Gender Inequality in Families: Women as the Cooking Apes (Second Chapter 12 post)

On a recent visit home, I watched a scene I have observed so many times before at mealtime.  After my family returned from an outing together (shopping, movie, etc.), my dad retired to the den to watch football or to do something on his computer while my mom automatically began preparing the evening meal.  There is never a discussion of who will prepare the food:  it is always my mom (with or without some help from me).  That’s just how it is.  I never really thought about it before, but in a strange coincidence, at the same time we read Chapter 12 on Sex and Gender inequality for Sociology, I also read a book related to the Human Evolution class I am also taking.  The book Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire:  How Cooking Made Us Human.  In it, Wrangham sets forth his “cooking hypothesis” which stems from the idea that the control of fire and the cooking of food is what lead to the evolution of the modern human, both in terms of changes in the human body that were made possible by eating cooked foods (such as bigger brains), and changes in our behavior including the sexual division of labor and development of pair bonds.

Wrangham presents loads of evidence that suggests that man became “the cooking ape” beginning as early as the transformation from Homo habilis to Homo erectus beginning about 1.8 million years ago.  From a sociological standpoint, however, it is the behavioral changes this made possible that are most interesting.  After reading this book, I think that Wrangham should have said instead that “woman became the cooking ape.”

According to Wrangham, the harnessing of fire and the ability to cook led to the evolution of the sexual division of labor and pair bonding.  Once cooking reduced the amount of time necessary for chewing raw meat and tough plants, there was more time for hunting and gathering, which created the division of labor.  The male hunted while the female stayed behind to gather and cook.  Even if the hunt was not successful, the ability to eat cooking-softened gathered food would allow everyone to consume enough calories, but this depended on those staying behind to gather and cook other food, such as tubers and roots.  Cooked food plus more animal foods as a result of more hunting time (and less chewing time) created a division of labor.  Wrangham says that pair bonding was a natural outgrowth of this, because it solves the problem of who feeds whom:  The female stays behind and cooks and gathers while the males hunt.  The male protected the female from having someone stronger steal the food they have piled up waiting to be cooked, and in turn, the female provided a meal every night for their partner.  In other words, Wrangham’s idea is that pair bonding evolved in response not to mating competition but to competition for food. If the hunting was successful, the pair bond would share the food.  And thus it all began.

Interestingly, in the following quote, Wrangham acknowledges that this division of labor did not work out so well for the females in the long run:

The idea that cooking led to our pair-bonds suggests a worldwide irony.  Cooking brought huge nutritional benefits.  But for women, the adoption of cooking has also led to a major increase in their vulnerability to male authority.  Men were the greater beneficiaries.  Cooking freed women’s time and fed their children, but it also trapped women into a newly subservient role enforced by male-dominated culture.  Cooking created and perpetuated a novel system of male cultural superiority.  It is not a pretty picture.  (Wrangham, p. 177)

Wrangham goes on to devote an entire richly documented chapter to showing how the woman as the cooking ape model in a pair bond is nearly universal across time and place in most cultures since cooking began.  He observes that “while the arrangement is comfortable for both sexes, it is particularly convenient for the male” (Wrangham, p. 147). Newman says that “much of the inequality women face revolves around the traditional view of their family role” (Newman, p. 400).  It seems that role developed very early on, even before we became Homo sapiens, which makes changing this very “powerful and persuasive” aspect of  our sexist ideology a tall order indeed (Newman, p. 402).