Strathern and Weiner challenged the idea that only goods produced by men were imbued with cultural significance. Universal patriarchy and assumptions about women as gatherers and innate nurturers throughout history emerged in Sacks and Zihlman These studies are useful as they provided the foundation of later work in gender studies that more closely examined the ethnographic evidence, exploring and then returning to the question of whether female subordination was universal or largely a product of male observer bias and privilege.
Challenges to early ethnography and the assumption that all women experienced gender similarly did emerge and continue to with the publication of Mohanty, et al. Benedict, Ruth. Patterns of culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Originally published in Mead, Margaret. Coming of age in Samoa: A psychological study of primitive youth for Western civilisation.
New York: Harper Perennial. It has been a highly debated text but remains a central point of discussion in the emergence of the study of gender as social construction. Sex and temperament in three primitive societies.
Third World women and the politics of feminism. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Includes essential articles that emerged from challenges by non-Western female scholars to a homogeneous and monolithic understanding of women cross-culturally.
Sacks, Karen. Sisters and wives: The past and future of sexual equality. Urbana: Univ. With a focus on modes of production and power difference, it offers more complex ways of understanding the myriad roles that women play in societies across cultures and history. Strathern, Marilyn. The gender of the gift: Problems with women and problems with society in Melanesia.
Berkeley: Univ. In this book and later works, Strathern explores the complex meaning of gifting in society. Weiner, Annette. Making and maintaining clothing, housing, and tools also occupy a significant amount of time.
Early humans, both male and female, invented an array of items for carrying things babies, wood, water , dug tubers, processed nuts, and cooked food. Nor is it just hunting that requires intelligence, planning, cooperation, and detailed knowledge. Foragers have lived in a wide variety of environments across the globe, some more challenging than others such as Alaska. In all of these groups, both males and females have needed and have developed intensive detailed knowledge of local flora and fauna and strategies for using those resources.
Human social interactions also require sophisticated mental and communication skills, both verbal and nonverbal. Child care, even for infants, is rarely solely the responsibility of the birth mother. Instead, multiple caretakers are the norm: spouses, children, other relatives, and neighbors. Children and infants accompany their mothers or fathers on gathering trips, as among the! Kung San, and on Aka collective net-hunting expeditions. Agta women carry nursing infants with them when gathering-hunting, leaving older children at home in the care of spouses or other relatives.
In most agricultural societies, women who do not come from high-status or wealthy families perform a significant amount of agricultural labor, though it often goes unrecognized in the dominant gender ideology. Wet-rice agriculture, common in south and southeast Asia, is labor-intensive, particularly weeding and transplanting rice seedlings, which are often done by women Figure Harvesting rice, wheat, and other grains also entails essential input by women.
Women may accommodate their reproductive and child-rearing roles by engaging in work that is more compatible with child care, such as cooking, and in activities that occur closer to home and are interruptible and perhaps less dangerous, though cooking fires, stoves, and implements such as knives certainly can cause harm!
They gather or process nuts while their children are napping; they take their children with them to the fields to weed or harvest and, in more recent times, to urban construction sites in places such as India, where women often do the heaviest and lowest-paid work.
In the United States, despite a long-standing cultural model of the stay-at-home mom, some mothers have always worked outside the home, mainly out of economic necessity. This shifting group includes single-divorced-widowed mothers and married African-Americans pre- and post-slavery , immigrants, and Euro-American women with limited financial resources.
But workplace policies except during World War II have historically made it harder rather than easier for women and men to carry out family responsibilities, including requiring married women and pregnant women to quit their jobs.
While pregnant women in the United States are no longer automatically dismissed from their jobs—at least not legally—the United States lags far behind most European countries in providing affordable child care and paid parental leave. What is natural about the family? Like gender and sexuality, there is a biological component.
In the past, conception usually required sexual intercourse, but that is no longer the case thanks to sperm banks, which have made the embodied male potentially obsolete, biologically speaking. There is also a biological relationship between parents and offspring—again, more obvious in the case of the mother since the baby develops in and emerges from her body. Nevertheless, DNA and genes are real and influence the traits and potentialities of the next generation. We all know there are biological fathers who may be unaware of or not concerned about their biological offspring and not involved in their care and biological mothers who, after giving birth, give up their children through adoption or to other family members.
Clearly, then, parenthood, mother-father relationships, and other kinship relationships with siblings, grandparents, and uncles-aunts are not simply rooted in biology but are also social roles, legal relationships, meanings and expectations constructed by human cultures in specific social and historical contexts.
This is not to deny the importance of kinship; it is fundamental, especially in small-scale pre-industrial societies. But kinship is as much about culture as it is about biology.
Biology, in a sense, is only the beginning—and may not be necessary. We all know that it is not necessary to be married to have sex or to have children. Indeed, in the United States, a growing number of women who give birth are not married, and the percent of unmarried women giving birth is higher in many northwestern European countries such as Sweden.
With what rights, obligations, social statuses, access to resources, group identities, and all the other assets—and liabilities—that exist within a society? Children have historically been essential for family survival—for literal reproduction and for social reproduction. Think, for a moment, about our taken-for-granted assumptions about to whom children belong. Not in human societies. One fascinating puzzle in human evolution is how females lost control over their sexuality and their offspring!
What conditions must be met? Throughout most of human history, kinship groups and, later, religious institutions have regulated marriage. In some countries, like India, there is a separate marriage code for each major religion in addition to a secular, civil marriage code. Cross-culturally, the U. In addition, U. But a majority of societies that have been studied by anthropologists have allowed polygamy multiple spouses.
Polygyny one husband, multiple wives is most common but polyandry one wife, multiple husbands also occurs; occasionally marriages involve multiple husbands and multiple wives. Across cultures, then, most households tend to be versions of extended-family-based groups.
These two contrasts alone lead to families in the United States that are smaller and focused more on the husband-wife or spousal and parent-child relationships; other relatives are more distant, literally and often conceptually. On the other hand, nuclear families own and control their incomes and other assets, unlike many extended families in which those are jointly held.
This ownership and control of resources can give couples and wives in nuclear families greater freedom. Often there are explicit norms about who one should and should not marry, including which relatives. Another major contrast between the U.
Of course, even in the United States, that has never been entirely the case. Some religions explicitly forbid marrying someone from another religion. But U. These so-called anti-miscegenation laws, directed mainly at European-American and African-Americans, were designed to preserve the race-based system of social stratification in the United States. During slavery, most inter-racial sexual activity was initiated by Euro-American males. It was not uncommon for male slave owners to have illicit, often forced sexual relations with female slaves.
Euro-American women, especially poorer women, who were involved sexually with African-American men were stereotyped as prostitutes, sexually depraved, and outcasts. Overall, stratified inegalitarian societies tend to have the strictest controls over marriage.
Patriarchal societies closely regulate and restrict premarital sexual contacts of women, especially higher-status women. One function of marriage in these societies is to reproduce the existing social structure, partially by insuring that marriages and any offspring resulting from them will maintain and potentially increase the social standing of the families involved. Elite, dominant groups have the most to lose in terms of status and wealth, including inheritances.
Since marriages affect families and kin economically, socially, and politically, family members especially elders play a major role in arranging marriages along lines consistent with their own goals and using their own criteria. In Nuosu communities of southwest China, some families held formal engagement ceremonies for babies to, ideally, cement a good cross-cousin partnership, though no marital relationship would occur until much later.
This does not mean that romantic love is purely a recent or U. Romantic love is widespread even in cultures that have strong views on arranging marriages. Nevertheless, cross-culturally and historically, marriages based on free choice and romantic love are relatively unusual and recent.
We have certain expectations about the trajectories of relationships and family life in the United States—young people meet, fall in love, purchase a diamond, and then marry.
To some extent, this specific view of family is changing as same-sex relationships and no-longer-new reproductive technologies expand our views of what family can and cannot be. Still, quite often, we think about family in a rigid, heteronormative context, assuming that everyone wants the same thing. What if we think about family in an entirely different way? In fact, many people already do.
In , 10 percent of American adults lived in cohabitating relationships. Meanwhile, 51 percent were married in state-endorsed relationships, and that percentage has been dropping fast.
It is true that adults with limited resources face challenges raising children when they have limited access to affordable, high-quality child care. They struggle when living wage jobs migrate to other countries or other states where workers earn less. In an economic system that encourages concentration of resources in a tiny fraction of the population, it is no wonder that they struggle.
But is the institution of marriage really to blame? The number of cohabitating unmarried individuals is high in many parts of Europe as well, but with better support structures in place, parents fare much better.
They enjoy parental leave policies that mandate their jobs be held for them upon return from leave. They also benefit from strong educational systems and state-subsidized child care, and their children enjoy better outcomes than ours.
Few people can easily dismiss these concerns, even if they do not reflect their own lived realities. And besides, the family model trumpeted by politicians as lost is but one form of family that is not universal even in the United States, much less among all human groups, as sociologist Stephanie Coontz convincingly argued in books including The Way We Never Were and The Way We Really Are The Navajo, Kiowa, and Iroquois Native American cultures all organize their family units and arrange their relationships differently.
Na people living in the foothills of the Himalayas have many ways to structure family relationships. One relationship structure looks like what we might expect in a place where people make their living from the land and raise livestock to sustain themselves. They have children, who live with them, and they work together. A second Na family structure looks much less familiar: young adults live in large, extended family households with several generations and form romantic relationships with someone from another household.
If both parties desire, their relationship can evolve into a long-term one, but they do not marry and do not live together in the same household. When a child is conceived, or before if the couple chooses, their relationship moves from a secretive one to one about which others know.
Even so, the young man rarely spends daylight hours with his partner. The state is not involved in their relationship, and their money is not pooled either, though presents change hands. If either partner becomes disenchanted with the other, the relationship need not persist. They enjoy everyday life with an extended family Figure The third Na family structure mixes the preceding two systems.
Someone joins a larger household as a spouse. Perhaps the family lacked enough women or men to manage the household and farming tasks adequately or the couple faced pressure from the government to marry. As an anthropologist who has done fieldwork in Na communities since , I can attest to the loving and nurturing families their system encourages. It protects adults as well as children.
Women who are suffering in a relationship can end it with limited consequences for their children, who do not need to relocate to a new house and adjust to a new lifestyle. Lawyers need not get involved, as they often must in divorce cases elsewhere in the world.
A man who cannot afford to build a new house for his family—a significant pressure for people in many areas of China that prevents young men from marrying or delays their marriages—can still enjoy a relationship or can choose, instead, to devote himself to his role as an uncle. Women and men who do not feel the urge to pursue romantic lives are protected in this system as well; they can contribute to their natal families without having to worry that no one will look out for them as they age.
Like any system composed of real people, Na systems are not perfect, and neither are the people who represent them. In the last few decades, people have flocked to Lugu Lake hoping to catch a glimpse of this unusual society, and many tourists and tour guides have mistakenly taken Na flexibility in relationships as signifying a land of casual sex with no recognition of paternity. These are highly problematic assumptions that offend my Na acquaintances deeply.
Na people have fathers and know who they are, and they often enjoy close relationships despite living apart. Of course, as in other parts of the world, some fathers participate more than others. Fathers and their birth families also take responsibility for contributing to school expenses and make other financial contributions as circumstances permit.
Clearly, this is not a community in which men do not fulfill responsibilities as fathers. It is one in which the responsibilities and how they are fulfilled varies markedly from those of fathers living in other places and cultures. Though problems exist in Na communities and their relationship patterns are already changing and transforming them, it is encouraging that so many people can live satisfied lives in this flexible system. The Na shatter our expectations about how families and relationships should be organized.
They also inspire us to ask whether we can, and should, adapt part of their ethos into our own society. Still, for feminist scholars, the question of male dominance remained important. Were some societies gender-egalitarian? Was gender inequality a cultural phenomenon, a product of culturally and historically specific conditions? Research in the s and s addressed these questions. Think of our own society or the area in which you live.
What would you examine? What information would you gather and from whom? What difficulties might you encounter when making a judgment?
Might men and women have different views? Kung San in Botswana. What would they notice? What would they have difficulty deciphering? This experiment gives you an idea of what anthropologists confronted—except they were trying to include all societies that ever existed.
Many were accessible only through archaeological and paleontological evidence or through historical records, often made by travelers, sailors, or missionaries. Surviving small-scale cultures were surrounded by more-powerful societies that often imposed their cultures and gender ideologies on those under their control. For example, the! Kung San of Southern Africa when studied by anthropologists, had already been pushed by European colonial rulers into marginal areas.
Others lived in market towns and were sometimes involved in the tourist industry and in films such as the ethnographically flawed and ethnocentric film The Gods Must Be Crazy More-recent research has been focused on improving the ethnographic and archaeological record and re-examining old material.
Some have turned from cause-effect relations to better understanding how gender systems work and focusing on a single culture or cultural region. Others have explored a single topic, such as menstrual blood and cultural concepts of masculinity and infertility across cultures. Many previously unexplored areas such as the discourse around reproduction, representations of women in medical professions, images in popular culture, and international development policies which had virtually ignored gender came under critical scrutiny.
The past virtual invisibility of women in archaeology disappeared as a host of new studies was published, often by feminist anthropologists, including a pioneering volume by Joan Gero and Margaret Conkey, Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory. That book gave rise to a multi-volume series specifically on gender and archaeology edited by Sarah Nelson. Everything from divisions of labor to power relations to sexuality could be scrutinized in the archaeological record.
Some anthropologists argued that there are recurring patterns despite the complexity and variability of human gender systems. It is not always valued and does not necessarily lead to political power.
Gender relations seem more egalitarian, overall, in small-scale societies such as the San, Trobrianders, and Na, in part because they are kinship-based, often with relatively few valuable resources that can be accumulated; those that exist are communally owned, usually by kinship groups in which both women and men have rights.
Another factor in gender equality is the social environment. Positive social relations—an absence of constant hostility or warfare with neighbors—seems to be correlated with relatively egalitarian gender relations. In contrast, militarized societies—whether small-scale horticultural groups like the Sambia who perceive their neighbors as potential enemies or large-scale stratified societies with formal military organizations and vast empires—seem to benefit men more than women overall.
As to old stereotypes about why men are warriors, there may be another explanation. From a reproductive standpoint, men are far more expendable than women, especially women of reproductive age. One can ask why it has taken so long for women in the United States to be allowed to fly combat missions? Certainly it is not about women not being strong enough to carry the plane. Gender intersects with class and, often, with religion, caste, and ethnicity.
So, while there could be powerful queens, males took precedence over females within royal families, and while upper-class Brahmin women in India could have male servants, they had far fewer formal assets, power, and rights than their brothers and husbands. Similarly, while twentieth-century British colonial women in British-controlled India had power over some Indian men, they still could not vote, hold high political office, control their own fertility or sexuality, or exercise other rights available to their male counterparts.
In matrilineal societies, descent or membership in a kinship group is transmitted from mothers to their children male and female and then, through daughters, to their children, and so forth as in many Na families.
In this sense, it is the reverse of the kinds of patrilineal, patrilocal, patrifocal male-oriented kinship groups and households one finds in many patriarchal societies. Peggy Sanday suggested, on these and other grounds, that the Minangkabau, a major ethnic group in Indonesia, is a matriarchy.
Ethnographic data have shown that males, especially as members of matrilineages, can be powerful in matrilineal societies.
Warfare, as previously mentioned, along with political and social stratification can alter gender dynamics. The Nayar in Kerala, India , the Minangkabau, and the Na are matrilineal societies embedded in, or influenced by, dominant cultures and patriarchal religions such as Islam and Hinduism. The society of the Na in China is also matrifocal in some ways. The debate was simultaneously about the power and importance of Afro-Brazilian women in spiritual and cultural life.
On one side of the debate was E. He believed that black women had been matriarchal authorities since the slavery period and described them as defiant and self-reliant. She also explained that newer caboclo houses in which indigenous spirits were worshipped in addition to Yoruba spirits had less-stringent guidelines and allowed men to become priests and dance for the gods, actions considered taboo in the Yoruba tradition.
Thus, her writings likely represent the views of her primary informants, making her work unique; at that time, anthropologists ethnocentrically considered themselves more knowledgeable about the cultures they studied than the people in those cultures. Landes incorporated ideas from the pre-Brazil research of E. The picture is complicated, but the opposite may actually be true.
Sometimes they lose traditional rights e. On the other hand, new political, economic, and educational opportunities can open up for women, allowing them not only to contribute to their families but to delay marriage, pursue alternatives to marriage, and, if they marry, to have a more powerful voice in their marriages. Deeply embedded cultural-origin stories are extremely powerful, difficult to unravel, and can persist despite contradictory evidence, in part because of their familiarity.
They resemble what people have seen and experienced throughout their lifetimes, even in the twenty-first century, despite all the changes.
Cultural origin stories also persist because they are legitimizing ideologies —complex belief systems often developed by those in power to rationalize, explain, and perpetuate systems of inequality.
Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage, especially in the dissenting views. And cultural models of gender and family played a role in the U. Presidential election. For a related activity, see Activity 3 below. Text Box 3: Gender and the U. Presidential Election By Carol C.
The presidential election was gender precedent-setting in ways that will take decades to analyze see for example Gail Collins. For the first time, a major U. And while Hillary Rodham Clinton did not win the electoral college, she won the popular vote, the first woman to do so, and by nearly three million votes.
As a cultural anthropologist who has long studied women and politics, I offer a few preliminary observations on the role of gender in the presidential election.
The role-modeling impacts are enormous—and, one hopes, long-lasting. While she was a very positive role model, especially for African-Americans, and developed major initiatives to combat childhood obesity and promote fresh food, she did not challenge gender conventions.
How many girls remember her professional credentials and achievements? The presidential campaign stimulated discussion of other often-ignored gender-related topics. Despite some progress, sexual harassment and sexual assault, including rape, remain widespread in the workplace and on college campuses cf.
Stanford case , The Hunting Ground. Yet there has been enormous pressure on women—and institutions—to remain silent. Hearing these denials, several women, some well-known, came forth with convincing claims that Trump had groped them or in other ways engaged in inappropriate, non-consensual sexual behavior. Trump responded by denying the charges, insulting the accusers, and threatening lawsuits against the claimants and news media organizations that published the reports.
In a normal U. Instead, accusers experienced a backlash not only from Trump but from some media organizations and Trump supporters, illustrating why women are reluctant to come forth or press sexual charges, especially against powerful men see the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas case. Clearly, we need more public conversations about what constitutes appropriate and consensual sexually related behavior.
The presidential campaign revealed that sexism is alive and well, though not always recognized , explicit, or acknowledged even when obvious see article by Lynn Sherr. The media, both before and after the election, generally underplayed the impact of sexism despite research showing that sexist attitudes, not political party, were more likely to predict voters preference for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. The campaign also reflected a persistent double standard.
As a researcher and someone who had many conversations with voters during this election, I was shocked by the intensity and level of animosity directed at Hillary Clinton. It was palpable, and it went far beyond a normal critique of a normal candidate. Patriarchy was being threatened, and many, though not all, voters found that profoundly disturbing even though they did not necessarily recognize it or admit it.
Beyond that, there is a long tradition of blaming women for personal and societal disasters—for convincing Adam to eat the forbidden fruit, for the breakup of joint family households in places like India. Hillary Clinton and her campaign and coalition symbolized and embraced the major transformations—indeed, upheavals—that have occurred in the United States since the s. It is not just feminism and a new definition of masculinity that rejects the old baboon male-dominance tough-guy model, although that is one change.
Bernie Sanders attracted an enormous, enthusiastic following and came close to winning the Democratic presidential primary. And, not surprisingly, Sanders appealed largely to Euro-American demographic groups rather than to the broader spectrum of twenty-first century voters. In short, the election and the candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton symbolized more than half a century of enormous change—and a choice between continuing that change or selecting a candidate who symbolized what was traditional, familiar, and, to many, more comfortable.
Whether the transformations of the past fifty years will be reversed remains to be seen. For national legislative bodies, U. The U. Yet the U. Are you surprised by these data or by some of the countries that rank higher than the United States?
What do you think are some of the reasons the US lags behind so many other countries? Contemporary anthropology now recognizes the crucial role played by gender in human society. Anthropologists in the post era have focused on exploring fluidity within and beyond sexuality, incorporating a gendered lens in all anthropological research, and applying feminist science frameworks, discourse-narrative analyses, political theory, critical studies of race, and queer theory to better understand and theorize gendered dynamics and power.
We next discuss some of those trends. In the long history of human sexual relationships, we see that most involve people from different biological sexes, but some societies recognize and even celebrate partnerships between members of the same biological sex.
Heteronormativity is a term coined by French philosopher Michel Foucault to refer to the often-unnoticed system of rights and privileges that accompany normative sexual choices and family formation.
If she married him, she would be continuing to follow societal expectations related to gender and sexuality and would be agreeing to state involvement in her love life as she formalizes her relationship. Despite pervasive messages reinforcing heteronormative social relations, people find other ways to satisfy their sexual desires and organize their families.
Increasingly, people are choosing partners who attract them—perhaps female, perhaps male, and perhaps someone with ambiguous physical sexual characteristics. Labels have changed rapidly in the United States during the twenty-first century as a wider range of sexual orientations has been openly acknowledged, accompanied by a shift in our binary view of sexuality.
Rather than thinking of individuals as either heterosexual OR homosexual, scholars and activists now recognize a spectrum of sexual orientations. Given the U. Transgender , meanwhile, is a category for people who identify as a different gender than the one that was assigned to them at birth. Various groups have led efforts to change aspects of prevailing gender roles that they believe are oppressive or inaccurate, most notably the feminist movement.
Some systems of classification, unlike the WHO, are non-binary or gender queer, listing multiple possible genders including transgender and intersex as distinct categories.
Androgyny, for example, has been proposed as a third gender. The point at which these internalized gender identities become externalized into a set of expectations is the genesis of a gender role. Gender roles are usually referenced in a pejorative sense, as an institution that restricts freedom of behavior and expression, or are used as a basis for discrimination. Because of the prevailing gender role of general subordination, women were not granted the right to vote in many parts of the world until the 19th or 20th centuries, some well into the 21st.
Contrariwise because of the prevailing perception of men as primarily breadwinners, they are seldom afforded the benefit of paternity leave. Skip to main content. Search for:. Gender Role A gender role is a set of societal norms dictating what types of behaviors are generally considered acceptable, appropriate, or desirable for a person based on their actual or perceived sex.
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