Surely you are joking... Miscarriages, even a century ago, claimed so many women. You would be lucky to live past your third, much less your tenth!
Without some network to provided for her (either by her family, or the village, or her mate, all of which are strongly effected by status), the likelihood of surviving a pregnancy becomes much lower.
Women couldn't just flip a switch and get pregnant to satisfy a biological urge. Pregnancy represents both an enormous investment in time, effort, and energy, and a gamble on life. Status structure reflects this.
Even today, there are ten different countries in which the fertility rate is currently above 6 and a couple above 7. I don't think 10 children would be unreasonable as an upper bound for the exceptionally successful.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territori...
However, massive wealth only became possible once human culture grew, and then, for reasons I outlined below, memes became far more sticky, more influential, and more important, by comparison. In this, women have a greater evolutionary incentive to gain wealth or prestige or spread memes, but not a greater genetic incentive.
s/Miscarriages/Childbirth
That's why wide hips are important.
"The historical level of maternal deaths is probably around 1 in 100 births." However: "Mortality rates reached horrible proportions in maternity institutions in the 1800s, sometimes climbing to 40 percent of birthgiving women."
"Also, the life expectancy for women was lower throughout history than it was for men; because, until the advent of modern medicine, one in four women died in childbirth."
I had heard this statistic originally in some atheist propaganda video, hilariously enough.
Basically, men aren't as important as women. If 99.99% of men died today, the human race could be back to it's normal population within a generation (a man could easily father a child a day for 30 years ~10,000 children). On the other hand, we'd have much more trouble if 99.9% of women died, since a women can only realistically have about 10 children in a lifetime. This encourages men to be bigger risk takers - women were the limiting reagent to population growth.
Similarly, the potential gain for a ridiculously successful man (genetically speaking) is that he can have several thousand children. A women, on the other hand, can likely have 10 children whether or not she is successful; so there is little (evolutionary) benefit for her to be hugely successful (or take risks necessary to do so).