The First Political Order, by Valerie M. Hudson, et al. (introduction)

INTRODUCTION

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light went on for one of our coauthors, Valerie Hudson, one spring day more than a decade ago when she had the opportunity to have lunch with one of the first female Afghan ministers of parliament (MPs). As Hudson chirped about the growing empowerment of women in Afghanistan, as evidenced by the fact that her guest was university educated and an MP, the MP stopped her: “Valerie, I could go home today, and my husband could divorce me by simply saying the phrase ‘I divorce you’ three times. If he did, I would lose custody of my children and would have nowhere to live. Even if he does not divorce me, I may have little say in when and to whom my children are married. How empowered am I really, Valerie?” Hudson was pulled up short. Although she was used to assessing women’s empowerment through indicators such as educational attainment and political participation, she clearly had failed to consider something prior to and much deeper than these things. In a sense, this entire book emerged from that conversation of more than a decade ago.

In his 2015 study, Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind, historian Yuval Noah Harari notes that throughout human history, the hierarchy “of supreme importance in all known human societies” is the hierarchy of sex. “People everywhere have divided themselves into men and women. And almost everywhere men have got the better deal.”1 So why is this the case, not just in one or two cultures, but almost universally? Why would men get the better deal not just in one place, but most everywhere? And why would this system be so stubbornly persistent, from the dawn of history even into the twenty-first century?

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Introduction

We aim to answer these questions in this book. Building upon, but then extending, decades of scholarship, we explain the causes of women’s systematic subordination as an outcome of human societies’ dependence on men to defend their physical security. In particular, we uncover a deeply male security dilemma that guides the choice of security provision mechanism within most human societies even to this day. That preferred means is the male fraternal group. Men seeking their own security attempt to construct strong male-bonded alliances, typically based on patrilineal (agnatic) relationships, and these alliances strive for security through dominance. Of course, women have historically been an irreplaceable support to this security provision mechanism, as it is they who biologically reproduce the group, providing brothers and sons for this male alliance. The fraternity’s dependence on women, we argue, leads to the necessity for men to control them. We analyze an interlocking set of eleven practices— remarkable in their consistency across space and time in human history—that simultaneously strengthen the patrilineal–fraternal alliance structure, while profoundly subordinating women. We demonstrate that these practices remain common in today’s world and that they cross geographic regions, ethnic groups, religious groups, and language groups.

This socially constructed system of male security alliances, united through agnatic kinship networks that have safeguarded their physical and social reproduction over millennia, is what we term in this book the Patrilineal/Fraternal Syndrome. We call it a syndrome because we identify a set “of symptoms that characterize a particular social condition,” which leads to “a predictable, characteristic pattern of behavior.” A syndrome is often associated with a pathological condition, which is what we believe the Patrilineal/Fraternal Syndrome produces.

Through the set of practices that make up the Patrilineal/Fraternal Syndrome, control over women has solidified the subordination of women throughout human history and around the world. Although male willingness to utilize physical force, which is used universally to dominate women, is a critical factor, the Syndrome encodes more systematic means of female control that make day-to-day use of such violence less necessary, such as early marriage for girls, polygyny, differential inheritance rights for men and women, and other mechanisms we will detail. Furthermore, it is important to recognize that women may very well consciously support this Syndrome to ensure their own security and perhaps even augment their status in a world of men who are prepared to use violence against them. We suggest that this system of control begins at the most intimate level—the relationship of husband and wife—and from that point radiates through the extended family, through societies, and through nation-states, and ultimately has the ability to cross borders and destabilize regions. Denial of equal participation in family decision making, unequal access to resources, asymmetrical use of violence in the home, and unequal

Introduction

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status in common law all help create the schoolhouse that ensures the perpetuation of the Syndrome through time.

We document the creation and maintenance of this universal Syndrome, but our purpose does not end there. We theorize that the Syndrome actually—and ironically—heightens the insecurity and instability of the group. That is, despite the fact that reliance on male-bonded alliances was chosen for its presumed ability to provide security, it ultimately subverts that aim. The heart of this book, therefore, is our empirical documentation of the negative impact this system has on women, children, men, and nation-states. We find through rigorous cross-national empirical analysis that the search for security through a malebased fraternity that strongly subordinates women, pushed to its logical end, has serious and negative ramifications for the security, stability, resilience, prosperity, health, and happiness of the collective as well as negative security effects regionally and even internationally. Our empirical results strongly suggest that for peace, stability, security, and resilience to obtain, the Syndrome must be disrupted and dismantled. For example, every unit increase in our scale measurement of the subordination of women (see chapter 3) increases a state’s chances of being fragile by 2.3 times. Every unit increase results in a 3.5 greater chance that a nation-state’s government will be autocratic, less effective, and more corrupt, and a 1.57 greater chance the nation will be unstable and violent.

Every unit increase in the subordination of women gives a nation 1.5 times the chance of experiencing poverty and 1.8 times the chance of experiencing food insecurity (see chapter 7 and appendix III for details). It appears as if the surest way to curse one’s nation is to subordinate its women.

The informal social organizations that best mirror the patrilineal/fraternal kinship networks we study are tribes and clans. Although some might think of clans and tribes as being prevalent today only in the least developed countries, that is untrue. Agnatic kinship groups are power brokers in many different types of countries, rich and poor, developed and less developed, democratic and autocratic. Most people recognize that tribal societies exist in countries such as Afghanistan and South Sudan, but the power of agnatic kinship groups is also strong in countries such as India, Qatar, and Indonesia.

Other countries are in transition to either greater or lesser reliance on such networks, such as the Philippines, Tunisia, and China.

For a man, status and success in this type of social environment stem from being the protector of his family and also his kinship group. For example, reflecting this worldview, a popular Pakistani tribal proverb states, “a man’s gun is his jewelry.” In contrast, women’s role in these types of societies is to reproduce the agnatic kinship group. Although women may have great pride in their tribal affiliation, they are rigorously governed by expectations of honorable behavior as defined by obedience, modesty, and chastity. As the group is all-important, the effort of all members is required to secure group strength, defend group

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Introduction

property, and reproduce the group. Individual subordination to the group is expected, but if flouted, will be punished by expulsion or death.

As some societies began to slowly and fitfully move beyond male kinship groups as the most important security provision mechanism, observers began to note the emergence of two different approaches to societal organization where once there had been only one. For example, nineteenth-century legal scholar Sir Henry Sumner Maine seized on this difference. He described one type of society as being “status societies,” which in his view were more traditional societies in which family, clan, and tribal identities were the basis of social organization. Status societies, according to Maine, emphasize the needs and customs of the whole, the larger group at the expense of individual members who are expected to sublimate personal needs. In these societies, states may be absent or weak, and individuals rely on their kinship group to pursue their interests as well as their security.2 In contrast, Maine also identified a second category of states whose governance is based on contracts between rulers and the ruled that grant and enforce rights of the individual as well as safeguard the nation. Such systems, according to Maine, often feature rights of personal freedom, free markets, and restrictions on state authority, all of which are supported by government institutions subject to laws and regulations and are applied equally. Women and minorities specifically benefited from these developments as they claim rights established to belong to individuals.3 Maine’s status societies are analogous to the societies we identify as encoding the Patrilineal/Fraternal Syndrome. As we have noted, such societies have developed a web of practices to ensnare women as permanent subordinates.

We find not one practice, but a combination of practices that interlock to provide a perfect straitjacket of female subordination. The eleven practices we focus on in this volume include physical violence against women, patrilocal marriage in which brides move to their husbands’ family compounds, early marriage for girls, personal status laws that benefit men and grant women few rights in the family, laws and traditions restricting women from owning property, practices of dowry and brideprice, son preference and sex ratio alteration, cousin marriage, polygyny, sanction/impunity for the killing of women, and the treatment of rape as a property crime against men. In the Patrilineal/ Fraternal Syndrome, all of these practices are interrelated in a vicious cycle, seemingly without beginning or end, like an ouroboros, that is, the mythical snake of antiquity eternally swallowing its tail.

Breaking the links of the Syndrome through such developments as later marriage of girls, formation of nuclear families in their own domiciles (neolocal marriage), and the abandonment of practices such as polygyny has historically created an observable division between what Maine termed status and contract societies. In part III of this volume, in which we undertake the subject of change,

Introduction

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we argue that much can be learned from these historical and even contemporary efforts to move beyond fraternity as the security provision mechanism of the society. Some of these efforts have been hugely successful; others have been dismal failures. Analysis of these cases provides the foundation for contemporary applications and recommendations in the final chapter of our book.

Our study is designed to identify practices and methods of informal social organization that subordinate women and benefit men, not to demonize men as a sex. Many, perhaps most, men have chosen a more peaceful and egalitarian relationship with women and are strong advocates of women’s rights. Furthermore, although we document the actions of men in the social practices that we detail, as noted previously, these practices can be maintained only through the acquiescence, and in many cases the active collusion, of women. Thus, when women search for additional wives for their sons or value their daughters less than their sons, they become complicit in propagating the Syndrome. We agree that women have far less power than men in household decisions, but it must be acknowledged that some women have been instrumental in furthering practices that harm women, just as others have actively worked to abolish such practices. In sum, men are not devils and women are not angels in the story we tell in this book.

✳✳✳ This has been a long-term project. To formulate and support our argument both theoretically and empirically, we delved into the disciplines of history, anthropology, sociology, evolutionary biology, and political science, seeking insight on the subordination of women and the effects of that subordination on the group.

As we worked out the means by which women are controlled, we discovered that many of the variables we thought to be critically important, such as prevalence of patrilocal marriage, were not objects of current cross-national study. More bluntly put, there wasn’t any data. To undertake this research project, we were going to have to compile that data. We could not have done so without the help of our sponsors, particularly the Minerva Initiative of the U.S. Department of Defense. With that crucial support, we led our teams of student coders in compiling and then scaling the empirical data necessary to investigate our arguments.

Finally, we performed extensive statistical analyses to evaluate our assertion that the subordination of women undermines national security and stability.

Our academic home for this research is The WomanStats Project (womanstats.org), which holds that “The fate of nations is tied to the status of women.”

To demonstrate the linkage, WomanStats has assembled data on every country with a population greater than 200,000, currently 176 nations. Coders who are graduate and undergraduate students at Brigham Young University (BYU), Texas A&M University (TAMU), the University of Kent, Ankara Social Sciences

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Introduction

University, and the Universidad del Rosario have been tasked with researching open sources for data on more than 350 different variables that detail the situation of women country by country. The superb student researchers at BYU and TAMU were those who compiled the empirical data for this book.

The WomanStats database allows researchers access to both qualitative and quantitative data on women’s worldwide situation, plus cross-national univariate and multivariate scales as well as analysis and mapping of the data.

All of the data compiled for our analysis as well as maps and other materials are freely available on our website, representing our contribution to any who are interested in these topics.4 This book, the culmination of that massive data collection effort, is divided into three sections. Part I introduces what we term the “first political order,” the order of authority in the household that forms the basis for community and state actions. Part I also presents our theoretical framework concerning the male security dilemma and its resolution through fraternal alliances.

We extend that framework by delineating the specific means that subordinate the interests of women to that of the fraternal alliance. We define and explicate the Patrilineal/Fraternal Syndrome and explain how it manifests historically and in the modern day.

Chapter 1 defines the options for household authority relations, laying out the sexual political order that we believe is determinative of the wider political order. Here, we explore the first political order in the title of this work.

The chapter surveys the works of philosophers and theorists seeking to answer how the subordination of women produces a given political order. Chapter 2 outlines our theoretical framework and introduces our definition of the Patrilineal/Fraternal Syndrome. As agnatic kin groups coalesce to counter threats of violence from other groups, they strategically utilize practices designed to concentrate authority, reproductive rights, and property in male hands. We define how the Syndrome operates through these component practices, and note, in a preliminary way, implications for the organization and behavior of the nationstate. We suggest that the tragedy of great power politics actually derives from the tragedy of the Syndrome. Chapter 3 lays out the contemporary prevalence of the Syndrome. The introduction to the chapter details our construction of the Syndrome index and our methods in determining its prevalence and intensity in countries worldwide. We then examine the eleven components of the Syndrome and trace how each plays its role in the subordination of women, even in today’s world.

Part II further develops our theoretical framework, by positing in detail the causal mechanisms through which the Patrilineal/Fraternal Syndrome produces negative consequences for governance, security, and stability within a society.

Chapter 4 examines the consequences of the Patrilineal/Fraternal security order for state governance and national security and discusses the ways the Syndrome

Introduction

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undermines state stability and resilience as well as furthers conflict. Chapter 5 takes up three of the mechanisms by which the Syndrome obstructs marriage markets, which obstruction in turn deepens national instability: these three mechanisms are alteration of sex ratios, polygyny, and brideprice or dowry.

This chapter explores the impact of such obstruction not only on individual women and men but also on the larger society and on the stability and security of the nation-state. Chapter 6 examines the variety of consequences, outside of security and governance, that the Syndrome visits upon societies.

These consequences affect families, communities, and states across a range of dimensions, including health, demographics, food security, economic performance, environmental protection, educational investment, and social progress.

Human, economic, and environmental security are all undermined by reliance on male fraternities for security.

Chapter 7 introduces the empirical analysis designed to test the propositions proposed in chapters 4, 5, and 6. The chapter first notes which additional factors, such as urbanization, may influence, contextualize, or compete with the Syndrome as possible explanations of these nation-state outcomes, and these then serve as control variables in our models. The remainder of the chapter is the heart of our analytical work—that is, we present the results of our multivariate modeling. We divide our empirical analysis into nine dimensions of nation-state outcomes and explore the relationship between outcome variables in each dimension and a model incorporating the Syndrome and our seven control variables. The dimensions are as follows: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

Political Stability and Governance Security and Conflict Economic Performance Economic Rentierism Health and Well-Being Demographic Security Education of the Population Social Progress Environmental Protection

Each dimension contains dependent variables that together grant insight into the impact that the Syndrome has on the overall stability and security of the nation-state, its people, and its environment. Although some familiarity with quantitative analysis is helpful for getting the most from these empirical results, we have streamlined the presentation of the results for the sake of the reader. (Most of the technical details and tables for the multivariate analyses are provided in appendix III, with summary tables and extensive comments throughout chapter 7 that will guide the general reader.) We have provided

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Introduction

visual aids such as scatterplots showing the relationship between the Syndrome and specific outcome variables in our large N analysis. In addition, where possible, we computed odds ratios through logistic regression analysis, analyzing how each unit of additional intensification of the Syndrome affects the outcome variables. Appendixes I–V provide additional information, and our full replication dataset and ancillary files can be found online (see appendix III for details on locating the online information).

Part III considers the possibility of change. In particular, it identifies meaningful distinctions among Post-Syndrome, Transition, and Syndrome societies, and it notes that nation-state outcomes for Transition nations are intermediate between the other two types of society. In other words, we show that even a partial dismantling of the Syndrome’s components offers salutary effects for the nationstate. Chapter 8 examines the first political order from a historical perspective to shed light on what specific changes to the Syndrome have allowed states to move away from the centrality of male fraternity, and as a result, to create and maintain rule of law and individual rights. We highlight in this chapter the work of scholars such as Jack Goody, John Hajnal, Mary Hartman, and others who have written on the revolutionary adjustments made over human history to counter Syndrome practices, such as neolocal marriage and the abolition of polygyny and cousin marriage. Positive cases, such as post-Roman northwestern Europe, are examined, but we also examine cases in which change failed, such as in Soviet Central Asia during the early part of the twentieth century. This historical backdrop, plus a look at cases in the modern era, such as South Korea, help us to understand what works to facilitate change and under what conditions.

Chapter 9 ponders the question of what can be done to limit the Syndrome’s influence today. It suggests and evaluates specific policies and approaches that can make a difference in diminishing the grasp that the Patrilineal/Fraternal Syndrome has on societies. It also suggests when other policy initiatives, such as democratization, are likely to fail as a result of the Syndrome status of the target nation.

Before moving to the first chapter, we invite the reader to turn to the illustration in the frontispiece. If you examine the seated figure, you will note that the woman with hooded face and dejected posture is holding a snake in her right hand. On closer examination, you can see that it is not just an ordinary snake but rather an ouroboros, the serpent who has swallowed its tail, thereby forming a continuous unit, a circle that in classical imagery reflects infinity.

We see the Patrilineal/Fraternal Syndrome as best symbolized by this archetype, a phenomenon also without beginning or end. The ouroboros is destined to live on eternally—no wonder the hooded female figure is so sorrowful.5 Unlike the classic ouroboros, however, we find that the Syndrome can be disrupted and dismantled through concerted, focused efforts. We write this book to aid those efforts and pray they may be successful. Otherwise, the Syndrome, which has plagued humankind for millennia, will continue to cause immeasurable grief for us all far into the future.