Lineages of the Feminine
An Outline of the History of Women
1. Edition June 2023
336 Pages, Hardcover
Professional Book
Short Description
We are experiencing an anthropological revolution. We see it in the #MeToo movement, in the denunciation of femicide and in an increasingly vociferous critique of patriarchal domination. Why this sudden rise of an antagonistic conception of the relationship between men and women, at the very moment when progress is accelerating and when the goals of first- and second-wave feminism seem on the verge of being achieved?
In this book, the anthropologist and historian Emmanuel Todd, while not underestimating the importance of crucial inequalities that remain, argues that the emancipation of women has essentially already taken place but that it has given rise to new tensions and contradictions. As women gain more freedom, they also gain access to traditional male social pathologies: economic anxiety, the disorientation of anomie, and individual and class resentment. But because they remain women, with the ability to bear children, their burden as human beings, although richer, is now more difficult to bear than that of men.
In order to understand our current condition, Todd retraces the evolution of the male/female relationship through the long history of the human species, from the emergence of Homo sapiens a hundred thousand years ago to the present. He also conducts a broad empirical study of the convergence between men and women today and of the differences that still separate them - in education, in employment and in relation to longevity, suicide and homicide, electoral behaviour and racism. He explores the relations between women's liberation and other changes in contemporary societies such as the collapse of religion, the decline of industry, the decline of homophobia, the rise of bisexuality and the transgender phenomenon, and the decline in a sense of the collective life. And he shows how and why Western countries - and especially the Anglo-American world, Scandinavia and France - are, in their new feminist revolution, perhaps less universal than they think.
We are experiencing an anthropological revolution. We see it in the #MeToo movement, in the denunciation of femicide and in an increasingly vociferous critique of patriarchal domination. Why this sudden rise of an antagonistic conception of the relationship between men and women, at the very moment when progress is accelerating and when the goals of first- and second-wave feminism seem on the verge of being achieved?
In this book, the anthropologist and historian Emmanuel Todd, while not underestimating the importance of crucial inequalities that remain, argues that the emancipation of women has essentially already taken place but that it has given rise to new tensions and contradictions. As women gain more freedom, they also gain access to traditional male social pathologies: economic anxiety, the disorientation of anomie, and individual and class resentment. But because they remain women, with the ability to bear children, their burden as human beings, although richer, is now more difficult to bear than that of men.
In order to understand our current condition, Todd retraces the evolution of the male/female relationship through the long history of the human species, from the emergence of Homo sapiens a hundred thousand years ago to the present. He also conducts a broad empirical study of the convergence between men and women today and of the differences that still separate them - in education, in employment and in relation to longevity, suicide and homicide, electoral behaviour and racism. He explores the relations between women's liberation and other changes in contemporary societies such as the collapse of religion, the decline of industry, the decline of homophobia, the rise of bisexuality and the transgender phenomenon, and the decline in a sense of the collective life. And he shows how and why Western countries - and especially the Anglo-American world, Scandinavia and France - are, in their new feminist revolution, perhaps less universal than they think.
Introduction
The future is now
The singularity of the original human couple
Research versus ideology
The power of women today
Economics and anthropology
Women's liberation, and the antagonism between (or abolition of) the sexes
Part One. The contribution of historical anthropology
Chapter One
Patriarchy, gender and intersectionality
The fog of patriarchy
The emergence of the concept of gender
Gender: a useless and ideologized duplication
For a generalized intersectionality
French intersectionality
Chapter Two
Degendering anthropology
A tribute to female anthropologists
Julian Steward: sexual equality among hunter-gatherers described by a classical anthropologist
Martin King Whyte: anthropology just before gender
Henrietta Moore: The first disruptions
Marilyn G. Gelber: the monstrous man
Janet Carsten: Decomposition
An insufficiently feminist history
Chapter Three
The tools of historical anthropology
The nuclear family
The stem family
The communitarian family
The local group and marriage
Chapter Four
In search of the original family
Classical anthropology and the original family
The block in anthropology
The conservatism of peripheral zones: English, Americans, French, Shoshone, Bushmen, Eskimos, Chukchi and Agtas in one humanity
Saving Private Murdock
A new geography of the world
Chapter Five
The confinement of women: history comes to a halt
Nomads and the history of the family
Patrilineality and social stratification
The patrilineal impasse
Chapter Six
A detour by way of Australia
The debate on the Aborigines
The role of New Guinea
Chapter Seven
The sexual division of labour
Ideology versus reality
Ideology against itself
Collectivist men versus individualist women
The issue of equality: we are not chimpanzees
Chapter Eight
Christianity, Protestantism and women
Early Christianity and women
The Church and sexual security
Protestant patricentrism
Part Two. Our revolution
Chapter Nine
Liberation: 1950-2020
1950-1965: the height of petty-bourgeois conformism
The educational and sexual revolution: 1965-2000
Women, services and industry
Educational matridominance: 2000-2020
From hypergamy to hypogamy
Differences according to social class
Poverty and single-parent families
The middle classes in survival strategy
Women at the risk of anomie
The concept of soft anomie
Chapter Ten
Men resist but the collective collapses
The persistent sexual division of labour, yet again
The sex of the state
The medical profession
Mathematics
The top 4%: a residual patridominance
Even higher: capital has no sex
Divorce at the heart of the system
The masculine collective and its disintegration
Chapter Eleven
Gender: a petty bourgeois ideology
France in the face of the Anglo-American world
The sex of social classes
Anger as a general social phenomenon
Ideological hegemony in the feminine: doctorates
Matridominance at the OECD as well as at the INED
Farewell to reality
A provisional summary
Chapter Twelve
Women and Authority
Women as less racist
The weakening of the collective, but not of authority
The origin of Prohibition?
Ideological anomalies
Swedish family types
The riddle of authoritarian feminism
No paternal authority without maternal authority
The mother at the centre of the family
Constructed authority and natural authority
Chapter Thirteen
The mystery of Sweden
Against the myth of an original matriarchy
The Sweden of the origins
Interpreting the runic steles
Peasant patrilocality from the seventeenth to the twentieth century
The birth of the 'Swedish woman': literacy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
Sweden and Denmark
Chapter Fourteen
Homophobia: a male business
Orders of magnitude and causal sequences
LGBT: a tactical alliance
Words before things
Homosexuality, a natural human behaviour
Mapping homophobia: the BBO axis yet again
Homophobia: a male business
Chapter Fifteen
Women, between Christianity and bisexuality
Simple Protestant homophobia and Catholic ambivalence
The collapse of religious sentiment and homophobia
Are gays zombie Christians?
The objection of Eastern Europe
Marriage for all men and all women
The rise of female bisexuality
Chapter Sixteen
The social construction of transgender
The case of the berdaches
Berdaches and transgender people
'My new vagina won't make me happy'
Ideological centrality...
... but statistical weakness
Women and identity
The omnipotence of mothers
Does society think through individuals?
The Christian taste for extraordinary sexuality
Chapter Seventeen
Economic globalization and the deviation from anthropological trajectories
Globalization and the tertiarization of the economy
Economic or anthropological specialization?
The worker nations of Eastern Europe
Sweden, yet again...
The cost of rejecting liberation
Conclusion
Has humanity come of age?
Notes
Index
David Sabean, Distinguished Professor of European History and the Henry J. Bruman Chair in German History, Emeritus, at UCLA
'Lineages of the Feminine is a tour de force of thinking outside the box, adroitly grounded in historical anthropology and demography. The author's deep knowledge of the history of family forms and relationships empowers him to open new debates about current social predicaments.'
Kenneth Wachter, Emeritus Professor of Demography and Statistics, University of California, Berkeley
