Sorry in advance — I kind of went to town and perhaps gave you more than you really wanted to know. 😸
I gave the article a cursory look, but it was readily apparent that they were describing patriarchal dynamics - and since that social system has only been around for about 3% of human history, those conclusions elucidate absolutely nothing about human mating more generally.
In layman's terms, women only have had to put up with men being patronizing and controlling in order to get them to support them and their offspring in a cultural context where women are not allowed to support themselves until recently (or have a greater array of kin and as-kin) help with that. For most of human history, alloparenting was the norm and there was no nuclear family in the way that we have it today.
"Today, most anthropologists would agree, regardless of their stance on issues such as the universality of male dominance, that an entirely different order of male dominance became associated with the rise of the large and populous agricultural states organized in terms of classes. The patriarchal systems that emerged brought women for the first time under the direct control of fathers and husbands with few cross-cutting sources of support.
Women as wives under this system were not social adults, and women’s lives were defined in terms of being a wife. Women’s mothering and women’s sexuality came to be seen as requiring protection by fathers and husbands. Protecting unmarried women’s virginity appears to go along with the idea of the domestication of women and an emphasis on a radical dichtomy between the public and the private sphere."
With patriarchy, not only do social classes emerge for the first time, but women’s sexuality is monitored and managed in a way that it had never been before. If sexual monogamy were natural and something that women gravitated to, there would have been no need for these new monitoring systems. Instead, women began to be tightly controlled and severely punished if they failed to reserve their sexual selves for only one man — their husband.
In the world that came before patriarchy, where the good of the entire tribe or enclave was the priority, paternity has no particular relevance. In fact, these cultures were matrilineal, with family and clan affiliation going through the mother. After all, everyone knows for sure who the mother of a baby is, and being able to give life was viewed with reverence and respect. Until the tight control of female sexuality that arose with patriarchy just a few thousand years ago, there was no effective way to know who the father of a child might be for sure, and it didn’t really matter anyhow.
Marriage, as we consider it today, did not exist before patriarchy, which arose with the advent of agriculture. Once paternity becomes important, because you have land and possessions to pass along to your heirs, control of women becomes intrinsic, and they are then held in a status that is somewhere between child and chattel, under the control of fathers and husbands where their sexual and social lives could be monitored.
Small bands of hunter/gatherers with strong kinship bonds would have cared for all children born into that group, regardless of paternity, which would have been unknowable without the sequestering and control of women.Because all food acquisition would have been done in groups and shared communally, there is no biological incentive to mating with the best provider. It was only with patriarchy that the role of a provider becomes important. Women no longer had any autonomy and had only one mate upon whom they were entirely dependent. It is only within this context that a good provider begins to truly matter.
If you are prohibited from providing for yourself and your children, and must rely on only one man to do that, then it is in your best interests to find a man who can do that well. Whereas, if you had been an adept gatherer, you might not have even needed a hunter at all. Neil Gaiman’s poem about the first scientists, The Mushroom Hunters, speaks to this.
In addition, meat was a small part of the Paleolithic diet unless you lived very far north and we now know that women also hunted — including big game. The whole idea of a male provider and a woman staying at home to caregive is really something that only existed much at all between 1950 and the end of the 1970s. Even then, only about 60% of families were like this even during that 20 year period. Prior to that time, families consisted of aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents and others all living together and supporting the work of the family — the farm, the cobbler shop, or what have you and everyone worked, including children.
The 1950s and 60s normative notion of a single male breadwinner providing for a wife and children is really just a blip in history that is anything but traditional. Paleontologists today believe that such an idea of autonomous nuclear families would have spelled the death of the human race in the Paleolithic age. Aside from the fact that in most foraging societies, it is the gatherers who provide most of the food that the tribe consumes, communal food sharing and child rearing are central to hunter-gatherer bands. One man hunting only for his mate and children makes no sense in the context of actual foraging communities and would be looked upon as aberrant.
In fact, for most of human history, it took the work of at least both parents, and frequently other kin as well as non-kin, to keep children fed and a family alive. It’s been hypothesized that gender roles arose in order to maximize the effectiveness of this, with each person having a job and a contribution to make, although within current foraging societies, there is often quite a bit of flexibility around whether or not those roles are actually adhered to and it can be reasonably assumed that it was the same in the ancient past based on how deeply personal autonomy was valued.
In addition, for a woman, being unmarried, or no longer having a male partner did not bring hardship to her or her children as it often does in the modern West. In cooperative, egalitarian societies, the well-being of the group is considered in the best interests of each person. Food sharing is a fundamental survival mechanism and cooperative child care means that even mothers of several young children can contribute both work and food to the tribe. This idea continued well into more patriarchal times because it took both “men’s work” and “women’s work” to survive. In addition, the legitimacy of children was not always a major concern even in later times (up to a point).
Women were not necessarily impoverished by divorce in the medieval world. Because no one in the Middle Ages ever claimed that the man was the main breadwinner, a divorced wife was entitled to a percentage of the household estate in line with the labor she had contributed to it.
A woman who did not marry the father of her out-of-wedlock child was not necessarily considered damaged goods in peasant communities. A historian who examined the records of Halesowen Manor, in England, between 1270 and 1348 estimates that for every two women who gave birth in marriage, one woman gave birth out of wedlock. Many of these women subsequently married, some of them quite well, suggesting they did not face permanent stigmatization. Even so, richer peasants, with more to lose in inheritance disputes, tended to avoid bearing children out of wedlock.
Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, a History (pp. 112–113). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
