Sarah Kanning

Read a bit on Skepchick about the “Quiverfull” movement the other day (go ahead, it’s a quick read, I’ll wait right here), and the whole concept of this group and others like it existing today highlights the need to understand culture as a response to environment and an attempt at solving real-world problems people are having right now.

Back in the Bronze Age (when the books now known as the Old Testament were written), society was decidedly patriarchal. Sons were prized; daughters, not so much. I’m sure there were many reasons for this, but I want to point out one set of reasons in particular: the lack of medical knowledge and care and (as a result) the very real dangers of childbirth, which were not shared equally. If you had a son, you didn’t have to worry about him growing up to die in childbirth. Women who survived their childbearing years lived longer than men (just as they do now), but running that gauntlet meant there were a lot fewer of them at the other side.

So passing property patrilinearly at that time was not necessarily a bad idea; men were more likely to live longer to care for the children. In this light, tracing one’s lineage through the fathers’ lines isn’t so crazy, either (although still not as accurate as matrilineal).

Fast forward about four thousand years. Medical advances have not eliminated the risks of childbirth, but they have reduced them to a level that would have astonished our forebears. Women live longer than men, on average, and many of the patriarchal holdovers in our culture look quaint if not downright stupid. (Some of them weren’t the best choices 4,000 years ago.)

And there are still folks like the Quiverfulls around, trying to drag Bronze Age family values into the twenty-first century, because they a) want to and think it’s advantageous to them, and b) really feel like biblical literalism is the way to go.

What does this have to do with writing? Well, I’m working on a story right now that takes place in a culture not all that dissimilar from the one that produced the books of the Old Testament, and in studying some of those Mesopotamian cultures, I’m struck by what a practical people they were (for the most part). Even many of the behaviors that seem ridiculous to us had some utility. This is not the case, however, if you take those behaviors and just transplant them willy-nilly to another time and place — say, to the United States in 2009.

But even those throwbacks have some reason for wanting to roll back the cultural clock, even though the behaviors they advocate are no longer advantageous to the broader culture (and they are therefore likely doomed to fail in their efforts). Perhaps they want to regain power they think they’ve lost in the cultural changes of the last (cough) four thousand years.

Anyway, when world-building, the cultures will and should be messy and the practices they present to address practical problems (like death in childbed) may not be elegant, but they should be at least somewhat functional. And splinter/fringe cultures are interesting in that they directly oppose some practices of the mainstream culture and can serve to highlight some fracture or fault line in that dominant culture, some contested or shifting ground.