We are experiencing an anthropological revolution. We see it in the #MeToo movement, in the denunciation of femicide and in an increasingly vociferous critique of patriarchal domination. Why this sudden rise of an antagonistic conception of the relationship between men and women, at the very moment when progress is accelerating and when the goals of first- and second-wave feminism seem on the verge of being achieved?

In this book, the anthropologist and historian Emmanuel Todd, while not underestimating the importance of crucial inequalities that remain, argues that the emancipation of women has essentially already taken place but that it has given rise to new tensions and contradictions. As women gain more freedom, they also gain access to traditional male social pathologies: economic anxiety, the disorientation of anomie, and individual and class resentment. But because they remain women, with the ability to bear children, their burden as human beings, although richer, is now more difficult to bear than that of men.

In order to understand our current condition, Todd retraces the evolution of the male/female relationship through the long history of the human species, from the emergence of Homo sapiens a hundred thousand years ago to the present. He also conducts a broad empirical study of the convergence between men and women today and of the differences that still separate them in education, in employment and in relation to longevity, suicide and homicide, electoral behaviour and racism. He explores the relations between womens liberation and other changes in contemporary societies such as the collapse of religion, the decline of industry, the decline of homophobia, the rise of bisexuality and the transgender phenomenon, and the decline in a sense of the collective life. And he shows how and why Western countries and especially the Anglo-American world, Scandinavia and France are, in their new feminist revolution, perhaps less universal than they think.

Emmanuel Todd is a sociologist, demographer and historical anthropologist at the National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED), Paris.

Preface


Introduction

The future is now

The singularity of the original human couple

Research versus ideology

The power of women today

Economics and anthropology

Womens liberation, and the antagonism between (or abolition of) the sexes



Part One. The contribution of historical anthropology



Chapter One

Patriarchy, gender and intersectionality

The fog of patriarchy

The emergence of the concept of gender

Gender: a useless and ideologized duplication

For a generalized intersectionality

French intersectionality



Chapter Two

Degendering anthropology

A tribute to female anthropologists

Julian Steward: sexual equality among hunter-gatherers described by a classical anthropologist

Martin King Whyte: anthropology just before gender

Henrietta Moore: The first disruptions

Marilyn G. Gelber: the monstrous man

Janet Carsten: Decomposition

An insufficiently feminist history



Chapter Three

The tools of historical anthropology

The nuclear family

The stem family

The communitarian family

The local group and marriage



Chapter Four

In search of the original family

Classical anthropology and the original family

The block in anthropology

The conservatism of peripheral zones: English, Americans, French, Shoshone, Bushmen, Eskimos, Chukchi and Agtas in one humanity

Saving Private Murdock

A new geography of the world



Chapter Five

The confinement of women: history comes to a halt

Nomads and the history of the family

Patrilineality and social stratification

The patrilineal impasse



Chapter Six

A detour by way of Australia

The debate on the Aborigines

The role of New Guinea



Chapter Seven

The sexual division of labour

Ideology versus reality

Ideology against itself

Collectivist men versus individualist women

The issue of equality: we are not chimpanzees



Chapter Eight

Christianity, Protestantism and women

Early Christianity and women

The Church and sexual security

Protestant patricentrism



Part Two. Our revolution



Chapter Nine

Liberation: 1950-2020

1950-1965: the height of petty-bourgeois conformism

The educational and sexual revolution: 1965-2000

Women, services and industry

Educational matridominance: 2000-2020

From hypergamy to hypogamy

Differences according to social class

Poverty and single-parent families

The middle classes in survival strategy

Women at the risk of anomie

The concept of soft anomie



Chapter Ten

Men resist but the collective collapses

The persistent sexual division of labour, yet again

The sex of the state

The medical profession

Mathematics

The top 4%: a residual patridominance

Even higher: capital has no sex

Divorce at the heart of the system

The masculine collective and its disintegration




Chapter Eleven

Gender: a petty bourgeois ideology

France in the face of the Anglo-American world

The sex of social classes

Anger as a general social phenomenon

Ideological hegemony in the feminine: doctorates

Matridominance at the OECD as well as at the INED

Farewell to reality

A provisional summary



Chapter Twelve

Women and Authority

Women as less racist

The weakening of the collective, but not of authority

The origin of Prohibition?

Ideological anomalies

Swedish family types

The riddle of authoritarian feminism

No paternal authority without maternal authority

The mother at the centre of the family

Constructed authority and natural authority



Chapter Thirteen

The mystery of Sweden

Against the myth of an original matriarchy

The Sweden of the origins

Interpreting the runic steles

Peasant patrilocality from the seventeenth to the twentieth century

The birth of the Swedish woman: literacy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

Sweden and Denmark



Chapter Fourteen

Homophobia: a male business

Orders of magnitude and causal sequences

LGBT: a tactical alliance

Words before things

Homosexuality, a natural human behaviour

Mapping homophobia: the BBO axis yet again

Homophobia: a male business



Chapter Fifteen

Women, between Christianity and bisexuality

Simple Protestant homophobia and Catholic ambivalence

The collapse of religious sentiment and homophobia

Are gays zombie Christians?

The objection of Eastern Europe

Marriage for all men and all women

The rise of female bisexuality



Chapter Sixteen

The social construction of transgender

The case of the berdaches

Berdaches and transgender people

My new vagina wont make me happy

Ideological centrality

but statistical weakness

Women and identity

The omnipotence of mothers

Does society think through individuals?

The Christian taste for extraordinary sexuality



Chapter Seventeen

Economic globalization and the deviation from anthropological trajectories

Globalization and the tertiarization of the economy

Economic or anthropological specialization?

The worker nations of Eastern Europe

Sweden, yet again...

The cost of rejecting liberation



Conclusion

Has humanity come of age?



Notes

Index