FORMACIÓN PROFESIONAL

Universal male dominance and the lowly status of women have been assumed with little regard for what is meant by “dominance” or “status.” These concepts have many dimensions. Status may, among other things, mean either deferential treatment or actual power over resources and decision making (Brown 1975). Thus, upper-class women in the romantic traditions of feudal Europe and Victorian England were given the highest status—idealized and placed on pedestals—but they had no real power. Status can refer to the rewards that society offers certain people, to pres- tige, to power over others, to authority without coercive power, to official office, to control of resources, or to one’s freedom or autonomy, and each of these has many permutations. Also, status is not an isolated thing,

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but is embedded in the many subsystems of a society, so that there may be separate statuses for the spheres of kinship, subsistence, politics, eco- nomics, religion, ideology, and so forth. Status in religion may not carry over into the economic sphere. Status may be fluid, changing throughout one’s life and often changing from one situation to another. Indeed, the attempt by anthropologists to assess status—especially some universal concept of status—may be ethnocentric, devoid of meaning within the society to which it is applied.

This multivariate approach was validated by an extensive cross- cultural study by Martin King Whyte (1978), who examined 93 prein- dustrial cultures, using 52 variables associated with gender status, such as sex of political leaders, division of domestic work, and physical pun- ishment of the spouse. He concludes that “One can no longer assume that there is such a thing as the status of women cross-culturally. Nor can one search for the best indicator of the status of women, or for the

key variable that affects the status of women. Instead, one has to start with a very different assumption: that there is no coherent concept of the status of women that can be identified cross-culturally” (p. 170). In other words, status is not a universal, but can be understood only within specific contexts—not merely particular societies but particular subsys- tems within those societies.

Whyte’s findings on male dominance were similar. There was consid- erable variation in dominance both between and within societies, ranging from absolute male supremacy to broad equality between sexes. Al- though no matriarchies were found, there were spheres of activity within which women had power over men.

Women’s Power and the Distribution of Resources

Such studies have added to the complexity of the issue, but they have not stopped researchers from defining particular types of status—such as social prestige or power in group decision making—and seeking key variables that would explain cross-cultural differences.

Male dominance is often related to the division of labor by sex. Cross- cultural studies reveal that women are commonly assigned such tasks as food and fuel gathering, grain grinding, water carrying, food preserva- tion, cooking, pottery making, weaving, basket manufacture, dairy pro- duction, and laundering—in other words, activities that can be performed near the home and involve monotonous operations that can be interrupted and resumed. Men are more likely to engage in activities that require travel, danger, and sometimes sudden bursts of energy, such as hunting

large game, warfare, lumbering, trapping, mining, herding, fishing, and long-distance trade. Such division of labor seems to be more closely related to the demands of motherhood than to size, strength, or innate propensities. Tasks that are dangerous or remove women for long periods from home may be perceived as incommensurate with the demands of childbearing and child care (Coontz and Henderson 1986: 115; Dahlberg 1981: 13; Schlegel 1977: 35).

These are only statistical probabilities, however, not universals. There is virtually no job that is not performed by women somewhere. Foragers such as the !Kung and Mbuti pygmies seemed little restricted by child- bearing in their extensive travels. As noted previously, Agta women reg- ularly hunted big game. Among the nineteenth-century Plains Ojibway and in the African kingdom of Dahomey, women were warriors. Often women were assigned the heaviest jobs, such as clearing jungle or car- rying water and firewood. Among Northern California Indians, most of the shamans were women.

In any case, there is no intrinsic reason to value one set of jobs over another, and as Karen Sacks (1979: 89) points out, there is something ethnocentric about the assumption that all cultures rank economic activ- ities—an assumption that is most common in capitalist inegalitarian so- cieties. The division of labor by sex may become a basis of sexual stratification, but it cannot be the sole explanation.

It has been argued that it is not the division of labor that determines the status of women, but rather women’s contribution to the subsistence of the group. Cross-cultural studies, including different levels of social complexity, reveal that women contribute on the average about 30 to 45 percent of the food (Dahlberg 1981: 14–15). However, this can vary from women providing virtually none of the food (as among some Eskimos) to upward of 70 percent (the !Kung). Unfortunately, the “common sense” view that degree of contribution to subsistence determines status is wrong; cross-cultural comparison reveals no such pattern (Whyte 1979: 169).

Ernestine Friedl (1975, [1978] 1990) hypothesizes that power does not rest on the contribution to subsistence per se, but rather on the exchange of goods outside of the family. It is control of public exchange, not control of domestic production, that is the key, because such exchange creates the obligations and alliances that are at the center of political relations. The greater men’s monopoly is on the distribution of scarce resources, the greater their dominance is over women.

This is most evident in less-complex societies. In hunting-gathering groups, plant foods are distributed only within the family, whereas ani-

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mal protein is shared with the entire band. Usually, only men hunt big game; therefore, the range should extend from egalitarianism among groups in which there is little hunting to extreme male dominance among groups in which hunting is the primary means of subsistence. Among those groups in which both women and men hunt and gather commu- nally, such as the Washo Indians of North America, women and men are roughly equal. In groups in which women and men each collect their own plant food, but men supply some meat, such as the Hazda of Tan- zania, there will be a slightly greater tendency toward male dominance. The subordination of women will be even more pronounced if there is a sharp division of labor by sex, with females gathering and men hunting, as among the Tiwi of Australia. Finally, in societies such as the Inuit in which men supply virtually the entire food supply through hunting, women will have a very low status.

When this theory is applied to industrial society, it is obvious that jobs that do not give women control over productive resources do not garner power (although, it should be noted, this is also true of men’s jobs).

Friedl has put her finger on one of many influences on male domi- nation. However, as a universal theory, hers does not work. In his cross- cultural study, Whyte did not find any variable to determine gender status (although, his sample of hunting-gathering societies was relatively small, and he may have slighted African examples in which the correlation between status, economic contribution, and control of property is more clear [Duley and Sinclair 1986]). There are also some rather blatant ex- ceptions to her theory. As was previously mentioned, among the Chip- ewyan it is the women who distribute the meat, yet male domination is very pronounced. There also may be considerable variation within par- ticular groups; the Eskimo women described by Jean Briggs (1970) do not seem nearly as subservient as Friedl claims for Eskimos in general.

Domestic/Public, Nature/Culture

The belated recognition that “male dominance” is neither a universal nor a singular characteristic, the same for all societies in which it is manifested, has led to a search for the structural and cultural factors that give rise to gender differences. Michelle Rosaldo (1974) noted that men often control the “public domain,” where the broader political issues of society are decided, whereas women are confined to a “domestic domain” largely concerned with the interests of their own families.

It is true that in preindustrial societies, women’s activities are most often confined within the context of the family or the lineage. This can

imply considerable power, however, especially in matrilineal systems in which inheritance of property takes place through the women and women run local lineage affairs. If matrilocality is combined with matrilineality, the man may have little power in the home where he lives with his wife and in-laws, as is the case among the Iroquois. Among the Hopi of the American Southwest, women control the lineage pueblos, so that men must exercise their authority through religion and community councils. From this point of view, “politics,” which deals with public decision making and the public allocation of resources and authority, would be- long to the men’s sphere. This perspective does not deny women power, but suggests that each gender has its own sphere of power.

This is certainly true in many societies, but the domestic/public di- chotomy is by no means universal. Women often do exercise power in the public sphere—for example, queens and female prime ministers (however, it should be noted that the existence of a woman in an official position of power does not necessarily raise the status of all women in that society; more often, formal power by women serves only an elite group or maintains a patriarchy). Also, in societies oriented around kin- ship, it may be very difficult to distinguish the domestic from the public. Often the family and the lineage are the mechanisms through which public decisions are manifested. In peasant villages, distinctions between public and private may be all but irrelevant, because the real locus of power—where decisions are made about land tenure, taxes, war, and education—is outside of the peasant community altogether (Hammond and Jablow, 1976). The private/public distinction would seem to be most clear-cut in state societies, but even in patrilineal states such as China, women moving from their natal homes at marriage may maintain lineage ties that bind them into a wider political world (Moore 1988). It should also be noted that there is a paucity of information on women’s partic- ipation in public politics, partially because few researchers have been looking for it and partially because such influence may be less formal and less overt than that of men.

Another dichotomy that has been suggested as useful for explaining male dominance is nature/culture (Ortner 1974), which emerged from an approach, influenced by the works of Claude Le´vi-Strauss and Clifford Geertz, that views gender as basically a symbolic construction that closely intermeshes with the other symbol systems of a society. From this perspective, females are associated with nature mainly because of their procreativity and, in many societies, their occupation of tilling the earth. They are bound up within such symbol sets as earth, moon, plant- ing, and fecundity. Men, on the other hand, are enmeshed in the symbol

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sets of culture: sun, language, law, architecture, and politics. Such sym- bolic definitions would tend to place women in the domestic sphere and men in the public sphere.

There are problems here too, of course. Although many societies do relate women symbolically to nature and men to culture, many do not; some societies relate men to nature and women to culture (in the United States, it is much more common to refer to men as “beasts” or “animals,” and to believe that their warfare, hunting, and football emerge from feral instincts). In addition, despite Le´vi-Strauss’s contention that the culture/ nature dichotomy is embedded in the very structure of the human mind, many peoples do not make the distinction at all. It has been argued that distinctions between nature and culture and domestic and public are re- ally Western categories that have been imposed on, rather than derived from, non-Western cultures (Rapport and Overing 2000: 145).

These insights may be valuable in the analysis of some particular cultures, and certainly the idea of the “cultural construction of gender” is a sophisticated approach, replete with possibilities. However, as an- thropology has found time and time again, the reduction to simple di- chotomies, no matter how extensively they may be elaborated, tends to obscure the enormous intricacy and complexity of human behavior.

Residence Rules, Socialization, and Violence

General explanations of gender stratification that rely on a single vari- able—whether nature of subsistence, distribution of public goods, or motherhood—have not been particularly successful; there are too many exceptions. Marc Howard Ross (1986) offers a multivariate explanation based on a cross-cultural survey of 90 preindustrial societies. The inev- itable problems with any such survey are compounded by the lack of material specifically concerned with female participation and with women’s ownership or allocation of resources. It was necessary to code for titled offices and attendance at meetings and also for private conver- sations, indirect influence, and control over information.

Female power could not be measured along a single dimension but had to be, at the least, broken into two independent categories: (1) female involvement in group decision making, and (2) politically important po- sitions or organizations controlled by women. There was no significant overlap between these two categories; each emerged in different types of societies.

Women’s control of organizations and positions of power was most closely correlated with socioeconomic complexity, and seemed to be part

of a more general social and economic differentiation. However, such organizations did not necessarily proffer higher status or more power on women.

Women’s involvement in group decision making corresponded strongly with the organization of men; patrilineal kinship and other strong fraternal organizations had a negative effect on female status. Postmarital residence was also significant; women who remained within their own communities after marriage had greater power. Early sociali- zation of the male that was warm and affectionate led to little conflict between genders, with a resultant relative equality. Finally, in situations of high internal conflict, women were encouraged to be politically active in negotiations and as peacemakers; in situations in which internal vio- lence was low, there was little stimulus for them to act outside of the domestic sphere (in situations of high external violence, women were relatively excluded from politics).

Such cross-cultural studies suggest that differential female status and power will be explained not by a single universal cause, but by a number of factors working together.

THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF