@Drazen: Ha! Love the Starkey quote and the “campaign against the giving of clear answers” – fabulous. But clarity and conciseness lose their virtue the further they hew from the truth. And any simplification which is phrased “surely [this simplification] is the only rational solution” is particularly likely to fall wide of the mark.
For reference, I hadn’t thought we were debating “Is gender a real issue?” – I agree that it has been and is. I’m interested in the question “Need gender be an issue – and if so in what ways?”, which pertains to the future of our world as well as the alternate worlds in which much CoG fiction is set. Hence my strong interest in the actual reasons behind the different gender roles we see in existing human cultures.
You suggested that these reasons are “seldom commented upon.” I think there’s actually quite a lot of popular commentary out there on this topic… usually taking the form of just-so stories about our shared hunter-gatherer or agrarian past which, when you push them, reveal themselves as oversimplifications of the unhelpful, misleading kind.
Plants grow when they have soil and water is an unarguably useful simplification – the response “What about hydroponics?” would be merely persnickety. If the simplification were phrased, Surely the only way for plants to grow is if they have soil and water, a mild reminder about hydroponics might be appropriate. Surely all plants have flowers as their reproductive organs would quite rightly spur the objection, “What about conifers, ferns, mosses, etc.?” But while it’s significantly inaccurate and deserves correction, that simplification is at least true of some 88% of known plant species, which outnumber the non-flowering ones by roughly 8 to 1.
As far as I can see, the simplification you offered (as, again, “surely the only rational solution”) does not accurately describe anything close to 88% of known human societies, whatever their stage of technological development.
To be clear, the case I understood you to be making was this: The difference in average muscle mass between males and females leads rationally to a pre-industrial gender division of labour where “more labour intensive… strenuous” tasks such as “tending the fields [or] working the mines” go to men, while women get tasks requiring more “attention” and “tiresome manual” effort, both in the house and in acquiring/preparing food. As it happens, this is also one fairly popular and familiar answer to the question that interests me, “Need gender matter?” – and from the way you framed it, I thought you were advancing it that way (e.g. contending that it would be “ludicrous” to expect a pre-industrial society to have a more egalitarian division of labour on the basis of physical strength).
And my response remains: Women’s agricultural roles in most agrarian societies are just as physically strenuous and labour intensive as men’s, and in many cases more so. This is notably true in areas where land clearance and tillage is carried out by hoe or stick… and the paper I linked to suggests that this describes 86% of pre-industrial societies. Now, of course the plow isn’t nearly as marginal as that number alone might be taken to suggest – it’s quite a successful technology, and plowing societies often grew to be much larger in population and geographical area. So I’m not going to argue that your simplification is actually more analogous to “Surely no plants have flowers.” But it certainly doesn’t warrant the confident language of “only rational,” or even “typical.”
Indeed, even a humbler rephrase – Pre-industrial gender divisions of labor more or less correspond to the difference in average muscle mass between sexes – would still be wrong. It’s a fact that men are (on average) physically stronger than women. And yet it’s remarkable how many pre-industrial societies have divisions of labor that leave women with a disproportionate share of physically demanding work, including work (like hoe tillage, water transport, and care of large animals) that would give a comparative advantage to high upper body strength.
So I do think your simplification collapses; perhaps you had a broader tapestry in mind, but the argument as you actually phrased it hung far too much weight on one thread. As it would if we tried to explain social roles in terms of any other merely biological factor (testosterone, childbearing, etc.) All those facts about the sexes are interpreted in strikingly diverse ways in different cultures. And if no single biological factor requires a given social response… then why could the tapestry not be woven in as many self-consistent ways as we can imagine?
From your last post, you seemed to answer the question, “Need gender matter?” with “Not necessarily, if the author has put some thought into it.” Which would not have elicited anything like the same response from me.
A couple other notes: if you do only want to focus on Europe in discussions like these (as you seemed to imply by your suggestion that examples from sub-Saharan Africa or mountain Asia were “irrelevant to my main argument”), you might say so from the outset, rather than using phrases like “from the dawn of human civilisation.” And while I agree that “ideals are systemic, not specific,” it seems rather question-begging to suggest that that rules out a society where strong women don’t get the same roles as men of equivalent musculature. Why must the “system” necessarily take gender rather than physical strength as its key category?