“For at least 10,000 years or so virtually every political system, economic system and religion has been designed by men for men. There is no natural or divine law that requires any of these structures to be designed in the way that they have been. During those same 10,000 years every justification of those structures have been developed by men to benefit men.”
We often hear the slogan
“The War on Women,” bandied about by those, on one side or the other, seeking political advantage. In fact, this war on women has been going on for over at least 5000 years. What we have now in politics in the United States and going on in the Near and Middle East is not so much a War On Women but a War About Women. Like it or not, those that continue to oppose the march of women to equality and more are faced with resisting one of the great turning points of human history.
About 9000 years or so ago the Neolithic agricultural revolution got under weigh. This new culture was unusual because it was centered on women. Women tilled the crops while men engaged in perfunctory hunting and caring for the animals. The economic system, social system and the intellectual system for the production of crops and the production of children (workers) were considered under women’s control. This culture as far as we know was relatively peaceful. Derived from Mesolithic gatherers it lacked the tradition of masculine violence and the need for war.
Eventually new technologies (the plow and animal husbandry) reduced the economic and social dominance of women and more warlike masculine cultures ultimately moved in, finally reducing women to the status of more or less chattel. A status that has lasted almost until the dawn of this century.
During the 1950’s or so, due to their greater longevity, wealth (not income) fell into the hands of women such that by some measures women held a greater overall percentage of the nation's wealth than men. This did not help women much because that wealth was usually managed by men and only a very few women had been able secure income and social status independent of male largesse.
Since then, technology, ideology and society have changed so that women have been able challenge the dominance of men and begin to amass their own power and wealth as well as develop their own ideology. For example: in the conduct of war, because of the computerization of many weapons systems, women have become as good as men in the science of killing and often better. Also, in schools they are excelling and graduating in ever larger majorities.
Thus the War About Women began in earnest. Their excelling in school and scholarship for example, I believe in part, encouraged the attack on schooling by the male dominated traditional religious denominations and conservative organizations.
In the Near and Middle East, it was not simply the replacement of burka’s with Western dress, but the realization that these free and educated women inevitably would move into positions of economic independence and ultimately seek political power that drove the reactionary mullah’s into a frenzy.
What is happening in the US and in the Near and Middle East is all about women and their destiny. Women stand at the threshold of real power, economic, social and intellectual and many men are afraid.
In the US the 2012 election was to a great extent about the future of lower middle and lower class white male privilege. 2014 is the first American election in which the issue is all about the attempts to halt and reverse the emerging and inevitable power of women.