Women and economic evolution: or, The effects of industrial changes upon the status of women — Themes and Context

The Argument from Economic Stages

McMahon organizes her evidence around a sequence of economic stages—lower hunters, higher hunters, pastoral peoples, and cultivators—borrowing from ethnographer Ernst Grosse. For each stage, she examines the prevailing marriage form and women's labor contribution. Among lower hunters like the Bushmen and Esquimaux, she notes that monogamy is the norm, but hunger and lack of accumulation limit social differentiation. The author is careful to qualify that these groups may represent degeneration rather than a primitive type, a caution that recurs throughout the text.

In pastoral societies, the price of a wife becomes a measure of wealth: a well-to-do Kalmuck demands fifteen horses, fifteen cows, three camels, and twenty sheep for a daughter, with a dowry of far less value. McMahon uses such specific data to argue that women's economic value is tied to their productive role, and that polygamy emerges where wealth allows men to support multiple wives.

The Role of Ethnographic Sources

McMahon relies heavily on a small set of late-nineteenth-century ethnographers: Lewis Henry Morgan, Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse, and Ernst Grosse. She does not conduct original fieldwork but synthesizes their accounts, often juxtaposing them to highlight disagreements. For instance, she quotes Morgan's speculation that promiscuity was limited to a frugivorous stage, then immediately counters with Hobhouse's view that promiscuity was likely never an institution but rather an extreme of looseness. This dialogic method reveals McMahon's critical stance: she treats her sources as provisional and notes when evidence is thin.

The author also flags when an ethnographer's own uncertainty affects the argument. When Grosse describes the Bushmen, McMahon adds that the author himself does not know whether they represent a lower or degenerate culture. Such asides remind the reader that the thesis is built on contested foundations.

Women's Labor and the Great Family

A key structural shift McMahon identifies is the rise of the great family (sippe) based on agriculture. She cites Starke's observation that agricultural communities value each individual's labor more than pastoral ones do, because losing a household member is harder to replace. This economic logic, she implies, shapes women's status: where their labor is essential, they may have more bargaining power within the family. The great family, whether matrilineal or patrilineal, becomes a social organization that binds women's productive and reproductive roles.

McMahon does not romanticize this arrangement. She notes that the price of a wife in pastoral societies treats daughters as assets, and that dowries are often unequal. The economic lens allows her to see marriage as a transaction embedded in production systems, not merely a cultural custom.

Cautions and Limitations in the Evidence

Throughout the excerpts, McMahon repeatedly hedges her claims. She warns that certain moral principles observed in societies may be “mental excrescences” rather than healthy developments, and that only repeated causes justify inferences about unknown stages. This epistemological caution is a hallmark of the thesis: she is aware that her sources are fragmentary and that her own evolutionary framework may impose order where none exists.

For the reader, this means the text is as much about the limits of nineteenth-century social science as about women's history. McMahon does not claim to have uncovered a universal law; instead, she offers a provisional map of how economic changes correlate with marital forms and women's work. The thesis is valuable for its method—tracing economic causation through ethnographic detail—even when the data is sparse.

Readers approaching this thesis should attend to McMahon's use of ethnographic sources as both evidence and problem. She is not simply compiling facts but testing an economic hypothesis against contested accounts. The book rewards those who read with an eye to its methodological self-awareness: the author's qualifications and caveats are as instructive as her conclusions. For a first reading, focus on how she moves from specific marriage prices or family structures to broader claims about industrial evolution, and note where she admits the evidence is insufficient.

Reading Theresa McMahon’s reflections on how work shapes a woman Woman and Economic Evolution, I found myself thinking of that older, stranger volume, The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races With Particular Reference to Their Respective Influence in the Civil and Political History of Mankind — Context and Discussion. Both treat human difference as a puzzle of circumstance, not essence—yet McMahon’s kindness feels like a quiet answer to Gobineau’s cold taxonomy. One sees systems; the other, lives.