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From: omo@mcnc.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.singles,net.women
Subject: Re: Why male dominance?
Message-ID: <1199@alvin.mcnc.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 4-Mar-86 19:42:53 EST
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Posted: Tue Mar  4 19:42:53 1986
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> >Some questions for all you feminists out there (men and women alike):
> >You claim that:
> > Throughout hundreds of years of civilzation, a male-dominated
> >society has evolved

> >How do you account for the evolution of this male dominance? 
> >Also, by what means have men
> >managed throught history to "keep women in their place"? 
> >I don't see
> >much evidence that men are threatening women with guns or physical 
> >violence, so why do the majority of women cooperated throughout history 
> >and continue to cooperate with this male-dominated society?

>There are some historical reasons why males have become
>dominant in most cultures.  These probably are their greater
>physical strength and the fact that they do not bear their
>young.

Yes.  Perhaps this will give everyone a better understanding of
how primitive conditions interact with male/female biology to
produce the subservience of women:
			_________________
Excerpted without permission from Science, Vol 226, No 4676 (Nov 84):

The Population Factor in Africa's Development Dilemma, Fred T. Sai

...The status of women is a matter of great concern to Africa.
Perhaps the rural African woman is the most underprivileged of
all human beings.  Various social roles, cultural practices and
the biological tasks imposed by fertility have combined to keep
the average rural African woman close to a beast of burden...

...Maternal mortality rates are also very high:  two to six deaths
per 1,000 live births---that is, 100 to 500 times the western
European rates.  Thus the high population growth rates of Africa
result from high fertility and relatively high mortality and are
therefore achieved at a very high price in the lives and health
of African women.  By the time women complete their families, 50%
of their cohort is dead....

...The usual African fertility pattern is for childbearing to
start as soon as it is biologically possible and stop at menopause.
The total fertility rate per woman is between four and eight births,
but mostly between six and eight.  This very high fertility means
the African woman spends between 18 and 20 years of her adult
life in childbearing (that is, the interval between the first live
birth and the last one), in comparison with 3 to 5 years for many
more advanced countries.  

...most women have traditionally handled most of the family
food crop production and have therefore played a major role
in agriculture...

(My favorite line:)
...Her potential for other pursuits is therefore considerably 
reduced....
		-------End of Article------

The suggestion that males are dominant because women fear rape
and beating is probably somewhat of a simplification of the 
situation in primitive cultures, where it was not so much the threat 
of violence from the immediately `dominating' males (mate, brother, 
father, etc), but the threat of violence from a physically hostile
environment, which included males.  The biggest threat probably
came from tribal warefare.  Another threat would be predators. 
In an effort to survive, each tribe naturally depended upon their
most physically strong (ie, males, not only because of raw physical
power, but because they weren't pregnant and nursing babies all of 
the time) members to defend the community against these threats.
This made these folks *very* valuable.  Oh, sure, women had babies
and grew a lot of food, but that's a long-term asset, and humans
are incorrigibly short-term planners.  Under these circumstances,
I believe *I* would have seen males as more `valuable' than myself.
After all, what good is being able to produce babies (most of which
are dead before they reach the age of 2, anyway) and grow food, if
the neighbors are likely to drop in and slaughter us all tomorrow 
night?  My guess is that *women became subservient* (rather than 
men becoming dominant) in order to survive, and also developed 
conniving, manipulative, sexually competitive behaviors in order
to attract and keep males that would protect them and their young.