their inner circle, never give them the same loyalty you show to male allies.

Teenage Telemachus similarly asserts patriarchal authority and tells his mother to shut up - a point well-noted by Mary Beard:

Even with all her cunning, all Penelope can do is delay marriage. She has no alterative. Furthermore, she never gains state power, never commands an army, or wield wider influence. She can’t even force the suitors to leave her own house! Absent rule of law, what stops the suitors from seizing Penelope is fear of other men’s vengeance.

Just like the Ramayana’s Sita and Confucian ‘Exemplary Women’, she is praised for maintaining her chastity and preserving Odysseus’s honor. Preferably in silence.

Note also the sexual double standard. Odysseus starts his epic journey home by sacking the town of Ismarus, killing the men, and taking the wives. Yet, when he finally returns, the only stain on his name is the suitors, who must be savagely killed in order to restore his honor.

In my view, it is an unhelpful distraction to ask whether women were agentic. Of course, everyone tries to better their lot. But when societies glorify women’s seclusion, submission and self-erasure, then her pathway to status stops at the front door. Men alone then compete for dominance of the public sphere.

Powerful Goddesses

Female power abounds in the Odyssey - but only on Olympus, not on earth. Athena engineers Odysseus’s entire homecoming, Circe and Calypso each hold him captive at their pleasure. As Wilson notes “there is a vision of empowered femininity in the Odyssey, but it is conveyed not in the mortal world but in that of the gods”.

This distinction is absolutely crucial: many societies ascribed phenomenal powers to their goddesses, but kept mortal women under the thumb.

Goddesses < Rule of Law

I am very much looking forward to watching Christopher Nolan’s production of “The Odyssey”. I sincerely hope he appreciates Emily Wilson’s translation.

Far too many reconstructions of the past tend to exaggerate women’s historic power, but this is deeply misleading. The truth is that Europe really was run by warmongering patriarchs. Rival armies fought for conquest and glory, cemented fraternal bonds, while they confined their own wives and enslaved others.

Progressives might instead celebrate that Europe ultimately vanquished this militarized patriarchy: Homeric boasts would now be prosecuted as war crimes.

Let’s scrap the mythology. Women’s safety has never been guaranteed by powerful goddesses, but by the rule of law and credible deterrence, alongside a culture where men’s pathway to prestige does not rely on confining insiders and raping outsiders.

Related essays:

• Confining Insiders, Raping Outsiders

• Patriarchal rents

• Glorifying Sacrifice

At home, Roman freemen maintained honour by keeping their own wives and daughters under strict surveillance. Moralists praised respectable wives and daughters for pudicitia: sexual virtue. “Casta fuit, domum servavit, lanam fecit” (she was chaste, kept the house and made wool”) declares Claudia’s epigraph. Valerius Maximus preserves stories of husbands repudiating wives for going out unveiled, speaking to unsuitable women, or attending public games without permission. By guarding their own women, patriarchs excluded rivals and monopolised public institutions for themselves.

Roman moralists thus sanctified two distinct patriarchal rents - the guarded chastity of female insiders, and the celebrated conquest of outsiders. Julius Caesar famously encapsulated imperialism as veni, vidi, vici, but that is perhaps too benign. Veni, rapui, genui may be more accurate: I came, I seized, I begot.

Throughout the historical record, militarised male coalitions have seized territories, slaughtered rivals, captured women and achieved disproportionate reproductive success. Yet elite women still struggled to exert public influence because they often gained respect through silence, submission and self-erasure. The commanding institutions of state power - armies, assemblies, courts, and temples - were overwhelmingly run by men, who legitimised their own authority and impunity.

This essay explores the rape and abduction of female outsiders in Spanish colonialism, Papua New Guinea, the Indian caste system, Islamic State and modern Britain.

Cross-cultural differences and similarities

While Eurasian empires tended to idealise female seclusion (or at least modesty), small-scale societies in the Americas, Sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania permitted far greater female visibility and mobility. However, many of these societies were nevertheless violent, so often raiding against female outsiders.

Militarised male coalitions have tended to elevate religions and ideologies that sanctify their own dominance, praise female self-erasure as virtuous, while ostracising out-groups as infidels, slaves, or untouchables. This dehumanisation has often served to sanctify men’s sexual violence against female outsiders. And when rape becomes morally permissible, it may continue even during peacetime.

The Mongol Empire

As Mongol armies stormed across Eurasia - from northern China, Central Asia, Iran and Rus’ - they slaughtered men, seized female captives and received concubines as part of diplomatic marriage alliances.

This left a trace in DNA! The Y chromosome passes from father to son, so when one paternal lineage becomes common across diverse populations, it implies that one closely related group achieved disproportionate reproductive success. Zerjal and colleagues have identified one such Y-chromosomal “star cluster”. It is only found in 0.5% of men worldwide, but shows up across 16 populations from the Pacific to the Caspian Sea. The lineage appears to have originated in Mongolia roughly a thousand years ago - precisely the era of Genghis Khan and his descendants.

One conquering lineage is now carried by 16 million men.

Iberian Conquistadors

In the 16th century, when Iberian men colonized the Caribbean, Central and South America, they not only seized land, minerals, and labour, but also gained an extraordinary reproductive advantage. Today’s Latin American populations exhibit sharply sex-biased ancestry: paternal lineages are disproportionately European, while maternal lineages are primarily Indigenous. In countries with long histories of African slavery, the maternal line is often substantially African.

DNA tells us something profound: indigenous men not only died from disease, but were also demographically displaced, while Iberian conquistadors, landowners and friars reproduced at far higher rates.

Reading the wealth of literature on colonial Latin America, I realise a pervasive dichotomy: elite Catholic landowners kept their own wives cloistered, while abusing black and indigenous women with impunity. Abuse, harassment and concubinage was repeatedly sanctified: slave-origins were associated with illegitimate birth and thus dishonour - she was already fair game.

Latin American elites thus extracted two patriarchal rents: (1) elite honour and inheritance from guarding their wives’ chastity, alongside (2) sexual pleasure from disadvantaged women

Did Small-Scale Societies also Rape Outgroups?

Ethnographies from the 19th to early 20th centuries attest that across many small-scale societies, male warriors would embark on out-bound raiding for slaves, who they would drag back, kicking and screaming, so as to enlarge their own group as wives and concubines. Visualising the Standard Cross Cultural Sample, it was widespread.

Over in Oceania, Papua New Guinea has over 840 living languages. That one fact alone is hugely informative. It effectively tells us that no army or bureaucratic state has exerted power and forced the rugged highlands into one cohesive community. Instead, distinct communities maintained loyalty to insiders, while raiding outsiders. Classic ethnographies of the Kapauku, Dani and Maring describe warfare as an arena of male competition and revenge, often abducting enemy women.

Francesca Merlan undertook ethnographic research in the 1980s and 2000s. Jakelin, a mother of three interviewed, shared observations of female captives:

“One young woman was surrounded while she was collecting peanuts. She couldn't run away. They caught her and gave her to an old man (to take her as his wife). They were married; the woman had no strength (todul) to resist, Jakelin said, so the enemy kept her”.

In-group loyalty prohibited open expression of sympathy. A woman from the Tambul range shared that although she wanted to mourn the loss of two young men from a sister clan, she felt restricted. “To cry for people who were regarded as the collective enemy would have earned her rough treatment at home, she said; and so she said nothing”.

While the government does not maintain reliable data, some estimates suggest that 70% of women experience rape or assault over their lifetime.

20th Century Conflicts

In 1937, when Japanese soldiers seized the Chinese city of Nanking, they embarked on extensive sexual violence - raping between 20,000 and 80,000 girls and women. Subsequently, during World War II, the imperial military institutionalised an extensive system of brothels, in which thousands upon thousands of Korean women into sexual enslavement. That is, rather than permit rape at random, the Japanese Army created ordered institutions. Enslaved comfort women were mostly aged between 14 and 18.

In 1945, as the Soviet army moves into East Prussian villages, “it was not untypical for Soviet troops to rape every female over the age of twelve or thirteen”. In Berlin’s two main hospitals, staff estimated between 95,000 and 130,000 rape victims.

In 1971, when Pakistan’s army invaded East Pakistan, around 200,000 Bengali women were raped. One teacher regarded Pakistani rapists as invoking scriptural justification to mal-e-gonemat (booty during the war). Further east, Myanmar’s army has committed gang rapes against the Rohingya minority, while in the former Yugoslavia, Bosnian Serbs committed mass rapes against Muslim girls.

Throughout Sub-Saharan Africa’s civil wars - like Rwanda’s genocide, Uganda’s Lords Resistance Army and Sudan’s contemporary strife, rape remains a weapon of war - humiliating the enemy. Across the Sahelian-Sudan belt, interviewed combatants have often shared that they joined because they were promised women as booty:

“We were told we will get money and wives when we join the group” Goroma, 23 years old, Nigeria.

In 2014, Islamic State fighters attacked the Yazidi minority in northern Iraq, executed several thousand men, and captured several thousand more girls and women. Enslaved captives were sexually abused, sold into slavery, and redistributed to fighters as “spoils of war”. ISIS repeatedly justified the enslavement and rape of Yazidi women by invoking the legal category of ‘sabaya’ (female captives) and the doctrine of mā malakat aymānukum, “those whom your right hands possess”.

As part of the UK parliament’s inquiry into sexual violence, Yazidi women shared their experiences:

Were these horrendous attacks perpetrated for personal gratification, or were they political?

Woman #1: They were doing this to them because they were Yazidis. They saw it as a religious motive.. The Amir was talking through a microphone saying “Whoever becomes a Muslim can stay in this village. Whoever doesn’t become a Muslim will be killed”.

Were any Yazidi men raped?

Woman #3: They [the men] were killed immediately.

Did you have the opportunity to ask them “why are you doing this?”

Woman #1: She did and she was told that they were implementing the Prophet Mohammed’s law.

Militants repeatedly invoked scripture to legitimise the rape of infidels.

Upper-caste Impunity

Caste is a distinctive form of hierarchy. Historically, dominant-castes preserved their own prestige through endogamous marriage, often before the girl reached puberty. Dalits (literally the ‘broken’), meanwhile, were cast derided as polluting ‘untouchables’ - sinning in past lives, fated to degrading roles. By cloistering their own women, while branding Dalits as impure, dominant-castes maintained their own supremacy and extracted cheap, dependent labour.

As late as 2014, Human Rights Watch reports that some Dalit women do not want to clean open defecation sites, but are subject to bullying. In Uttar Pradesh, Gangashri shared that she and other women had stopped cleaning toilets, and men from the dominant Thakur caste came to their homes, threatening to deny them grazing rights:

“They called our men and said “If you don’t start sending your women to clean our toilets, we will beat them up. We will beat you up.” They said, “We will not let you live in peace.” We were afraid”.

Although caste hierarchy resembles racial oppression, it is much less visible. Instead, dominant castes might note more subtle cues - asking someone’s surname, observing their eating habits, or tapping their shoulder, seeing if they wear the sacred thread (which marks the ‘twice-born’ upper castes).

Dominant caste men’s impunity is reinforced by four interacting mechanisms.

1. An over-stretched criminal justice system - police are seriously under-staffed, cases languish waiting for trial.

2. Elite capture of institutions. Dominant caste men are over-represented in positions of power and persuasion - sometimes ensuring that state institutions shield their peers, and disregard abuse against ‘impure’, ‘dishonoured’ Dalits.

3. Shame lies with the victim and is reinforced by Jati economy. ‘Good girls’ are praised for staying close to the home and safeguarding their purity. When rape is seen as worse than death, victims stay silent.

4. Economic marginalisation means that Dalit communities may be reluctant to challenge upper-castes. In Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, and Rajasthan, village councils (khap panchayats) may pressure lower-caste survivors to stay quiet (‘chup’).

In 2020, these dynamics came to a head in Hathras, Uttar Pradesh. A 19 year old Dalit woman said she was attacked by four men, who tried to strangle her as she resisted their rape. Subsequently, she went to the police but the officer allegedly refused to register the case. Two weeks later, she died from ‘injury to the cervical spine by blunt force trauma’. At 2:30am, the police burnt her body without her family’s consent. When the case circulated on social media, it was dismissed by the government of Uttar Pradesh. In 2023, three of the accused were acquitted, a fourth was convicted of culpable homicide.

Europe’s 21st Century Challenge

While the entire world was incredibly violent, Europe and North America ultimately diverged. Thanks to more professional policing, effective criminal justice, advanced technology and feminist activism, they ultimately became more peaceful, safer, and constrained male violence.

European countries are increasingly diverse, welcoming migrants from more patriarchal cultures, but without investing in policies that would promote integration, such that all women can achieve economic inclusion, while being protected from violence. This failure is manifest in employment, attitudes, and honour-based abuse.

In World Values Surveys, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria register extreme sexism. As European Muslims expand, imams remind believers to ‘lower their gaze’, and castigate ‘free-mixing’ (men chatting to unrelated women). In recent surveys, 40% of British Muslims agreed that ‘girls and boys should be taught separately’, including 36% of university graduates. Since men’s honour rests on female seclusion, British Muslim women tend to remain outside the labour force.

European politicians have generally been reluctant to recognise these cultural differences, and have even suppressed investigations into rapes. Taking advantage of this impunity, organised groups of men have sexually abused vulnerable (often white) working-class girls - showering them with gifts and affection, plying them with drink and drugs, then proceeding to bully, rape and traffic them as part of large criminal networks. Yet when victims, journalists and researchers sought help or pressed charges, they were dismissed and derided. Where suspect ethnicity was recorded, such as in Greater Manchester, men of Pakistani heritage are over-represented (relative to their population share) as perpetrators of group-based child-sexual exploitation. Going beyond unsubstantiated claims on social media, we urgently need an empirical inquiry to make sure all girls and women are safe.

In Baroness Casey’s National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (CSE) (2025), she documents chronic failures by political parties, local councils, social services and police: many repeatedly denied abuse; dismissed victims; suppressed whistleblowers; failed to record basic offender characteristics; cited fear of community tensions and accusations of racism as reasons for inaction; and resisted external scrutiny by obstructing public access to data.

Although the UK Government has launched a national inquiry, progress has been slow. Going forwards, the Government could easily track the full extent of abuse and the likely ethnic distribution, by using police case notes with suspects’ names. But this has not yet occurred. As long as politicians, judges and journalists turn a blind eye, violent men reoffend with impunity.

Progressive politicians like to champion ‘gender equality’ rhetoric, but safety isn’t secured with slogans. What women - worldwide - need is state protection from violent men. That requires effective policing, punishment to ensure credible deterrence, and a full inquiry to identify institutional failures, so that everyone can walk home safely.

Related Essays

• Stopping Sexual Harassment

• Towards a Scientific Study of Sexual Violence

• Male Violence and the Myth of Female Freedom

• Can Women Walk Home Safely?

• “Violent Intimacy” by Tiantian Zhen (review)

• “Flowers of Fire” by Hawon Jung (review)

• Why Do Some States Protect Women While Others Enable Abuse?

• Why are So Many Latin American Women Beaten & Murdered?

• What do Epstein’s Emails, the Catholic Church & Grooming Gangs have in Common?

• Female Power for Whom?

Is she right?

More broadly, are scholars right to push back against narratives of imperial militarism, by instead stressing women’s agency and roles as hidden powers? Moreover, does progressives’ quest to support indigenous people’s struggles against racist oppression and past suffering mean that they themselves turn a blind eye to actually existing patriarchy?

1. Valued work or hard graft?

Dodds Pennock argues that “[i]n the rigidly controlled and cooperative environment of Tenochtitlan, a system of dual organization ensured that men and women fulfilled very specific and very different roles, which were regarded as equally essential for the successful perpetuation of their culture.. Their roles were complementary, working together”.

Certainly, women’s work was hugely important to household survival and imperial wealth. Women were economically active: grinding maize, preparing tortillas for their families, selling the surplus at markets, and producing cloth as tribute.

Mothers certainly instructed their daughters to perform this valuable labour, punishing negligence and laziness by beating them with sticks, or pricking them with maguey spikes. Yes, women’s work was absolutely fundamental, but hard graft does not necessarily advance women’s status.

2. Do sacrifices signify women’s importance?

Dodds Pennock writes that a single round of the Aztec religious calendar included 90 instances of human sacrifice. These are mostly vague as to the sex, but 37 ceremonies name the gender, and women feature in 16 instances. She further argues that the victims were ixiptla (impersonators) of the gods, embodying the deity the ceremony was supposed to honour.

Building on this, Pennock argues that female victims often embodied deities associated with earth, fertility, water, maize, salt, childbirth, disease and natural forces. “Women were bound up with the earth – and this connection gave both their lives and their deaths significance”.

Curious to learn more about female ixiptla, I turned to the Florentine Codex.

Book 2, folio 8r, details that in the 11th month (Ochpaniztli), the Aztec would celebrate Toçi, the mother of the gods, by killing a woman dressed with the ornaments that depicted this goddess.

She would be accompanied by a number of female healers and midwives, celebrating for four days, while ensuring that the intended victim would not discover she was about to die or else she would become sad - a bad omen. So instead, they would say they were taking her to a great lord, and covertly cut off her head, skin her, and a young man would dress himself in her skin. (This evokes the Mexica origin myth).

Just as Dodds Pennock states, the Florentine Codex certainly details that the Aztecs performed sacrifices to other goddesses, such as Uixtocihuatl (the goddess of salt).

Female ixiptla clearly had ritual significance. But I suspect that many readers may want further evidence that this actually signified women’s status. Did it really correlate with how women in general were perceived and treated in everyday life? In Classical Athens, men gave (non-human) sacrifices to Athena, but kept their own women in seclusion and male guardianship. I, for one, am unconvinced that sacrificial victims (even those signifying the deities) are hugely informative about women’s status.

3. Does self-sacrifice demonstrate ‘agency’?

Dodds Pennock further argues that female worshippers were not passive, but actively chose to pierce their own skin, thereby demonstrating agency.

Ever since the 1970s, counter-cultural revolution, many people have used the language of ‘individual choice’ to render any action inherently important.

But if ‘agency’ just refers to any choice given the circumstances, this becomes rather trivial. Aren’t we all demonstrating agency all the time? If every action qualifies as ‘agentic’, even self-laceration, it seems rather uninformative.

Everyone tries to improve their welfare, prosper or gain broader esteem, given the available trade-offs and community pathways to prestige. As Marx insisted, ‘men make history but not in circumstances of their own choosing’. If revered priests and peers celebrate and participate in auto-sacrifice, one might well follow suit.

To abstain from religious practices in an extremely religious society, where everyone attends religious schooling, would surely be extremely risky, if not dangerous! The Aztecs are not renowned for their tolerant liberalism…

4. Do childbirth myths imply status?

The Aztec priests taught that most people would spend the afterlife in Mictlan, a place under earth, full of misery and deprivation. But Dodds Pennock details that this could be avoided by dying in battle, as a priestly sacrifice, or in childbirth.

During childbirth, women were believed to be possessed by the Earth Mother, via her guise as Cihuacoatl (Woman Snake). If she happened to die, the Aztecs said that she gained the goddess Cihuacoatl’s power. For four nights after burial, grieving relatives would guard her corpse lest young warriors steal her fingers, hair or forearm. (To me, such mutilation indicates a brutal disregard of other people’s bodies).

Even if these deaths were revered, Dodds Pennock acknowledges that a subsequent divergence. Dead warriors accompanied the Sun to its glorious resplendence at noon, whereas women bore the dreadful responsibility of carrying it down to the people of Mictlan. (Aztecs feared the Sun would not rise).

After four years of accompanying the Sun, the souls of men would become beautiful dancing butterflies, while the souls of women would become demonic tormentors, bringing suffering and affliction.

I suspect that readers may be unconvinced by this logic.

Studying the global history of gender, I realize that many societies glorified both men’s military sacrifice and women’s childbearing, because these were absolutely vital for social reproduction and imperial expansion, yet extremely dangerous. Before the advent of modern medicine, becoming pregnant was extremely dangerous. Spiritual rewards potentially encouraged women to keep pumping out babies. Any society that failed to make a convincing case would surely contract - as in South Korea today.

Moreover, even if childbearing was celebrated, the overwhelming majority of Aztec mothers woke early, spent five hours a day grinding maize for tortillas, scrubbing their children’s clothes. Head to any impoverished community in South Asia or Africa: childbirth is celebrated with a big party, but everyday life as a mother is tough.

5. What did priestesses do?

Girls could become priestesses, typically only briefly in adolescence; their primary roles included sweeping and making cloth for the deities’ images. Once they reached the marriageable age (around 15), they would marry and start families, like all other young women (Florentine Codex Book 2: 144r, 144v, 145r).

Dodds Pennock affirms this same account, but refers to this as women playing ‘key roles… as priestesses’. Here, I think it’s important to distinguish between women making important contributions (producing children, cloth, tortillas), and actually being seen as knowledgeable authorities. One does not entail the other, especially not for 14 year old girls. In my own interviews in small town Oaxaca, young women told me that older generations would see them as servants, to serve and obey, not as people whose autonomy should be respected or whose words carry weight. They worked, men governed.

6. ‘Intimacy’ or Child Marriage?

Dodds Pennock’s account of marriage omits that Aztec girls were typically wed at 15. The new couples were usually barely acquainted, then spent four days in seclusion to,

This emphasis on compassion and consideration seems an odd gloss on a 15 year old entering into marriage, which was arranged with a man she barely knew, but had completed intensive military training at the telpochcalli or calmecac, where he was trained for conquest and aggression.

Today, child marriage is often associated with increased risk of abuse. So why presume this was avoided in the past?

Dodds Pennock repeatedly emphasises that elderly matchmakers and midwives commanded ‘social authority’, and that’s true. They were respected, but I think it’s important not to overstate their importance. Their roles were to ensure social reproduction: marriage and safe births. Outside state-run educational institutions, they lacked the powers of wider ideological persuasion or contestation. They did not collectively mobilise to advance women’s status, or abate male violence. So even if individually significant, there was little they could do to challenge male supremacy.

While I greatly appreciate Dodds Pennock’s careful examination of women’s work and authority, there’s clearly a delicate tightrope in not understating actually existing patriarchy.

Getting Real about Patriarchy

If I may summarise my own reading of the primary sources (in translation) and wider academic research, it seems that:

1. Aztec society was militaristic, male aggression was glorified, and surrounding city-states were at risk of attack, possibly becoming human sacrifices, or sending tribute.

2. State power and prestige were dominated by male priest-warriors. They ran the temples and schools, which instilled discipline. Women lacked an equivalent means of mass ideological persuasion.

3. Aztec women entered arranged marriages at 15, then performed a huge volume of domestic drudgery.

4. Spanish conquistadors seized land and power - bringing diseases, instilling brutal labour coercion, and racist hierarchy. Indigenous peoples were then over-ruled and oppressed.

Going beyond the Aztec, I would now like to suggest some ways we might rethink our approach to gender history:

Broadly, the post-1970s has heralded a reaction against narratives that centre male military might, and instead centre ‘weapons of the weak’. But these groups so often were indeed weak and marginal. Our task as historians is to surely recognise that oppression.

The fixation with ‘agency’ is also unhelpful. If anyone trying to better their lot is seen as ‘agentic’, the concept is so trivial as to be uninformative. This does not imply that women were ‘passive’ (a classic straw man). Clearly, they joined collective festivities, worshipped, and pierced their own skin with maguey thorns. But they were nevertheless hugely constrained, by pervasive conflict, ecological precarity, poverty and religious dogma.

Spanish imperialism was truly oppressive, and over subsequent centuries they derided indigenous peoples as savage barbarians. In reaction to this racism, post-colonial scholars and activists have often tried to support indigenous communities’ quests for dignity and self-governance by minimising their own oppression, but this actually papers over indigenous patriarchy. Get real: the entire world was patriarchal!

Moving forward, it would be more empirical to trace how power and prestige were actually won, even if that means an overwhelming focus on male military coalitions, legitimised by religious persuasion.

Once we recognise that the entire world was patriarchal, then we can also realise the triumph of contemporary progress. Over the past century, Mexico has become radically more gender equal - with women gaining economic independence, supporting female leaders, and condemning male violence. Getting real, we should also recognise major challenges, most notably violence.

But what if these correctives inadvertently minimize the oppressive reality of patriarchy? What if human history is indeed the clashes and coalitions of empires, where macho militaries tussled for control, built bureaucracies to extract wealth, then instilled their righteous dominance through patriarchal religions? What if it really is “MEN MEN MEN”?

Keen to learn from the past, I find it extremely valuable to read primary sources, while recognising likely bias, triangulating with archaeology and multiple experts.

Today, let’s dive into the Aztecs, who built an empire across Mesoamerica reigning from the 14th to 16th centuries. Ideally, one would read their own history books. But Spanish conquest often destroyed institutions that preserved pictorial codices. Instead we must read slightly later sources. In 1541, the viceroy of New Spain, Don Antonio de Mendoza, organised native artists to create the Codex Mendoza. It provides a pictographic history of Aztec rulers, their conquests and daily life. You can access it online, along with the superbly detailed description by Berdan and Anawalt.

Crucially, the Codex Mendoza must be read as an idealised imperial history, blending description with mythology. Berdan and Anawalt note that while the Mexica present themselves as triumphant conquerors, they were originally marginal vassals. This error it itself important: the Aztecs present their origins as victorious warriors! I would add, the Codex Mendoza seldom shows human sacrifice, even though skeletal evidence shows that was pervasive.

We can also read the Florentine Codex (1577), led by Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún, who arrived in New Spain only eight years after conquest, spoke Nahuatl, and sought to understand indigenous culture. Over several decades, he collaborated with Nahuatl elders, authors, and artists to produce the Florentine Codex. This includes 2,500 images, alongside parallel columns of Nahuatl and Spanish texts.

Join me as I trawl through the primary sources, while also drawing on expert analysis from Berdan and Smith’s tremendous book, “Everyday Life in the Aztec World”, as well as Mexico’s superb National Museum of Archaeology. I also embarked on a trip to an Aztec pyramid, but as loyal readers may recall, this was cut short by a punch in the face.

Controversially, I suggest that feminist narratives often create a rose-tinted patriarchy, vastly exaggerating women’s prominence and downplaying the reality of imperial militarism and back-breaking drudgery.

The Aztec Military Machine!

Codex Mendoza Folio 2r represents the Mexica founding of Tenochtitlan, the future imperial capital of the Aztecs! The blue diagonal waterways bisect the city, nourishing flora and fauna. Around the island sit ten founding leaders. The largest is Tenuch - whose black body paint and blood stain mark him as the priestly leader. The other nine dignitaries sport the hairstyle of distinguished warriors (the temillotl, ‘pillar of stone’). Just below the eagle sits a shield and arrows, an Aztec glyph for war. You may also spot the skull rack (tzompantli) - signifying large-scale human sacrifice.

Immediately below we see two conquest scenes. Warriors (with the ‘pillar of stone’ hairstyle) force captives into subservient positions, next to toppled burning pyramid temples. Note the left captor’s ‘macuahuitl’, a club with sharp blades of obsidian!

Conquest

The Aztec Empire emerged through a “Triple Alliance” of city states (Texcoco, Tenochtitlan and Tlacopan) (circa 1428–1430), which then militarily subdued northern Mesoamerica.

Ahuitzotl ruled from 1487 to 1502. Folio 13r shows him seated on a reed mat, clad in a white cloak. He was the younger brother of the prior ruler and high ranking military officer. For his coronation, a thousand captive warriors were sacrificed on the temple altar. Other rulers likewise would personally go to war and return with sacrificial captives for their coronation.

Shortly after his installation as tlatoani, Tenochtitlan’s Great Temple was completed. Before its dedication, Ahuitzotl’s armies captured Huaxteca warriors for ritual sacrifice, as well as prisoners from other subjugated city-states, paid as tribute. Everyone in Tenochtitlan and neighbouring cities was ordered to attend, and mythology boasted of over 20,000 sacrificial warriors. The goal? To demonstrate that the Aztec were masters of the world and strike enemy hearts with fear.

The Mendoza lists 45 conquests under Ahuitzotl, depicted by burning toppling temples, alongside the shield and arrows. Each altepetl (city state) is signified by a temple - conveying the utmost importance of religion.

Tribute

Conquest was not only justified mythologically but also economically beneficial - enabling commerce, diplomatic gifts, and taxes.

The Codex details the tributes given by each conquered region. Tlapan for example gave 400 women’s tunics and skirts, 400 red-striped mantas (blankets), 800 large mantas and 800 gourd bowls every six months, as well as 1 red warrior costume and shield, 1 yellow warrior costume and shield, and 10 gold tablets (as visualized below in Folio 39r; 163).

Such weaving was done by women. Now, a feminist re-reading might emphasize that women’s work was indispensable to empire, a crucial part of GDP, as part of ‘gender complementarity’. But if we focus on what is actually commemorated and celebrated, we see that women’s labour is merely extracted and invisible.

Childbirth

The following sections on everyday life are from Part 3 of the Codex Mendoza; Berdan and Anawalt say that this was a novel, post-conquest creation with no known pre-hispanic prototype. So it must be carefully triangulated and corroborated with other sources.

The Florentine Codex, Book 6: Rhetoric, Moral Philosophy, and Theology details that Aztec midwives would give baby boys tiny shields and little arrows. Raising him to the sky, she would let out a war cry and declare:

“He belongs to the family of soldiers and warriors who fight on the battlefield”. (Sahagún 1950-1982 6:172v).

When baptising the baby girl, the midwife includes domestic implements such as a spindle. When offering prayers for the girl, the midwife was apparently very quiet.

This ceremony is illustrated in the Codex Mendoza Folio 57r, top right. Here you see possible careers for the baby boy: a war shield with four arrows, a carpenter’s awl, a featherworker’s obsidian knife, a scribe’s brush and a goldsmith’s tool. The girl’s household tasks are signified by a broom, spindle with thread, and a reed workbasket for spinning and weaving equipment.

Gender Divisions of Labor

The Codex Mendoza 59r shows how Aztec fathers raised their sons, while mothers raised their daughters. The boy is taught to fish, the girl is taught to spin (158).

The third panel depicts an incorrigible 9 year old boy’s body being pierced with maguey sticks as punishment. The daughter’s wrist is pricked for being negligent and idle. In the fourth panel the misbehaving children are about to hit with sticks. Berdan and Anawalt add that parents might tie their children up while chastising them, and that girls’ feet might be tied to make them sit still and focus on work.

(That is of course precisely the argument that Bossen and Hill Gates make about Chinese footbinding: it was partly to keep girls still, working maximum hours of spinning and weaving).

Punishing Misbehaving Teenagers

Folio 60r illustrates how children were raised. In the top panel, the children are reprimanded for disregarding their parents’ advice. The 11 year old boy cries, while being held by his father over a fire of burning chiles. Berdan and Anawalt add that chile smoke could be lethal. In the second panel, the son is naked, bound and crying.

After these punishments, the children become more dutiful and hardworking.

Military-Religious Schooling

The Aztecs had several different kinds of educational institutions:

• calmecac (temple school for noble boys)

• cuicacalli (house of song)

• telpochcalli (the house of male youths, for commoners)

Both the calmecac and telpochcalli trained male adolescents for military service.

The calmecac was the temple school, run by priests (top right, black body paint). Priests lived in a calmecac. These were generally attended by children of nobility (and some promising commoners), where they would learn to read, as well as military training, religious training, and governance.

Ritual training might vary, since the Aztec were polytheistic and each Aztec deity had its own specific temple, public ceremonies, rituals and retinue of priests (sometimes priestesses). At the calmecac, they practised what Berdan and Smith (2021:44) term ‘auto-sacrifice’: letting one’s own blood as a form of worship (below, see the blood smeared ear).

Girls could attend temple schools, but in a separate facility.

The cuicacalli ‘house of song’ was open to all Aztec children, aged 12-15. Youths learnt religious rituals and ceremonies, by singing and dancing.

After 15, commoner male youths also attended the telpochcalli (the house of male youths), which instructed them to become disciplined laborers and warriors.

Unfortunately, we do not have bioarchaeological data on everyday intimate personal violence, but across the Ethnographic Atlas, Ember and Embar find that warring societies tended to have more homicides, likely because they socialised male adolescents for aggression.

Early Marriage

A girl was usually married at 15, as arranged by a match-maker - as shown in Folio 61r.

By 1500, Tenochtitlan had a population of 200,000-250,000. Aztec agriculture and weaving were extremely labor intensive, since they had no beasts of burden, iron or steel tools or practical uses of wheels.

Ethnographer Oscar Lewis (1951) estimated that a woman might spend five hours a day hand-grinding sufficient maize for her family’s tortilla needs. She would then shape and cook the tortillas on the clay griddle.

Besides grinding maize, cooking meals and caring for children, women also spun thread, wove cloth, and went to the marketplace to sell any surplus.

Waking early, most women spent their days performing back-breaking drudgery, with little respite, recognition or reward. This labour was grim.

Slavery

Captive slaves, likely women, were sometimes used for household cotton production: ginning, beating, spinning, and perhaps weaving.

Punishment

Folio 62r shows the priestly calmecac training. Disobedience was punished by piercing the boy’s body with maguey spikes, drawing blood from the ears, chest, thighs or calves. This instilled fear.

Punishment for illicit sexual activity

Folio 63r depicts two instructors punishing a youth at a telpochcalli (house of male youths) who had been cohabiting with a woman by beating him with burning firebrands. Male and female adolescents met as part of their cuicacalli training in ritual singing and dancing, though they were supposed to be chaperoned.

The second panel represents the calmecac equivalent of young men’s sexual impropriety. Pine needles are stuck all over his body. The girl is also pictured, with a red trimmed skirt - implying she is from the Aztec nobility. Priests took a strict vow of chastity, and deviance was chastised.

Curiously, her punishment is not shown here.

Conquest & Prestige

Military aggression was vital to territorial expansion and the extraction of tributes, as previously illustrated. War was also a sacred duty, supplying the captured warriors that supplied sacrificial hearts and blood.

“A primary avenue for social advancement was through military achievement, and successful warriors were publicly rewarded and honoured”, explain Berdan and Smith (2021:212). We see this in the Codex Mendoza, 64r.

After training at telpochcalli (house of male youths), commoner boys went on to become warriors. As warriors take more captives, they gain higher military ranks and wear a more prestigious costume. Folio 64r shows that with each additional captive, they gain prestige. The final segment reads,

“This warrior, called tlacatecatl, with the style of clothing he is wearing and his device of rich feathers, shows that in war he has performed all the brave deeds of the above [warriors] and has a higher rank as a warrior and famous person than the above”.

Sahagún translates “Tlacatecatl” as “Commanding General”, though Durán says it really means “Man-Cutter” or “Man-Slasher.” This was the most elevated rank of all telpochcalli commoner warriors. The pathway to institutional authority ran through military might.

Priest-Warriors

Noble men graduated from the calmecac to become military and governing offices. Folio 65r below shows the military career of the priest warrior. Note his obsidian-studded club and smeared blood on his ear, vanquishing foes.

Once the priest-warrior has taken three captives, his costume is upgraded (green, top right). After he has taken three enemies, he gains the right to wear the coyote attire, with animal-head helmet. (Berdan and Anawalt add, it is unclear which of the below represent nobles and commoners).

An alternative (safer) priestly track was to stay in the temple. These intellectuals wrote books, undertook astronomical observations, presided at ceremonies and worked as teachers.

Priestesses and Female Healers

While there were some priestesses, they usually only served a short period, primarily producing elaborate cloth in the image of deities, thereafter leaving to raise families. Berdan and Smith (2021) add that beyond the state there were also non-state female ritual specialists.

Punishments for Rebels

Provincial rulers who rebelled against the Aztecs were punished. Folios 66r and 67 show them (seated on reed mats) being tied, strangled with a rope, stripped and maimed. Note the wooden slave collars in the top right.

Both men and women could argue in court

Folio 68r show judges on the left, litigants on the right. Men are shown with cloaks wrapped around their knees, women kneel with their hands crossed. Each appears to be arguing their own case, though the Aztec judicial system did include attorneys. There were separate courts for nobles and commoners.

Illicit behaviour was punished

The final folio of Codex Mendoza begins with six individuals who have or will be executed. The first three lie beside pulque bowls - victims of drink. Among the Aztecs, drinking was permissible at certain religious festivals, but was otherwise supposed to be restrained. The fourth person is surrounded by five large stones - thieves were punished by stoning.

The final execution scene is for the adulterers under a blanket, who will be killed by stoning. Since marital bonds were crucial to political alliances, adultery among nobility was severely punished.

Can we use AI to Recode the Past?

In sum, by reading primary sources, one learns how the Aztec war machine glorified martial valor, so as to amp up predation.

Reflecting on the gulf between the Codex Mendoza and feminist narratives, I realise that anyone curious to understand the past currently has 3 options. Each are imperfect.

1. Read the primary sources - hugely insightful, but laborious;

2. Rely on secondary narratives - can be useful, sometimes add ideology.

3. Refer to quantified datasets, such as the Ethnographic Atlas which code original ethnographies, missionary accounts, travel narratives, and colonial reports for over a thousand societies. These are useful, but coding decisions are often unclear and questionable. For example, Murdock often coded bridewealth as ‘insignificant’ in the Americas, likely because he disregarded some payments (e.g. horses). Meanwhile, Sanday built up a composite index of ‘female power’, which set a very low threshold that often coincided with aggressive slave-raiding.

Might I suggest an alternative?

Can experts help train AI agents to read primary sources, with a greater focus on the pathways to power and prestige (i.e. priestly schools, military academies, and martial prowess), as well as a more in-depth understanding of what was revered and status?

Going beyond whether women farmed or inherited, a sharper focus on status, religion, governing institutions and violence, would provide a much sharper analysis of community members gained power and prestige.

Every coding decision could be made public, along with uncertainties. This would make history much more transparent and accessible to all! School children could pose their own questions, interacting with the original sources and AI.

Frankly, there is a gargantuan amount of data that could be digitised and analysed. Forgive my over-excitement, but one could incorporate translations of cuneiform tablets and medieval records, to create a gargantuan library of human history, enabling direct comparisons across time and place.

Sam, Dario, give me a call! :-)

Related Essays using Primary Sources/ Art/ Architecture:

• Can Architecture Reveal the Spread of Purdah?

• Can Big Data Reveal the Origins of Purdah?

• Can Big Data reveal how Egypt - repeatedly - become so Patriarchal?

• Who are the world’s most influential philosophers?

• Did Colonialism Help or Hinder African Patriarchs?

• Are Queen Mothers Over-Rated?

• Female Power for Whom?

Post-script for newcomers: walking up to Monte Albán pyramid in Oaxaca, a guy tried to grab my phone. Foolishly and perhaps over-estimating my own strength, I refused to give it up and persistently wrestled. After a protracted struggle, he ultimately overpowered me, threw me to the ground, punched me in the face, smacking my head down to the stone. I double-kicked him in the stomach, propelling him off by at least two metres. He then grabbed a serrated knife from his shorts and lunged straight down at me. Looking into his eyes, I realised he did not weight my welfare, and merely wanted to grab what he could. Swiftly, I somersaulted to the side, lobbed my phone and sprinted away - with my white t-shirt covered in blood. (Mine not his). Most people ignored me as I called for help, but a wonderful young woman came to my aid. The next day I flew to Chicago, where I was looked after by the extremely kind James Robinson and Maria Angelica Bautista.

I suggest that we consider the market for romantic love. In crude econ talk, men are more likely to provide devotion under two conditions: they want female companionship and women say that the price of intimacy is commitment. When both hold, men compete for female companionship by offering affection, monogamy and long-term support.

If these mechanisms break down, male devotion is under-supplied. If he is not eager for companionship or child-raising, why invest in costly commitments? If women’s bargaining power is weak, they may struggle to insist on devotion or contraceptives.

This essay explores five possible factors affecting the market for romantic love in Southern Africa:

1. Traditionally, conjugal unions were secondary

2. Apartheid and migrant labour ruptured families

3. Inequality raises employed men’s bargaining power

4. Transactional sex

5. Poor contraceptives

6. Risk-taking

These hypotheses are not mutually exclusive. Together, they may help explain why many women struggle to secure men’s love and long-term support.

(1) Traditionally, conjugal unions were secondary

Historically, Sub-Saharan African men gained power through “wealth in people.” Given land abundance, a man could cultivate as many fields as he had wives, concubines, slaves and children. Girls and women were thus economic assets - paid for with bridewealth, captured as slaves, or loaned as pawns, thereafter carrying heavy loads, growing crops, and nursing babies. From the West African Hausa to Southern African Basotho and Zulu, chiefs were often polygynous (Hunter, 38; Murray 1981, 125).

Across many African societies, marriage was not primarily a union of the couple, but rather of two descent-based groups. A man might certainly show affection, woo his beloved, elope and secure her consent (Hunter 38), but they were not necessarily idealised. Instead, many communities put greater weight on kinship, obedience to elders, age-set solidarity, or bridewealth. Echoing such traditions, South African president Zuma referred to a woman’s genitals as “isibaya sikababa wakhe” (her father’s cattle kraal) (Hunter, 2010: 2).

As African Christians spread the gospel, they championed marital consent and monogamy, while condemning bridewealth and polygyny (Hunter, 54). As urban elites headed to Church, read English novels in school, and aspired for modernity, they increasingly embraced ideals of personal freedoms and romantic love.

Recognising this particular cultural inheritance, some scholars argue that many African young people may continue to put greater weight on segmentary lineages (clans) and fertility, rather than necessarily seeking conjugal ties. Who’s to say they should follow the West? Perhaps grandparents and agnatic parenting may provide a satisfactory substitute, and young women are voluntarily choosing to become single mothers?

However, this hypothesis does not seem supported by the available data. The 2019 South African National Antenatal HIV Sentinel Survey enrols 36,015 pregnant women across 1589 public health facilities from across South Africa. Over half said their pregnancies were unintended.

Unintended pregnancies were highest among teenage girls (15-19) and singles (76%). 64% of those in relationships but not cohabiting also said it was unintended.

Since these pregnancies were unintentional, it does not seem like teenage girls are really embracing child-bearing or solo parenting as a cultural ideal. Instead we must ask, what’s weakening companionship?

(2) Did Apartheid & Male Migration Weaken Conjugal Ties?

From the early to late 20th century, South Africa’s government spurred men’s labour migration, while obstructing family formation in towns and cities. Men ‘oscillated’. As multiple generations of sons grew up with absent fathers, this may have suppressed their desire for female companionship.

The 1913 Natives Land Act restricted African land ownership to less productive peripheries, while the 1894 poll tax payable only in cash pushed men into wage labour. Rural households became increasingly dependent on wages from male migrants, who gained greater autonomy to pursue their chosen bride (Hunter 44).

Apartheid restricted Africans’ mobility, property ownership and living arrangements. Their place in towns was now contingent on carrying passes. Black photographer Ernest Cole wrote, “It is an extraordinary experience to live as if life were a punishment inflicted because you are Black.. Not a day goes by without a reminder of your guilt, without the disapproval of your condition and without the risk of running into trouble for transgressing laws designed solely to repress you”.

African men thus tended to be away from their homes for long stretches, while women often remained behind with the children. Urban sex ratios were highly skewed: in 1970 there were 201 men in Cape Town for every 100 women.

Oscillating Labourers across Southern Africa

By 1973, foreigners comprised 80% of black labour in the South African mining industry. These were mostly young men, working on 10-14 month contracts, returning home and taking up another contract. Typically, they might be abroad for 13-16 years. Yet few could retire on their own savings; instead they would depend on junior kins’ remittances (Murray, 1981: 41)

During apartheid, Basotho miners were not permitted to stay in South Africa beyond the length of their contracts, nor could they bring their families. They stayed in single-sex barracks. The South African Aliens Control Act of 1963 mandated passports, residence and work permits, which made female migration difficult, but the mines were exempt from this legislation.

Back in the 1970s, surveyed wives expressed significant strain and disruption, yet husbands often sought control and would “punish a wife severely if his instructions are not followed”. Since 1990, cross-border migration has dramatically increased.

By 1971, 26% of all adult men and 5% of women in Botswana were migrants to South Africa. Mothers increasingly managed alone, often struggling but ultimately becoming more entrepreneurial, and also prioritising their own happiness.

Through life history interviews, Unaludo Sechele finds that absentee husbands did not necessarily prioritise their wives’ welfare. They were absent for long stretches, did not necessarily send remittances, and then returned to be controlling or violent.

As South African mines drew in male migrants but restricted family formation, it effectively stretched conjugal ties to the point of breaking. In 1993, only 35% of South African children lived with both parents. Sons of single mothers may not necessarily have grown up wanting a conjugal union.

Apartheid may have thus weakened men’s preferences for female companionship. But it does not explain why over half of all South African births are unintended. Why are women embarking on these relationships?

(3) Extreme Inequality

Three economic conditions could suppress the market for romantic love by weakening women’s proclivity to bargain for male devotion, fidelity and contraceptives:

• Inequality invariably generates envy, status consciousness and heightened demand for scarce positional goods, so as to signal one’s own status. In highly unequal societies, poorer women may feel acutely behind rich elites and try to gain goods that signal higher status.

• Absolute deprivation could also motivate young women to be more materialistic when looking for partners.

• High unemployment implies an artificially low sex ratio, as so many men become ineligible. The few men with stable incomes thus exercise tremendous bargaining power in the mating market.

South Africa meets all three conditions. For starters, it is extremely unequal, the bottom 50% earn just 5% of national income. The poorest decile of South Africans are as poor as the poorest decile across low-income Sub-Saharan countries, yet the richest 10% of South Africans are as rich as the richest 10% in Eastern Europe.

South Africa also has an extremely high incidence of absolute poverty. Over 30% of South African households have no working adults, and rely on alternatives like government grants.

Youth unemployment is high across Southern Africa, this means that the majority of young men may be seen as ineligible (as emphasised by ethnographer Mark Hunter). South Africa is distinct in that it also has an unusually small informal sector, for its income level. Men with formal jobs are scarce and can thus exercise strong bargaining power over poorer girls and young women.

(4) Transactional Sex

Some men embark on short-term relationships, providing gifts and care in the hope of sex. When impoverished girls receive gifts from men, they may struggle to negotiate for devotion, monogamy or condoms.

In South Africa, a ‘taxi boyfriend’ may be highly coveted by other women as he provides free transport, and such competition lowers her capacity to bargain. As a 16 year old explained,

“Those guys, they can beat you anyhow, anywhere, even in front of your family. They don’t care, because they can have so many girls. I was a taxi queen for two months last year. I went everywhere. Then I became afraid of AIDS because I knew he had many girlfriends... Sis, those guys can be trouble”.

A growing literature suggests that transactional sex is widespread. When over 3000 Tanzanian school girls were surveyed, over half said their peers sometimes received money or gifts for having sex with older men, and around 40% said they were often sexually harassed (Berge et al 2026; see also Dean and Wamoyi 2015; Wamoyi et al 2010).

Of 1645 randomly-selected South African men, 60% reported that they participated in transactional sex, generally providing her with gifts of clothes or beauty products. Men often offer girls prestigious consumer goods - like scented beauty products and fashionable clothing. Over a third of surveyed young women in rural Mpumalanga, South Africa, said they spent such transfers on prestige goods, like perfume, hair extensions, expensive underwear, cosmetics, handbags and jewellery. As a young women shared: “Sugar daddies have money and I want their money. So nowadays girls want to make themselves beautiful, look nice and wear nice clothes… Look at me I eat well because I have a relationship with a sugar daddy”.

“AmaBlesser” became a South African smash hit in 2016, as a young male encapsulated the woes of losing love, as his girlfriend cheated on him with his wealthy uncle and became pregnant. With the official video racking up 38 million views, he laments: “Uhambile ama-baby... Uhambe namablesser” (My baby is gone, Blessers took her away).

A Nigerian reader articulated similar dynamics:

Sexual Harassment & Abuse

If men provide money and expect sex, yet feel little emotional attachment, then intimate relations become risky.

In South Africa, men who have ever engaged in transactional sex are also much more likely to report that they have committed sexual assault. Among surveyed rural young men in Eastern Cape, those who had been physically or sexually violent towards a partner in the past year also reported inconsistent condom use. Meanwhile, women who embarked on transactional sex were more likely to acquire HIV.

If only a few men have jobs, they can exercise considerable bargaining power over impoverished girls and young women. This could include inconsistent condom use, infidelity, or emotional and physical abuse.

“If you are lacking and you are getting pressure from the way your friends are looking, you will definitely find someone to sponsor you (sugar daddy). In the end you get pregnant, because you have no say and you will give in and get what you want” (young woman, urban Zambia)

“[I had sex] because of money. I wanted to buy something and I didn’t have money. In that situation, a man can tell you to sleep with him, especially when you are assured that he will give you something” (young woman, urban Zambia).

“I was not ready for a child but my boyfriend told me that his friends were teasing him about not having children. He wanted me to fall pregnant and give him a child. He said this would prove his manhood and this would secure our relationship”. (Kwa-Zulu Natal)

Even if only a few young women are enticed by small gifts, men may still adopt this general strategy of sexual harassment on the off-chance they’ll get lucky. The downside risks are invariably low when police are overstretched and male predators harass with near impunity. 29% of girls surveyed in Sub-Saharan Africa said that they had experienced physical or sexual violence. In Kwa-Zulu Natal, school boys pressure girls to engage in sexual activity, sometimes touching or publicly humiliating the girls.

“Sextortion”

Many poor girls and women are navigating schools, markets, offices and state services where corruption is rife. At each chokepoint, men may abuse their positions of power to extract not just financial payments but also sexual favours - ‘sextortion’.

The 2019 BBC documentary “Sex for Grades” exposed lecturers at the University of Lagos and the University of Ghana pressuring students for sex in exchange for better grades. In Johannesburg and Bogota, male water utility staff demanded sexual favours from women in exchange for water services.

This persists more widely, as a Nigerian woman shared with me,

(5) Poor Contraceptives

Why don’t sexually active women use contraceptives? While Southern Africa has higher rates of contraceptives than other African countries, as well as high knowledge, there is still a sizeable share of sexually active girls and young women who are not using contraceptives.

South African clinics often steer women towards injectables, since these are relatively cheap, can be obtained once every two or three months and do not require daily adherence. But interviewed women sometimes express negative side-effects:

“It was not good for my body… I felt dizzy, had terrible headache, menstruated for a long time and lost weight… I lost weight because of losing so much blood… I was bleeding too much”.

Intrauterine devices are an alternative, but in South Africa these are rarely used (1.6% of South African married women). Clinics may be steering women towards injectables (which do not require the same level of training), which are then discontinued due to negative side-effects.

(6) Risk-tolerance

Since sex carries risks - of disease, reputational damage, abandonment, unwanted pregnancy, and the cost of raising a child - women’s conditions for intimacy may partly depend on their tolerance for risk.

Anke Becker and co-authors demonstrate that there is considerably cross-country and within-country heterogeneity in self-reported patience, risk-taking and positive reciprocity. While different surveys yield slightly different results, these regional trends are broadly persistent.

What might explain this heterogeneity in long-termism? Unclear. Oded Galor and Ömer Özak suggest that agriculture may have reinforced a propensity to toil for later harvests. Beyond deep roots, delayed gratification may also be reinforced via cultural persuasion in folklore, religion and literature.

Obviously, risk-tolerance interacts with poverty, inequality and age. If a man with a job offers an impoverished teenage girl gifts and financial support, then she may be more inclined to take risks and not insist on a condom, so as to preserve that relationship.

Why is Male Devotion Under-Supplied?

Puzzled by Southern Africa’s exceptionally high rates of single motherhood, I’ve tried to theorise the market for romantic love. I’ve suggested that men are most likely to provide devotion if they want female companionship and children, while such women credibly insist on commitment. Men then compete with affection, reliability, monogamy and long-term support. But if men do not want female companionship or hands-on fatherhood then their incentives to signal devotion are considerably lower.

In Southern Africa, men with good jobs are scarce and they can bargain for preferred terms, sometimes pressuring poorer teenage girls and young women to have intimate relationships without using contraceptives. Opportunists may even harass girls and young women more widely, knowing that sanctions are weak.

Severe inequality and poverty mean that the market for love is lopsided. Although women may want love and long-term support, men can often obtain sex through lower-cost strategies. Today, only 38% of absent fathers in South Africa support their children financially.

Given these structural constraints, one plausibly effective intervention might be to increase access to safe, effective IUDs, so that Southern African women can truly control their bodies and have the children they want.

Their goal is to estimate the general-equilibrium effects of slavery by modelling what the antebellum economy would have looked like under full emancipation. Under this counterfactual, formerly enslaved workers would be free to choose their own labour supply, sector and location. Many would leave Southern agriculture and head north, to manufacturing and services. Allen et al estimate that “aggregate GDP rises by 9.1%”.

Did Female Emancipation raise East Asia’s GDP?

Similar questions can be asked about the general-equilibrium effects of female emancipation. But here we must distinguish between two transitions:

1. When societies loosen restrictions on women’s labour, enabling them to work in more productive sectors, this will mechanically raise economic output. But..

2. If those women also seize the means of persuasion and raise their standards for marriage and child-bearing, while men refuse to provide caring, committed egalitarian companionship, then fertility takes a hit, shrinks populations and mechanically lowers aggregate economic output.

Modernisation thus unleashes something once suppressed by patriarchy, a mismatch in men and women’s preferences. For this reason, female emancipation significantly raises women’s welfare, but whether it boosts long-run GDP depends on men’s adaptive preferences.

Stage 1: Industrialisation

Back in 1900, East Asian girls were raised to be obedient, uphold filial piety, accept being sent off to unknown homes, where they would toil for their in-laws, bear children for their husband’s lineage, even enduring abuse. To quote a historic saying “The husband sings and the wife follows”. Without her own ideas or independence, she was merely supposed to echo. Since divorce was condemned and girls were taught to please others, patrilineal clans were able to extract more labour and fertility than women would have otherwise supplied. I call these “patriarchal rents”.

Some communities even extracted that labour through physical violence - breaking and binding girls’ feet so that they might spend all day at the loom, unable to run away. Ideologies of male supremacy also trapped women in less productive sectors, since they were not permitted to take the imperial examinations nor even compete for prestigious domains.

20th century structural transformation was then transformative. Massive demand for factory labour raised the opportunity cost of keeping your daughter at home. Entire villages then despatched girls and women to work in sweatshops, bundled into over-crowded trains, sharing dirty dormitories, toiling long hours into the nights in bustling cities, expecting them to duly remit earnings back home.

Female employment thus raised East Asian GDP through both extensive and intensive growth.

• It was extensive because women who might otherwise have been secluded at home entered market work, increasing the sheer number of labour inputs in the economy. Women then did more work than before, raising children and working for pay.

• It was also intensive growth because women also moved out of unpaid household production and low-productivity agriculture into factories, offices, schools, hospitals and services. Even without any technological change, this sectoral reallocation mechanically raises economy-wide productivity: more labour is deployed in activities with higher output per worker. East Asia thus gained twice over: it mobilised more labour and moved that labour into more productive sectors, which in turn drove industrialisation and structural transformation

The USSR likewise mobilise female labour so as to spearhead industrialisation - not just in Russia but also in Muslim Central Asia.

By contrast, societies with a stronger preference for female seclusion have forfeited these economic benefits. In a geographical band that stretches from Casablanca to Calcutta, patriarchs confine women in home-based social reproduction and low-productivity agriculture in order to maintain honour. India has just as many working-age women as China, but far fewer of them work. Moreover, Indian women outpace men in higher education. Female seclusion mechanically reduces the size of the labour force, haemorrages talent, as well as aggregate GDP and GDP per worker.

Of course, there are other factors (such as labour demand, human capital, and infrastructure), but halving your workforce is significant.

Stage 2: Women Raise their Standards

As East Asians headed into cities and secured wage labour, they increasingly forged independent friendships, chose their own partners, and placed higher value on their own individual happiness.

For the first time in history, East Asian women then seized the means of persuasion. Rather than patriachs praising filial piety, female submission and sacrifice; feminist journalists, novelists, comic bloggers and stand-ups comedians challenged everyday sexism, pushed for their own prerogatives. Bestsellers include ‘Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982’ and ‘the Vegetarian’, movies like “Her Story” made $98m at the Box Office, and UrbanGirl Vivian’s story about women breaking out of stereotypes went viral. Now here’s a sprinkling of Yanyi Yangue’s performances on “Rock & Roast”:

In 2020, Yang Li asked, “Why are men so ordinary yet so confident” and launched thousands of memes, including male vitriol. She replied,

In my own interviews, Chinese young women tend to rejected the drudgery of cooking and cleaning for Lunar New Year festivals only for the men to have all the fun. Seeing their mothers’ social reproduction as a sacrifice, they increasingly put themselves first, and prioritised their own welfare. Young women became increasingly selective. Many are now raising the ‘reservation wage’ at which they will provide all the sex, care, companionship and laundry traditionally bundled with marriage.

But while East Asian women increasingly want egalitarian companionship, many men still prefer deference. Given this mismatch in preferences, they remain single. Moreover, men have myriad outside options, including drinking baijiu with male friends, enjoying sexy ladies in karaoke bars, online video games, convenience foods, marrying imported brides from poorer regions, or even turning to AI companions. As such, they are not necessarily prepared to pay the new price of marriage: egalitarian respect, care, companionship and emotional attentiveness. Instead, male-dominated platforms brim with resentment.

Now that women are free to avoid unsatisfactory unions and prefer egalitarian companionship, which many men are unwilling to supply because they prefer hierarchy, we see a rise of singles and collapse in fertility.

Some men still form families, of course. This may be because they are exceptionally charming, providing women with such love and care that they eagerly want to form a family together. Others may offer highly attractive terms on other dimensions. Meanwhile, in conservative communities, marriage may still be paramount for social respectability. But in East Asia’s big cities, where women can stay single and stigma-free, then the most disagreeable men on lower incomes generally struggle to attract.

Falling fertility has major macroeconomic implications

While AI could enable a massive boom in productivity, and may reduce the economic benefits of a larger workforce, East Asian growth could be slowed by ageing populations, rising dependency, higher savings and weaker domestic consumption.

Japan illustrates these headwinds. Between 1991 and 2019, Japan’s economy grew by just 0.83% annually, while the US achieved 2.53%. Many economists blamed Japanese monetary policy. But Fernández-Villaverde, Ventura, and Yao look at GDP growth per working-age adult; by this metric, Japan’s performance (1.39% annually) comes close to that of the United States (1.65%). Japan’s macroeconomic malaise is partly a function of its shrinking working-age population.

Is Female Emancipation Good for Growth?

When women are permitted to work, the labour force expands and this boosts aggregate GDP. If women also ditch low-productivity agriculture and bustle into more productive sectors (factories, hospitals and offices), then rising female labour force participation also means higher GDP per worker. East Asia thus prospered by mobilising women’s labour.

But this was only partial emancipation: East Asian patriarchs still instilled female sacrifice and filial piety to motivate marriage and social reproduction. In short, they extracted patriarchal rents.

As women forged careers, they also started rewriting the script, challenging sexist ideas of deference and duty. Many became more selective. Since men have often been unwilling to offer more egalitarian terms, women around the world appear to be going on strike, refusing patriarchal rents.

Modernisation thus unleashes something once suppressed by patriarchy: a fundamental mismatch in men and women’s preferences. For this reason, female emancipation is good for women’s welfare, but whether it increases long-run aggregate GDP really depends on men’s reactions. When women are free and prioritise their own happiness, they seem more inclined to make long-term investments with collaborators who offer more attractive terms. ❤️

Related Essays

• Patriarchal Rents

• Feminism:

  • Structural Transformation Enables Women to Rewrite the Script!

  • The Emergence of Chinese Feminist Consciousness

  • Ghosting the Patriarchy

• Misogynist backlash

  • China’s Economic Slowdown & Social Media

• East Asian culture:

  • How does exogamy affect economics and culture?

  • Economic Development & Cultural Change

  • Ideals of Upward Mobility

  • Does Filial Piety clash with Romantic Love?

• Singles and fertility:

  • Why are Childless Singles on the Rise in East Asia?

  • Why are Chinese Marriages Plummeting?

  • The Global Rise of Singles

  • The Global Collapse of Coupling & Fertility

  • Why don’t men want so many kids?

Colonial officials relied on chiefs to collect taxes, coerce cheap labour, and keep order in their overstretched territories. When senior men protested that wives, pawns and slaves were escaping to mines, markets and railway camps, officials began to bargain. The resulting colonial-patriarchal compromise preserved husbands’ control over wives’ labour and fathers’ claims to bridewealth. But, as I learnt during my PhD research in Zambia, women leveraged new opportunities to secure their own advantage.

To recall, the binding constraint on Sub-Saharan African agricultural production was not land but labour. A man could cultivate as many farms as he could command workers, and he did so by acquiring more wives, children, slaves, pawns, clients and junior kin. Women planted, weeded, pounded grain, fetched water and firewood, made pots, bore and raised children and produced the surplus that advanced men’s status. In both matrilineal and patrilineal societies, men incorporated wives to expand their own lineage. Girls and women were also valued booty: seized by warriors to become concubines, resold for profit, or redistributed to consolidate male alliances. Commercialisation made command over labour even more valuable, raising bride prices.

European colonisers marshalled superior firepower and brutal coercion to secure their own commercial advantage. African chiefs were integral to governance: collecting head or hut taxes and supplying contingents of able-bodied men so as to build infrastructure, like ports, roads, bridges, telegraphs and railways. These projects were invariably violent - in 1940s Portuguese Mozambique, over 800,000 Africans were compelled to cultivate cotton.

To maintain this alliance, European authorities permitted courts to uphold bridewealth, paternal authority and domestic servitude, while officials curbed women’s independent migration by requiring urban passes and punishing adultery. Cumulatively, they sought to reinforce men’s labour rents - extracting more labour than women would supply if they valued their own welfare and could freely exit.

But women, girls and junior men nevertheless resisted - seeking greater autonomy, as well as relationships based on mutual attraction and even companionship. Former slaves, concubines and unhappy wives escaped to small but emerging opportunities for wage labour at seaports, plantations, timber concessions, mining centres, railway camps and urban markets. Flocking to towns, women brewed beer, traded food, formed informal unions, cooked food, cleaned clothes, and sold sex, and sought men who would treat them better. Growing export markets thus raised the importance of command over labour, while simultaneously threatening to weaken men’s rents.

This cultural fist-fight is revealing. Slavery waned as pacification curtailed raiding, wage labour provided exit options, and missions emboldened quests for personal freedoms. However, husbands’ claims over their wives’ labour proved more durable, because marriage and child-bearing remained both prestigious and constraining. Patriarchy - as a social technology of extraction - certainly outlived slavery.

My argument rests on three core claims. First, in pre-colonial Sub-Saharan Africa, men gained wealth and power by commanding women’s labour and bridewealth. Second, the colonial administrations relied on chiefs and thus protected many of these claims. Third, women, junior men, slaves, converts, and migrants nevertheless leveraged urban markets, native courts and Christian missions to secure their own advantage.

Pre-Colonial Wives as Workers

Paul Du Chaillu became famous in the 1860s as the first European outsider to confirm the existence of gorillas. Journeying through Gabon, staying in different villages, he also observed local gender relations:

“The women not only provide all the food, they are also the beasts of burden…

A man’s great ambition is to have a great many wives… It is, in fact, their duty to feed him... The man buys his wife of her father for a sum agreed on, often when she is but a child… Men marry at every opportunity... Obedience is the wife’s first duty, and it is enforced without mercy…

Such a whip as is figured below is an important instrument found in every house. It is made of the hide of the hippopotamus or manatee, and is a barbarous weapon, as hard and heavy as iron. This is laid on with no light hand, the worthy husband crying out, “ Rascal, do you think I paid my slaves for you for nothing ?” The wives are more harshly treated than the slaves-a stroke of the whip often leaves a life-long mark; and I saw very few women in all my travels who had not some such marks on their persons…

Our party from here consisted of twenty men, thirteen women, and two boys. I caused the women to be relieved of their loads, to their surprise, and that of their idle husbands, who could not understand why I should object to a woman doing all the drudgery”.

Raiding for Wives and Slaves

Young men also sought wives and their labour, but often struggled to afford the bridewealth. In this context, slave-raiding could be alluring. In what is now Guinea-Conakry, Layes Kunda recalled that Samori’s men returned with women captives and were asked,

“Where did you get these beautiful women? … The men said, “A new war has just started, if you go and capture some people, they are yours.” This is how Samori’s war became popular. They captured people then took them to Sierra Leone to exchange them for guns”.

19th century Sub-Saharan Africa was especially violent: girls were often taken as captives, later used as wives, concubines or gifts to maintain fraternal alliances. Beyond warfare, girls were also given as pawns or wives, expected to work as service labourers.

The Colonial-Patriarchal Alliance

Sub-Saharan African men accrued wealth in women - as slaves, pawns, or servile wives. They prospered through labour coercion. But this created a predicament for European authorities who had promised their publics they were on a ‘civilising mission’, yet that same project required partnering with African authorities who gained strength through labour coercion:

“The task of the emancipation of the individual,” wrote Governor General Brunet in 1920, “which our ideological concepts incline us to follow, risks profoundly troubling the native order and loosening a social system upon which our domination rests”.

African authorities were often so reliant on slavery that colonisers were nervous that bans would trigger revolt. The West African Frontier Force, comprising 12 British officers and 500 African rank and file, was originally mandated to stop the slave trade, yet with strict instructions not to enter any house or yard. But even this triggered unrest. Chiefs petitioned, voicing anger that women were being abducted and deserting their husbands. (It remains unclear whether women were leaving voluntarily or not). To quell backlash, police were prohibited from interfering with domestic slavery.

When officials feared unrest, they trod cautiously. In the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast (a protectorate and Muslim-majority), the commissioner-in-chief warned his troops not to cause ‘trouble’ by interfering with people’s slaves. Likewise in French Soudan, when senior men expressed resistance, Brevie (1937) urged local administrators to ignore violations of individual liberties.

If colonial authorities were nervous to intervene against slavery, they were even more hesitant to challenge patriarchal rents.

Bridewealth or Slave-Trading?

European officers were deeply divided over whether to intervene in local patriarchy. Some saw bridewealth payments for young girls as akin to slave-trading (which they had pledged to curtail), while others stayed quiet for fear of upsetting rural authorities. One administrator in Koutiala (French Soudan/Mali) described it bluntly,

“Under the pretext of marriage, the exchanges of young girls or women are practiced. In reality, these exchanges are nothing less than disguised purchases and sales. In her new milieu, this child is, in reality, considered to be a captive... She is [often] exchanged a second time, either for another woman or for a horse, cattle, or some cowries… Under the pretext of bridewealth exchange, this is nothing less than a brutal sale”.

He argued that such marriages should be considered ‘acts of trade’ in people, which was prohibited in 1905. But Dakar refused. An official from the governor general’s office warned,

“Do not meddle in native custom except with the utmost circumspection. The act of agreement among two families to exchange two women is the guarantee of reciprocity. Marriage, in both Muslim practice and native custom, has all the characteristics of a sale. Do not, however, treat this as an infraction of the slave trade ordinance”. As a compromise, he suggested that young women ‘give their consent’.

In Bamako’s provincial courts, adultery cases comprised a third of all misdemeanours. One local commander emphasised that this was not about sexual passion, but rather women’s desperate escape:

“The young girl is married, or more exactly, exchanged against bridewealth, by her father or brother who has paternal power over her… Once arranged, the bride is never consulted regarding her antipathies, the disproportion of ages, or the incompatibility of character. One only examines the amount of the bridewealth.

The social condition of the married woman is thus very close to that of servitude: the most arduous work is given to her, she is often beaten. It is not necessary to search for passion in adultery; instead, it is simply the actions of a servant seeking a less onerous master”.

Patriarchal Parallels in French & British Africa

After the French colonised Gabon and Cameroon, they required, and even paid, chiefs to monitor girls’ age at marriage and the costs of bridewealth, hoping to encourage marriages based on the couple’s consent. But payments remained significant. As long as men profited from additional labour hands, they sought more wives and bridewealth from their daughters’ marriages.

• In 1924, a Catholic missionary in Edea reported that “Polygamists have many resources – all his wives work for him and so he can more easily buy young girls”.

• Chiefs in Southern Cameroon’s forests often had 10, 35, or even a thousand wives working on their cocoa farms. By cultivating more land, they could pay for yet more wives. To compete, men without resources might sell their own kin to raise cash.

• In 1929, an African woman in Dschang was murdered by her father after she deserted her husband and returned home, because her father did not want to repay the bridewealth.

• In 1935, a French administrator reported that a Balu man had inherited his dead brother’s widow and was “eager to sell her again to the highest bidder”.

• Four years later, French attorney Robert Blin condemned African fathers for “speculative profiteering, slavery and prostitution”, recommending that such practices be punished with imprisonment and heavy fines.

• Chiefs reportedly raided villages, stripped female captives naked, chained them at the neck and dragged them to construction zones.

• In Southern Cameroon, chiefs expanded practices known as mvia and mgba -providing temporary sexual access to their own wives.

• In Gabon, a Fang husband could give male guests and neighbours temporary sexual access to his wife in exchange for field labour or other compensation.

• In Gabon, fathers and uncles forced their daughters into marriage or remarriage in the quest for maximum bridewealth. They rejected French accusations that this was equivalent to the sale of women.

Yet French authorities moved carefully. A 1935 report acknowledged that “encouraging moral and religious evolution risks the grave perturbation of native leaders.”

While many rightly emphasise Africa’s cultural and geographical diversity, as well as differences between French and British rule, similar conflicts over women and bridewealth occurred in East and Southern Africa.

A Gusii patriarch (in what is now Kenya) could cultivate as much land as he had labourers, aka wives. As Sarah LeVine remarks, “the more wives he married, the more land he could bring under cultivation, the more daughters whose marriages would bring in cattle as bridewealth, the more sons to herd and defend the cattle and keep the homestead safe from outside attack. The ideal was proliferation - of wives, children, herds and crops”. Much of the food was farmed and processed by women, who were still derided as inferior minors. Women themselves often saw men as superior and more powerful.

Most fathers wanted to marry daughters to richer, often older men who could pay substantial bridewealth. When young women eloped with younger men, fathers and brothers lost prospective cattle, so some appealed to Native Courts (African-staffed, British-backed), which usually stipulated bridewealth for legitimate marriage, thereby affirming men’s labour rents.

But women fought back, leveraging newfound rights. In 1959, Nyaabe told the court that her kin had gone “to see cattle near Nyaramba in order to marry me off by force”, so she ran away to the accused. Her brothers had accepted eleven cows, but that union later collapsed over bridewealth disputes. When she returned home, her brother “tied me up with rope and beat me so much”. To legitimise their claims, women emphasised their own ‘agency’: “I went by my own choice” (kwa hiari yangu) or “by my own desire” (kwa upendo wangu). This speaks to a new moral lexicon.

In court, Kemunto expressly resented being “auctioned like a goat”.

Female Runaways

In 1914 Southern Rhodesia, chiefs and elders complained to colonial authorities, “You do not help us in the only thing that is vital to our tribe and our family”. Officials likewise recorded, “The great complaint we hear from natives is in regard to the women who get on trains and run away”. Across Sub-Saharan Africa, rural patriarchs were alarmed by women escaping to towns, jeopardising their control of bridewealth and young men’s labour obligations.

In early 1900s Abeokuta, some women fled to railway camps where they sought men on higher earnings. The Egba ruler requested the Railway Commissioners’ help in returning the women or restoring bridewealth.

In court, women presented their cases strategically so as to secure their own autonomy. As part of colonisers’ compromise with native authorities, slaves were legally entitled to self-redemption upon payment, but wives were not. In Abeokuta records, therefore, women perennially insisted they were former slaves (not wives).

“Kehinde bought me as a slave when I was a child, after some years he made me his wife. I have two children living for him out of ten, others died during child labour. Kehinde hardly liked me or cared for me; I have to serve as a labourer to earn a living and feed my children. I offer to pay redemption fee; I want to be free” - Amuda from Ijemo, 1916. The court granted her freedom without payment of the redemptive fee, but gave him custody.

“He said I was his father’s slave and fought with me, he threatened to sell me. I and my children want to leave” - Oyelabi, 1915.

Slaves or Wives?

On the Gold Coast, women increasingly petitioned the courts, claiming to have been former slaves now seeking their freedoms. Adjuah Filamponomah insisted that her husband had exploited her so severely that it had all the characteristics of slavery.

“He pawned one of my children! and with the money he married a young woman. I work in the gold mines and bring in gold and give it to him but he gives me none of it.. and whenever I go in search of gold and am unsuccessful, he scolded me.. He gives me no food... He does not consult me as his wife on family matters... I looked upon him as my master and as he is free I considered I was free too”.

Colonial authorities perennially struggled to ascertain whether a woman was a slave or a wife, since both cases involved a man making a payment and thereafter asserting dominance. This created a real challenge, because they had promised to respect native customs regarding wives.

Men leveraged this same legal loophole. In 1920s Sierra Leone, British officers raised concerns that African men were redeeming their slaves only to rename them as ‘wives’, who laboured under similar circumstances.

“Young girls would be redeemed in large numbers for the purpose of cohabitation, as being a cheap form of marriage by which dowry is avoided”, Captain Stanley.

“The word wife is deployed as a blind, there being no marriage, as native custom requires. If a case so clearly proved as this one elaborate cannot secure a conviction, it is a step towards legalising slavery under this form of alias,” Lieutenant Cowrie.

Urban Passes & Female Flight

To placate rural elders’ concerns about female runaways, the governments of both Southern and Northern Rhodesia came to insist that women could only enter towns with passes. Also in Basutoland, it was an offence for a woman to leave without her father or husband’s permission. As a chief native commissioner wrote in 1933,

“We are endeavoring to assist the kraal natives to control their women”.

But enforcement was weak. Escaping across the lengthy border, Basoto headed into the Rand, where they brewed beer and supplied domestic and sexual services to single men. So too on the Copperbelt, women kept manoeuvring. Some maintained economic independence through beer-brewing, trading or prostitution; others hid savings with friends and relatives, built networks of reciprocal support, or avoided binding marriages in favour of informal liaisons with easy exit. Even when repatriated to rural areas, women covertly returned to town.

Testifying to their quest for autonomy, a rural official in Southern Rhodesia declared in 1924 that “native women are asserting their rights under our law to quite an extraordinary extent”.

African Christians & Romantic Love

A more genuinely disruptive force came from young African Christian leaders and teachers, who preached a modern message of romantic love. These charismatic young men condemned older patriarchs as greedy and predatory, then positioned themselves as moral leaders.

Such discourses were immensely appealing to other young unmarried men, who struggled to afford bridewealth. African catechists condemned the chiefs for “wife hoarding” and “debasing their race”. Beti priest Leon Messi championed Christian love marriage as a romance between a free man and a free woman, based on individual desire and understanding. African Christians Joseph Zou and Hermann Mbono likewise built chapels, married rural couples, fought polygamy, preached consent and presented themselves as the moral vanguard of a new society founded on personal choice. In Gabon too, younger, mission-educated, literate men contested chiefs’ power.

Christian Domesticity & Mission Schools

Many historians have argued that colonial governments and Christian missions promoted monogamous domesticity. Girls were often trained in sewing, cooking, hygiene, and childcare, while boys were more likely to be prepared for skilled work. Girls’ aspirations were thus circumscribed. Campaigns against indigenous religions and political institutions also displaced those those women who had gained authority as spirit mediums, queen mothers and oracles.

But to assess whether Christianity really reinforced patriarchy, we must consider the entire ideological package and relevant counter-factual. In many regions, communities had legitimised child marriage, pawnship, slave-raiding, wife-sales, assimilative slavery, polygyny and domestic drudgery. African Christians ostensibly rejected all but the last. They pushed for radical ideas of romantic love.

Mission schools certainly reaffirmed marriage and motherhood, but they do not deserve blame for the gargantuan burden of domestic labour. That was sustained by persistently high fertility, poverty, and a dearth of social infrastructure. In the mid-20th century, very few African homes had private taps or electricity. That meant long walks to fetch firewood and water, scrubbing clothes by hand, cooking for 6 or 7 children. Bearing many children, many women were reluctant to leave abusive marriages. Instead, they tended to ‘shipikisha’ (endure).

A further issue is that even when communities formally endorsed marital monogamy, men still championed the husband’s authority over the wife, but now sought to obtain without paying bridewealth. Even if women only had one husband, many still complained of abuse, abandonment, neglect and infidelity.

In some ways, monogamy merely led to a more egalitarian distribution of wives, permitting more men to marry and benefit from women’s labour, while wealthier men still formed multiple relationships on the side. In Gabon, wealthier men would simply enjoy ‘une copine’ (girlfriend) whom they gave gifts.

Christianity thus weakened some older patriarchal institutions - like slavery, child marriage, polygyny and bridewealth - while preserving others.

Polygyny

As with other European interventions, missionaries often struggled to secure local support. Patriarchs were often so adamant to maintain polygyny that they refused to send their children to mission schools, for fear of a corrupting influence.

Bastian Becker finds that mission schooling spread less successfully in communities that favoured polygyny. Mission presence raised primary completion by 8.2 percentage points in non-polygynous areas, but only 3.9 percentage points in polygynous areas. Literacy rose by 11.0 percentage points versus 6.4. Polygynous African men valued this institution so highly that they sacrificed schooling rather than limiting themselves to just one wife.

In Belgian Africa, Manono put it bluntly,

“As long as the Government does not improve the situation of native farmers by providing them with agricultural machines, I do not think polygamy can be suppressed in the customary areas”.

Colonisers protected Gender Rents

African rural patriarchs lobbied hard to maintain control over women’s labour and children because these were central to their own wealth and power. While colonial authorities expressed strong reservations about slavery, polygamy, child marriage and bridewealth, they nevertheless authorised restrictions on female mobility, paternal custody, and punishments for adultery. In this patriarchal alliance, gender rents were preserved.

When we study how European colonialism impacted gender relations across diverse world regions, we must remember that they struggled to rule alone, but instead struck bargains with local patriarchs. They sometimes condemned or prohibited the most violent customs - slavery, pawnship, sati, forced marriage - especially when pushed by humanitarians back home. But they generally permitted men to maintain gender rents, so as to keep them on side.

The specific protections varied by place. In much of Sub-Saharan Africa, men prospered through control of women’s labour and lobbied for these rents. In South Asia, men’s honour and business networks were more dependent on arranged marriages, chastity and purity, so sought to preserve these ‘kinship rents’. In both regions, colonisers allied with patriarchs, so that both could maximise extraction.

Colonisers neither imposed European patriarchy nor preserved timeless tradition. They forged alliances with male elites and supported the patriarchal claims those men valued most. In Sub-Saharan Africa, moral panic over female runaways exposed patriarchal priorities: labour rents.

Related Essays

• Patriarchal Rents

• Female Power for Whom?

• Are Queen Mothers Over-Rated?

• Male Violence and the Myth of Female Freedom

In talk at Stanford, I synthesize cross-regional evidence to assess competing explanations, then offer a novel theory on the Global Islamic Revival.

To persuade you of this topic’s importance, let me share some new graphs on how Muslim-majority countries differ in terms of religiosity, beliefs towards gender and sexuality, as well as women’s economic outcomes.

Muslim-majority countries are exceptionally religious

Only 3% of Muslim-majority respondents say that religion is not very important.

Besides tracking beliefs over different waves, we can also compare by age.

Young Latin Americans are increasingly leaving their faith, becoming less likely to say that religion is very important, pray daily, and attend weekly church. By contrast, Indonesian and Malaysian Muslims show no such departure, they are just as religious as their parents.

Muslim-majority countries place far greater weight on the afterlife.

In the graph below, I distinguish between Muslim-majority and ex-communist Muslim-majority countries, since in the latter Islam was heavily repressed. Multiple generations were not free to practice their faith.

In my interviews, Muslims repeatedly tell me that this life is “temporary”:

• In Mumbai, Abdul told me that when a fellow market trader was economically distressed and brought his wife to work, he intervened saying, “this temporary life is just a drop in the ocean, endure whatever hardship”, keep the wife in seclusion so as to get to eternal paradise.

• In Luton, Hassan (a restaurant owner) translated the Quranic sura on the wall, adding “our time on earth is just like a bird perching on a branch, before making its journey”.

• In London, Zainab warned her nephew, “Don’t let your dunya be your akhira” (meaning don’t prioritise the temporary life over eternal paradise).

Believers may forgo material rewards in order to maximise utility over eternity. I call this “the paradise premium”.

Muslim-majority countries have closed gender gaps in education

Back in the 2000s, international development agencies championed female education, hoping that this would spur higher female employment. The good news is that Muslim-majority countries have belatedly closed the gap in schooling. However…

Female labour force participation is still 16 percentage points lower in Muslim-majority countries.

The exceptional high scorers include Sub-Saharan African countries like Mali and Niger (where women work in agriculture) as well as Qatar (which is mostly immigrant).

Muslim-majority countries tend to affirm male supremacy

Muslim-majority countries cluster in agreement that when jobs are scarce, men have more right to a job.

The Afterlife Penalty

To theorise how strong religiousity, belief in the afterlife and concern for gender segregation may suppress female employment, I’ve made a little visual.

Below, I show how the utility gained from women working alongside men varies by religiosity and concern for ‘free-mixing’.

• For secular people, even as there is a greater likelihood of mixing with unrelated men, women’s work generates the same utility. This blue line is flat.

• For religious believers, women working alongside unrelated men generates much much lower utility. The red line slopes downwards.

This visual is downward sloping because (1) some religions care more than others about interactions between unrelated men and women; and (2) even within the same religion, there is still significant variation (e.g. Indonesia versus Egypt).

Muslim-majority countries tend to prefer male leaders and condemn homosexuality

For those interested in cross-cultural variation, these differences are rather large, and worthy of further study.

British Muslims have different beliefs to their compatriots

British Muslims tend to be much more religious and strongly support the criminalisation of burning holy books. Unlike the general public, they do not strongly oppose gender segregation nor do they strongly oppose the legalisation.

What caused the Global Islamic Revival?

In my talk, I’ll discuss the competing explanations then offer a novel theory.

First, I argue that there was a crucial transformation in Muslim identity: from locally-based syncretism to state-attempted secular modernization to a reinvigoration of a transnational Muslim identity.

Second, I propose the Prestige-Piety Feedback Loop: modernization paradoxically amplified strengthened adherence to jurisprudential Islam and deference to credentialed religious authorities. As Muslims gained unprecedented access to jurisprudential knowledge, then piety and gender segregation became primary markers of status, with profound implications for women’s status.

Feedback is always welcome.