If you have read anything by me before, you probably have good reason to believe that sexism exists. It permeates every institution that holds up this painfully unequal, destructive, nation. It has existed and permeated since the United States became a nation, and it existed before then in the United Kingdom. And, not to overstep my privileged Euro-American bounds, I would contend that sexism is prevalent in most modern societies, and has been for a relatively long time. Fun thought, I know. But why? Have women always been considered inferior? Or was there some catalyst, like a Big Bang proportioned arm wrestling contest that created a gendered hierarchy with women on the bottom? Delightful as I'm sure that would have been, sadly, the explanation for sexism is much more boring, and much more real. The answer is capitalism, as it is the answer to most woes the world faces today. At the risk of boring you with too many more rhetorical questions, I'll just explain without prompting myself.
In the academic world, until recently, it actually was believed that women have always been on somewhat of a lower plane than men, in all societies. The undisputed presence of matriarchal and matrilineal societies didn't even convince the dudebros of the anthropological world otherwise. However, the dudebros were wrong. Sexism isn't innate, and it's incredibly dangerous to even venture to assume so. The issue lies in agriculture, to begin with.
Hunter-gatherer societies had a subsistence based economy. This means that they foraged and hunted for what they needed to survive only for the limited foreseeable future. After that, they hunted and foraged some more. With this kind of economy, societies were nomadic and a lot more concerned with community well-being than individual needs. Within this community, the skills and work of all constituent members was valued. In many hunter-gatherer societies, women, men, and older children all participated in group hunting missions. And even when women took most of the responsibility for child-rearing and domestic labor, their labor was not valued any less. If anything, women had more power in these societies, because family was not private, but communal. Women had control over the distribution of resources, a significant political voice, and guaranteed bodily autonomy. Divorce was common, abortions were practiced using herbs and other earlier methods, and women generally enjoyed equality with men. But once agriculture came into play, women were slowly relegated to the newfound privacy of the home. With the development of a stationary agricultural system came surplus. Surplus food that could be traded with neighboring societies at a higher volume. Property became an important factor in considering power. There was a distinctive shift from the needs of the community to the needs of the individual. Considering the fact that women's importance was contingent on the communal aspect of society, women were slowly robbed of the equality they previously had.
In North America, indigenous societies also had equal, matrilineal societies until the invasion of the New World. When fur traders from France landed in the Americas, they introduced a way to make a profit out of the hunting performed by men. Making the men economically more powerful than women introduced gender inequality to the indigenous nations in North America.
This inequality has been maintained and exasperated by capitalism, which places an individual's personal and communal worth in their wage-earning capabilities, while limiting the capability to earn sufficient wages to traditionally masculine professions. Domestic work is undervalued, restricting the worth that can be given to women, and preventing women from being equal to men.
Going forward, we must reinvent our economic system and replace it with a communal system that values all work equally. This doesn't necessarily mean tearing everything down and returning to hunting and gathering, although I do not think we should rule it out.
