The Real Truth About The Female Body

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But if women embrace biology, which male-chauvinist diehards still equate with "destiny," won't they have to give up something else--like dignity and free will? The popularity of evolutionary theories featuring man-the-hunter from Mars and his Venusian sidekick, woman, has led many feminist scholars to assert that biology is a sexist "ideology," not a science, and Darwin just another dead white male with an ax to grind. In the mid-'80s, the influential French feminist theorist Christine Delphy advised thinking women to "ignore" biology, and in this country there were mutterings that research into sex differences should be de-funded forthwith, since no good could come of it. Recall those "scientific" theories of the innate inferiority of African Americans and Jews compared with the more highly evolved Wasps.

But the only cure for bad science is more science, and the story of human evolution has been evolving pretty rapidly itself. There were always plenty of prima facie reasons to doubt the Mr. and Mrs. Man-the-Hunter version of our collective biography, such as the little matter of size, or, in science-speak, "sexual dimorphism." If men and women evolved so differently, then why aren't men a whole lot bigger than they are? In fact, humans display a smaller size disparity between the sexes than do many of our ape cousins--suggesting (though not proving) that early men and women sometimes had overlapping job descriptions, like having to drive off the leopards. And speaking of Paleolithic predators, wouldn't it be at least unwise for the guys to go off hunting, leaving the supposedly weak and dependent women and children to fend for themselves at base camp? Odd too, that Paleolithic culture should look so much like the culture of Levittown circa 1955, with the gals waiting at home for the guys to come back with the bacon. In what other carnivorous species is only one sex an actual predator?

Beginning in the '70s, women began to elbow their way into the field and develop serious alternatives to the old, male-centered theory of human evolution. It shouldn't matter, of course, what sex the scientist is, but women had their own reasons for being suspicious of the dominant paradigm. The first revisionist blow came in the mid-'70s, when anthropologists Adrienne Zihlman and Nancy Tanner pointed out that among surviving "hunting" peoples, most of the community's calories--up to 70%--come from plant food patiently gathered by women, not meat heroically captured by men. The evidence for Stone Age consumption of plant foods has mounted since then. In 1994 paleobotanist Sarah Mason concluded that a variety of plant material discovered at the Paleolithic site of Dolni Vestonice in the Czech Republic was in fact edible roots and seeds. At the very least, it seems, the Paleolithic dinner was potluck, and it was probably the women who provided most of the starches, salad and raspberry-mousse desserts. The mother-of-us-all was beginning to look a little peppier and more self-reliant.