The Status of Women in Preindustrial Societies
Abstract
How does the status of women in different cultures actually compare with that of men? How does this position vary from one realm-religious, political, economic, domestic, or sexual-to another? To examine these questions, Martin King Whyte draws on a cross-cultural sample of 93 preindustrial societies throughout the world. His analysis describes women's roles in historical perspective, offering a much-needed foundation for feminist scholarship as well as provocative thoughts about the future. To determine why women fare better in some societies than others, Professor Whyte compares data from cultures ranging from small, preliterate hunting bands to the capitals of the Inca and Roman empires. This ethnographic material makes possible a systematic review of the diverse roles of women and also enables the author to test many of the theories advanced to explain the situation of women today. Some of the specific questions considered are: Does male supremacy have its origins in the hunting way of life of our distant ancestors? Are women always inferior to men? Do women have superior status in cultures where they produce much food and thereby play an important economic role? Has the position of women improved over the course of human evolution? Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
... Last but not least, across societies, there is a division of labor, with men and women being ascribed different roles and specializations (Whyte, 1978). For instance, across different cultures and different times, wealth is predominantly controlled by men (Whyte, 1978). ...
... Last but not least, across societies, there is a division of labor, with men and women being ascribed different roles and specializations (Whyte, 1978). For instance, across different cultures and different times, wealth is predominantly controlled by men (Whyte, 1978). Accordingly, such sex difference would translate in this trait being of little fitness importance in a prospective mother-in-law than in a prospective father-in-law. ...
... With respect to the other factors where sex differences were found, across preindustrial and postindustrial societies, women are more involved in housekeeping and cooking activities (Whyte, 1978), which can potentially account for why parents valued the "Good cook-housekeeper" factor more in a motherthan in a father-in-law. Furthermore, across cultures, men usually control more wealth than women (Nettle & Pollet, 2008), so it is expected that parents would value being well-off more in a prospective father-than in a mother-in-law. ...
Across different times and cultures, parents play an important role in influencing their children's mating decisions. When they do so, they aim to forge useful alliances with other parents which raises the question of what parents look for in the latter. The current research aims to address this question. In particular, we employed an online sample of 925 Chinese parents who were asked to rate the desirability of 88 traits in the parents of prospective mates for their children. Principal components analysis classified these traits in eight factors for the mothers and 10 factors of interest for the fathers of their children's mates. We also found that parents had a well-defined hierarchy of preferences, fathers, and mothers were in agreement in what they looked for in a prospective in-law, but their preferences were contingent to the sex of the in-law.
... In the majority of human societies parents have a substantial role in determining who is going to have mating access to their offspring. As the anthropological record indicates, the offspring are constrained from exercising mate choice freely and the selection of spouses is frequently made by their parents (Apostolou, 2007b;Broude & Green, 1983;Minturn, Grosse, & Haider, 1969;Stephens, 1963;Westermarck, 1925;Whyte, 1978). Based on this evidence, Apostolou (2007b) proposed a model whereby, along with female and male choice, parental choice constitutes a significant sexual selection force in our species. ...
... Finally, foraging societies, in contrast to other preindustrial societies, are more egalitarian and females enjoy higher social status (Endicott, 1999;Whyte, 1978). Also, in agropastoral societies, resources are predominantly controlled by men despite the fact that women have a significant role in production (Lerner, 1986;Whyte, 1978). ...
... Finally, foraging societies, in contrast to other preindustrial societies, are more egalitarian and females enjoy higher social status (Endicott, 1999;Whyte, 1978). Also, in agropastoral societies, resources are predominantly controlled by men despite the fact that women have a significant role in production (Lerner, 1986;Whyte, 1978). Higher social status combined with more control over wealth enable men to be more influential over their offspring's mating decisions. ...
Evidence from the anthropological record indicates that in most human societies, parents control the mating access to their offspring. Based on these data, a model of sexual selection has been recently proposed, whereby along with female and male choice, parental choice constitutes a significant sexual selection force in our species. This model was found to provide a good account for the mating patterns which are typical of foraging societies. By employing data from the Standard Cross Cultural Sample, the present study aims at examining whether this model can also account for the mating patterns typical of agricultural and pastoral societies. In addition, comparisons between different society types are made and two model-derived hypotheses are tested. First, it is hypothesised that parents have more control over their offspring's mate choices in non-foraging societies. Second, it is hypothesised that male parents exert greater decision making power in agropastoral societies than in hunting and gathering ones. Both hypotheses are supported by the results presented here. The evolutionary implications of these findings are also explored.
... However, the ethnographic record indicates that female mate choice is far from free. To the contrary, it demonstrates that the mating decisions of females are heavily controlled by their parents (Broude & Green, 1983;Minturn, Grosse, & Haider, 1969;Whyte, 1978b). Consequently, present models that do not incorporate the influence of close kin in mating decisions are inadequate for the study of human mating (Cronk, 1991). ...
... Similarly, Broude and Green (1983) use a subsample from the standard cross-cultural sample and find that arranged marriages were the most common marriage type, with more control exercised over the marriage of females. Moreover, Whyte (1978b) concluded that in the majority of the preindustrial societies considered, marriage arrangements are dominated by males. It was also found that, in the vast majority of cases, divorce was equally available as an option for both husband and wife. ...
... To date, the evolutionary literature on human mating has often been inconsistent, or incomplete, in its attention to ethnographic evidence such as that studied here. Perhaps this is because data on mating patterns among foraging societies are scattered across individual studies (e.g., the !Kung; Lee, 1979) or presented along with evidence from nonforaging societies (e.g., Whyte, 1978b), or perhaps this is because much human mating research takes place within a Western context where parents have little direct role in the choices of their offspring. Regardless, taking into account the role of parents in manipulating the mating choices of their offspring may broaden our understanding of human mating, enabling us to more accurately reconstruct the evolution of human mating behavior. ...
Much of the evolutionary literature on human mating is based on the assumption of extensive female choice during the history of our species. However, ethnographic evidence from foraging societies reveals that, in societies thought to be akin to those of our ancestors, female choice is constrained by the control that parents exercise over their daughters. Data from 190 hunting and gathering societies indicate that almost all reproduction takes place while the woman is married and that the institution of marriage is regulated by parents and close kin. Parents are able to influence the mating decisions of both sons and daughters, but stronger control is exercised with regard to daughters; male parents have more say in selecting in-laws than their female counterparts. In light of the fact that parental control is the typical pattern of mate choice among extant foragers, it is likely that this pattern was also prevalent throughout human evolution. Because daughters' preferences can be expected not to fully coincide with those of their parents, research to date may thus have simultaneously overestimated the contribution of female preferences to processes of sexual selection and underestimated the contribution of parental preferences to such processes.
... Daughters-in-law versus sons-in-law. Men and women differ in their capacities and in the social goals ascribed to them (Whyte, 1978). For instance, women face menopause, and as a consequence, their reproductive value declines more sharply than men's with age (Buss, 2017). ...
... For instance, women face menopause, and as a consequence, their reproductive value declines more sharply than men's with age (Buss, 2017). To use another example, across different societies, wealth is controlled predominantly by men (Whyte, 1978). Such differences suggest that it would pay for parents to differentiate their preferences depending on the sex of the in-law. ...
Across different times and cultures, parents exercise considerable influence over their children's mate choices. When they do so, parents are looking for specific traits in a prospective daughter-and son-in-law. Using a sample of 674 parents, the current research investigated in-law preferences in China. Participants rated 88 different traits, which were clustered in 10 different preference domains. In-law preferences were found to be contingent on the sex of the in-law and the sex of the parent. The data from the current study were compared with data from a different study which took place in the Republic of Cyprus. It was found that preferences varied in the two samples, but specific cultural differences were identified. It was also found that for both samples, the 10 different domains clustered in two supra-domains. The first supra-domain, where personality traits clustered, was preferred more by both Chinese and Greek-Cypriot parents than the second domain, where the rest of the traits clustered.
... Women's position has a central role in the success of fertility and reproductive health policies in developing countries, thus its explication has become an important goal of social-demographic research. Women's status is multi-dimensional and cannot be captured by any one index (Balk 1994;Mason 1986Mason , 1993Mason , 1997Ware 1993;Whyte 1978). Control over material resources, the degree of their autonomy, and their material well-being have been proposed to be the most essential dimensions of women's status because they presumably influence demographic outcomes (Mason 1986). ...
... These aspects of status, however, do not necessarily rise and fall together. In some societies women are accorded high prestige and reverence, but they do not necessarily have autonomy and control over resources (Mason 1986;Whyte 1978;Degler 1980;Ware 1977). While some scholars emphasize women's versus men's control over resources and the extent to which women are free to take action on their own (Mason 1986(Mason , 1993, others focus on decision-making power in the household, freedom from the control under patrilineal kin, freedom of movement, and freedom to keep contact with natal kin (Dixon 1978;Balk 1994;Caldwell 1986;Caldwell and Caldwell 1993;Dyson and Moore 1983;Safilios-Rothschild 1985;van de Walle and van de Walle 1993;Ware 1993;Mason 1997). ...
Abstract This study extends the literature by identifying two new dimensions of rural women's status (husband's housework sharing and women's exposure to the larger world, in addition to power and autonomy) based on rich information from a representative sample of 1,062 childbearing women in rural Yunnan, China. It utilizes linear structural relations models to operationalize and analyze variations in women's status. The findings show that women's status is multi-dimensional and cannot be captured under a single index. Female literacy and family socioeconomic status are positively associated with women's status, whereas the extended household structure and spousal age differences have a negative effect on women's status. Minority women and women from the plains area enjoy greater equality in housework sharing than the Han women and those from hilly villages. Han Chinese women and those residing in the plains area enjoy greater decision-making power than minority women and women residing in mountainous areas.
... On the other hand, being involved in warfare can generate a greater need for female involvement outside the home, which may in turn affect the evolution of beliefs about gender." This puzzle is by no means new: more than four decades ago, Whyte (1978) already considered countries' involvement in warfare as explaining factor for why women's status is higher in some societies than in others. Nevertheless, the question whether exposure to conflict has a lasting impact on women's work outside the home has so far primarily been studied in the context of Europe and the U.S. post-WWII, but has rarely been adopted to the context of civil wars in developing countries. ...
What are the social legacies of civil war and how do they differ for men and women? Despite a growing body of research on civil war consequences, the social legacies of conflict remain among the least understood impacts of war. Furthermore, empirical evidence on the distinct effects wartime violence has on men and women is scarce. Quantitative research mostly overlooks the gendered experiences, consequences, and potential benefits of conflict. The aim of my dissertation is to contribute to research on gendered civil war legacies by combining observational and experimental micro-level evidence in different post-conflict settings. The overarching question of my dissertation is addressed in three self-contained essays which test theories of the gendered impacts of war.
Chapter 2 asks whether civil war (dis)empowers women and explores the causal relationship between civil war and women’s labor force participation by leveraging the arbitrary Côte d'Ivoire--Burkina Faso border as setting for a natural experiment. Using a regression discontinuity design, I find that Ivoirian women are 25 percentage points less likely to work outside the home post-war. I investigate three potential mechanisms and argue that the decline in female labor force participation might be explained by a shift towards more traditional gender norms and a reduction in women's bargaining power.
Chapter 3 investigates social (dis)trust in post-war Sri Lanka and analyzes a list experiment to explore the causal relationship between war-related sexual violence and intra- and inter-ethnic group trust. Combining the list experiment with survey data of the Tamil population, I find evidence that war-related sexual violence affects trust decisions of men and women differently. Although both Tamil men and women lose trust in fellow Tamils, female victims are more trusting towards their ethnic out-group. Possible explanations might be that both context of sexual violence and coping strategies differ by gender.
Chapter 4 focuses on social (dis)integration in the Democratic Republic of Congo and explores how forced recruitment shapes male ex-combatants' violent behavior. Based on survey data, I present evidence that former forced recruits commit significantly more violence against their intimate partners and their children compared to voluntary recruits. Using structural equation modeling, I scrutinize the combatant socialization mechanism to show that more intense exposure to violence as part of armed groups and ensuing mental health problems mediate this relationship.
Taken together, my dissertation highlights the importance of systematic micro-level evidence as well as the significance of applying a gender perspective to conflict research. I argue that it is necessary to account for gendered war experiences and consequences, both in theory-building and methodology, as well as in policy-making. This thesis contributes to different literatures on the consequences of armed conflict, the social implications of violence for individuals, and the risks of recurring violence. In chapter 5, I derive several implications and suggest avenues forward for academic research and policy-making.
... and history, gender emerges as a social construct that distinguishes men from women on a hierarchical basis. Men have benefited from higher status than women, have controlled more of the public sphere, and have exercised power over women (Darmangeat 2009;Rosaldo et al. 1974;Whyte 1978). Most explanatory models that account for the origins of male domination pay particular attention to the sexual division of labor (SDL) in hunter-gatherer societies and describe it as the most ancient example of a status-relevant distinction between men and women. ...
Interactions between males and females often display a power imbalance. Men tend to adopt more dominant physical postures, lead conversations more, and are more likely to impose their will on women than vice versa. Furthermore, social representations typically associate males with a higher power than females. However, little is known about how those representations emerge in early childhood. The present study investigated whether preschool children from different countries assign more power to males than to females in the context of mixed-gender interactions. In Experiments 1a (n = 148) and 1b (n = 403), which implemented power through body postures, 4–6 year-old children from France, Lebanon, and Norway strongly associated power with a male character. Experiment 2 (n = 160) showed that although both French boys and girls identified themselves more with a dominant than with a subordinate posture, girls were less likely to do so in a mixed-gender context. In Experiment 3 (n = 213), which no longer used body postures, boys from Lebanon and France attributed more decision power and resource control to a male puppet than did girls. By investigating gender representations through interactions, the present study shows that children associate gender and power at an early age.
... Third, proxies alter the channels through which empowerment works. Finally, as empowerment compromises multiple dimensions, proxies obscure which dimension is being measured (Whyte, 1978 andAgarwala andLynch, 2006). Direct measures managed to tackle many of the inadequacies of the indirect-measure approach. ...
Purpose
This paper aims to tackle an important question related to women’s economic empowerment in highly patriarchal societies like Egypt. The paper discusses individual, household, wealth and location factors determining women empowerment, as measured by two dimensions: decision-making power and mobility.
Design/methodology/approach
Using the “Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey” (ELMPS) 2012, a Multiple Indicators Multiple Causes (MIMIC) model was estimated to study the main economic resources and social constraints that determine women empowerment as measured by the power of women over household decisions and her freedom of movement in Egypt.
Findings
Three key messages could be delivered. First, women’s own economic resources as captured by her employment status are an important source of her empowerment. Second, contrary to theoretical prediction education is not playing its expected role in developing awareness and transforming ideas concerning gender roles in Egypt. Third, the importance of social local context is fundamental for Egyptian women empowerment.
Originality/value
This study is an attempt to address some of the gaps in the literature for the Egyptian case, where there is a lack in rigorous studies measuring women empowerment and examining its determinates. This is done by first, tackling multiple dimension of women’s empowerment, decision-making inside households and freedom of mobility. Second, using MIMIC model, which is a modeling approach that allows for studying the relations between several causes of a given latent variable, such as “Empowerment” in our case, and a number of its possible indicators, without a directly observable measure of the latent variable. Third, using the most recent set of data; the ELMPS 2012 which has a special focus on women’s resources and agency that permits greater content validity of the multidimensional setup. Forth, the macro level differences in women’s status are tackled through using location dummy variables. Finally, given the important correlation between wealth level and women empowerment, the paper is considered a first attempt to analyze such impact by including a variable that captures the wealth level of the woman’s household as one determinant of empowerment.
... Anthropologists have produced memorable monographs on particular ways of life, as, for example, Colin Turnbull's (1962) study of the Pygmies of the Congo, Bronislaw Malinowski's (1922) study of the Trobriand Islanders, Clifferd Geertz' (1960) study of the Javanese religion and Melford Spiro's (1975) study of the utopian Israeli collective. They also like to compare the practices of different peoples as does Guy Swanson (1960) in his analysis of different forms of religion or Martin Whyte (1978) in his investigation of the status of women in preindustrial societies. ...
Tourism is a dynamic activity that most of the time involves interaction between the host community and the tourists. Though such interactions are short lived between one group of tourists and the residents the constant inflow of tourists assures that residents are exposed to the tourists continuously for long durations. Such intermingling of different cultures causes definite cultural changes especially in the host communities. Thereby the destination undergoes manifold changes which may not necessarily be positive all the time. This paper discusses all these issues in length. Socio-cultural impacts of tourism and the concerns for planners and policy makers are also dealt with in detail. Therefore, anthropological studies can go long way in contributing to an in depth analysis of all such impacts. This can be of immense help to tourism policy makers and planners in developing a destination for tourism.
... T. Liu, Hutchison, & Hong, 1973;Szinovacz, 1987). In nuclear families, spouses are more directly interdependent and rely on each other for services and companionship (Whyte, 1978). In patrilocal coresident households, the conjugal bond is weaker and secondary to the husband's bond with his parents (Zuo, 2009). ...
Objective
This study examines how intergenerational coresidence modifies the association between women's education and their household decision‐making power in China.
Background
Past research on how married women's education increases their decision‐making power at home has focused primarily on nuclear families. This article extends prior research by examining how this association varies by household structure. It compares women living with their husbands with those living with both their husbands and parents‐in‐law.
Method
This article used data from the China Family Panel Studies in 2010 and 2014. It employed marginal structural models to address the concern that certain characteristics selecting women of less power into coresidence with their parents‐in‐law may be endogenous to women's education.
Results
In nuclear households, women with a higher level of education have a higher probability of having the final say on household decisions. In multigenerational households, however, where women live with their parents‐in‐law, a higher level of education of women is not associated with an increase in women's decision‐making power.
Conclusion
Coresidence with husbands' parents may undermine the effect of women's education on their household decision‐making power.
... Women, when compared with men, have been perceived as having a subordinate status. One particular aspect that influences a woman's perceived status, and thus the way she is treated, is the way she looks to herself and to others (26). Because a woman's body size and shape, skin color, and the characteristics of her hair are noticed by others, they can influence the way she is treated. ...
Background
African American (AA) women face unique sociocultural barriers to physical activity (PA) engagement. Such barriers may contribute to their low PA levels and high cardiometabolic disease burden. One particular barrier reported among AA women in recent research is that being physically active can have an undesirable effect on the hairstyles and hair maintenance of many AA women. However, the underlying mechanisms contributing to this barrier have not been fully elucidated. The purpose of this study is to explore hairstyle maintenance as a barrier to PA among AA women and to identify effective strategies to overcome this barrier in the design of a culturally relevant PA intervention.
Methods
A qualitative study design was used. Data were collected from the focus groups comprising 23 sedentary and obese AA women (median age = 38.1 years, median body mass index = 39.8 kg/m²). Content analysis was used to analyze these focus group data.
Results
Three key themes emerged from the qualitative narratives of participants: (1) impact of perspiration on hair and hairstyle maintenance, (2) image and social comparisons, and (3) solutions to overcome hair-related barriers to PA. For impact of perspiration and hairstyle maintenance, participants described how perspiring while engaging in PA negatively impacts many of their hairstyles. Participants further discussed how time and monetary burdens associated with PA-related hairstyle maintenance further contributed to this issue. Findings for the theme of image and social comparison focused on how an AA woman’s hairstyle is an important part of the image and the social comparisons made by non-AAs regarding the hairstyles and maintenance practices of AA women. For solutions to hairstyle maintenance barriers, participant described a variety of potential styling techniques that may help alleviate PA-related maintenance concerns, including braids, locks, and natural hairstyles. However, no styling technique was uniformly endorsed by all study participants.
Conclusion
Findings highlight the significance of hair in the AA community and provide further insight on appropriate intervention design strategies to overcome this sociocultural barrier to PA. Future research is needed to corroborate and further expand on our findings.
... Women, when compared with men, have been perceived as having a subordinate status. One particular aspect that influences a woman's perceived status, and thus the way she is treated, is the way she looks to herself and to others (26). Because a woman's body size and shape, skin color, and the characteristics of her hair are noticed by others, they can influence the way she is treated. ...
... Moreover, women usually control less wealth than men (Whyte 1978), which means that daughters are more, and for a longer period, dependent on their parents' resources than sons. In addition, women are physically weaker than men that translates into daughters being more dependent on their family's protection than sons. ...
... Recognition of private property is present in 70 / 84 cultures for which there is data ( Murdock and White 2006, V704;Whyte 2005). In addition, punitive attitudes to 'theft' in six cultures ( Newman 1976), and responses to items in the World Values Survey (reported in Weeden and Kurzban 2013) indicate that 'respecting property' is widely considered to be morally good. ...
What is morality? And to what extent does it vary around the world? The theory of morality-as-cooperation argues that morality consists of a collection of biological and cultural solutions to the problems of cooperation and conflict recurrent in human social life. By using nonzerosum game theory to identify distinct problems of cooperation and their solutions, morality-as-cooperation exhibits a theoretical precision, explanatory scope and predictive power, exceeding that of previous atheoretical accounts of morality. For example, morality-as-cooperation predicts that specific forms of cooperative behaviour – helping kin, helping your group, reciprocating, being brave, deferring to superiors, dividing disputed resources, and respecting prior ownership – will be considered morally good wherever they arise, in all cultures. We test this prediction by investigating the moral valence of these cooperative behaviours in the ethnographic records of 60 societies. We find that, as predicted, their moral valence is uniformly positive. We find also that the majority of these cooperative moral values appear in the majority of cultures, in all regions of the world. We conclude that morality-as-cooperation could at last provide the unified theory of morality that anthropology has hitherto lacked.
... The transition from a mode of subsistence based on hunting and gathering to a mode of subsistence based on agropastoralism has resulted further into more male influence in parental control over mating (Apostolou, 2014b). In particular, agropastoral societies produce more material wealth, which is usually controlled by men, than foraging societies do (Whyte, 1978). More wealth means also more threats from others who may attempt to gain access to these resources. ...
Personality traits such as low emotional stability and low empathy have a considerable negative impact on an individual's mating success. This impact is more severe in cases where such traits reach extreme levels and are classified as personality disorders. Several evolutionary models have been proposed to account for the relative high prevalence of these apparently maladaptive traits. The present paper contributes to the explanatory power of these models by putting forward the hypothesis that in ancestral human societies selection pressures on personality traits that predict success in intimate relationships had been weak. The reason why is that mate choice had been controlled by parents, mainly fathers, who did not place considerable weight on these traits in a prospective son- and daughter-in-law, and who were willing to impose substantial costs on their children in order to benefit themselves from a marriage alliance.
... On the other hand, both dominance-striving and prestige-striving strategies lead to increases in peer-evaluated social rank, and the two strategies are equally effective in men and women (Cheng, Tracy, Foulsham, Kinstone, & Henrich, 2013). While it is true that men have historically held more resources and power than women (e.g., Buss, 1996;Pratto, 1996;Whyte, 1978), it is misguided to assume that women would not likewise benefit from enhancing their status or having increased means at their disposal. Rather than assuming that men seek status and resources, and women seek out those men who have status and resources (Buss & Kenrick, 1998), it is reasonable to assume that women also seek rank and resources for direct benefits as well, due to the fact that there are obvious fitness advantages to anyone sitting atop a social hierarchy (Hawley, 1999). ...
We sought to determine what styles of social dominance are associated with Dark Triad traits (i.e., narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism) and whether sex differences in Dark Triad traits are mediated by dominance styles measured by the Dominance and Prestige Scale, and the Rank Styles with Peers Questionnaire. Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism are strongly associated with dominance-striving, but only narcissism is consistently correlated with prestige-striving. Dark Triad traits are negatively correlated with coalition-building, but positively correlated with dominant leadership and ruthless self-advancement. Sex differences in Dark Triad traits were mediated by various dominance styles, but mainly by dominance-striving and ruthless self-advancement. These results suggest that particular styles of social dominance are utilized by both men and women with Dark Triad traits.
... Por otra parte, el concepto se refiere al lugar de las mujeres en relación con los hombres en una jerarquía de dos, implicando estratificación. En este sentido, la aplicación de esta noción de estratificación sexual para describir las relaciones entre hombres y mujeres en las sociedades africanas ha sido cuestionado por diversos estudios que muestran que una posición favorable paras las mujeres en cualquier dimensión de la vida no implica necesariamente una situación igual en otra dimensión (Whyte, 1978;Sudarkasa, 1986;Iniesta, 2010). ...
British colonial development policies targeted at women impacted them in an unequal
ways and, influencing gender relations. These measures have resulted in different forms
of acculturation’s processes: in the one hand, they influenced the “traditional” African
feminine and familiar model transformation; in the other hand they promoted social
differentiation among women, situating them in different positions in the independents
movement in Tanganyika and, after independence. This document recovers ethnographic
data from fieldwork in Tanzania, during 2006 and 2007, showing that European gender
ideologies influenced the status of women and the new social class that shape the country
after independence.
This chapter provides a critical overview of archaeological approaches to gender and social inequality, and suggests future perspectives and approaches. We argue that considering gender as a central framework through which to analyse past social inequality is long overdue in archaeology. Surprisingly, even under Processualism, which focused on the origins and development of social inequality, the issues of gender inequality were rarely raised. Today, in spite of the fact that feminist and gender perspectives have repeatedly demonstrated the significance of gender for the construction of social differences and identities in the past, we identify a continuation of earlier approaches. Much work remains to be done by archaeologists, both addressing gender inequality and placing it within the social context of change in different periods. We identify positive steps in this direction, and propose that multi-proxy approaches are a promising way to address these complex questions and bring social inequality into focus.
Belief in gendered social power imbalance (i.e. males are more powerful than females) leads to undesirable gender disparities, but little is known about the developmental origins of this belief, especially in Eastern cultures. We investigated the development onset of this belief by focusing on 4–7-year-old Japanese children while considering another belief (females are nicer than males) for comparison. In the dyadic context tasks, children saw pairs of animated characters depicting powerful–powerless or kind–unkind postures and judged the characters' gender (boy or girl). Results suggested both ‘nice = female’ and ‘powerful = female’ gender stereotypes in children. In the collective context tasks, children were presented with stories in occupational contexts, including multiple unspecified people and verbal cues, describing more explicitly the powerful and nice traits of the protagonists. The results replicated the ‘nice = female’ gender stereotype. Moreover, early ‘powerful = male’ gender stereotypes were seen in 6-year-old boys but not among girls in general. These findings demonstrate that Japanese children's beliefs regarding gender differences in power vary depending on the context in which male–female interactions are presented. Additionally, the study reveals that signs of the ‘powerful = male’ social power gender stereotype emerge around the age of 6.
Women in politics and income inequality have become two prominent issues in developed economies and remain a topic of ongoing debate. To achieve sustained economic transformation, economies around the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) urgently need to adapt to sustainable development practices to reduce the risk of experiencing bad economic outlooks. However, the gap in the existing literature is the relationship between women in politics, income inequality, and the well-being of people, which has not received sufficient attention thus far. To fill this gap, this study aims to assess how income inequality and women in politics affect the social and economic well-being of OECD countries. This study adopts a panel dataset from 2000 to 2020 in a panel regression model and performs a fixed-effects analysis of the relationship among these factors. Interestingly, we show no significant association between women in politics and human development. In contrast, we confirm a positive and significant relationship between women in politics and gross national savings as well as renewable energy supply. Moreover, we confirm the key role of income and poverty levels in triggering social and economic well-being, as it shows a significant and negative relationship in all of our models. These original findings have several practical implications for policymakers and contribute to the current debate on the role of women in politics and income inequality across OECD countries.
The ideal wife, according to Proverb 31, is far more indispensable in any given society and plays a far less walk-over role in her marriage. Conversely, the highly recognised African term makoti, which originates from abroad (Dutch culture), reduces a newlywed to slave status, at least when understood from its linguistic context. This is because, according to the literature that is currently available, the term makoti originates from either the “Dutch/Afrikaans” phrase Maak ons tee, which roughly translates to “make us tea.” Consequently, when considered in light of Proverb 31 woman, the term makoti, as used in most African cultures, becomes problematic. This paper aimed to refute colonialist notions of African makoti by first describing the African daughter-in-law or recently married woman in the context of Proverb 31. Methodologically, through the employment of the decolonial theory and literature review, it confirmed that the esteemed African term makoti originates in Dutch culture rather than the African patriarchal corpus. The primary finding of this study was that, contrary to the stereotype of makoti that has been fortified by colonial context, the real African daughter-in-law is more akin to a Proverb 31 woman. The study concluded that correcting falsehoods like these contributes to the restoration of African culture’s dignity and the veracity of African history, while also challenging the continued colonial narratives that marginalize African women. This study enhances and contributes towards the decolonial agenda by dispelling stereotypes that misplace makoti as an invention of African culture. Keywords: Colonisation, Decoloniality, Religion, Culture, Patriarchy, African Makoti
Policies may change the incentives that allow cultural practices to persist. To test this, I study matrilocality and patrilocality, kinship traditions that determine daughters’ and sons’ post-marriage residences, and thus, which gender lives with and supports parents in their old age. Two separate policy experiments in Ghana and Indonesia show that pension policies reduce the practice of these traditions. I also show that these traditions incentivize parents to invest in the education of children who traditionally coreside with them. Consequently, when pension plans change cultural practices, they also reduce educational investment. This finding further demonstrates that policy can change culture. (JEL G51, I20, J15, J16, J32, Z13)
This chapter applies a power-theory perspective to data from New Guinea to examine: (a) how patriarchy was reproduced in contact-era New Guinea; and (b) how it may have arisen. Because patriarchy is at base an asymmetry in gendered power, power theory argues that, to understand it, we must focus on the nature of power, its properties, and factors that constrain or enable its construction. In the case of New Guinea patriarchy, the most important of those factors was the portion of an agent’s time budget that he or she could devote to political interaction and hence to building power. Male agents in New Guinea were able to reproduce patriarchy because the sexual division of labor afforded them more time and opportunity than it did women to interact with others and hence build power. Extrapolating this argument, the chapter proposes that the necessary condition for New Guinea patriarchy lay in the sexual division of military labor, which in turn ordained the broader division of labor in New Guinea—the condition that allowed men to reproduce an asymmetric power over women.
This chapter explores the qualities parents look for in a prospective spouse for their children. Several studies on in-law preferences converge in the conclusion that parents place considerable value in specific personality traits, family background, similarity, economic prospects, sexual behavior, and the capacity to have a family. These preferences are contingent upon the sex of the in-law, as traits are valued differently in a prospective daughter-in-law and in a prospective son-in-law. The in-law preferences of fathers and mothers largely converge, but there is some divergence over specific traits. In addition, in-law preferences are contingent upon the specific environmental context, and consequently, they vary across societies of different subsistence type.
In this chapter, a formal model of parental choice is introduced. In this model, parental choice arises from parental control over mating, which is motivated by the opportunity cost of free mate choice. This opportunity cost has two components, namely, the diverging opportunity cost and the converging opportunity cost. The diverging opportunity cost emerges from the differences in genetic relatedness between parents and their children and children choosing mates with traits which give them more fitness benefits than they give to their parents. The converging opportunity cost arises from the overlap in genetic relatedness and from children being young and inexperienced to risk making erroneous mating decisions that their parents would not make if they were to exercise choice in their place. In addition, this chapter explores the contingencies in the opportunity cost of free mate choice and, thus, the contingencies in parental control over mating and the strength of parental choice. It is argued that the opportunity cost of free mate choice is higher for daughters than for sons and is usually higher for male than female parents.
In this chapter, the model of parental choice is applied to societies which base their subsistence on agriculture and animal husbandry. As in the case of societies which base their subsistence on hunting and gathering, the model predicts that parental choice is a strong selection force, with more control exercised over daughters than over sons and male parents being more influential than female parents over their children’s mating decisions. It is further predicted that individual mate choice is a weak sexual selection force. Evidence from the anthropological and historical records on agropastoral societies is presented which provides a strong support for these predictions.
In this chapter, the model of parental choice is applied to societies which base their subsistence on hunting and gathering. The model predicts that parental choice is a strong sexual selection force, with male-male competition and individual mate choice being also strong sexual selection forces. It predicts further that parents exercise more control over their daughters than over their sons, while fathers are more influential than mothers over their children’s mating decisions. Anthropological evidence from hunting and gathering societies is presented which strongly supports these predictions.
We propose that romantic love is a biosocial phenomenon that may well be a universal and that its cultural aspects are a product of social conditions. This position is unique because romantic love is promoted as a cultural rather than social universal. We argue that culture, social, and psychological phenomena are too frequently conflated and their core definitional features underdefined by researchers. Culture refers to learned practices that have collectively shared meanings to the members of a society. Under social conditions in which romantic love does not confer reproductive and health advantages to a mother and child, it will often be suppressed, undeveloped, and rejected as a cultural component. Through a cross-cultural study, we show that female status and family organization are important features that help in regulating the sociocultural importance of romantic love as a basis for marriage.
This article explores the place and religious activities of medieval Jewish women in northern France and especially in Germany during the High Middle Ages. The centrality of the synagogue in Jewish life in medieval Ashkenazi communities invites a reassessment of the role of women in the synagogue and of their ritual participation more generally. The article is based on four exemplary case studies, the first of which relates to Dolce, the famous wife of the German rabbi R. Eleazar b. Judah. The article then addresses the question of women’s presence in the synagogue when menstruating and during the circumcision ceremony, and ends with a look at changing attitudes toward women benefactors. Based on an analysis of liturgical, archaeological, halakhic and poetic sources, this article demonstrates the extent to which women were active and present in Ashkenazi synagogues and provides an explanation of their gradual segregation and marginalization starting in the thirteenth century.
This article discusses the antifeminist men’s rights movement and its ideological connections with the political far right. Through the lens of online forums and networks, it explores antifeminist paradigms in Germany, Switzerland and Austria and draws comparisons with the UK. By drawing out the commonalities and disparities between these countries’ networks, the most prominent threads of antifeminist discourse become tangible and comparable to their counterparts in far-right and new-right movements. Organized antifeminism is shown to be both heterosexist and misogynistic, at times racist, and to frequently employ hate speech as an intervention strategy.
Parents across societies and across time have been exercising considerable influence over their children’s mate choices. Parents desire specific traits in a prospective spouse for their children; however, the contribution of those traits to the parents’ fitness is contingent upon whether they are found in a daughter- or a son-in-law. Furthermore, certain traits can potentially make a different fitness contribution to mothers and fathers. On this basis, by using a comprehensive instrument of in-law preferences and a within-family design, the present study tests the hypotheses that (a) in-law preferences are contingent upon the sex of the in-law and (b) in-law preferences are contingent upon the sex of the parent. Evidence from a sample of 541 families finds support for both hypotheses.
The model of sexual selection under parental choice has been proposed to account for the control that parents exercise over their children's mating decisions. The present paper attempts to formalize and advance this model with the purpose of providing a better understanding of how parental choice mandates the course of sexual selection. In particular, in the proposed formulation, free mate choice involves an opportunity cost which motivates parents to place their children's mate choices under their control. When they succeed in doing so, they become a significant sexual selection force, as traits that appeal to parents in an in-law are selected and increase in frequency in the population. The degree of parental control over mating, and thus the strength of sexual selection under parental choice, is positively predicted by the size of the opportunity cost of free mate choice. The primary factors that affect the level of opportunity cost vary between society types, affecting the strength of parental choice as a sexual selection force.
Glass cliffs describe situations in which women are promoted to executive roles in declining organizations. To explain them, some authors suggest that people tend to “think crisis-think female.” However, the root cause of this association remains elusive. Using several subfields of evolutionary theory, we argue that biology and culture have shaped the perception of women as being more empathic than men and, consequently, as capable of quelling certain crises. Some crises are more intense than others and, whereas some brew within organizations, others originate from the external environment. We therefore propose that women will be selected to lead whenever a crisis is minimal to moderate and stems primarily from within the organization. Men, on the other hand, will be chosen as leaders whenever the crisis threatens the very existence of the firm and its source is an external threat. Leadership is a highly stressful experience, and even more so when leaders must scale glass cliffs. It is imperative that we understand what gives rise to them not only because they place women and potentially other minorities in positions where the likelihood of failure is high, but also because they help propagate stereotypes that undermine their true leadership ability.
Despite widespread assumptions about women’s empowerment and agency in the Arab Middle East, psychometric research of these constructs is limited. Using national data from 6214 married women ages 16–49 who took part in the 2006 Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey, we applied factor analysis to explore and then to test the factor structure of women’s agency. We then used multiple indicator multiple cause structural equations models to test for differential item functioning (DIF) by women’s age at first marriage, a potential resource for women’s agency. Our results confirm that women’s agency in Egypt is multi-dimensional and comprised of their (1) influence in family decisions, including those reserved for men, (2) freedom of movement in public spaces, and (3) attitudes about gender, specifically violence against wives. These dimensions confirm those explored previously in selected rural areas of Egypt and South Asia. Yet, three items showed significant uniform DIF by women’s categorical age at first marriage, with and without a control for women’s age in years. Models adjusting for DIF and women’s age in years showed that women’s older age at first marriage was positively associated with the factor means for family decision-making and gender-violence attitudes, but not freedom of movement. Our findings reveal the value of our analytical strategy for research on the dimensions and determinants of women’s agency. Our approach offers a promising model to discern “hierarchies of evidence” for social policies and programs to enhance women’s empowerment.
The chapter opens with a brief overview of the early years of sexual science and sociology in Europe and America and then looks at more recent theoretical work in the sociology of sexual science. The interrelationship of macro and micro theory is presented and then there is a comparison of two macro studies of sexuality in the U.S. One of those studies is a national research study examining the way autonomy effects changes in premarital sexual permissiveness and the other is a descriptive national study with major findings on a wide variety of sexual behaviors. There is also discussion of two cross cultural studies—one proposes a theory linking sexuality to three basic structural aspects of human societies: power, ideology and kinship and tests this theory using a data base of 186 non industrial cultures. The other is a macro theoretical study of 43 cultures explaining the growth of post-industrial societies that stress well being and quality of life more than economic security. There is a brief coverage of three very recent theoretical articles each of which examined both biological and sociological theories of sexuality. The possibility of joint sociological and biological theories of human sexuality is discussed as part of an examination of Edward Wilson’s recent dual selection theory that stresses the importance of group selection over individual selection. The complexities of integrating sociological theories into Wilson’s gene/cultural interaction theory are analyzed.
Why are men, like other primate males, usually the aggressors and risk takers? Why do women typically have fewer sexual partners? In Why Sex Matters, Bobbi Low ranges from ancient Rome to modern America, from the Amazon to the Arctic, and from single-celled organisms to international politics, to show that these and many other questions about human behavior largely come down to evolution and sex. More precisely, as she shows in this uniquely comprehensive and accessible survey of behavioral and evolutionary ecology, they come down to the basic principle that all organisms evolved to maximize their reproductive success and seek resources to do so, but that sometimes cooperation and collaboration are the most effective ways to succeed. This newly revised edition has been thoroughly updated to include the latest research and reflect exciting changes in the field, including how our evolutionary past continues to affect our ecological present.
This monograph-length contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means” reviews and assesses the state of ethnographic and political scholarship concerning how nonstate, tribal societies deal with peacemaking and peacekeeping. A central argument is that the condition among nonstate societies was and is neither one of permanent war nor one of permanent peace but one of permanent peacelessness . Nonstate societies recognize the danger of warfare and take measures to reduce its likelihood, or at least try to mitigate its destructiveness. This article treats the politics, strategies, and practices of peacemaking in tribal societies throughout the world, as well as the full spectrum of attempts at war mitigation.
Differentiated gender roles in adulthood are rooted in one's gender role socialization. In order to understand the persistence of gender inequalities in the domestic sphere, we need to examine the gendered patterns of children's housework time. Although researchers have identified behavior modeling as a major mechanism of gender role reproduction and characterized gender socialization as a contextually embedded process, few have investigated contextual variation in behavior modeling, particularly in non-Western developing countries. Analyzing data from the China Family Panel Studies 2010, the author examined the differences in behavior modeling between boys and girls age 10–15 from 2-parent families (N = 1,903) in rural and urban China. The results revealed distinctive gendered interplays in the way parental housework and employment behavior helps shape children's housework time. This analysis is a crucial illustration of how the distinctive sociocultural contexts of rural and urban China moderate the effects of housework-behavior modeling on intergenerational gender role socialization.
In recent years, there has been a marked increase in the demand for global data on historical family systems, both in the social sciences and in the humanities. Until lately, however, scholars interested in historical global family variation had to rely on simplified and often ahistorical world-scale classifications of family systems by world geographic regions. This article communicates Mosaic to the scholarly community - one of the largest infrastructural projects in the history of historical demography and family sociology. The article provides a brief history of the project, a discussion of the main issues involved in creating the database (including sampling and representativeness), and Mosaic's data structure and coverage. In the remainder of the article, the authors provide an overview of methodological and research opportunities that the project can offer to scholars, showing how the most pertinent problems of historical family demography can be tackled in more systematic ways than previously.
In homes, schools, and workplaces, women and men are often separated in ways that sustain gender stratification by reducing women's access to socially valued knowledge. The fact that these spatial arrangements may be imperceptible increases their power to reproduce prevailing status differences. I use cross-cultural and historical examples to illustrate that the more pronounced the degree of spatial gender segregation, the lower is women's status relative to men's. The advantages of such a spatial perspective are its interdisciplinary foundations and its creation of avenues for change.
This article stands at the confluence of three streams of historical social science analysis:
the sociological study of power relations within the family, the regional demography of
historical Europe, and the study of spatial patterning of historical family forms in
Europe. It is a first exercise in the design and application of a new ‘master variable’ for
cross-cultural studies of family organization and relations. This indexed composite
measure, which the authors call the Index of Patriarchy, incorporates a range of
variables related to familial behaviour, including nuptiality and age at marriage, living
arrangements, post-marital residence, power relations within domestic groups, the
position of the aged, and the sex of the offspring. The index combines all these items,
with each being given equal weight in the calculation of the final score, which represents
the varying degrees of sex- and age-related social inequality (‘patriarchal bias’) in
different societal and familial settings. In order to explore the comparative advantages
of the index, the authors use information from census and census-like microdata for 91
regions of historical Europe covering more than 700,000 individuals living in 143,000
domestic groups, from the Atlantic to the Urals. The index allows the authors to identify
regions with different degrees of patriarchy within a single country, across the regions of
a single country, or across and within many broader zones of historical Europe. The
unprecedented patterning of the many elements of power relations and agency contained
in the index generates new ways of accounting for both the geographies and the histories
of family organization across the European landmass.
This article is divided into two main sections. The first discusses “Female Inheritance and the Male Retention Hypothesis.” Permanent groups (groups with no inherent limit on group longevity) exist in several species because over generations members share important interests. Considering the association between cooperation and degree of relatedness, it seems to follow that a collective interest is more likely to be achieved when members show a higher degree of relatedness. I argue that if membership is inherited by only one sex, and this is the female sex, this results in a higher degree of relatedness between group members than when membership is inherited by both sexes, or by males only. Indeed, this is found in the overwhelming majority of species of insects, fish, birds, and mammals living in permanent groups. The (few) exceptions to the rule are briefly discussed. Humans are of special interest because human preindustrial societies tend to show either male or female inheritance. The second section asks, “Do Moralizing Gods Raise Paternity Confidence?” Since males inherit valuable membership in patrilocal/lineal societies, they are expected to be more concerned about the probability of paternity than males in matrilocal/lineal societies. Moral rules, and specifically belief in moralizing gods, are expected to reflect this difference. An analysis of cross-cultural data of preindustrial societies does not refute the hypothesis that moralizing gods are more often found in patrilocal/lineal societies, nor is this hypothesis unambiguously supported.
As early as 1985, Rosenfield and Maine began to look at what is called the maternal child field (MCH). More than two decades later, maternal and infant mortality is still among the worst performing health indicator in resource-poor countries and regions, and it has barely changed since 1990. Although three of the eight United Nations Millennium Development Goals aim at reducing child mortality, maternal mortality, and promoting gender equality, most literature in the field is either clinical or exclusively deals with women’s health problems. In this study, I proposed an empirical model that tests the impact of gender equality, women’s human rights, and maternity care on MCH with economic and political development as background factors. The proposed model was tested by using structural equation analysis. Data were obtained from 137 developing countries. The proposed model is partially supported by the data. Empirical findings demonstrate that gender equality has a pivotal role to play in the promotion of MCH. The relationship between MCH and maternity care is found to be strong and statistically significant. This finding may permit a probable verification given the current social conditions in some developing countries, particularly the neglect of many of women’s health needs and the assignment of their primary responsibilities in childrearing. The women’s human rights hypothesis is not supported by the data. It is perhaps that human rights instruments provide a legal discourse for political functions and social welfare issues, but that the legal approach alone does not necessarily provide a moral and social foundation to ensure the implementation of social welfare and human well-being, particularly maternal and child health in developing countries. The findings also indicate the importance of economic development in predicting maternity care. Finally, a positive and statistically significant relationship is found between economic development and gender equality. Implications and limitations of the study are discussed.
Opening Paragraph
It has only been in recent years that anthropologists have begun to investigate women as actors with resources important in the political field and to broaden the concept of political system to include the activites of women (see Collier, 1974 and Nelson, 1974 for another statement of the problem). The analysis of the political processes of the nineteenth century Kikuyu (Kenya) presented here lays the framework for the inclusion of women's subsistence activities and domestic decision making with the field of public or political relations.
This paper tries to explain why the Lenski (1970) theory of stratification based on ecology and subsistence technology had relatively little effect on theories of sex inequality. In cultural anthropology, generalization was held to be impossible. Feminist explanation in sociology was social-psychological. Moreover, by the 1980s, the bias against biology in feminist theory came to include all of science. Exceptions to these trends include the work of Blumberg, Chafetz, Collins, Coltrane, and Turner. Whether feminist sociologists will follow their lead remains to be seen.
This paper suggests why the intensification of agriculture is associated with a relative decline in women's participation in agriculture. The statistical evidence described here is consistent with the theory that women contribute relatively less to agriculture when it becomes intensive because their domestic work and fertility have increased. It is also argued that most men may be able to contribute more to agriculture in societies cultivating intensively because hunting, warfare, and trade are not so likely to pull them away from crop production [women's contribution to subsistence, agricultural intensification, time allocation, fertility, cross-cultural]
This paper describes the results of a series of cross-cultural tests of several different explanations of matrilocal versus patrilocal residence. The first explanation tested was the traditional assumption that division of labor determines residence. The results did not support that assumption. The results of other tests suggest rather that patrilocal residence is favored by internal warfare, whether or not such warfare interferes with a normally patridominant division of labor; and matrilocal residence appears to be favored by purely external warfare if such warfare compels the women to do at least as much subsistence work as the men.
An examination of community studies of peasant life reveals consistencies and variations in family structure. The findings demonstrate a strong patri-orientation, the rarity of polygyny, and the absence or weakness of larger kin-based corporate structures in the forty-six communities analyzed. Three patterns of family structure, each closely associated with a particular mode of inheritance, were found: (1) patrilocal stem with patrilineal impartible inheritance, (2) patrilocal joint with patrilineal partible, and (3) nuclear with bilateral inheritance. Proceeding from ecological presuppositions, the factors of (1) land scarcity and (2) the dominant state organization were examined as potentially salient influences. The data indicate that while land scarcity appears to be a contributory influence in the development of stem families, the variations in family structure are best accounted for not simply by the existence of the larger political community, but more specifically by the social and political forces emanating from the centers of power.
A theory of the status of women is presented which draws primarily on ecological and economic factors and posits a relationship between female production and female status. It was hypothesized that female contribution to subsistence activities would be a function of certain ecological factors and/or a prolonged drain of male labor. It was found that these factors were related to female production activities. A scale of female status was then derived from a small pilot sample and correlated with female contribution to subsistence. The results indicated that female production is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the development of female status