But “stealing” a husband in industrialised pre welfare state Britain would have had devastating consequences for the woman and children losing the main earner of the family. Destitution and the workhouse would be their only option. So is it any surprise that women who put energy into acquiring as much male attention as possible would be feared (and despised) in such conditions? Perhaps there is an element of playing down the role of the men as always due to the belief in men being inconstant naturally and easily led astray.
In the biography of Nisa, it appears that due to women being able to sustain themselves and their children with support from female friends and relatives the relationships between men and women were more relaxed. Dissolution of relationships was not so frowned upon or destabilising for the community as it would have been in pre welfare state Britain.
In more recent history I propose the miners strikes of the 1980’s as an example of how women relied upon and supported one another despite being very capable individually. In normal times a crisis can happen to a family or individuals and close female friends step into the breach to offer support.
Given that working class women in post industrial revolution Britain had to work outside the home there must have been a need to support one another in child rearing.
Close female bonds are in my opinion the glue which holds any human group, family, village, tribe together.
If this is so important then it will be innate and the misfiring and misdirection of this instinct leads to girls harming themselves in order to belong to one another and create lasting bonds.
In fact a friend from West Africa once suggested to me that she believed it a component in the continuation of FGM, that all the girls in a village go through this horrific experience, usually together in an age cohort binds them in suffering so that they are more deeply bonded. And I believe Hibo Wardere said something similar, the girls who had been cut taunted and shamed her until she asked to be cut too, not knowing what it meant, afterwards the other girls welcomed her as one of their own.
There is a fictional book, I think it was - Possessing the secret of Joy where a character having escaped FGM as a child seeks it out as an adult in order to better belong.
We tell ourselves that we do things for ourselves but even as adult women I think that we are concerned with fitting in with other women. Witness the politics of the school gates as an example!
So I think that this desire to be accepted by her cohort is so strong for a teenage girl that she is even willing to harm her body in order to belong to the group, self harm, eating disorders and suicide chat groups are all an example of this.
I think that in gathering/hunting communities the emotional and practical support from female friends may have been more consistent across a lifetime and more significant than romantic or reproductive relationships between men and women. So the current social contagion we see is simply that survival need to be part of a close female friendship group played out in the modern world.
We gain ever greater understanding about how babies are essentially the same today as they were in pre history and evolved in a time and place where separation from the mothers body meant likely not surviving at all and how that relates to kangaroo mother care, the fourth trimester and why babies cry when they are not being held. I think perhaps we could help and support older children and teenagers by understanding their development in similar terms.
(By the way Our babies, Ourselves by Meredith Small, Touching by Ashley Montagu, Why love matters by Sue Gerhardt are all quite fascinating on this topic regarding babies.)