Women and power: perspectives from anthropology

Framing the Issues

Do the biological differences between women and men translate in all cultures to differences in status, roles, and power? Are there cultures in which women and men are equals? Have such cultures existed in the past? Are differences not necessarily inequalities? Where inequalities seem strongest, what is re­sponsible? Where powers are more balanced, what is responsible? What are the possibilities?

These are cross-cultural questions asked by modern feminists, and they are asked primarily of anthropologists. Anthropology, the study of cultures, is itself a field once dominated by men. But from the early years of this century onward, women have played an increasingly large part both in the fieldwork that provides anthropological evidence and in the writing that in­terprets that evidence. By enabling us to look insightfully at cultures other than our own, anthropology enables us to better understand what is common to all people and what varies from one group to another. Anthropological perspectives also encourage us, after looking at how others live, to look at our own culture with fresh eyes. Patterns that we accept as natural because they are familiar begin to look more strange.

We begin with some overviews – generalizations that may suggest some lines of thought and argument. The first passage is from Male and Female (1949) by Margaret Mead, America's most prominent anthropologist and one of the earliest women in the field. The next is by Simone de Beauvoir, who is not an anthropologist but a philosopher and whose book The Second Sex (1953) has had a strong influence on the contemporary women's movement. E. E. Evans-Pritchard is one of the founding fathers of modern anthropology. His often quoted comments, originally part of a public lecture, appeared in his article "The Position of Women in Primitive Societies and in Our Own" (1955). The passage by Sherwood Washburn and C. S. Lancaster is from an article first presented at a symposium called "Man the Hunter" (1968). Eleanor Leacock, Sherry Ortner, and Karen Sacks are all contemporary anthropolo­gists writing from feminist perspectives; their selections were published in 1972, 1974, and 1975, respectively. The "Preliminary Questions" that follow these selections are meant to help you sharpen your sense of the issues and to prepare you for reading the more detailed cultural descriptions that form the core of this section. The cultural descriptions range widely – from southwest African bushwomen to Sicilian peasants to cocktail waitresses in an American bar – but you'll find, along with the obvious dissimilarities, some interesting parallels. The chapter closes with suggestions for writing arguments about women and power.

From MALE AND FEMALE

Margaret Mead

In every known human society, the male's need for achievement can be recognized. Men may cook, or weave or dress dolls or hunt humming­birds, but if such activities are appropriate occupations of men, then the whole society, men and women alike, votes them as important. When the same occupations are performed by women, they are regarded as less important. In a great number of human societies men's sureness of their sex role is tied up with their right, or ability, to practice some activity that women are not allowed to practice. Their maleness, in fact, has to be underwritten by preventing women from entering some field or performing some feat. Here may be found the relationship between maleness and pride; that is, a need for prestige that will outstrip the prestige which is accorded to any woman. There seems no evidence that it is necessary for men to surpass women in any specific way, but rather that men do need to find reassurance in achievement, and because of this connection, cultures frequently phrase achievement as something that women do not or cannot do, rather than directly as something which men do well.

The recurrent problem of civilization is to define the male role sat­isfactorily enough – whether it be to build gardens or raise cattle, kill game or kill enemies, build bridges or handle bank-shares – so that the male may in the course of his life reach a solid sense of irreversible achievement, of which his childhood knowledge of the satisfactions of child-bearing have given him a glimpse. In the case of women, it is only necessary that they be permitted by the given social arrangements to fulfill their biological role, to attain this sense of irreversible achievement. If women are to be restless and questing, even in the face of child-bearing, they must be made so through education. If men are ever to be at peace, ever certain that their lives have been lived as they were meant to be, they must have, in addition to paternity, culturally elaborated forms of expression that are lasting and sure. Each culture – in its own way – has developed forms that will make men satisfied in their con­structive activities without distorting their sure sense of their masculinity. Fewer cultures have yet found ways in which to give women a divine discontent that will demand other satisfactions than those of child-bearing.

From THE SECOND SEX

Simone De Beauvoir

But is it enough to change laws, institutions, customs, public opinion, and the whole social context, for men and women to become truly equal? "Women will always be women," say the skeptics. Other seers prophesy that in casting off their femininity they will not succeed in changing themselves into men and they will become monsters. This would be to admit that the woman of today is a creation of nature; it must be repeated once more that in human society nothing is natural and that woman, like much else, is a product elaborated by civilization. The intervention of others in her destiny is fundamental: if this action took a different di­rection, it would produce a quite different result. Woman is determined not by her hormones or by mysterious instincts, but by the manner in which her body and her relation to the world are modified through the action of others than herself. The abyss that separates the adolescent boy and girl has been deliberately opened out between them since earliest childhood; later on, woman could not be other than what she was made, and that past was bound to shadow her for life. If we appreciate its influence, we see clearly that her destiny is not predetermined for all eternity.

From THE POSITION OF WOMEN IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETIES AND IN OUR OWN

E. E. Evans-Pritchard

If we bear in mind that every disability primitive women may be said to suffer has compensations our own women may no longer enjoy, we may come to the conclusion that, taking everything into consideration and on balance, it cannot be said, certainly not without many qualifications, that women are much more favorably situated in our own society than in primitive societies. Lest this should seem to you an extravagant, even absurd, statement I hasten to emphasize again that I am speaking of women's position relative to men. Certainly, and obviously, English women enjoy comforts and leisure and luxuries and the advantages of Christianity, education, medicine, mechanization – everything, in fact, which we speak of as civilization; and all this primitive women lack; but then the men lack them too. Indeed it might reasonably be held that where our womenfolk are most conspicuously better off than primitive women, this is due not so much to alteration of women's status in society, which means vis-a-vis men, as to innovations which have affected every­body equally, both men and women, woman's status remaining in es­sentials, and in spite of all formal and conventional appearances, relatively constant. If this is true, it suggests that some of the changes which have come about with regard to her situation in our own society which present a contrast with primitive conditions may prove to be transitory, especially where we find that they are recent developments which have taken place in very peculiar historical circumstances.

I would take the risk of going even further, and say that I find it difficult to believe that the relative positions of the sexes are likely to undergo any considerable or lasting alteration in the foreseeable future. Primitive societies and barbarous societies and the historical societies of Europe and the East exhibit almost every conceivable variety of insti­tutions, but in all of them, regardless of the form of social structure, men are always in the ascendancy, and this is perhaps the more evident the higher the civilization. I am not wishing to be provocative – it might be better were it not so – but, so far as I can see, it is a plain matter of fact that it is so. Feminists have indeed said that this is because women have always been denied the opportunity of taking the lead; but we would still have to ask how it is that they have allowed the opportunity to be denied them, since it can hardly have been just a matter of brute force. The facts seem rather to suggest that there are deep biological and psychological factors, as well as sociological factors, involved, and that the relation between the sexes can only be modified by social changes, and not radically altered by them.

From THE EVOLUTION OF HUNTING

Sherwood L. Washburn And C. S. Lancaster

Human hunting, if done by males, is based on a division of labor and is a social and technical adaptation quite different from that of other mam­mals. Human hunting is made possible by tools, but it is far more than a technique or even a variety of techniques. It is a way of life, and the success of this adaptation (in its total social, technical, and psychological dimensions) has dominated the course of human evolution for hundreds of thousands of years. In a very real sense our intellect, interests, emotions, and basic social life – all are evolutionary products of the success of the hunting adaptation. When anthropologists speak of the unity of mankind, they are stating that the selection pressures of the hunting and gathering way of life were so similar and the result so successful that populations of Homo sapiens are still fundamentally the same every where.

From THE INTRODUCTION TO THE ORIGIN OF THE FAMILY, PRIVATE PROPERTY, AND THE STATE BY FRIEDRICH ENGELS

Eleanor Burke Leacock

An interesting subject for reassessment is the mystique that surrounds the hunt and, in comparison, that surrounding childbirth. A common formulation of status among hunter-gatherers overlooks the latter and stresses the importance and excitement of the hunt. Albeit the primary staple foods may be the vegetable products supplied by the women, they afford no prestige, it is pointed out, so that while not precisely subservient women are still of lower status than men. However, women's power of child-bearing has been a focus for awe and even fear as long ago as the Upper Paleolithic, judging from the fertility figurines that date from that period. This point is easy to overlook, for the ability to bear children has led in our society not to respect but to women's oppressed status. Similarly, the mystique surrounding menstruation is underestimated. At­titudes of mystery and danger for men are interpreted in terms of our cultural judgment as "uncleanliness." Indeed, the semantic twists on this subject would be amusing to analyze. Women are spoken of as "isolated" in "menstrual huts" so that the men will not be contaminated. Where men's houses exist, however, they are written about respectfully; here the exclusion of women betokens men's high status. Doubtless this con­geries of attitudes was first held by missionaries and traders, and from them subject peoples learned appropriate attitudes to express to whites.

From IS FEMALE TO MALE AS NATURE IS TO CULTURE?

Sherry B. Ortner

Woman is not "in reality" any closer to (or further from) nature than man – both have consciousness, both are mortal. But there are certainly reasons why she appears that way. . . . The result is a (sadly) efficient feedback system: various aspects of woman's situation (physical, social, psychological) contribute to her being seen as closer to nature, while the view of her as closer to nature is in turn embodied in institutional forms that reproduce her situation. The implications for social change are sim­ilarly circular: a different cultural view can only grow out of a different social actuality; a different social actuality can only grow out of a different cultural view.

It is clear, then, that the situation must be attacked from both sides. Efforts directed solely at changing the social institutions – through setting quotas on hiring, for example, or through passing equal-pay-for-equal-work laws – cannot have far-reaching effects if cultural language and imagery continue to purvey a relatively devalued view of women. But at the same time efforts directed solely at changing cultural assumptions – through male and female consciousness-raising groups, for example, or through revision of educational materials and mass-media imagery – cannot be successful unless the institutional base of the society is changed to support and reinforce the changed cultural view. Ultimately, both men and women can and must be equally involved in projects of creativity and transcendence. Only then will women be seen as aligned with culture, in culture's ongoing dialectic with nature.

From ENGELS REVISITED

Karen Sacks

Men are more directly exploited and more often collectively so – a situation which gives them the possibility of doing something about it. Women's field of activity and major responsibility is restricted to the household, which neither produces nor owns the means of production for more than domestic subsistence, a level of organization at which little can be done to institute social change in a class society. This situation has several consequences. First, women are relegated to the bottom of a social pecking order (a man's home is his castle). Second, because of their isolation and exclusion from the public sector, women can be used as a conservative force, unconsciously upholding the status quo in their commitment to the values surrounding maintenance of home, family, and children. Finally, the family is the sole institution with responsibility for consumption and for the maintenance of its members and rearing of its children, the future generation of exchange workers. It is necessary labor for the rulers, but women are forced to perform it without compensation. Modern capitalism has maintained this pattern of exploiting the private domestic labor of women, but since industrialization women have also been involved heavily in public or wage labor. Meeting the labor burden that capitalism places on the family remains socially women's responsi­bility. Responsibility for domestic work is one of the material bases for present barriers to women working for money and for placing them in a more exploitable position than men in the public labor force. As Margaret Benston shows, this domestic work is not considered "real" work because it has only private use value and no exchange value – it is not public labor. . . .

The distinction between production for use and production for ex­change places a heavy responsibility on women to maintain themselves as well as exchange workers and to rear future exchange and maintenance workers. In this context, wage work (or social labor) becomes an ad­ditional burden and in no way changes women's responsibility for domestic work. For full social equality, men's and women's work must be of the same kind: the production of social use values. For this to happen, family and society cannot remain separate economic spheres of life. Production, consumption, child-rearing, and economic decision-making all need to take place in a single social sphere – something analogous to the Iroquois gens as described by Engels, or to the production brigades of China during the Great Leap Forward. What is now private family work must become public work for women to become fully social adults.

Preliminary Questions

1. Write a short report classifying and then briefly comparing the preceding overviews. Make sure your report adequately represents the range of opinions.

2. From your reading of these passages, what do you take to be some of the key anthropological questions in thinking about women's issues?

3. What is "natural" and what is "cultural"? What are the fundamental dif­ferences of opinion on this question? Show how defining these terms can make a difference.

4. Do the authors express any disagreement about relations between the sexes in contemporary Western societies? If so, illustrate the differences. If not, describe the basic point of view they seem to share.

5. Some of the authors offer or imply views of how modern societies have evolved from primitive ones. Do they agree on an interpretation?

6. Define primitive and civilized as complementary terms. How does one definition depend on the other? How do we draw the line between them? Do these terms contain hidden assumptions?

7. What does Simone de Beauvoir mean by "the abyss" that separates male and female adolescents? Does your own experience substantiate this view?

8. From Margaret Mead's perspective, what is the relationship between civilization and discontent?

9. What are "hunter-gatherers"; how would you define this term? In what ways does the organization of a hunter-gatherer society seem to be different from our own?

10. Karen Sacks's view of women's situations seems attached to an inter­pretation of their economic situations. Summarize her view.

11. In what ways might earlier anthropologists have distorted the roles of women in the cultures they analyzed? Speculate, as well, on attitudes and assumptions found in America today that could distort our perceptions of women's roles in other cultures and in our own.