The Sexual Division of Labor

Written by John Keith Hart

Introduction

The idea of a sexual division of labor rests on asserting that men and women are fitted to
mutually exclusive, but complementary occupational roles owing to their specialized
interdependence in reproduction, namely protection of child-bearing females by socially
active and physically stronger males. This idea could be as old as the human species itself— or not. If it is true, all previous human societies were built on the premise that this, the most profound of social divisions was originally grounded in our nature as a sexually dimorphic species. Yet today the world is split by a movement to abolish the idea of sex divisions and its institutional practice. The norm of heterosexuality is coming under fire, at least in the western industrial countries. Even when sexuality is admitted to being genetically transmitted, feminists distinguish between nature and society and insist that male and female role differences should be attributed, not primarily to our genes, but to gender, a cultural and therefore malleable construct.1

This attempt to delink social organization and sex divisions is the most profound political
movement of our times, more significant by far than struggles against imperialism, racism,
and class dominance. For it involves nothing less than the emancipation of human society
from its archaic and passive underpinnings in natural categories sustained by breeding
imperatives. I believe that this movement will ultimately be successful, in that it represents a necessary response to the new social and material conditions brought about by industrialization on a global scale. Society no longer needs a specific domestic arrangement between men and women to reproduce itself. That is why institutional sex divisions are decaying most rapidly in advanced industrial areas, but also to a varying degree worldwide.

Humanity has only just begun to break out of the agrarian phase of its existence, a phase
that lasted some 10,000 years. The sexual division of labor in agrarian societies rests on an
exaggeration of male dominance in both domestic and public spheres. Society was ruled by
father-figures or, if you prefer Greek, patriarchs. This was especially true in tribal and
peasant societies, where male household heads were the semi-autonomous building blocks
of law and order. One major exception to this preindustrial pattern was slavery, particularly
in its Ancient Mediterranean and New World variants. Slave owners sometimes aspired to
replenish their supplies through war and trade, rather than rely on the family organization of ordinary workers. The Caribbean region—which entered the industrial era as a decomposing slave society, then partially rediscovered the virtues of peasant reproduction, and now sits uneasily on the fringes of an industrialization process whose engine is elsewhere—this region provides a peculiarly complex, even confused vantage point from which to observe the four processes discussed in the four parts and overview listed above.

1. The sexual division of labor in our species history

There is no topic about which we care so much and know so little as the origin of our
species. Paleoanthropology has made significant scientific advances in recent decades; but
the role of ideology in explaining its discoveries is no less prominent today than it was
among the Victorians. In a society like the United States, where jogging yuppies are more
abundant than factory workers, experts tend to stress the importance of bipedalism more
than tool use. They are just as likely to support their preferred family norms with
extravagant claims that there is evidence for them in hominid evolution.2
My remarks on this subject are both speculative and amateur.

The original condition of life is to produce and reproduce alone. Simple organisms evolved
into more complex forms with specialized parts. Some of them in turn increased their
complexity by evolving sexual complementarity and aggregation into social units as
conditions of their reproduction and collective survival. This evolution entailed the
emergence of some creatures with large bodies and brains, considerable longevity,
a prolonged period of juvenile dependence, and complex social organization of a sort rivalled only by the insects. Of all the higher mammals, the primates and of them the hominids developed furthest along this line of evolution. The story can be told in terms of what are sometimes called “life history parameters.”3

Larger bodies need larger brains; but if the proportion of neurological tissue increases over
time—if the brain/body size ratio rises—more of the brain is released from passive
regulation of bodily functions for active use in processing information. Brain size affects
longevity—unlike life expectancy, the average age of the one percent longest living members of a species—and, by slowing down the rate of maturation: periods of gestation and juvenile dependence are attenuated. Individual litters and birth spacing increase further the length of time required for reproductive replacement. Human beings are, by this standard, an extreme case of a species which invests in programming a few dependent offspring, a process requiring specific social arrangements for care and protection of the young.

The question is whether such an arrangement implied in our case the “pair-bonding” of
monogamous mating couples.4 Human males are bigger and stronger than females,
although the latter generally have higher brain/body size ratios, a fact that might make them “smarter” on average. Comparison with other primates suggests that such sexual
dimorphism may be associated with competition between polygamous males (for example,
gorillas and baboons), but then we do not have pronounced canine teeth, which ought to
accompany a pattern of male fighting. Other primates and monkeys are monogamous (for
example, gibbons and lemurs), but the sexes tend to be of equal body size in such cases.

In other words, the marital conduct of early humanity is as much a matter for speculations
today as it was for Lewis H. Morgan. Nevertheless, some very ancient differences exist
between men and women, reaching far beyond modern consciousness to the origins and
growth of our species itself. This does not mean that we must be passive in the face of such facts, only that we should be sure of our theoretical grounds for asserting that society need no longer be founded on such differences.

Sexual difference is a common reproductive principle among plants and animals, including
primates. Apart from some insects and perhaps lions, this only extends to production in the
case of human beings. It is quite common for temporary compartments to arise when
females are occupied with their dependent offspring, for example, when male birds take on
the main responsibility for provisioning their nest.5 But among no other animal or bird do
males and females habitually carry out different tasks in the food quest. We have good
reason to suppose that the sexual division of labor—specialization in production along lines determined by sex differences in reproduction—is unique to the human species and
therefore a plausible candidate for inclusion in the cluster of features that account for our
distinctive origin.

If labor is the activity of organisms, whether singly or in groups, to secure the provision of
their material needs, it may be said to be divided when some forego producing all their own
needs expecting that others will meet the gap through their own complementary surplus production. Specialization introduces the need for distributive mechanisms assuring the link between production and consumption threatened by any move away from self-sufficiency. The more complex the specialization, the more remote and vulnerable is the distribution mechanism.6

The archetypical distributive mechanism articulating a sexual division of labor is marriage.
This is a guarantee that each side of a mating couple will supply the needs that the other’s
sex—perhaps gender would be more appropriate—prevents them from providing. Of
course, marriage partners in practice are usually flexible enough to help across conventional boundaries when needed. One consequence of a routinized division of labor, however, is that social interdependence is much increased beyond the requirements of occasional breeding. Such a development gave rise to the now conventional identification of men with public life and women with the private domestic sphere.7 Whatever natural differences once existed between the sexes were culturally exaggerated to promote closer interdependence.

The earliest human societies were, to the best of our current knowledge,8 small groups of 25 to 50 individuals formed out of close family ties, living off the planet in much the same way as the other mammals—as nomadic collectors of plants and animals. Generally, men hunted larger mammals, often over quite long distances, while women gathered plants and other foodstuffs near to the camp. One justification for such a division might be that men are stronger and faster; another that women’s mobility was hampered by young children whom they carried and normally breast-fed for three years or more. Based on studies of contemporary hunter-gatherers, women might have provided the staples of family diet, while the men’s erratic kills occasioned distribution between wider social groups. Ernestine Friedl suggests that male power under such circumstances may reflect their proportionate contribution of large animals to total production—with whale-hunting Inuit (Eskimos) ate one extreme and Kalahari San at the other.9 In general, mobile band societies seem to be too small and weak to permit male dominance to any developed degree.

(…to be continued)

Sources:

1. M. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere (eds), Women, Culture and Society (Stanford, 1974); special issue, “Development and the sexual division of labour,” Signs 7.2, 1981.
2. Compare L.H. Morgan, Ancient Society (New York, 1877) with C.O. Lovejoy, “The origin of man,” Science (23 January 1981).
3. G. Sacher, “Maturation and longevity in relation to cranial capacity in hominid evolution,” 1975.
4. T.H. Clutton-Brock (ed), Primate Ecology (New York, 1977); A.F. Richard, Primate Ecology and Social Organization (North Carolina, 1982).
5. D. Lack, Ecological Adaptations for Breeding in Birds (London, 1968).
6. K. Hart, “on commoditization,” in E, Goody (ed), From Craft to Industry (London, 1982).
7. L.M. Fedigan, “The changing roles of women in human evolution,” Annual Review of Anthropology (Palo Alto, 1986; Rosaldo and Lamphere (Note 1).
8. R. Lee and I. Devore (eds), Man the Hunter (New York, 1968); S. Washburn, The Social Life of Early Man (Chocago, 1961)
9. E. Friedl, Women and Men (New York, 1975).

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