I can react to the book, but I cannot truly review it. The topics range too widely, and Todd’s anthropological terminology is too confusing to me (perhaps this is confounded by the fact that I am reading Lineages in translation).
In examining sex roles, anthropologists have often classified ancient societies by looking at family patterns. What sorts of marriages are encouraged or forbidden? Does the newly married couple live closer to the husband’s family or the wife’s family? Who inherits property when parents die? Todd uses these sorts of questions to infer the status of women historically.
From a modern perspective, two questions stand out in my mind:
I take away from Lineages three phases illustrating how the Western world has answered these questions. The first phase, from roughly 1500 to 1950, was a patriarchy. The second phase, from roughly 1950 to 2000, was women’s liberation. The third phase, still ongoing, Todd sees as headed toward matriarchy.
Under the patriarchy, high-status occupations were predominantly male. In the United States, women were rarely found in leadership positions in business, politics, or the judiciary. In writing for newspapers, they were often confined to the fashion or society pages. In higher education, they were mostly confined to service-oriented fields at second-tier institutions.
Also under the patriarchy, women’s sexual freedom was restricted. Premarital and extramarital sex were taboo. Abortion was illegal. Female sexual desire was ignored or denied.
Of course, under this regime men’s sexuality was also repressed. But the legal and religious codes were written and enforced by men, without female input.
Evolutionary psychology provides an explanation for how patriarchy would arise. Joyce Benenson’s Warriors and Worriers, for example, says that prehistoric males learned to organize and cooperate though fighting, which would have made them temperamentally suited to forming and leading corporations and government institutions.
Todd seems unfamiliar with evolutionary psychology. But as an anthropologist, concerning males’ role in hunting in ancient cultures, he writes,
Todd argues that the sexual division of labor in prehistoric societies is undeniable. But he also sees it as anachronistic. The economy has progressed far beyond hunting and gathering, as it moved to agriculture, then to manufacturing, and now increasingly to services.
Evolutionary psychologists predict that men will want to control the sexual behavior of women, in order to assure paternity. A man does not want to risk providing resources to a woman to support another man’s child.
Again, Todd ignores this theory. He sees sexual repression as an anachronism. He links the shift toward sexual freedom since 1950 to the advent of better birth control, notably the pill, and to Christianity’s rapid decline.
By the 1960s, the patriarchy is giving way to women’s liberation. Under women’s liberation, male-dominated occupations are opened to women. Premarital sex becomes tolerated. Extramarital sex and divorce lose some of their stigma. Women’s sexual desire is acknowledged.
Over the last two decades, Todd sees a new phase in the cultural evolution of sex roles. Now, any high-status occupation that is still male-dominated is suspected of suffering from unwarranted discrimination against women. The expectation is that such bastions must fall. But no questions or doubts are raised as women become dominant in other high-status fields and obtain an ever-larger majority of college degrees.
Sexual norms, as embodied in the #MeToo movement, for example, give women the power to dictate sexual conduct to men. Today, it is men’s sexuality that is repressed by women. Todd refers to the 21st-century trend as “antagonistic feminism” or the onset of matriarchy.
For the record, my preference would be for all occupations to be open to women, but if a particular organization or niche becomes mostly male, that should not require a change. My preference would be for sexual restraint to be encouraged for both sexes, but not insisted upon. And a male who makes an awkward pass should not be punished with ostracism.
Lineages is filled with Todd’s observations, some of which he supports with statistics and others which he does not support at all. The rest of this essay will offer a sample of these. Note that I disagree with many of them.
Todd is scornful of contemporary uses of the terms patriarchy and gender:
Todd speculates that men are naturally more communitarian than women:
He speculates that Christianity in the Middle Ages was protective of women:
Concerning the social effects of the birth control pill, he writes:
On the trend toward more women completing college:
On the paradox of female progress:
Against this, he notes a sense in which the sexual division of labor has not changed.
Todd uses his picture of women as individualistic to throw this wild punch:
On the impact of women on academic research:
On the disconnect between the feminism of the upper middle class and the needs of society at large:
On female dominance in the judicial system in France:
On trends against freedom of expression:
On sexual preference becoming an identity:
For more on these topics, see
Again, I include these quotations to give the flavor of the book, not to indicate agreement. What I took away from Lineages was narrower and may differ from what the author intended.
*Arnold Kling has a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of several books, including Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care; Invisible Wealth: The Hidden Story of How Markets Work; Unchecked and Unbalanced: How the Discrepancy Between Knowledge and Power Caused the Financial Crisis and Threatens Democracy; and Specialization and Trade: A Re-introduction to Economics. He contributed to EconLog from January 2003 through August 2012.
Read more of what Arnold Kling’s been reading. For more book reviews and articles by Arnold Kling, see the Archive.