Herstory

Source: Laura Betzig

Last weekend, my daughter got married. She's become a more beautiful, more brilliant, more accomplished, and better adjusted young woman than I ever could have imagined. And she's deeply in love with her beautiful, brilliant, accomplished and good natured husband. Because personal happiness trumps every other kind of happiness, it was probably the most important day of their lives.

But there will be other important days. There will be days of public satisfaction -- after jobs in the arts or sciences, trade or politics, have been taken on; and after jobs well done -- for her husband. And there will be days like that for my daughter, too.

It hasn't always been so. Most of the 5000 year old written record, most of history, has been by and about men. Women have often been in the middle of that record: plenty of men have become artists or architects, merchants or politicians, in order to get girls. But those girls have been often anonymous; and they've almost never been artists or architects, merchants or politicians themselves.

What a difference a few centuries make! As I write this, women head international energy (Sunoco), food and beverage (PepsiCo), internet (Yahoo!) and publishing (The New York Times Company) corporations. 14 women were elected this year to the National Academy of Sciences. 13 out of 30 authors on the New York Times fiction and nonfiction bestseller lists this week are women. 74 women sit in the US Congress; and one former senator, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, gave her own daughter away at a wedding last night.

There's good reason to believe that in prehistory, over the 100,000 plus years before people kept written records, women were active in public life. Most hunter gatherer societies -- small, family bands, like the ones prehistoric people lived in -- are notoriously egalitarian: no man, and no woman, is allowed to stand out too much.

So why are women in history so much less conspicuous than men? If boys and girls were more equal in prehistory, and if they're more equal now, why is so much of history -- from the first states in Mesopotamia, to Columbus' discovery of America -- all about patriarchy? History is full of courtesans and concubines, daughters and wives; why did so few of them turn into historians, or heads of state?

A generation ago, Bob Trivers may have come up with the answer. He wrote a paper in 1973, along with Dan Willard, his mathematician friend, that predicted when parents should favor sons over daughters, and when they should treat them the same. In the inegalitarian societies of history, a successful son fathered dozens of children by dozens of wives, concubines and slaves; a successful daughter mothered an order of magnitude fewer. But in the egalitarian societies at the beginning and end of the human spectrum, a successful son is unlikely to have a bigger family than his successful sister. So treating them equally -- giving them the same time, money, education and inheritance -- makes Darwinian sense.

Near Eastern civilizations were filled with obscure women. More than a millennium after history began, Israel's king Solomon put up a bronze and cedar palace, and filled it with 700 noble and 300 common consorts -- almost all of them anonymous, even the Pharaoh of Egypt's daughter, "whom he had taken in marriage," and provided with her own house. Only Naamah, the mother of Solomon's successor, Rehoboam, is named (1 Kings 7:8, 11:3, 14:21). We know the names of at least 18 of Solomon's brothers, who were David's sons, but the name of just one of his sisters, Tamar. David's "virgin'" daughter gets press in the Bible, after she's raped by her half brother, Ammon (2 Samuel 13:14).

In the Far East, it was worse. A few legendary empresses acted as regents, as elsewhere, for their underage sons: China, in the 7th century, was ruled over by Wu Zetian; she came to the palace as another anonymous concubine at 13, became a favorite of 2 emperors, and the mother of 2 imperial sons. But the vast majority of imperial women remained unnamed -- from the 3000 pretty women in 270 palaces rounded up by China's first emperor and Great Wall builder, Qin Shihuangdi; to the incredible 100,000 consorts attributed to the Sui emperor and Grand Canal builder, Yangdi; to the 40,000 girlfriends of the Tang emperor, Zhongzong, who was Wu Zetian's son; all the way back to China's legendary progenitor, the Yellow Emperor, who went to heaven "because" he had sex with 1200 women.

Things have gotten a lot better since Columbus got to this side of the Pond, though Americans were once less egalitarian than some of us remember. Most of the Founding Fathers were landowners, and many of them owned slaves. Antebellum US presidents often did. George Washington has been credited with 216, Thomas Jefferson with hundreds, James Madison with at least 118, Andrew Jackson with roughly 100, John Tyler with 60, and Zachary Taylor with over 100 slaves. Some of those slaves were the objects of their masters' affections: Thomas Jefferson, notoriously, fathered 6 children on Sally Hemmings. On the eve of emancipation, in his Travels in the United States, Charles Darwin's great friend and mentor, the geologist Charles Lyell, wrote: "The anxiety of parents for their sons, and a constant fear of their licentious intercourse with slaves is painfully great." A century before that, a sister of President James Madison complained: "We southern ladies are complimented with the name of wives, but we are only the mistresses of seraglios." But after the Civil War, the numbers of slaves, even the number of wives, of US politicians went down.

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And their daughters seem to have been better taken care of. Since the Civil War, presidents have fathered a higher ratio of girls; and they've left them more in their wills. John Adams (president #2), William Henry Harrison (president #9) and Zachary Taylor (president #12) all passed on bigger inheritances to their sons than to their daughters. But John Tyler (president #10), Rutherford Hayes (president #19), Chester Arthur (president #21), Grover Cleveland (president #22 and #24), Benjamin Harrison (president #23), Teddy Roosevelt (president #26), William Howard Taft (president #27), Franklin Delano Roosevelt (president #32) and John Fitzgerald Kennedy (president #35) all bequeathed to their children, equally.

In any event, the equality, and notoriety, of women in the 21st century is here for anybody to see. I expect that to make my daughter a better wife, and a better person. And I hope it will be so for generations of her own children, and grandchildren.