Woman, Culture, and Society - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804708517 ISBN 13: 9780804708517

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 1974

Synopsis

Sixteen women anthropologists analyze the place of women in human societies, treating as problematic certain questions and observations that in the past have been ignored or taken for granted, and consulting the anthropological record for data and theoretical perspectives that will help us to understand and change the quality of women's lives.

The first three essays address the question of human sexual asymmetry. Recognizing that men's and women's spheres are typically distinguished and that anthropologists have often slighted the powers and values associated with the woman's world, these essays examine the evidence for asymmetrical valuations of the sexes across a range of cultures and ask how these valuations can be explained. Explanations are sought not in biological "givens" of human nature, but in universal patterns of human, social, psychological, and cultural experience―patterns that, presumably, can be changed.

The remaining papers explore women's roles in a wide variety of social systems. By showing that women, like men, are social actors seeking power, security, prestige, and a sense of worth and value, these papers demonstrate the inadequacies of conventionally male-oriented accounts of social structure. They illuminate the strategies by which women in different cultures achieve a surprising degree of political power and social recognition; and investigate, from case-oriented and comparative perspectives, the social-structural, legal, psychological, economic, ritual, mythological, and metaphorical factors that account for variation in women's lives.

About this title

About the Author

Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo is Assistant Professor at Stanford University.

Louise Lamphere is Assistant Professor at Brown University.

From the Back Cover

Sixteen women anthropologists analyze the place of women in human societies, treating as problematic certain questions and observations that in the past have been ignored or taken for granted, and consulting the anthropological record for data and theoretical perspectives that will help us to understand and change the quality of women's lives.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Woman, Culture, and Society

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 1974 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-0851-7

Contents

Introduction MICHELLE ZIMBALIST ROSALDO AND LOUISE LAMPHERE...................................................1Woman, Culture, and Society: A Theoretical Overview MICHELLE ZIMBALIST ROSALDO................................17Family Structure and Feminine Personality NANCY CHODOROW......................................................43Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture? SHERRY B. ORTNER...................................................67Women in Politics JANE FISHBURNE COLLIER......................................................................89Strategies, Cooperation, and Conflict Among Women in Domestic Groups LOUISE LAMPHERE..........................97Sex Roles and Survival Strategies in an Urban Black Community CAROL B. STACK..................................113Matrifocality in Indonesia and Africa and Among Black Americans NANCY TANNER..................................129Chinese Women: Old Skills in a New Context MARGERY WOLF.......................................................157Madam Yoko: Ruler of the Kpa Mende Confederacy CAROL P. HOFFER................................................173Female Status in the Public Domain PEGGY R. SANDAY............................................................189Engels Revisited: Women, the Organization of Production, and Private Property KAREN SACKS.....................207Women in Groins: Ijaw Women's Associations NANCY B. LEIS......................................................223Sex and Power in the Balkans BETTE S. DENICH..................................................................243The Myth of Matriarchy: Why Men Rule in Primitive Society JOAN BAMBERGER......................................263The Mastery of Work and the Mystery of Sex in a Guatemalan Village LOIS PAUL..................................281Mediation of Contradiction: Why Mbum Women Do Not Eat Chicken BRIDGET O'LAUGHLIN..............................301References Cited...............................................................................................321Index..........................................................................................................343

Chapter One

Woman, Culture, and Society: A Theoretical Overview

As anthropologists looking at the roles and activities of women, we are confronted, from the outset, with an apparent contradiction. On the one hand, we learn from the work of Mead and others of the extraordinary diversity of sex roles in our own and other cultures. And on the other, we are heirs to a sociological tradition that treats women as essentially uninteresting and irrelevant, and accepts as necessary, natural, and hardly problematic the fact that, in every human culture, women are in some way subordinate to men.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a perspective that at once incorporates earlier observations while at the same time suggesting systematic dimensions within which the social relations of the sexes can be investigated and understood. After a brief discussion of variation, I attempt to document aspects of what I take to be a universal asymmetry in cultural evaluations of the sexes. Women may be important, powerful, and influential, but it seems that, relative to men of their age and social status, women everywhere lack generally recognized and culturally valued authority. The secondary evaluation of women can be approached from a number of perspectives. Here, rather than put forth a single causal explanation, I propose a structural model that relates recurrent aspects of psychology and cultural and social organization to an opposition between the "domestic" orientation of women and the extra-domestic or "public" ties that, in most societies, are primarily available to men. This approach, developed further in some of the other papers in this volume, enables us to make sense of a number of very general characteristics of human sex roles and to identify certain strategies and motivations, as well as sources of value and power, that are, available to women in different human groups. As such, it provides an introduction to the various "sources of power" for women that are treated in detail later in this book.

Asymmetries in Cultural Evaluations of the Sexes

The fact that what Westerners take to be the "natural" endowments of men and women are hardly necessary, natural, or universal (as an ethnocentric perspective might lead one to expect) was first emphasized in the work of Margaret Mead. In her words, "If those temperamental attitudes which we have traditionally regarded as feminine-such as passivity, responsiveness, and a willingness to cherish children-can so easily be set up as the masculine pattern in one tribe, and, in another, be outlawed for the majority of women as for the majority of men, we no longer have any basis for regarding aspects of such behavior as sex linked" (1935: 279-80). And to some extent Mead was right. There are, in fact, groups like the New Guinea Arapesh, in which neither sex shows much aggression or assertiveness, and there are societies like our own, in which children of both sexes are more egoistic than boys in other parts of the world (Chodorow, 1971). The same sort of variability attaches to almost every kind of behavior one can think of: there are societies in which women trade or garden, and those in which men do; societies where women are queens and those in which they must always defer to a man; in parts of New Guinea, men are (like Victorian women) at once prudish and flirtatious, fearful of sex yet preoccupied with love magic and cosmetics that will lead the maidens-who take the initiative in courtship-to be interested in them.

But there are also limits to variation. Every known society recognizes and elaborates some differences between the sexes, and although there are groups in which men wear skirts and women wear pants or trousers, it is everywhere the case that there are characteristic tasks, manners, and responsibilities primarily associated with women or with men. Cross-cultural studies of child rearing (Barry, Bacon, and Child, 1957) reveal certain temperamental differences between the sexes, and studies of adults indicate that it is women, and not men, who have the primary responsibility for raising children; this fact seems to make it unlikely that women will be a society's hunters, warriors, or the like (Brown, 1970b). Differences in physical constitution, and especially in endurance and strength, may also lead to characteristic differences in male and female activities.

But what is perhaps most striking and surprising is the fact that male. as opposed to female, activities are always recognized as predominantly important, and cultural systems give authority and value to the roles and activities of men. Contrary to some popular assumptions, there is little reason to believe that there are, or once were, societies of primitive matriarchs, societies in which women predominated in the same way that men predominate in the societies we actually know (see Bamberger, this volume). An asymmetry in the cultural evaluations of male and female, in the importance assigned to women and men, appears to be universal. Mead recognized this in observing that "whatever the arrangements in regard to descent or ownership of property, and even if these formal outward arrangements are reflected in the temperamental relations between the sexes, the prestige values always attach to the activities of men" (1935: 302)

Nor is this difficult to document. We find in some parts of New Guinea, for example, that women grow sweet potatoes and men grow yams, and yams are the prestige food, the food one distributes at feasts. Or again, in the Philippine society I studied, men hunted in groups while women gardened (for the most part) individually; and although a woman's rice became the food supply of her immediate family, its dietary staple, meat was always shared by the community and was the most highly valued food. The same pattern obtains in other hunting societies, where women may help on the hunt but the catch is the men's to distribute, and meat, unlike the nutritious grubs and nuts a woman gathers, is socially valued and shared. Among aboriginal groups in Australia, only the meat, which men distribute, is felt to be a proper "food" (Kaberry, 1939).

Cultural expressions of sexual asymmetry may be associated with economics, but they are often found in other domains of activity as well. Among the Arapesh, studied by Mead (1935, 1971), the roles of men and women were seen as cooperative and complementary, but a wife was felt to be a "daughter" to her husband, and at the time of the dominant male ritual (when men played on secret flutes) she was required to act like an ignorant child. Among the nearby Tchambuli (Mead, 1935), the women were traders, controlling the family economics; yet there the men were artists and ritual specialists, and although the women had little respect for masculine secrets, they still found it necessary to adhere to, and engage in, a ritual order that marked them as inferior-in morality and knowledge-to men. Again, in certain African societies like the Yoruba (Lloyd, 1965), women may control a good part of the food supply, accumulate cash, and trade in distant and important markets; yet when approaching their husbands, wives must feign ignorance and obedience, kneeling to serve the men as they sit. Even the Iroquois, who, according to Murdock, "of all the people of the earth approach most closely to that hypothetical form of society known as the matriarchate" (1934: 302), were not ruled by women; there, powerful women might instate and depose their rulers, but Iroquois chiefs were men.

Still another form of cultural subordination is revealed in the linguistic practices of women of the Merina tribe in Madagascar (Keenan, 1974). There it is felt that in order to be cultured, sophisticated, and respectable, one must learn how to speak indirectly. Rather than being assertive, men are masters of an allusive, formal style in public speech. Women, on the contrary, are said not to know the subtleties of polite language. They are, in effect, cultural idiots, who are expected to blurt out what they mean. And so again, in the public ideology women are inferior. Yet they too have their methods of influence; in public meetings, men cluster together, whispering polite and evasive words of discreet opinion, while women, who are political outsiders, manage to influence public decisions by simply shouting out what they think.

For a final example, consider the Jewish ghetto communities of Eastern Europe (Zborowski and Herzog, 1955). In these communities, women had an extraordinary amount of influence. They were strong and self-confident mothers whose sons were their loyal supporters; as community gossips, they shaped most political events; in the household, a woman kept control of the pocketbook and effectively dictated family spending; and finally, in wealthier families, women and not men were the workers, running the family business, usually a small local store. Yet, in spite of all this, wives would defer to their husbands, and their greatest joy in life was to have a male child. A woman's work was rewarded by having the son become a scholar, a man whose actual activities might have little influence on the everyday life of the community but who stood, nonetheless, as its source of pride and moral value, its cultural ideal.

Taken individually, no one of these examples is surprising, yet a single thread runs through them all. Everywhere, from those societies we might want to call most egalitarian to those in which sexual stratification is most marked, men are the locus of cultural value. Some area of activity is always seen as exclusively or predominantly male, and therefore overwhelmingly and morally important. This observation has its corollary in the fact that everywhere men have some authority over women, that they have a culturally legitimated right to her subordination and compliance. At the same time, of course, women themselves are far from helpless, and whether or not their influence is acknowledged, they exert important pressures on the social life of the group. In other words, in various circumstances male authority might be mitigated, and, perhaps rendered almost trivial, by the fact that women (through gossiping or yelling, playing sons against brothers, running the business, or refusing to cook) may have a good deal of informal influence and power. While acknowledging male authority, women may direct it to their own interests, and in terms of actual choices and decisions, of who influences whom and how, the power exercised by women may have considerable and systematic effect.

This distinction between power and culturally legitimated authority, between the ability to gain compliance and the recognition that it is right, is crucial to our study of women. Social scientists have by and large taken male authority for granted; they have also tended to accept a male view that sees the exercise of power by women as manipulative, disruptive, illegitimate, or unimportant. But it is necessary to remember that while authority legitimates the use of power, it does not exhaust it, and actual methods of giving rewards, controlling information, exerting pressure, and shaping events may be available to women as well as to men. This point is elaborated in later essays. Here it is necessary simply to note that in acknowledging the universal fact of male authority, we are not denying women importance.

The kinds of power available to women, and the reasons they have been traditionally ignored, will be clarified by examining those features of women's position that present special problems for study. We begin by asking what to make of the fact of male authority. Why is sexual asymmetry a universal fact of human societies? What is its importance and how is it related to other aspects of men's and women's lives? Once these complex relations are understood, we can ask how and in what situations male systems of authority are reduced or mitigated in importance, what sources of power are available to women, and what sorts of social arrangements give what sorts of value to women's lives.

Most available accounts of the asymmetrical relations of the sexes have attempted to explain them in terms of a universal and necessary cause. These explanations range from the rather implausible assertion that at some moment in human history men "took" power away from women (Engels, 1891) to more suggestive accounts relating sexual asymmetry to male envy of female reproductive powers (Bettelheim, 1954) or to aspects of the human biological endowment (Bardwick, 1971). Different hormonal cycles, infant activity levels, sexual capacities, or emotional orientations have all been proposed as possible sources of the cultural subordination of women to men.

But it seems reasonable to ask what the available facts, or the promise of future information (deriving from, say, advances in biological studies, or archaeological research), can tell us. Will they explain the constant factor in the secret flute cults of the Arapesh, the Merina woman's lack of subtlety, or the bowing and scraping of the Yoruba wife? Although there is no doubt that biology is important, and that human society is constrained and directed in its development by facts of a physical kind, I find it difficult to see how these could possibly lead to moral evaluations. Biological research may illuminate the range in human inclinations and possibilities, but it cannot account for the interpretation of these facts in a cultural order. It can tell us about the average endowments of groups or of particular individuals, but it cannot explain the fact that cultures everywhere have given Man, as a category opposed to Woman, social value and moral worth.

I look, rather, to human social and cultural organization. Paraphrasing Parsons (1964: 58), I would suggest that anything so general as the universal asymmetry of sex roles is likely to be the result of a constellation of different factors, factors that are deeply involved in the foundation of human societies. Biology may be one of these, but biology becomes significant only as it is interpreted by human actors and associated with characteristic modes of action (De Beauvoir, 1968: 29-33). Because biology dictates that women will be mothers, it seems that an analysis of the balance of forces in human social systems, and of the organization of human families in particular, will give the most promising results. In the discussion that follows, I will suggest that characteristic asymmetries in the experience of men and women-asymmetries ranging from their emotional orientations to the fact that men have public authority-can be understood in terms, not of biology directly, but of a near-universal fact of human experience. The fact that, in most traditional societies, a good part of a woman's adult life is spent giving birth to and raising children leads to a differentiation of domestic and public spheres of activity that can, I think, be shown to shape a number of relevant aspects of human social structure and psychology.

Domestic and Public Orientations

In what follows, it will be seen that an opposition between "domestic" and "public" provides the basis of a structural framework necessary to identify and explore the place of male and female in psychological, cultural, social, and economic aspects of human life. "Domestic," as used here, refers to those minimal institutions and modes of activity that are organized immediately around one or more mothers and their children; "public" refers to activities, institutions, and forms of association that link, rank, organize, or subsume particular mother-child groups. Though this opposition will be more or less salient in different social and ideological systems, it does provide a universal framework for conceptualizing the activities of the sexes. The opposition does not determine cultural stereotypes or asymmetries in the evaluations of the sexes, but rather underlies them, to support a very general (and, for women, often demeaning) identification of women with domestic life and of men with public life. These identifications, themselves neither necessary nor desirable, can all be tied to the role of women in child rearing; by examining their multiple ramifications, one can begin to understand the nature of female subordination and the ways it may be overcome.

Although the fact that women give birth to and nurse children would seem to have no necessary entailments, it appears to provide a focus for the simplest distinction in the adult division of labor in any human group. Women become absorbed primarily in domestic activities because of their role as mothers. Their economic and political activities are constrained by the responsibilities of child care, and the focus of their emotions and attentions is particularistic and directed toward children and the home. So, for instance, Durkheim was able to speculate that "long ago, woman retired from warfare and public affairs, and consecrated her entire life to her family" (1964: 60). And Simmel points out that woman "because of her peculiar functions was relegated to activities within the limits of her home, confined to devote herself to a single individual and prevented from transcending the group-relations established by marriage [and] family" (1955: 180).

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 1974
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804708517
• ISBN 13: 9780804708517
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 360
• Editor: Rosaldo Michelle Zimbalist, Lamphere Louise