Where men have more than one wife
Not long after the terrorist strikes of Sept. 11, 2001, Al Gore visited Harvard to speak with faculty members about the causes behind the attacks and to explore how to prevent such attacks from happening again. Harvard researcher Rose McDermott remembered that one academic in the room made a bold statement, one that piqued her curiosity and led her to a decade-long research project. McDermott recalled that Richard Wrangham, Harvard’s Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology, said the issue was about “the political ecology of the control of women by men,” male management of female reproduction, and the notion that female independence undermines male power in patriarchal and pastoral societies. Intrigued, McDermott, the Katherine Hampson Bessell Fellow in Political Science at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, chose to examine polygyny, the practice where one man is married to a number of women, as a proxy mechanism for male control over female reproduction...