Fire in the Stone: Prehistoric Fiction from Charles Darwin to Jean M. Auel

5. Sex and Gender

5. Sex and Gender [T]he human family is the result of the reciprocity of hunting, the addition of a male to the mother-plus-young social group of the monkeys and apes. —Sherwood L. Washburn and C. S. Lancaster, “The Evolution of Hunting” (1968) More efficient hunting permitted the women to stay more often at home instead of following the hunters to get their share of the kill. “Woman’s place is in the cave,” Father began to say. —Roy Lewis, What We Did to Father (1960) Revising Genesis The biblical account of human origin, while vague about many other aspects of the divine creation, is unequivocal about how there came to be two human sexes and what the difference between them signifies. A male God first created from the dust of the earth a male human being in his image to tend Eden. Later, as an afterthought, he created a woman out of an inessential part of Adam’s body (a rib) to be his companion (Genesis 2:20–23). The human sexes, then, were created at different times out of different substances for different purposes, and the male had seniority, and retains priority, over the female. Once created, Eve immediately displays the weakness to be expected of a secondary being made from disposable material. There is only one divine interdiction in Eden, but she breaks it and uses her naked charms to ensure that Adam breaks it too. The future mother of Cain is gullible, fickle, disobedient, and manipulative from the beginning ; her first significant act is to use her sexual power to damage male integrity. Genesis could hardly be more explicit: God punishes Eve with painful childbearing and mandates that for humanity’s good 125 ▲ she must in future be ruled by Adam (Genesis 3:16). Scripture implies that subsequent generations of men will be justified in blaming Eve’s daughters for everything that has gone wrong in their lives. One of the first joint tasks of Darwinism and paleoanthropology after 1859 was to revise Genesis so as to tell a new story about how, why, from when, and to what extent men and women differed. Darwinism provided a credible naturalistic theory of human origin. It reduced the role of a supernatural Creator to providing, at best, the “vital spark” that set the evolutionary process unfolding at the beginning of time; for many, it simply disposed of him altogether. But to get rid of God was also to dispose of the divine anathema on womanhood . Even the obstetric “curse” could be naturalistically explained by evolutionary theory. Babies’ heads had expanded at a rate too fast for mothers’ pelvic openings to accommodate comfortably. Indeed, labor pains affirmed that evolution by natural selection was an imperfect and contingent process. What kind of omniscient Designer could have failed to anticipate, chosen to ignore, or refused to remedy one of the more obvious consequences of our increasing braininess? Darwinism, then, tended to restore Woman to the primary status that observation and natural logic demanded: Man came out of her, not the other way around. But how, in the new naturalistic universe, to account for the universal fact of women’s social subordination to men, into which relative size, physical strength, and intellectual attainment all seemed to factor? The answers surely lay in human evolutionary history, but human fossils were tantalizingly silent on the question of prehistoric gender roles. Early paleoanthropology had consequently to extrapolate from the behavior of modern savages and of nonhuman primates. There is a strong argument to be made for locating the origin of first-wave feminism in the perceived need to revise Genesis in the Darwinian aftermath. If there was no divine mandate for female social subordination , then it could well be a human phenomenon, and if it was, humans could change it. In such an insight lay the embryo of the current usage of gender to emphasize the constructedness and transformability of human sexual politics in contrast to the relative fixity of biological sex. At the same time there was a rapid growth after 1859 in what we now call scientific sexism. Most theorists in the new discipline of sexology were male, and had the vested interest in preserving the status quo typical of all dominant groups. Many of them proposed that there were essential biological or physiological reasons for female subordinaThematic Evolution 126 ▲ tion. If not...