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HISTORIOGRAPHY
Introduction: This selection comes from a text on women in world history. Since world history is full of patriarchal, or
male-dominated, societies, one of the thorniest problems is to determine just how widespread patriarchy was. Against
the commonly held assumption that patriarchy has always existed, that it is universal or natural, we have seen that male
domination was not common in most hunting-gathering and early agricultural societies – that is, throughout most of
human history. When and how did it come about? What is the answer given in this selection? What kind of evidence
best supports the author’s conclusion?
Thinking Historically: As already mentioned, one of the earliest, and still widely accepted, stage theories of human
history posits three important stages: hunter-gatherer, agricultural-pastoral, and city-based or urban. Archaeologists use
the corresponding terms of Paleolithic (Old Stone Age), Neolithic (New Stone Age), and Bronze Age. This reading
suggests other developments of the urban or Bonze Age that might be better descriptions of the third stage than cities
or bronze: states, plow agriculture, stratified, salve, and literate and writing-based societies. How does each of these
new developments affect the lives of women? If you were to divide only women’s history into two, three, or four stages,
what would they be?
Women in the First Urban Communities – Catherine Clay, Chandrika Paul, and Christine Senecal. 2009.
The world’s first cities emerged in Eurasia around 3500BCE. Fostered by the spread of villages, the urban centers of this
continent grew up along major river systems –an environment conducive to planting and harvesting crops with relatively
predictable patterns. There were four major regions where urban civilizations developed: in the Fertile Crescent along
the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, along the Nile in Egypt, along the Indus River in modern Pakistan, and along the Yellow
and Yangtze Rivers in China. Eurasia’s urban centers brought rapid changes in the organization of populations.
Institutional patriarchy probably developed alongside the state, tribute extraction, social stratification, and slavery. The
state, especially, was a political institution that organized, disciplined, and enslaved numerous inhabitants in order to
provide security and order for itself. Law codes to promote universal standards of behavior, irrigation projects to ensure
food supply, and extensive military defense were now possible and deemed necessary. Of course, in order to manage
this type of society, institutional governments were needed, and the leaders who ran these growing states exercised a
disproportionate share of power. State power transformed everything.
At the same time the world’s first urban political institutions were taking shape, a disparity of wealth also grew in urban
centers. Gaps between the haves and the have-nots of society appeared in heretofore unseen proportions. Slavery and
the slave trade, essential to ancient Eurasian civilizations, are first in evidence. Some have argued that men’s control and
exchange of women’s sexuality and reproductive capacity generally became the basis of private property in
Mesopotamia between 3100 and 600BCE. This affected not only female slaves and concubines but also the daughters of
elite and free men. A bride’s father, representing his family, exchanged her reproductive capacity for wealth and
household goods and sometimes less tangible objects, such as status and/or influence. Sometimes payments were made
in installments, and after a marriage, when her first child was born, the balance of bridewealth or dowry payments
became due. This overall disparity in status, wealth, and power spelled a worsening of women’s position.
Another explanation for the worsening of women’s position and the emergence of patriarchy focuses on demography
and technology, beginning with burgeoning population of village communities, which, as discussed above, encouraged
women’s fertility to support the needed workforce. Populous urban centers could no longer practice hoe agriculture, but
often needed intensive plow agriculture to feed everyone. With more children, urban women had less time for heavier
agricultural work and the long, intensive hours needed for cultivation. Women of plow-using cultures may have
preferred and chosen to work around the house and to perform lighter agricultural work. This scenario resulted in a
gradual loss of women’s social power and prestige – sometimes through their own choices that made sense to them at
the time, but that accelerated men’s control over economic activity and social resources. Ultimately, then, when the
Key Concept 1.2: The Neolithic Revolution & Early Agricultural Societies
AP World History
communities began using plows and more laborious, intensive methods of cultivation (and the groups prospered
materially), women’s status changed.
Women’s experience in the first urban centers was marked by a general devaluation of their social freedoms, a denial of
their claims to the results of their labor, and sometimes even a reshaping of their religious expression. This decline did
not affect all women’s communities in the same way or at the same time. We notice this in the great variety of women’s
experiences across Eurasia in all four of the earliest urban areas.
Women & Society in the Earliest Civilizations
Although some villages had begun to experience greater social stratification by 3500BCE, the difference between the
powerful and the powerless was not nearly as marked as it was in the earliest cities. The increased wealth possessed by
a small proportion of the urban population led to a growing interest in keeping wealth and power within familial units.
And it led in many ways to the constriction of women’s lives, whether slave, concubine, free, or elite.
The social experience of many women was shaped by the flourishing Eurasian slave trade. In Mesopotamia as early as
2300BCE, inscriptions for ‘slave girl’ appear earlier than those translating as ‘slave male.’ Female slaves in Mesopotamia
often originated as captives of raids and were more plentiful than male slaves. They also seem to have been valued
more than male slaves. In Syria, the reward for the return of fleeing females was double that for male fugitive slaves.
Enslaved women lived under a wide range of conditions, from the relative comfort of high-level slaves important in the
domestic realm, such as concubines (unfree females purchased for reproduction) to females laves used for their brute
physical labor. Thus, although many enslaved women held very low positions in society, the status of some was not as
low as slaves in other time periods. For instance, a second-generation slave was often valued more than one that had
been recently captured. Furthermore, female slaves could upon occasion be freed from their servitude. In Babylon
around 1750BCE, slave concubines were frequently freed after the demise of their masters. Additionally, the children o
freewomen and male slaves were considered to be free of status there. High slave mortality and these legal paths to
slave freedom made slave raiding for new supplies a constant imperative.
The situation fo free and elite women was shaped by family control. Ensuring the lineage of a family meant keeping
ever-closer tabs on women’s morality, which could include preserving a woman’s virginity until marriage and ensuring
that she had only her husband for a sexual partner. This would guarantee that the paternity of family members would be
unquestioned. Even a woman’s reputation could be of critical interest to her family. We see this in practices such as
veiling and seclusion, which marked women’s high familial social standing and reputation for chastity (meaning virginity
when single and fidelity in marriage), and actually prevented her from any sexual contact with males other than her
husband.
As mentioned above, the decrease in women’s social influence did not strike equally in all places. For instance, little
evidence points to women’s morality being constrained in the cities of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro in the Indus River
Valley around 2500BCE. The thousands of written sources from this civilization have yet to be deciphered, and thus it
would be hazardous to assume that women’s social position never declined there, and yet archaeological evidence
suggests that the gap between the haves and the have-nots might not have been terribly significant to the urban
population. The facades of the residential buildings in those cities were relatively similar, even though some families
possessed much larger storerooms than others. This evidence therefore suggests that maintaining a family’s wealth and
power, and the corresponding demotion that meant for women, was not as marked there … Similarly, in the less
urbanized Egyptian civilization, evidence suggests that women held positions of relative social equality and enjoyed
freedom of movement unlike in other ancient societies. Given geographic barriers protecting them from warlike
neighbors, Nile and Indus River civilizations were more militarily secure generally than civilizations in Mesopotamia and
East Asia, and this may have resulted in fewer constraints on women.
Insight from Law Codes
We can see the inferior social position of urban women in law codes. Although legal texts from Mesopotamia often
reflected social guidelines rather than actual practice, they nevertheless give critical insight to the ways a society’s most
powerful people intended to govern. For example, in one Mesopotamian city in 2000BCE, the murder of a woman was a
Key Concept 1.2: The Neolithic Revolution & Early Agricultural Societies
AP World History
capital offense. But by the time of Hammurabi (d.1750BCE), a Babylonian ruler and famous lawmaker in Mesopotamia,
killing a common woman only resulted in a fine according to the law code. (There was a stronger punishment if an elite
woman were the victim).
We can also see the uneven treatment of urban women in the law and practices surrounding marriage and divorce. For
instance, wives’ positions in Mesopotamia differed from city to city even within the same time frame. Whereas one law
code from the urban civilization of Sumer made it legal for a new bride to refuse intercourse without punishment, later,
a woman could be drowned if she refused to consummate her marriage. By 2500BCE, a law allowed a man to break his
wife’s teeth with a burnt brick if she disagreed with him. Divorce laws from Mesopotamian civilizations show that,
although women experienced new inequities and constraints, they continued to enjoy some protections also. The cases
compiled by the Babylonian ruler Hammurabi about 1700BCE forbade women from divorcing, yet allowed men to
terminate their marriages. Nevertheless, even Hammurabi’s law code required divorced men to support their former
spouses and any children they had together.
Key Concept 1.2: The Neolithic Revolution & Early Agricultural Societies
AP World History