Free Cannibals and Kings by Marvin Harris

prevent lactating women from leaving their infants in someone else’s care for a few hours once or twice a week. Since bands consist of closely related kinspeople, hunter-collector women are not as isolated as modern working women and have no trouble finding the pre-industrial equivalents of baby-sitters and day-care centers.
    The explanation for the near-universal exclusion of women from big-game hunting appears to lie in the practice of warfare, the male supremacist sex roles which arise in conjunction with warfare, and the practice of female infanticide—all of which ultimately derive from the attempt to solve the problem of reproductive pressure. Virtually all band and village societiesteach only males how to become proficient in the use of weapons, and frequently women are forbidden even to touch these weapons just as they are generally discouraged or prevented from engaging in front-line combat.
    Male military prowess is closely associated with sexually differentiated training for fierce and aggressive behavior. Band and village societies train males for combat through competitive sports such as wrestling, racing, and dueling. Women seldom participate in such sports and never compete with men. Band and village societies also instill masculinity by subjecting boys to intense ordeals involving genital mutilations such as circumcision, exposure to the elements, and drug-induced hallucinatory encounters with supernatural monsters. It is true that some band and village societies also put girls through puberty rituals but these usually involve trials by boredom rather than terror. Girls are kept out of sight in special huts or rooms for a month or more, during which time they are forbidden to touch their own bodies. Even if they develop an itch, they must use an instrument like a back-scratcher. Sometimes they are forbidden to speak throughout the entire period of their seclusion. It is also true that some cultures mutilate the female genitalia by cutting off a portion of the clitoris, but this is a very uncommon practice and occurs far less frequently than does circumcision.
    One question that remains is why
all
women are barred from being trained as military co-equals with males. There are women who are brawnier and more powerful than some men. The winner of the 1972 Olympic women’s javelin competition set a record of 209′ 7″, which not only surpasses the spear-throwing potential of most males but also betters the performance of several former champion Olympic male javelinthrowers (though they used slightly heavier javelins). So if the crucial factor in forming a war party is brawniness, why not include women whose strength matches or exceeds that of the average enemy male? I think the answer is that the occasional military success of well-trained, large, and powerful females against smaller males would conflict with the sex hierarchy upon which preferential female infanticide is predicated. Males who are successful warriors are rewarded with several wives and sexual privileges that depend on women being reared to accept male supremacy. If the whole system is to function smoothly, no woman can be permitted to get the idea that she is as worthy and powerful as any man.
    To sum up: War and female infanticide are part of the price our stone age ancestors had to pay for regulating their populations in order to prevent a lowering of living standards to the bare subsistence level. I feel confident that the causal arrow points from reproductive pressure to warfare and to female infanticide rather than the other way around. Without reproductive pressures, it would be senseless not to rear as many girls as boys, even if males were looked upon as more valuable because of their superiority in hand-to-hand combat. The fastest way to expand male combat strength would be to regard every little girl as precious and not to kill or neglect a single one. I doubt very much that any human being has ever failed to grasp the elementary