Positive Liberty

I found an odd argument from Stephanie Coontz’s Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, around pages 48-49.

Coontz begins by suggesting that in the last couple of centuries, the power of “kin, community, and state to arrange, prohibit, and interfere in marriages has waned,” which is certainly true. And this is not a shocking, unprecedented development, but rather a return to the norms that prevailed during hunter-gatherer times, when marriage wasn’t about property or dynastic succession, and when partners enjoyed much greater freedom. They could choose freely among potential mates, they worried less about infidelity, they loved even illegitimate children, and they could enter and leave marriages more easily. She writes,

Legal scholar Harry Willekins argues that in most modern industrial societies, marriages are contracted and dissolved in ways that have more in common with the habits of some egalitarian band-level societies than the elaborate rules that governed marriage in more complex societies over the past 5,000 years. In many contemporary societies, there is a growing acceptance of premarital sex, divorce, and remarriage, along with an erosion of sharp distinctions between cohabitation and marriage and between ‘legitimate’ and out-of-wedlock births.

This may seem good or bad depending on one’s own beliefs about marital norms. Yet it’s debatable whether what’s being said about past societies is even true. Most of us, I suspect, have heard neither of moieties nor of phratries, but we should all pity the person who wanted to marry against the rules that these kinship divisions entailed. The much-discussed same-sex unions among Native Americans were actually quite rare. And the reason preliterate marriage had little to do with wealth transfer is in part because there was so very little to go around.

But let’s ignore all that and grant that hunter-gatherer societies did have fluid enough marriage norms to make the comparison apt. Coontz continues,

In hunting and gathering bands and egalitarian horticultural communities, unstable marriages did not lead to the impoverishment of women or children as they often do today. Unmarried women participated in the work of the group and were entitled to a fair share, while children and other dependents were protected by strong customs that mandated sharing beyond the nuclear family.

This is not the case today, especially in societies such as the United States, where welfare provisions are less extensive than in Western Europe.

One wonders: Would today’s single mothers be better off as hunter-gatherers? Clearly this isn’t what Coontz means, so I’m searching for what this passage is supposed to get at (aside from a gratuitous swipe at the United States, and some doubtful praise for Europeans, who now seem to be better ersatz hunter-gatherers as well as everything else that they do better).

No, the absolute difference in wealth between the two types of societies is so vast that it’s hard to get too worked up about relative differences at all. Even the poorest of us does better than the richest hunter-gatherer. But perhaps what’s being said really is that when compared to single-mother hunter-gatherers, today’s single mothers are relatively worse off when each is compared to the married people in their respective societies.

Yet it’s a bit hard to believe that in hunter-gatherer societies, unstable marriage “did not lead to impoverishment of women or children.” Certainly it did. Aside from the general poverty, which was extraordinarily severe, these women and children would by far have had the worst of it.

I also think that their relative poverty would have been worse, and that losing a husband would be a bigger step down from an already very low level. Today’s labor is vastly different from the kind done in hunter-gatherer bands; it favors mental skills rather than physical ones, and here men and women have the greatest degree of natural equality. Today’s battle of the sexes is fought on considerably more even turf, which may explain why men are so uneasy lately.

Men are physically stronger, and therefore relatively more valuable to hunter-gatherer societies. By the same token they are, relative to women, less valuable today: Men are not more adept at using their minds and may even be less so on average. This makes single mothers’ labor more valuable as well.

Let’s also add the great benefits of a commercial economy: Whereas marriage in prehistoric societies might have been the only way to get the goods that men provided (meat, protection), today’s women can earn money — a new invention — and exchange it for whatever they want. It doesn’t matter whether the goods they want are produced by the father of their children or by unknown factory workers on the other side of the globe. Every working man (and woman) in the entire world is competing, potentially, to provide goods and services for her. This increases her wealth still further.

Again, this may be why men are so uneasy these days. But it also suggests that even relatively speaking, there are powerful institutions and social processes favoring women and women’s labor in the modern world, and that even by relative standards, it would be better to be a single mother today than one in a noncommercial, non-monetized society where brute force had a higher economic value relative to mental traits. Frankly, women never had it so good, single or otherwise, relatively or in absolute terms.

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