I would argue that the advent of birth control is on par with fire, agriculture, and the industrial revolution in the impact on changes in human culture and patterns in civilization. We humans are post-biological creatures: technology has allowed us to transcend the pressures of the environment and has rendered starvation, child mortality, death by communicable disease, etc. the aberration rather than the norm. And when mortality is from these causes there are usually politics involved.
In short, we don’t need women to stay home and have babies to insure the survival of our species, race or nationality. We have the opposite problem—global population has boomed to an unprecedented degree and the pressure of increasing the standard of living for all of those humans is posing a larger feedback on human survival beyond the individual death rate. We are quickly approaching the point of having made the global climate bad for the survival of all humans, not to mention other species (already there).
But what are the impacts of women being free of the cycle of birthing, infant care, washing diapers, etc. on societal organization? One aspect is that we no longer need the strongly delimitated gender roles as we did in the past. Just a few hundred years ago if women had not stayed home and had babies civilizations would have been in serious jeopardy. The human story is one of war, famine, disease and the struggle to repopulate after these events. Countless civilizations did not survive these pressures.
For example almost all California natives were wiped out by smallpox brought unwittingly (or not) by the Spanish explorers and missionaries, and these cultures have effectively died out in terms of their dominance in society. Another example is the Mayans, a rich technological society which waned long before the arrival of Europeans in the New World. It is argued that shorter-term climate change caused by ENSO related climate fluctuations after a build out during an especially agriculturally fertile period lead to a rapid decline in their culture. There was probably war involved in there somewhere as well. In both of these cases one reason these cultures waned is that people were not able to reproduce fast enough to maintain the culture. In our own US history we can ask: if women had gone out to fight in the Civil War what effect would it have had on the demographics of the US?
So we used to really, really need women to make a lot of babies, as most of those babies would die: in childbirth, as children or as soldiers. This was true historically until very recently. Birth control would arguably been terrible for humanity before we had antibiotics and immunizations. But we as women (and humans) are now free of this. Free from the burden of obligate reproduction but still burdened by the social conditioning of millennia of needing to do so. It is understandable that it is deep in our culture and therefore deep in our psyches that we are “supposed” to fulfill certain behaviors, attitudes and actions as women.
I am a reluctant feminist. Personally, I wish we could fast forward and get over the psychological and cultural issues stemming from our long lineage of gender norms. But here we are. All struggling to figure out what women do: what they sound like, what women in power look like, what parenting looks like and how it is shared now that women are freed from the cycle of endless reproduction. This is also true for men. As women are freed from obligate reproduction men have the freedom to take on more household roles, parenting duties, and are generally freed from being the sole providers.
What am I getting at? All of this has made our old, very delineated gender roles obsolete.
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