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by JulianMorrison 2611 days ago
Patriarchy is a farming-age invention.
2 comments

I am pretty sure menstruation and child birth are not farming age inventions.
You'd be surprised. Longer breastfeeding suppresses ovulation and menstruation, so fertility is relatively rare. Childbirth works better squatting. Humans evolved to be hunter gatherers, most of our history is pre-settled-agriculture, we do fit that lifestyle better.

And patriarchy was never contingent on those things anyhow. It's just a cultural choice that got stuck because it was woven into the form of citified civilization.

There are patriarchal hierarchies among crustaceans, it seems less like a 'choice' and more like the result of a random, survivorship-biased process.
Similarly, crustaceans have hard shells, which explains why we live in buildings made out of hard materials.
I don’t actually believe one way or the other but I can’t help but notice that is a convenient viewpoint for the patriarchy.
> Longer breastfeeding suppresses ovulation and menstruation, so fertility is relatively rare.

> Childbirth works better squatting.

I would like to see citations indicating that these statements are true to a significant degree that modern improvements are of little value.

I can't even find data on maternal mortality before 1800.

Do you mean in the sense that hunter-gatherer prehistorical cultures tended to be more egalitarian?