ArticleArchives of sexual behavior2022
Our Grandmothers' Legacy: Challenges Faced by Female Ancestors Leave Traces in Modern Women's Same-Sex Relationships.
Article in Archives of sexual behavior, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 67 citations in OpenAlex.
- The Role of Group Gender Composition in Shaping Intergroup Evaluations and Interaction Willingness.Archives of sexual behavior · 2025Article
- Why friendship and loneliness affect our health.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Review
- Exploring Within-Gender Differences in Friendships Using an Online Social Network.Archives of sexual behavior · 2024Article
- Inter-sexual Mate Competition in Humans: A Historical Example from Seventeenth Century Portugal.Archives of sexual behavior · 2024Article
- Perceptions of Income Inequality and Women's Intrasexual Competition.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- Repercussions of patrilocal residence on mothers' social support networks among Tsimane forager-farmers.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- New perspectives on the evolution of women's cooperation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Thriving together: the benefits of women's social ties for physical, psychological and relationship health.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Sustaining the potential for cooperation as female competitive strategy.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- When fertile, women seek status via prestige but not dominance.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Competitive gossip: the impact of domain, resource value, resource scarcity and coalitions.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Archives at 50 Years.Archives of sexual behavior · 2021Article
- Pandemic Leadership: Sex Differences and Their Evolutionary-Developmental Origins.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Review
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Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Investigations of women's same-sex relationships present a paradoxical pattern, with women generally disliking competition, yet also exhibiting signs of intrasexual rivalry. The current article leverages the historical challenges faced by female ancestors to understand modern women's same-sex relationships. Across history, women were largely denied independent access to resources, often depending on male partners' provisioning to support themselves and their children. Same-sex peers thus became women's primary romantic rivals in competing to attract and retain relationships with the limited partners able and willing to invest. Modern women show signs of this competition, disliking and aggressing against those who threaten their romantic prospects, targeting especially physically attractive and sexually uninhibited peers. However, women also rely on one another for aid, information, and support. As most social groups were patrilocal across history, upon marriage, women left their families to reside with their husbands. Female ancestors likely used reciprocal altruism or mutualism to facilitate cooperative relationships with nearby unrelated women. To sustain these mutually beneficial cooperative exchange relationships, women may avoid competitive and status-striving peers, instead preferring kind, humble, and loyal allies. Ancestral women who managed to simultaneously compete for romantic partners while forming cooperative female friendships would have been especially successful. Women may therefore have developed strategies to achieve both competitive and cooperative goals, such as guising their intrasexual competition as prosociality or vulnerability. These historical challenges make sense of the seemingly paradoxical pattern of female aversion to competition, relational aggression, and valuation of loyal friends, offering insight into possible opportunities for intervention.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.