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We have proposed that an alternative explanation of sex-role evolution is available which is, unlike the prevailing conservative explanation, based on empirically supported observations. The model proposed here focuses upon the differential access of men and women to scarce resources and goods. Generally, but not always, this involves control of communications systems, intergroup relations, surplus products, and special ritual and recreative ends. We have argued that men have had greater access to these sources of power than have women because of demographic factors, and because of the power reproducing character of social evolution.Our model explicitly rejects explanations based on conservative premises. We have rejected the conservative assumptions that systems are based on survival needs, that male and female role division accords with inherent male and female capacity to meet survival demands, that status and power are a consequence of an individual's contribution to the subsistence system or to defense systems, that females are incapable of coping with the rigors of traditional male roles such as hunting, that males need to protect females, that males carry out most subsistence activity, and that the activities males engage in are those which are most necessary to system survival. In its place we have formulated a constraint model which focuses on the demographic limitations placed on females and the greater access these limitations give males to social resources through their greater ability to occupy cultural interfaces.We have also shown that the introduction of conservative premises into work aimed at providing an alternative model of sex-role evolution has prevented the formulation of research based on an alternative model. From Marx and Engels through the cultural evolutionists and up to Sanday's work, the introduction of conservative premises dealing with system needs of subsistence or of defense have prevented social scientists from dealing with the main problem: that of the strategic basis, and potential, of power wielded by men merely because they are new.

DOI: 10.1007/BF00417682

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