Gyna Sapien
From Fire to Feminism in Five Minutes by Kathryn Lukas-Damer
Introduction
We all understand that creating and sustaining healthy copies of ourselves is critical to our ability to thrive and survive as a species. Have you ever wondered why then the activities most important to our reaching this biological imperative, like cooking and child rearing, are relegated to the lowest rungs on our status hierarchy ladders?
I hadn’t ever really thought about this question in those specific terms until I started researching another much broader question: What is feminine power? A particularly challenging business relationship with a woman had prompted me to search for examples of powerful women in history. I traveled down too many rabbit holes to recount here and along the way discovered a history that helped me understand our present-day narrative about the feminine. The following is a 5-minute telling of how this story might have evolved and how together we might write the next chapter of human history.
Gyna Sapien: From Fire to Feminism in Five Minutes
Humans have always gathered around Fire. The earliest version of your central heating system, your stove and your oven, the place you think of as both communal and refuge, was ignited more than a million years ago when we humans learned to control and contain fire. That flame brought warmth from the elements, protection from predators, and an important new skill: cooking. More easily digestible foods freed up the energy required to grow bigger brains that forged the tools that helped us build structures around Hearths, first for rituals and then for the place we now call Home.
Bigger brains came with some bugs. The rapid increase in the size of baby’s head made childbirth a very risky business and nearly caused our extinction. That is until one Gyna Sapien cracked the DNA code: Mitochondrial African Eve who is thought to have emerged some 150,000 years ago. Eve’s slight genetic mutations were perhaps enough to increase the chances of both mother and baby surviving childbirth allowing them to avoid the fate of earlier hominids. This new strategy along with the more ancient one, the ability to discern mates who could protect and provide for their progeny until they reached reproductive age, would see the rise, for better or worse, of the most dominant species the planet had ever seen, Homo and Gyna Sapiens Sapiens (the doubly wise humans).
As hunters and gathers and part time horticulturists, homo and Gyna Sapien shared equally in securing food for their tribe and as a result were economically interdependent, resulting in egalitarian societies. The shift to nomadic pastoralism and agriculture, started to change this social and power dynamic. Men’s physical strength was necessary to manage the plow and large draft animals, and the surplus food that followed the plow, meant shorter birth intervals and more children. Men became the primary “calorie earners” and as a result, they controlled the family’s finances. Women could no longer simply gather needed resources from nature as before but instead relied solely on the resources supplied by men to survive.
As society and agriculture expanded, specialized jobs emerged, further increasing men’s status and wealth in the public sphere, while an increase in domestic duties kept women at home, further distancing them from wealth and ultimately, control over their lives. The egalitarian society that had defined cultural norms was now replaced with an asymmetrical power dynamic that eventually subordinated women to men. Home and Hearth came to symbolize too many children to care for, extreme poverty, backbreaking work and powerlessness.
By the mid 19th century, the chains that kept women bound in servitude were showing stress. After years of fighting for the right to vote in public elections, women’s suffrage finally prevailed and ignited more than a hundred years of unprecedented progress for women. In 1890 in the West, fewer than 5% of married women worked outside of the home but two world wars upended that arrangement. The mythological icon and bad ass, Rosy the Riveter, represented the 19 million American women who were employed at factories during WWII, disproving any notions that women were too physically or mentally weak to work outside of the domestic sphere. The “cult of domesticity” narrative that insisted that true femininity was “pious, pure, submissive and domestic” was dead.
By 1965, the second wave of feminism burst forth as the Pill gained acceptance and modern appliances freed up time for women who wanted to work outside of the home. Betty Frieden captured the zeitgeist of the time with her bestselling book “The Feminine Mystique” which challenged the long-held belief that a woman’s fulfillment was limited to her roles as wife, mother and homemaker. In 1972, nearly 50 years after it was first drafted, the landmark Equal Rights Amendment passed both houses of congress, and although it never became law (because shockingly not enough states ratified it), blatant gender-based discrimination declined. Married and single women from all classes were now entering the labor market in record numbers, transforming our culture in ways that no one could yet imagine.
Women’s contributions to the family fund meant that they now had more of a say in just about everything. In a very short period, women went from being thought of as the weaker sex and second-class citizens to crashing through glass ceilings and paving the way for women of my generation to have the freedom to dream up any life we could imagine. Except that’s not what we’re doing.
Most of us must now work just to make ends meet and only a handful of us are doing what one would consider fulfilling work. We spend an average of 40 plus hours a week at our first jobs before coming home to put in another 25 hours at our second jobs as cooks and caretakers - and that’s in the 50% of households lucky enough to have both parents around. We hand our babies over too early to well-meaning but under compensated and undereducated workers at day care centers so we can rush back to earning money for our families. If we are high earners, we might bring in a nanny, usually a young inexperienced woman, or a woman who must find care for her children so she can care for ours. Our mothers aren’t around to help. They’re either still working and/ or back home in the small town we escaped in our quest to find freedom and the American dream.
The truth is, we’re exhausted, and our kids are struggling more than they should given all our advances. And even though we have more freedom to choose our mates than ever before, more than 50% of our marriages end in divorce, taking an enormous psychological and financial toll on men, women and children. The planet is a mess, and we seem to have lost the ability to talk to each other civilly. We are not only not thriving, we are racing to the bottom and risking our viability as a species.
When our mothers and grandmothers left home to fight for equality and gain access to economic resources, they didn’t do it for themselves, they did it for us. Their actions, which took enormous courage, provided us with the education, wealth and influence to come up with the next part of the plan. And the opportunity to creatively solve our problems including those we inadvertently made for ourselves. I think they would expect nothing less from the incredible women we’ve become because of their sacrifices. If they could talk to us from beyond, I imagine they would have a lot to say, and I think might go something like this:
Time is short and the stakes are high. Don’t let this moment in time when women have more power ever before, slip away.
Let go of your anger about the past. The bitter seed of resentment hurts you more than anyone else. Most men are your allies and many are as confused as you are. They will support you in your efforts to find solutions that realign cultural values with what really matters to our species well-being. You must work together.
To the Elders, the old narrative is dying, and your young people are struggling to make meaning of their lives. Don’t abandon them. They need your wisdom more than ever to help them find the new narrative -whether they know it or not.
And speaking of wisdom. Cultivate it relentlessly. It lives in your belly and needs constant attention and upgrading. You know exactly what this means. Do it.
Do no Harm, take no shit. Be strong but don’t be a bitch except when absolutely necessary. A soft front, and a strong back will not only make the journey more pleasant for all passengers, it will also get you to the destination much faster.
Heal your sister and mother wounds and work together to figure out the next steps. Make sure your daughters are well loved and prepared to create the next part of the story for their daughters and so on.
Let us gather around our hearths and with our hearts and our minds, (and a hot cup of tea), and start the necessary conversations so that together we can begin to create a new path to the future. The one where we leave this place, and its inhabitants better than we found it. This is within our reach. This is our birthright. This is feminine power.
Kathryn Lukas-Damer
April 2022
Boulder Creek, CA