Christ Wave Feminism
Ending polygamy, arranged marriages, & conferring rights of property and inheritance to women were 3 ways the Church undercut patriarchal sexism
— Women pray more than men (assume Christianity unless [specified])
(Argyle, 1958; Baker, 2008; Batson et al., 1993; Bradshaw & Ellison, 2009; Collett & Lizardo, 2009; Firth, 1997 [Hinduism]; Ghorbani et al., 2014 [Iran Muslims]; Gonzalez, 2011 [Kuwait Muslims]; Jones, 2021; Jung, 2014 [South Korea]; Khan et al., 2015 [Pakistan Muslims]; Krause & Chatters, 2005; Miller & Hoffman, 1995; Ryberg et al., 2018; Schnabel, 2015 [Judaism]; Schnabel, 2019 [Hindu women & Buddhist women]; Voas et al., 2013).
— Women are more likely to be baptized than men
(Diane M. Notarianni, 1996; John Richard Johnson, 1982; Judge H. Klein, 2018; Ralph Peay, 2005; P. Jonsson et al., 2020).
Table of Contents
· Christianity & Feminism
∘ Romantic Love (vs Arranged Marriages).
∘ Taken together…
· “The Gender Pray Gap” (Landon Schnabel, 2019)
∘ Related Articles of Faith
· Sidenotes
∘ Obama, Barack. A Promised Land (p. 633).
∘ Hunting & Gathering
∘ Preference For Multiracial Models
· Counterfeit Intimacy
Prelude
The available molecular genetic evidence suggests that our ancestors likely practiced female exogamy (Seielstad, Minch, & Cavalli-Sforza, 1998).
When girls reached puberty, they left their natal groups to marry into neighboring groups to avoid inbreeding, while boys stayed in their natal groups their entire lives. So all men in a hunter–gatherer band were genetically related whereas women were not (Geary et al., 2003).
“While likely monogamous, they practiced exogamy, as six out of eight non-locals are women. This provides evidence for the society being patrilocal, perhaps as a way of protecting property among the male line, while in-marriage from many different places secured social and political networks and prevented inbreeding” (Karl-Goran Sjogren et al., 2020).
Christianity & Feminism
Christianity Outlawed Polygyny…
“And this has had profound and positive effects. Indeed, without the Christian teaching on monogamy, Western civilization might not have emerged in its current form” (Potts & Hayden, 2008).
Korotayev & Bondarenko, 2000: “The total absence of polygyny in the Christian part of the Mediterranean region (but not in its Muslim part) could be hardly explained by anything else but by the strict prohibition of polygyny by the Christian Church. Germans, Celts, and Slavs were quite polygynous in the pre-Christian period. Hence, the formation of the zone of uninterrupted monogamy in Europe could be hardly attributed to anything but the Christianization.”
Next, the Church ushered in egalitarian changes to property rights & inheritance laws, two of the most important components of patriarchal sexism in patrilineal societies. Based on Christian doctrines of equality under God, and the fact that in Europe the Church was recognized as having divine authority that superseded the government, Christianity created the first ripples of feminism (centuries before the 1st wave).
Jack Goody (2005): “The Church’s insistence on consent and affection… meant taking a stand… against male supremacy, for it asserted the equality of the sexes in concluding the marriage pact.”
Romantic Love.
By the mid-12th century in NW Europe women were free to marry w/o parental consent, allowing greater equality between spouses by basing mate choice on love & not lineage (Goody, 2000).
And so it was that another core millennia-old pillar of patriarchal societies was felled by Christianity. Marriage based on romantic love ended the practice of daughters being arranged into marriages resulting in distant patrilocal relocations to live her life with her husband’s well bonded male kin group while she is bereft of any comparatively strong support network.
Taken together…
- Monogamy meant the development of more intimate spousal bonds than polygyny (on average).
- Marriages based on “consent & affection” dismantled the patriarchal stronghold that patrilineal-based arranged marriages held over women’s lives for thousands of years. This meant husbands now had to rely more on their spouse relative to their patrilocal male kin group.
- Neolocal marriages also meant men now had to rely more on males they weren’t related to in their workplace as opposed to their male relatives.
2. Giving women inheritance & property rights meant that husbands had to approach their wife as an equal more than perhaps ever before in human history. Property & inheritance had been solely a patrilineal responsibility for thousands of years. With the relevance of the male kin group weakened & with women now having greater rights, society was becoming more egalitarian — starting at the household level.
3. Ending arranged marriage lead to the decline of patriarchal male clans which lead to corporations… and ultimately this thing we now call Capitalism.
“Capitalism was the consequence rather than the cause of a change in social relationship and custom” (Fukuyama, 2011).
- Each nuclear family became its own mini business with spouses working together to ensure they had their basic needs met (Mary Hartman, 2004). Thus, moral ethics of individualism & self-reliance emerged.
- Romantic marriages were based on such individualistic ideals. The end of arranged marriage meant men now had to try & be a decent person to get married. One result was people getting married at later ages.
4. Older age of marriage means higher literacy rates (males have to try harder than in arranged marriages; women have more time to hone their skills prior to marriage; women have fewer kids when they get married later, which means more time), which Foreman-Peck & Zhou (2018) identity as a key ingredient of the Industrial Revolution.
The End.
Foreman‐Peck, J., & Zhou, P. (2018). Late marriage as a contributor to the industrial revolution in England. The Economic History Review, 71(4), 1073–1099.
—
As a result, “over time,
the Church became the largest landowner in Europe, holding one-third to one-half of the land in various European countries, including England, France,
and what we now know as Germany” (Valerie Hudson et al., 2020).
To be continued…
“The Gender Pray Gap” (Landon Schnabel, 2019)
Krause & Chatters, 2005: Research suggests that more frequent prayer is associated with a greater sense of psychological well-being (Poloma and Gallup, 1991).
🕉 Hindus: women are more religious (Firth, 1997; (Landon Schnabel, 2019).
☯ Buddhists: Women are “substantially more religious than men” (Landon Schnabel, 2019)
☪ Muslims: women more religious than men
Iran (Ghorbani et al., 2014; Khan et al., 2015)
Pakistan (Khan et al., 2015)
Kuwait (Alessandra Gonzalez, 2011)
✡ Judaism: Jewish women pray more than men (Schnabel, 2015)
However → men more religious (Muslims; Landon Schnabel, 2019), (Hindus, Jews, & Muslims; Kate Loewenthal et al., 2002)
Sikhs: No difference (Francis et al., 2020)
Women have a higher quantity & quality of interpersonal relationships than men in church (Krause et al., 2002), and they rely on church more than men for provisions of social support (Ross and Mirowsky, 2010).
Prayer helps attenuate the influence of stress on depression — but only for women (Mirola, 1999; Wang & Patten, 2002).
Earning$$$ per hour is negatively associated with prayer frequency (Brown, 2009). People who are wealthy don’t talk to God as much.
Related Articles of Faith
—
Sidenotes
Obama, Barack. A Promised Land (p. 633).
Crown. Kindle Edition.
“opportunities for women and girls across the globe directly supports everyone’s security and prosperity” (p. 569).
“…the value of harnessing new technologies in the developing world, a 10% increase in the penetration rate for mobile phones in a developing country can lead to an increase in GDP per capita of between .6 and 1.2%. That translates to billions of dollars and countless jobs”
Hunting & Gathering
“The genus Homo appeared on earth approximately two million years ago, and until approximately 10,000 years ago all humans lived as hunters and gatherers (Lee & DeVore, 1968). Approximately 10,000 years ago, human societies started making the transition from a hunting and gathering mode of subsistence to a mode of subsistence based on agriculture and animal husbandry (Price, 2000).”
Preference For Multiracial Models
When Asian/ Black/ Hispanic minorities are featured on cover spreads or used in marketing campaigns they’re more likely to be half White than White models on the cover are to be half minority.
N = 100 covers
80 = monoracial White models
10 = monoracial minority models
10 = half minority — half White models
Of 20 minority models, 10 were monoracial minorities (50% multiracial)
Of 90 White models, 80 were White monoracials (11.11% multiracial)
“Editorial director of Numéro Tokyo, Sayumi Gunji, said in a phone interview that
“Almost all top models in the their 20s are Hafu [multiracial], especially the top models of popular fashion magazines.”
When maximally fertile, they prefer cues of phenotypic quality (e.g., facial symmetry, testosterone markers, dominance cues) whereas at other stages of their menstrual cycles they have a penchant for “softer” features (Feinberg et al., 2006; Gangestad et al., 2007; Little, Jones, & Burriss, 2007; Penton-Voak & Perrett, 2000; Penton-Voak et al., 1999).
Further, Grammer, Renninger, and Fisher (2004) found that estrogen levels were associated with provocative attire. At an Austrian night club, the researchers had photos taken of women patrons and had their estrogen levels measured.
Estrogen levels were positively correlated with the amount of skin revealed and clothing tightness,
in women who were in a committed relationship but whose partner was not present at the night club.
Counterfeit Intimacy
GamerGirl’s dramaturgical performance of inauthentic intimacy when interacting with male avatars (Foote 1954; Goffman, 1959). The emotional labor associated with this “counterfeit currency in interpersonal relations” (Foote, 1954, p. 162) means attempting to appear more sexually attractive than the other rival women avatars around the same free-roam zone.
It is worth it if he’s influenced by it long enough to optimize the tangible resource extraction from the avatars that are most likely to be ‘tanks’ (male avatars) & thus provide assistance with a dungeon, dragon, etc.
Prelude 1.12.2022 Update
Karl-Goran Sjogren et al. (2020) discuss evidence “of a kinship structure that was based on a dominant male line that married in women from other groups and married out their own daughters in this way building up a network of alliances, which could become part of a competitive mobilization in periods of unrest, and perhaps also to secure access to resources like metal. Such a system corresponds to the well-documented Omaha kinship structure of exogamy linked to virilocal residence and patrilineal descent, and primogeniture. It favored an expansive settlement policy, and it also provides for the first time a realistic model for the spread of a prehistoric language family along male lineages, as well as their genetic dominance through time.”
The “rule that one was not allowed to marry twice into the same family” helped “produce more variable alliances with other families, and thus expand potential political support, whether for exchange/ trade or when mobilizing for hunt/warfare.”
As a result, “there are multiple female lineages, and not a single mitochondrial haplotype is identical in both cemeteries despite them being only 17 kilometers apart and mostly contemporaneous. This evidence supports the notion that marriage was indeed an instrument in creating widespread alliances.”