The Sex Factor

by Victoria Bateman

  In Africa, the central entities of society consisted not of a nuclear family but of lineages, comprising around 100‒200 people with a common ancestor, and clans, a collection of lineages.32 Lineages could be patrilineal (common in northern sub-Saharan Africa), matrilineal (common in West Africa and equatorial Africa) or bilateral (in southern Africa). In matrilineal societies, women arguably had a greater degree of agency, including through property, divorce and the ability to hold some positions of leadership.33 Economic autonomy appears to have been greater than in both Asia and the Middle East. Women farmed the land and were often involved in trade, particularly in West Africa.34 However, the other side of this coin is that wives were almost entirely responsible for providing for their own children, with relatively little support from husbands. This was an unenviable task, given that women tended to marry young, resulting in big families.35 Since, unlike in Europe, marriage was always ‘an exchange between lineages’ rather than requiring individual consent, women were involuntarily condemned to this unenviable hard labour.

  Unlike in Europe, women had less control over whether and who they married, and polygamy was common. Since labour was scarce relative to land,36African women were commonly seen as a productive resource from which men could extract, to borrow the Marxist phrase, ‘surplus value’.37 To quote Claire Robertson, ‘[l]abor acquistion and control formed the basis of most wealth in under-populated precolonial Africa. Female-generated agricultural surplus helped men to acquire more wives and children, hence wealth and political power.’38 As Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch points out:

  The King of the Ganda, in central Africa, is said to have possessed several hundred and even thousands of wives; Mutesa, in the nineteenth century, had three or four hundred. Any lineage aspiring to political office did well to give several of its daughters to the king. The man who wanted a favour or pardon for an offence would offer one or two daughters.39

  Women's involvement in production and their intricate knowledge of the land could have been channelled into productivity improvements. Their need to produce in order to support their families – together with the scarcity of labour ‒ certainly would have provided an acute incentive. In some ways, therefore, Africa wasn't far off usurping Europe. The problem, however, was that, unlike the men responsible for production in Europe, African women lacked the requisite capital, power and formal skills needed to bring about productivity-boosting change. To quote Claire Robertson once more, there was ‘a tendency for resources to flow toward men and away from women’.40 Furthermore, witchcraft trials and accusations, which died out in Europe after the seventeenth century, persevered in many parts of Africa,41 meaning that it was dangerous for a woman to stand out by trying something new (such as an improved seed variety) or by challenging existing (male) authority. Indeed, submission to men was taught and socialized from a young age, which could include painful initiations. Whereas it would be wrong to paint a picture of African women as victims,42 it would also be wrong to suggest that they had more choices or control over their lives than was in practice the case.

  One factor that we haven't so far mentioned is bride price and dowries. Research suggests that around 66 per cent of human societies have family structures that involve the groom paying for a bride, including sub-Saharan Africa, whilst 4 per cent feature dowries, including South Asia.43 Bride price has been associated with land-based agricultural societies, and dowries with more market-based societies, but where women lack access to markets and, upon marriage, pass into the household of their parents-in-law (taking their dowry with them). Maristella Botticini and Aloysius Siow argue that if dowries are seen as inheritance for daughters, then they may incentivize economic activity amongst men as, once their sisters are married, the sons of a family have more of a reason to work hard as they will receive all remaining family wealth. In Europe, dowries were more common than bride price but declined over time, suggesting that women were gaining opportunities outside of the home and that the family structure was evolving.44 This contrasts markedly with modern-day India, where dowries have been on the increase, indicative of quite different underlying conditions facing women.45

  If we were to condense our global comparisons into a single quantitative measure that can help us to see the difference between women's experiences in Europe and those elsewhere, it would have to be the average age of women at first marriage. In general, where women marry later in life, as we will see in the next section, it is indicative of less coercion and greater agency. It is a stand-out feature of northern Europe – the home to the Industrial Revolution – that women did not marry until their mid-twenties.46 This compares with the Middle East, where ‘[w]omen married soon after reaching puberty’47; China, where women generally married between the ages of 14 and 18; and Africa and India, where child marriage is still common today.48

  None of these regional comparisons should be used to suggest that women's lives were easy in Europe. That could not have been further from the truth. Women had far fewer legal and political rights than men, and marriage law treated women as dependents until the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Fewer men than women could read and write,49 and they rarely received formal training in the form of an apprenticeship or access to top schools.50 Indeed, women were commonly paid half that of men, even for the same task,51 and often lost control of property upon marriage, along with the ability to enter into contracts.52 However, relative to most other parts of the world, and having seen the whole range of experiences elsewhere, it should be clear that there were advantages to being a European woman, particularly so in the north-western region.53 As Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks notes, ‘[v]isitors from southern and eastern Europe frequently commented on what they regarded as the “freedom” of women in northern European cities.’54 In terms of marriage, men and women in northern Europe both tended to marry in their mid-twenties, with grooms typically being no more than two or three years older, whilst in much of southern and eastern Europe it was common for women to marry in their teens and to men who were in their twenties, thirties or even older, a sign of significantly lower autonomy.55

  It cannot be ignored that, as we mentioned previously, there was a negative turn against women's freedoms throughout Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,56 which may of course be interpreted as a backlash against how far women had come. This negative turn involved the rolling out of rather rigid Roman law, cancelling out many of the legal gains that women had made at the local level, increasing surveillance of unmarried women, along with higher abortion penalties and a significantly higher incidence of witch trials. Britain did not escape this backlash but fared relatively better. Unlike the rest of Europe, the practice of common law meant that Roman law did not make headway, whilst the shift to Protestantism resulted in more liberal attitudes towards sex and women's bodies. There were also notably fewer witch trials in Britain (along with the Netherlands and Scandinavia). Although far from perfect – and the heavily gendered aspects of Britain's international relations were an abomination that showed how much further there was still to go (in gender and race terms)57 – the relative degree of gender equality for British women compared with those in other parts of the world at the time, and compared with most other parts of Europe, seems to stand out. Once we open our eyes to the experiences of women, there is an obvious candidate for why the West not only caught up with but overtook the rest of the world in the global economic race. And why Britain was first.

  Being ‘Me’: The Birth of Individual Freedom for European Women

  In the modern world, we value ‒ even celebrate ‒ individuality. We each have our own little quirks and our own likes and dislikes. I personally could not survive without tea and cake, even if it does mean that I live up to a rather British stereotype. This modern sense of ‘individuality’ is, however, a rather recent phenomenon. In the past, family came first and the individual came second. The family unit provided for us in ways which have become far less common today. With the family therefore ca
me a safety net, a guaranteed minimum standard of living. However, this required that families worked as a team rather than as a set of individuals. Rights came with responsibilities. The inevitable result was restriction – albeit not malicious – on personal freedom. Higher income earners were compelled to help support poorer family members; but the greatest restriction of all came in terms of marriage. The notion of ‘family first’ was nowhere more apparent than in the practice of arranged marriage.

  In the world of arranged marriages, the choice of mate is designed to be ‘right’ from the point of view of the wider family unit. Marriage is about uniting two families in a way that can be mutually beneficial. The search for a partner falls under the control of the parent and begins well before children reach maturity. The result is that girls tend to get married earlier in the traditional family unit than if they were themselves responsible for finding a partner. Indeed, there is an added incentive to arrange an early marriage ‒ the longer one waits, the greater the chance that the child will be in a sufficiently strong position to object and the greater the question mark over a woman's ‘sexual virtue’ and so ‘value’.

  This traditional family system was, as we have seen, present in many parts of the world throughout history. In China, until very recently, marriage involved a contract between two families – not between two individuals. It was very much a family, and not a personal, matter. In India and in the Middle East, arranged marriage is still common, and girls are regularly punished if they object. In pre-Colombian Latin America, ‘[v]illage headmen held the privilege of distributing the most beautiful virgins among the notables.’58 However, arranged marriage was also once a common feature in Europe, and in ancient Greece men in their thirties and forties regularly married women half their age.

  Whilst arranged marriage served the purpose of the family, it inevitably limited the freedom of young women, something noted in the modern world in the work of Alberto Alesina and Paolo Giuliano.59 A woman's inability to choose her own partner affected the power balance within marriage. Where marriage takes place through mutual choice, the two individuals are placed on a more level playing field. This can be very different in the case of arranged marriage. Furthermore, with arranged marriage often comes a difference in age between man and wife, which can further add to inequality within the home.

  In the West today, marriage is purely a matter of individual choice for the two parties involved. Each party has the personal freedom to enter into a marriage of their own choosing and is protected by law from being forced into a marriage to which they do not consent. But where did this modern idea of marriage come from?

  The Catholic Church adopted the principle of ‘mutual consent’ in the ninth century. By the twelfth century, the Church was clear that the consent of both the man and woman – and not the consummation of the marriage through sexual intercourse – was of central importance in establishing whether a marriage was valid. After all, in the words of one notable contemporary, ‘where there is to be union of bodies there ought to be union of spirits’.60 Marriage was now the personal choice of the bride and groom. Indeed, if a bride was coerced into marriage, she could have the marriage declared null and void and since, from the Church's point of view, such coercion was a sin, her parents could be refused the sacrament.

  However, freedom on paper is one thing. Freedom in practice is another. Whereas a European woman's consent was in theory required for marriage, her ability to exercise personal freedom was often limited; that limit was financial. Unless a woman could support herself financially (such as through work), she had limited bargaining power with her parents when it came to a marriage proposal. If her parents wanted her to accept a proposal, it was difficult for her to object. The risk of doing so was starvation (or a life in prostitution). When it comes to women truly gaining enough freedom to decide whether and who to marry, job opportunities and the wages they offer are, therefore, vitally important. The market provides women with opportunities outside of the family. It thereby allows them to stand up to social norms that restrict their freedom. To do so, however, the market must be ‘free’ ‒ free from the kinds of restrictions that have been adopted throughout history to limit the entry of newcomers through regulations and guilds.61

  In Britain's case, the early emergence of markets provided women with economic opportunities that, though far from perfect, bought them economic freedom, enabling them to escape from being under the thumbs of their fathers. In medieval Britain, around a half of the population already worked for wages, and it was perfectly normal for women to work.62 Evidence from the marriage records of the sixteenth through to the eighteenth centuries reveals that the average woman did not marry until she was around 25 years of age, and at least 10 per cent of women never married. That compares rather strikingly with many other parts of Europe at the time, such as Italy, where women regularly married in their late teens (often to older men), and, of course, to modern-day poor countries.63

  In the late medieval period through to the sixteenth centuries, the Italians, Spanish and Portuguese were busy looking outwards, developing magnificent port cities with endless connections overseas, but with relatively remote and underdeveloped internal territories. Britain was doing the opposite: building a deep and well-integrated internal market, in part supported by natural geographical advantages and in part through the emergence of a reasonably centralized state that limited what would otherwise have been significant barriers between regions.64 As a result, England was initially little noticed on the international stage, but these deep internal markets provided better foundations for economic advance in the longer term, particularly through the opportunities provided for women.

  Women and the Wealth of Nations: The Four Channels

  The relative freedom which markets offered women supported prosperity creation in at least four different ways. As we will see, it affected population dynamics and, with it, wages, but also human capital, investment, entrepreneurship and institutions, including the propensity to democracy and the capabilities versus incompetencies of the state.

  1 Population dynamics, fertility and wages

  In the previous chapter, we saw that sustained economic growth is often best supported by high ‒ not low ‒ wages. Where wages are low, businesses may have little incentive to raise productivity by investing in new technologies and mechanizing production as they can instead exploit cheap labour. The extent to which wages were higher in Britain than elsewhere (and for which groups) is still being debated. It is nevertheless crucial to note the way in which women's freedom can help to support a high-wage economy, particularly in a world before reliable birth control.

  According to Malthus, the ‘passion between the sexes’ risks overwhelming the economy's natural resources, pushing the wage down to subsistence level. He suggested two possible outcomes for the economy: a low-wage or a high-wage equilibrium. The low-wage equilibrium is the result of a system in which fertility is high and unresponsive to the economy. That is typical of family systems in which young women are ‘married off’ at a young age and have little or no ability to take charge of their own bodies. In the resultant high-pressure population regime, population can easily overwhelm resources, leading to starvation and undernourishment. The result is that high fertility is met with high mortality.

  In the alternative high-wage equilibrium, fertility is instead responsive to economic conditions. In a nuclear family system as opposed to a more traditional one, people can only marry and reproduce if they are able to financially support their offspring. That in turn helps to ease the pressure of population growth, meaning that fewer people have to ‒ literally ‒ starve to death in order to keep population in line with the economy's ability to support it. Rather than mortality doing all of the work to ensure equilibrium between the population and resources, fertility adjustment is able to help check population growth. The result is a much less harsh population regime, one in which population is kept under control through fertility, not just through
mortality. This lower-pressure regime enables the economy to support a higher wage and so a higher standard of living.

  Key to this high-wage equilibrium is the way families operated. John Hajnal famously distinguished between two types of household formation systems, what we tend to refer to as the traditional and the nuclear. Whilst traditional family systems have, he argues, been dominant across the world and throughout history, they were replaced with more consensual nuclear ones in north-western Europe in the two centuries before the Industrial Revolution.65 Rather than being married off at a young age, women living in this part of the world became free to decide for themselves whether, who and when to marry. And, having the taste of freedom, they had no intention of moving in with either set of parents upon marriage. This meant that, after finding partners of their own choosing, young couples had to save up and make sure they were in a financially stable enough position before they could get married and start a family. The result was that the age of marriage tended to be high and, all importantly, responsive to economic conditions. When the economy was going through a rough period, people had to delay marriage until the situation became more stable. After all, it would be risky to start a family if unemployment was on the cards. When times improved, such as during the Industrial Revolution itself, people could afford to marry sooner. This responsiveness of marriage to the economy helped to keep fertility ‒ the number of babies being born ‒ in line with the ability of the economy to support them.66 Furthermore, within Europe, we could find a high degree of monogamy, which is a stand-out feature, given that 85% of human societies have featured polygyny.67 By itself, a shift from polygyny to monogamy has been shown to increase the age of marriage and lower fertility by 40%, increase savings by 70% and raise GDP per person by 170%.68